Jean Valjean, Meet Javert

I am going to give my dear friend Barry Fagin the benefit of the doubt and hold the inherent limitations of newspaper commentary responsible for the sweeping generalizations found in his most recent column.  I assume Dr. Fagin does not really mean to suggest any of the following:  that all human civilizations were miserable and squalid before Western civilization and property rights came along; or that anti-poverty programs "enshrine envy"; or that those who favor a modest social safety net necessarily disapprove of the profit motive and want to kill economic incentives; or that without Warren Buffett being free to make $32.8 million a day in non-productive rent-seeking and arbitrage ("absolutely fantastic") we would all be living in caves and eating the flesh of wooly mammoths.

But it is hard to know for sure.  The  seduction of ideologies like libertarianism (or 20th century communism, for that matter) is the easy and systematic answers they provide to complicated problems.  You really do become a hostage to your simplicity. Follow this one rule -- thou shalt always maximize freedom -- and the ideal society inexorably emerges.  Question this principle and you embarrassingly fail to appreciate the leisure time the producers have given you to loaf around and whine about capitalism!

When the rules are few and simple, everything sketches out beautifully on the chalkboard.  A favorite assumption of the classical economists is "all other things being equal." Of course, all other things are never equal in human affairs.  The Humanities are not a chemistry lab.  This is why economics is rightly called the "dismal science" and why utopia is not one of the options.

Here is a small sample of things the libertarian charts and formulas assume away:

First, economic power is always translated into political power – a phenomenon called "political capture." It happens under capitalism and communism.  In effect, the wealthy tend to rig the system to grant themselves subsidies, lax regulation, immunity from prosecution, and so on.

Second, and closely related, is the problem of "externalities." This is a fancy academic term that simply describes the way companies push the costs of their businesses (often pollution) onto everyone else.  It is economically rational for profit-seeking corporations – in a free market – to attempt to get away with this.  It's capitalism on the revenue line items, and socialism for the expenses.

Third, the efficient deployment of material resources to their supposed highest and best uses is not necessarily the greatest of all human aspirations.  Material progress is unquestionably good.  But it is not the sole end of human existence.  Libertarian economic theory is expressly value-neutral.  It holds that only an elitist snob could believe humankind might benefit from a culture that openly declares its preference for Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” over "Smack My Bitch Up."  If utility-seeking consumers, ordering from the menu of choices offered by profit-seeking producers, give us a vulgar and dumbed-down culture of professional wrestling and junk food, how dare anyone complain (or even notice)?  Define "vulgar."  The market has spoken!

Fourth, other than references to "dumb luck," libertarians have almost nothing useful to say about generational privilege or the vestiges of racism and exploitation that still plague billions of people around the world.  Thanks in significant part to the libertarian-inspired dismantling of the post WWII settlement, social mobility and its cousin “equal opportunity” are largely mythical today.  Where you come from socio-economically counts infinitely more than Rothbardian notions of liberty in where you end up. Communities trapped for generations in cyclical economic serfdom need more than a copy of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

And that brings us to the libertarian's positively contemptuous attitude towards "fairness" (the derisive quote marks are Dr. Fagin's).  A desire for some modest fairness in economic outcomes -- say, CEOs making 100 times the average employee instead of 500 times -- gets lumped in with envy, rapine, sexual manipulation, and a host of other primal human tendencies that are best left to the campfires of our brutish prehistory.  Our innate altruism worked fine when we all had to share the same mammoth carcass.  But it is obsolete now because a rising tide supposedly always lifts all boats. (Dr. Fagin seems unaware of what has happened to the working class in the past 30 years of financial deregulation, globalism, and union busting.  Or maybe he thinks the problem is not enough libertarianism.)

We know that our ingrained sense of fair play precedes any exposure to religion or formal ethics instruction.  It can be observed in small children and even in primates.  It is the essence of the Golden Rule found in virtually all ethical systems.  Except, apparently, libertarianism which indicts this basic impulse on charges of being "unenlightened."  This is the dead end to which slavish allegiance to lofty principles leads you.

A democratic society cannot long survive the egregious levels of income inequality that are developing in America today.  Many boats are sinking, Dr. Fagin. (We tend not to notice this in our relatively affluent community that benefits hugely from government subsidies – i.e., our blue-chip military installations.)  If things keep heading in this direction, the shovels and pitchforks will come out – except, when they do, they will be semi-automatic rifles and Glock pistols.  Maybe that's merely a "pragmatic" reason for spreading it around a wee little bit better.  But the Romanovs probably wished they had acted more pragmatically as they sat in that dreary basement in Ekaterinburg, dressed in their royal finery, wondering how things were going to turn out for them.

The libertarian purist will tolerate no such pragmatism.  Once more unto the breach!  We must hold fast to our principles and harshly punish the pauper who steals the bread crumbs he feeds to his child.

Jean Valjean, meet Javert.

We Weep

On November 26, 1963, the famed American humorist Art Buchwald dispensed with his widely syndicated column in favor of a powerfully simple tribute to the recently slain President.  For the large majority of us who were not yet born (or too young to remember) when John F. Kennedy was so publicly and arrogantly murdered in a flawlessly-executed ambush, Buchwald’s words – for all their syrupy sentimentality – convey a sense of just how visceral the feelings of loss must have been to those alive at the time:

“We weep because there is nothing else we can do.

Except curse those who would destroy a man in the hope of destroying all of us.”

Judging from the recent glut of new book titles, reissues of old titles, interviews with surviving witnesses and participants to official investigations, and so on, the American public remains fascinated with the life and death of its 35^th President.  For all that, the superficiality of the coverage suggests that most Americans under the age of 60 are ignorant, and therefore ambivalent, about what really happened – and what was really lost – that terrible day in Dallas.  To most of our historically illiterate countrymen, I fear, the Kennedy assassination has become little more than a curiosity piece which has otherwise been relegated to the dustbin of “ancient history.”  Who cares anymore, right?

For nearly fifty years, large majorities have consistently doubted the “krazy kid Oswald” hypothesis.  Moreover, the last governmental body to investigate the case – the scandalously undermined and sabotaged House Select Committee on Assassinations – nonetheless concluded in the late 1970s that our president’s murder was “probably” the result of a conspiracy.  The existence of any kind of conspiracy – especially one implicating rogue elements of our own government – should be a really big deal to every American.  Why the apparent ambivalence, then?

One problem, perhaps, is that a zealous community of independent assassination researchers, assuming the role that ought to have been undertaken by our major media outlets and college history departments, but lacking the stabilizing influence of a recognized “mainstream,” has uncovered so many confusing and contradictory facts, leading to so many confusing and contradictory (and sometimes silly) theories, that a genuinely curious reader is left bedeviled and befuddled.

I believe a path through this wilderness of confusion can be blazed by focusing on the big picture.  In that spirit, I would offer the following points of fact that are not legitimately subject to dispute:

1.   Moments after the shooting, a policeman went running in the direction of the gunshots that dozens of witnesses had heard coming from the infamous grassy knoll.  This law enforcement officer told the Warren Commission that he was shoo’d away from the area by someone flashing Secret Service credentials.  It is a certainty, however, that no Secret Service personnel were on foot in Dealey Plaza that day.  The existence of even a single individual impersonating a Secret Service agent in Dealey Plaza is irrefutable proof of a conspiracy. (We now have reason to believe that in the early 1960s, the CIA’s Technical Services Division was responsible for generating Secret Service credentials; that responsibility was transferred back to the Department of the Treasury after Kennedy’s murder.)

2.                  The alleged killer, who had the “fingerprints” of the intelligence community all over him (according to a U.S. Senator who investigated aspects of the case for the Church Committee in the 1970s), was silenced while in police custody by a friend of the Dallas Police with known ties to both CIA-supported anti-Castro Cuban exiles and the Mafia. In the early 1960s, the CIA, the anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and the Mafia were all working in concert to murder Fidel Castro.  Bobby Kennedy went to his grave privately believing that a Castro murder plot had been turned against his brother.  His portfolio as Attorney General included the Mafia and Cuba – so he would be in a position to know many dark secrets.  There is reliable evidence that Oswald’s killer was involved in gun-running operations to Cuba and that he knew Oswald.  Oswald had provable connections to other anti-Castro zealots like his former Civil Air Patrol leader David Ferrie.  These facts render the “lone nut killed by a grieving patriotic citizen” hypothesis truly risible.

3.                  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told President Johnson the morning after the assassination that the CIA’s evidence of Oswald’s trip to Mexico City – a trip supposedly taken just weeks before the assassination for the purpose of getting into Cuba or Russia – was probably phony.  You read that correctly.  Hoover told his good friend, in so many words, that the CIA had created a false story linking Oswald to nefarious elements in Mexico City, specifically, a KGB officer known to be involved with assassinations.  It was an obvious frame-up – even if Oswald had gone to Mexico City and even if he was one of the shooters in Dealey Plaza.  We have the transcripts of Hoover’s phone call to LBJ and a copy of the memo on which Hoover commented, in his own handwriting, about the CIA’s “false story re: Oswald’s trip to Mexico.”

4.                  Jack Ruby abandoned his transparently ludicrous story that he killed Oswald in order to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the trauma of having to testify in a murder trial.  After appealing his murder conviction, he won the right to a new trial.  But he died in jail a month before his new trial was to start.  He went to his relatively early grave (at age 55) darkly hinting that JFK’s murder involved powerful people and forces.

5.                  Closing the loop, the prominent 1960s journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who obtained an exclusive private interview with Ruby and who told her close associates that she was about to break the case wide open, was found dead before she could break her story.  It was one of those “apparent suicides.”  Her close friend, to whom she entrusted her notes of the Ruby interview, died a few days later.  No notes of the Ruby interview were ever found.

Thousands of books, articles, conferences, mock trials, witness interviews and the like have flushed out a million more facts about this extremely complicated case.  Assassination buffs perhaps deserve some of the ribbing they endure for the passionate debates they are famous for having over arcane matters like Zapruder film frames, the highly compromised and botched medical and ballistics evidence, chain of possession issues, and the reliability of witnesses like the pathetic Helen Markham.  You could spend the rest of your life debating bullet trajectories and entrance / exit wound locations based on the same hopelessly compromised evidence and end up no closer to figuring out who fired what shots from where.  Indeed, it is unlikely we will ever know the truth about who squeezed which triggers, in which order, from which location(s).

Fortunately, those details are irrelevant to the most important questions about John F. Kennedy’s murder.  The facts outlined above (and many others) strongly suggest a conspiracy of some kind – very possibly involving Oswald as one of the shooters.  I submit that this is all that we really need to know. 

Once we reject the kooky “lone nut” explanation for the assassination, we inevitably confront larger questions that ought to concern us far more than bullet trajectories and autopsy photos.  Those bigger questions include the following: What groups or forces directed Oswald, Ruby and the other participants?  Why did those forces want Kennedy dead?  How did his death change the direction of our country – particularly in the area of war and peace?  Has the establishment’s tattered faith in the lone nut theory irreparably damaged our society and its political and legal institutions?  Why do they maintain that faith in the teeth of so much evidence pointing to a conspiracy of some kind?  These questions are vitally important today.  To pose them is not to delve into a pointless study of “ancient history.”

      John Kennedy was no angel.  By many accounts, he was a philanderer and a ruthless Machiavellian come election time.  He hid the severity of his potentially debilitating medical conditions from the public and he may have recklessly endangered our national security by having an affair with an East German spy.  Concerning his many flaws, however, I am with the late great Christopher Hitchens who, in discussing Martin Luther King Jr.’s final evening of debauchery before his murder, reminds us how King’s life proves that “a high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.”  We are all ordinary and flawed lumps of wet clay capable of great good and great evil.  There are no perfect Platonic heroes or villains and these twin facts should equally cheer us up.

Thus, the true measure of an American President is what he does when put to the test in moments of historical consequence.  How does John F. Kennedy come out on that score?  What kind of leader did we lose with his murder?  What kind of leaders succeeded him?  (Hint:  LBJ and Nixon).

Future generations will forever debate JFK’s life and presidency, of course.  And the professional historians tell us that we are out of bounds to speculate about what Kennedy “might have done” had he lived.  Fair enough.  We can nonetheless know something about what he actually believed, what he actually did, and what he intended to do in his second term.  What follows is one man’s view . . .  mine.

John Kennedy was a product of his time and place.  He certainly talked tough about communism for political gain.  He may have even believed some of his own Cold Warrior bullshit.  He famously out Cold-Warred Nixon in order to win the presidency in 1960.  But we know for certain that he wanted to avoid war – and especially nuclear war – at virtually all costs.

Look at his record on war and peace.  There has probably never been another American President who was under such unrelenting pressure from his generals and national security establishment to commit American troops to combat than John Kennedy was in his short time in office.  He resisted them every time: Laos, Cuba (twice), Berlin and Vietnam.  In all these cases, right-wing hawks pressured President Kennedy to go to war.  In all these cases, he rebuffed them.  His domestic enemies called this weakness.  I call it tremendous strength and courage. 

After coming to the brink of catastrophic nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy spent the last year of his life doggedly seeking a reduction in Cold War tensions and a path towards peaceful competition between to the two political systems.  After the Cuban Missile Crisis, if not before, there was no way Kennedy was going to commit combat troops to nearby Cuba – much less distant Vietnam.  We now know that, at the moment the fatal bullet passed through his skull, he intended to get completely out of Vietnam.  He intended to continue easing tensions with Khrushchev and the Soviets.  He intended to seek a rapprochement with Castro’s Cuba.

They killed him for it.

The rest, as they say, is history:  Vietnam, with all of its tragic implications for American and Vietnamese society. Watergate – carried out by ex-CIA agents with ties to the Kennedy assassination (one of whom admitted involvement on his death-bed).  Iran-Contra.  Two more unnecessary decades of Cold War with the Soviet Union and the attendant trillions of dollars wasted in that ignoble cause.  I am not the first person to trace all of it to John Kennedy’s murder by rogue forces within the national security state – a murder that had to be covered up for reasons of institutional self-preservation.

When Art Buchwald wrote about cursing those “who would destroy a man in the hope of destroying all of us,” his tone was one of certainty that we would never let this happen to us.  When I look around at the pervasive and malevolent influence of the national security state upon our lives 50 years later, I am not so sure.

We Told You So

No one likes a gloater.  No one likes to be on the receiving end of that smuggest of all taunts: "I told you so."  And decent people stay on their guard to avoid being on the giving end.

The tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, however, forces upon us a duty to say "we told you so" -- but for reasons having nothing to do with smugness or self-satisfaction.

The "we" in this statement includes everyone who spoke out -- in large and small ways -- against the rush to war.  We were denounced.  We were ridiculed.  We had our patriotism questioned.  But we were right.  Looking back, it is obvious that we were right.  More troubling, it was obvious then.

Sincere expressions of apology or embarrassment from prominent war cheerleaders have escaped my notice.  My own reading of the current zeitgeist is that too many Americans still refuse to accept or believe the breathtaking enormity of the fiasco.  Many in that same cohort, I fear, would not hesitate to support new wars in places like Iran, Syria or North Korea.  And this is why, regrettably, it is imperative to say "we told you so."  We need to keep saying it until the utter futility and immorality of using war as an instrument of international diplomacy sinks in with some critical mass of our fellow citizens. 

It was apparent immediately after the 9-11 attacks that we were going to lose our collective minds.  When the Department of Defense first announced the name for the military operations that would be launched in response to the attacks they called it "Infinite Justice."  In addition to evoking the worst conceivable form of war-crazed hysteria, it was a deliberate middle-finger to the world's 1.4 billion Muslims whose faith teaches that Allah provides "infinite justice."  Although the operation was renamed "Enduring Freedom" on September 25, 2001, it would take the sufferings and disillusionments of the war to bring the nation back to some modest sense of sanity and composure.

The costs of the Iraq War are incalculable.  It is not even possible to calculate merely the financial costs in dollars.  Historians of tomorrow will comb through the records of Congressional appropriations and guesstimate what the total outlays were to garrison and supply all those troops for all those years.  It must amount to at least hundreds of billions of dollars.  But those stupendous sums do not include the costs of medical care for wounded soldiers, interest on debts incurred to fund the war, billions wasted on failed reconstruction efforts and other grotesque boondoggles, and on and on.  A recent radio commentator who sounded well-informed on this question put the figure at $2 trillion.  That'll do as an estimate.  Even if it is off by 50% (which means the figure could be $3 trillion or $1 trillion) we are dealing with more money than the human mind is really capable of comprehending.  As one measure of how seriously this war warped our sense of reality, and as proof of our depravity and selfishness, we were unwilling to raise taxes a single nickel to pay for it all.  Instead we cut taxes, borrowed profligately, and passed the financial costs of our folly on to future generations.

But these are just the financial costs.  As sickening as they are, they are not nearly the worst of it.  The human toll in killed and wounded has been staggering.  The widespread killing of innocents -- a thoroughly predictable and warned-against feature of modern, high-tech, "surgical" war -- ought to have Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. hauled before an international war crimes tribunal.  When you launch a war of choice on knowingly false pretenses -- knowing that innocent people will be killed as "collateral damage" -- that's a war crime.  The brutalized and maimed survivors, whether friendly or enemy, have physical and mental scars that will never go away.

Added to these human costs, there is the violence done to our society, culture and civil institutions. 

Start will all the lying.  Trying to look back and assess the past ten years is like trying to look through a kaleidoscope of bad faith, shifting rationales, euphemisms, evasions of responsibility, distortions, calculated deceptions and cynical manipulations.  A couple of examples will suffice.

Remember the ridiculous "fly-trap theory"?  This was an idea the Bush Administration pulled out of its ass as a post-hoc rationalization for the war after the WMD pretense collapsed of its own hollowness.  The idea was that the war would attract all the world's worst Islamic terrorists to Iraq enabling the American military to "drain the swamp" by killing them all.  It was all bullshit but we mostly bought it because, as a country, we needed to keep lying to ourselves.

Or remember the way Pat Tillman's life and death were cynically exploited.  We now know that he was an atheist who studied Chomsky and became very disillusioned with the Iraq War after serving a tour of duty there and being tangentially involved in the Jessica Lynch rescue (another disgusting case of stage-directed war propaganda).   Within an hour of his death during an ambush in Afghanistan, possibly within minutes, his field commanders knew it was a fratricide.  The truth was known by the Army's highest brass within days if not hours.  But the myth of the All-American sports hero who gave up riches to fight and die in the line of enemy fire was too powerful a propaganda tale to resist.  So they lied.  Blatantly and brazenly.  After the truth came out, one of the Army generals most responsible for the lies -- a right-wing evangelical it turns out -- publicly insulted the Tillman family for their atheism.  Right-wing crone and scold Ann Coulter said on FoxNews that she "couldn't believe" Tillman was a Chomsky-reading atheist.  After reading about the whole sordid mess in Jon Krakauer's extraordinarily good book Where Men Win Glory, I felt an overpowering need to take a shower.

Let's see.  What else? The war made us into a nation that tolerates torture.  Too many of us positively champion it.  One of the most popular television shows of the war years -- Fox's "24" -- was little more than an apology for torture.  We now routinely spy on our own countrymen without warrants.  We engage in targeted "extra-judicial" killings from the air -- even of American citizens.  We maintain secret dungeons all over the world.  We refuse or fail to take care of the broken souls who return from the battlefield.  They are without a powerful lobby in Congress.  Their suffering is shamefully ignored and left to private charities like Wounded Warriors who are reduced to begging for donations from the very corporations in the defense sector who made a killing off the war.

We didn't even accomplish any strategic objective.  While history is always the final judge, we appear to have made matters much worse.  Did we succeed in securing Iraqi oil?  Nope.  In fact, tragic-comically, the Army was importing some 30 million barrels of oil per day during the height of this war to secure cheap oil.  Did we establish a counterbalance to the Iranian theocrats?  Nope, just the opposite.  Is Iraq a stable democracy -- a shining beacon to the rest of the Middle East?  Nope.  It is a democracy on paper only and a fragile one at that.  Saddam is dead, though.  So, that's pretty cool.

Those of us who opposed the war could see most of this coming -- if not in the exact details then at least in the broad brush trends the war would set in motion.  Among the most prescient was Chris Hedges -- the Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent, formerly with the New York Times, who was essentially run out of town after publicly lambasting the Bush Administration after the war began.  In a short but brilliant book he wrote just months before the war began (War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning) Hedges played Cassandra -- the prophet doomed to be tragically ignored.  Drawing on his experiences covering wars in El Salvador, the Balkans and the Middle East, including the First Gulf War, Hedges laid it all out for us.  War, he warned, destroys the culture, destroys truth, compromises a supposedly "free" press, turns the combatants into animals, injects society with the poisons of hyper-nationalism and hyper-masculinity, and kills a people's ability to see any humanity in "the other." And it ruins the economy, to boot.

Perhaps worst of all, when these inevitable catastrophes have run their course, memory itself becomes a casualty.  We want desperately to forget what we did.  We try earnestly to forget how war-crazed, blood-thirsty and all-god-damned-gung-ho we were when the war drums first started beating.  We absolutely cannot tolerate anyone reminding us.  As Hedges points out, it becomes impossible to question the cause without dishonoring the dead.  "How rude and crass of you to say 'I told you so.' I lost my son in Iraq!" (On the other hand, didn't one prominent Democratic supporter of the Iraq War once ask: "how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?")

I suppose it's nice that MSNBC, in its recent documentary "Hubris," has found it worthwhile to remind everyone of the through-and-through fraudulence of the Bush Administration's case for the Iraq War.  As a media outlet that is every bit the cheerleader for Obama and the Democrats that Fox News is for the GOP, I suppose it could not resist the temptation -- the ten year anniversary -- to pile on Bush, Cheney et al. one more time.  (They richly deserve it, of course.)  But how interesting that there is no mention of the role MSNBC played in squelching dissenting voices, most famously, by showing Phil Donahue the door when his show became insufficiently pro-war.  There were virtually no voices of dissent permitted in the mainstream press -- and that includes all of the 24-hour corporate-owned cable networks.  Journalists with unimpeachable establishment credentials like Chris Hedges who spoke out were ex-communicated.  Proving, I suppose, one of Hedges' main points.  It's a point that he is not the first to make.  Nor will he be the last:  truth is the first casualty of war.

We cannot let this happen again -- pipe dream though that may be.  And that requires us, regrettably, to say we told you so.

Open Letter to Sam Harris

Dear Mr. Harris,

In the Introduction section of your short e-book Lying, you recall wtih fondness how taking a college course called "The Ethical Analyst" accomplished "as close to a firmware upgrade of my brain as I have ever experienced."  A bit further on, you describe the experience of taking that course as "one of the clearest examples in my own life of the power of philosophical reflection."  I have had numerous similar experiences in my life -- mostly through reading -- and I can vouch personally for the view that new conceptual understandings can have truly profound effects on a person's entire approach to life, relationships, values, etc.  I think Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was getting at something similar when he reputedly said: "Man's mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to it's original dimensions."  So I want to first thank you for giving me more than one of those "eureaka" moments in your books, blog posts and YouTube lectures.  I have had this experience with numerous authors -- dead and living -- and it is one of the half-dozen or so things that I can say "I live for."

I read Lying today after receiving an e-mail from you announcing the fall release of a new hardcover edition of the book and inviting readers to submit comments or questions for your consideration.  The book left me in the uncomfortable position of having to confront -- once again -- a silent deception that I have been living in my own life for about eight years now.  Truth be told (!), I confront this deception just about every day of my life.  The dull but constant nagging it places on my every waking moment is of course one of the primary costs that lying places on all liars.  I often tell myself that I would much prefer to let the truth be more widely known.  But then I convince myself I have "good reasons" for maintaining the deception.

Some quick background.  I went to the Air Force Academy where we were all expected to live the Cadet Honor Code, which states: "We will not lie, steal or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does."  In my professional life, I am a practicing attorney in a very small law firm in Colorado Springs.  Lawyer jokes and bad apples aside, I can assure you that most lawyers take very seriously their "duty of candor" to the legal system and to opposing parties.  It is absolutely the case that our legal system is dependent upon truth-telling for its legitimacy. (For this reason, perjury prosecutions are extremely important -- even when (especially when) brought against powerful people for "politcial" reasons.)  Finally, I am actively involved with my son in the Boy Scouts of America.  We make a very big point in our troop of emphasizing the character development aspects of scouting, most importantly perhaps, the requirement that "A Scout is trustworthy."  Bottom line:  I have told my share of the white lies that we all have told in our lives.  And I can think of one major time in my life when I engaged in terrible dishonesty and betrayal of a sort that really hurt people I care about.  But for the most part, I think I can look at myself honestly (!) in the mirror and say: I do strive for the Boy Scout ideal of trustworthiness.

Ironically, it is in this very context -- Boy Scouting -- where I am dealing with the moral dilemma that I am writing to you about.

I am an atheist.  I am also a registered scout leader in my son's troop.  The Boy Scouts of America does not allow atheists to be scouts or adult leaders.  I have to keep my atheism to myself.  Yet, by merely belonging to an organization that requires its members to obey their 'Duty to God', my silence becomes a form of deception. 

You might be wondering: why would you want to be involved with an organization that does not accept such a fundamental aspect of your identity?  The answer requires that a distinction be made between what I like to call "big bad BSA," on the one hand, and the way Boy Scouts is experienced on the troop level (i.e., neighborhood level), on the other hand.  I am frankly ashamed of "big bad BSA's" policies against gays and atheists.  On the other hand, the day-to-day experience of Boy Scouting -- particularly as my son and I experience it on the troop level -- has been one of the great experiences of my life.  I can think of no better program for young boys.  My son and I have built a lifetime of memories in the eight years we have been doing this together.  He is maturing into an impressive young man.  Boy Scouts is a very big part of that.  The families we have grown close to in our scout troop are among the best people I have known in my entire life.  He is learning about citizenship, survival skills in the outdoors, a respect for the environment, leadership, honesty, and a host of other important skills and character traits.  What is not to love?

I am not ashamed to be an atheist.  Not by any stretch.  I do not even think I am all that "secretive" about it.  My relatives all know it.  My business associates all know it.  I strongly suspect most of the families in our troop know it.  I think the overwhelming majority of those families could care less.

As for my son (almost 14 years old), I very much want him to make his own choice in this area.  But his mother and I have given him no religious instruction of any kind and it seems fairly obvious that he finds both organized religion and the stories of the Judeo-Christian Bible to be more than a little odd (putting it mildly).  He and I are both more or less free to keep doing what we are doing in the troop.

So at this point, you might be wondering: what's the problem?  Here it is:  At some point, when my son is ready to make his Eagle Scout rank, he will be sitting in what is called a "Board of Review" in front of a panel of strangers from "big bad BSA."  They are going to ask him, point blank:  "So tell us how you discharge your 'Duty to God' in your day-to-day life." (Part of the Scout Oath).  "Tell us how you are 'Reverent' in your daily life." (Part of the Scout Law.)  I think about this moment in his life almost every day.  I even -- very briefly -- considered getting him involved with the local Unitarian-Universalist church just so he will have a response to those questions that will be both truthful and acceptable to the Boy Scouts.

Part of me wants him to lie.

How might I justify that?  On page 40 of Lying, you write that the temptation to lie is "often born of an understanding that others will disapprove of our behavior.  Often, there are good reasons why they would." (Emphasis mine).  But what if others will disapprove of our behavior (or opinions) for bad reasons? What right do they have to the truth in that case?

I think "big bad BSA" is flat wrong to have its policies against gays and atheists.  My son and I have invested eight years of our lives (including Cub Scouts) in the program at the neighborhood level.  He has about two more years to go before his Eagle rank.  I think it is flat wrong that BSA would deny him his Eagle rank over a matter of his personal conscience (much less over a matter of his father's personal conscience).  But I fear he will be denied his Eagle rank when the moment of truth (!) arrives.  I am fairly certain he will not lie about it.  But I have to be honest (!) and say again that part of me will want him to.

I don't suppose there is an "out" for this situation.

Ticking

“You’ve slept too long in silence,” Mama said

Remember Mama said --ticking, ticking

“Crazy boy you’ll only wind up with strange notions in your head”

Hear it, hear it, ticking, ticking

            from “Ticking,” on Elton John’s Caribou album (1974)

            Lyrics by Bernie Taupin

Public discussion about the Newtown mass murder has been depressingly pat and predictable.  Conservatives generally blame video games and the lack of armed teachers and principals. (I’m trying to imagine my white-haired first grade teacher, Miss Borden, with a .357 magnum strapped to her 1970s school marm dress.)  Liberals generally blame the National Rifle Association and something they call “gun culture.”  Both sides call each other names and accuse the other of having blood on their hands.

Right wing nut jobs of the Alex Jones variety equate the mildest calls for stricter gun control with “fascism” and are quick to remind us that the first thing the Nazis (supposedly) did was take all the guns away.  Liberals emote irrationally against the idea that an armed security guard might be the best defense against an armed attacker.

The media, for all its hand-wringing, loves these stories.  Riveting wall-to-wall coverage of every possible angle sells advertisements and improves the bottom line.  I have a vague memory of watching a movie back in the 1980s or early 1990s.  I can’t remember the name of this movie for the life of me.  But what I do remember is a scene in which a local news station stumbles into taping live, exclusive, up-close footage of a hostage situation.  As the camera rolls and the criminal points his handgun right into the temple of the terrified hostage, the news producer is seen whispering under her breath: “do it . . . DO IT!”

I would have no objection if every state and commonwealth in the country went and banned semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines tomorrow.  If I were a state legislator, I would cheerfully vote for such measures if it would make our simple-minded electorate feel better.  (And according to polls, it would.)  But thirty seconds of reflection ought to be enough to see that laws like these would do virtually nothing to stop the determined Adam Lanzas of the world.  The country is swimming in hunting rifles, shotguns and pistols.  At close range, a couple of handguns with standard-capacity magazines can kill 20 first graders in 30 seconds or less.  Double the number of perpetrators – a la Kleibold and Harris – and the carnage of Newtown becomes extraordinarily easy to pull off.

I agree with the NRA that the Second Amendment embodies a basic right to self-protection with firearms.  (I could care less about the “rights” of hunters even though I have enjoyed bird hunting in the past.)  Liberals who correctly defend the integrity of the womb – while denying the integrity of the whole person in the face of violent attack – annoy the piss out of me.  Moreover, I’m not sure I want to live in a country where the only people with guns are criminals and the government.  While I have to fight back the reverse peristalsis I experience admitting it, the NRA is the one organization devoted to this important proposition.  Self-protection, however, does not require an attic full of military hardware.

If all schools had armed security guards, then a statistically negligible number of lives would probably be saved.  I would have no objection to putting armed guards in all schools (and libraries and bus stations and other places of public accommodation.)  But the NRA’s apparent belief that this single measure would end school massacres is as stupid and goofy as the liberals’ belief that banning assault weapons will measurably reduce mass murders.  And the trembling fear and loathing liberals feel towards guns is as stupid and goofy as the creepy fetish gun nuts feel towards the same inanimate objects.

With that throat clearing out of the way, I am whole-heartedly with those who contend that the reason we have these massacres is mostly due to the broad cultural rot in our society. (Still not sure what “gun culture” is.)  By saying this, I don’t mean to suggest for a second that I accept the absurdly reductionist argument that we can stop these things from happening if we just ban violent first-person-shooter video games and put God back in school.  (Indeed, the latter would probably make things worse; read your Old Testaments people!) But for a host of really complicated historical reasons, we have reached a point where these things are going to happen every so often and there is virtually nothing meaningful or practical to be done about it.  Just accept it, OK?  You are living on the down slope of a decrepit and corrupt civilization.  These things will happen.  If banning assault weapons makes you feel better . . . fine with me.  But you still need to accept reality, OK?

Elton John’s haunting song “Ticking” is about “an extremely quite child” who, unbeknownst to anyone, is a ticking time bomb of pent up rage and resentment.  I tend to think of American society in those same terms.  As James Howard Kunstler is fond of saying, we are a wicked people who deserves to be punished.  When reality really starts biting, and millions of Americans start losing the obscene standards of living to which they feel entitled, the Newtown massacre will look like a family argument over whether to max out the credit card to purchase granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, or a weekend in Vegas.

There are hundreds of millions of guns in this great big country of NASCAR and Ultimate Fighting Championship morons.  Brace yourselves for what’s coming.

In the meantime, would everyone please calm down a little bit?  Stop calling gun control advocates “Nazis” and stop telling the NRA that it has blood on its hands. 

It's F%$*ing Hot Out There!

So after slacking off a bit in the month of October and the first two weeks of November, I have done a better job in the past week and a half getting outside and running a 4.5 mile loop around my neighborhood.  It has been freakishly warm out there -- in the high 60s and low 70s.  It has no business being this warm in Colorado Springs in mid to late November.  According to my local news station's website, it was 73 degrees on Saturday in Pueblo -- a short 45 miles south of where I sit.

For about five years in a row in the early to mid aughts, I would go on an annual pheasant hunt the day before Thanksgiving about an hour due east of Colorado Springs.  I remember it being below freezing a few times and always very cold.

Growing up in New England, Thanksgiving was always the biggest day of the year for high school football.  I remember playing defensive end my senior year in below freezing temperatures.  Friends and family tell me it's been in the 50s and 60s this year in the weeks and days just before Thanksgiving.

I have never "doubted" either the fact of global warming or the scientific consensus that it is man-caused (or at least, man-exacerbated).  But it was never an issue that troubled me very much.  I was certainly no alarmist.  That is starting to change.  Something is really off-kilter out there.

I recently read Bill McKibben's Rolling Stone article:  "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math."  The crisis is astonishingly (and frighteningly) easy to understand when reduced to three simple numbers:

1.  It is widely accepted (by politicians, too, not just by climate scientists) that an average global temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius would have devastating environmental consequences.  Actually, the 2 degree figure is thought too generous by many scientists; it is the political compromise number settled upon in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord.  In the past few generations, our planet has already warmed .8 degrees Celsius -- we're almost halfway there -- wreaking already observable havoc.

2.  There is also broad consensus that we will blow past the 2 degree barrier if we allow ourselves to put another 565 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere.

3.  Known reserves of fossil fuels represent 2,795 gigatons of stored carbon waiting to be pumped into the air.

The way that McKibben puts it:  think of 2 degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit.  565 gigatons is what we can drink without getting drunk.  The 2,795 gigatons in the ground are like three 12-packs of beer sitting on the table waiting to be consumed. 

Stated differently, we need to leave 80% of this fossil fuel in the ground to avoid crossing the (probably too high) 2 degree threshold.  Yeah, right!  As if!  It'll never happen.  Those reserves represent both the booked wealth of the energy companies and the abolutely essential ingredient of future economic growth.  It is impossible to believe we will not burn through most of it -- if not all of it.

By some estimates, burning most of it will raise average global temperatures 4 to 6 degrees Celsius.  McKibben says this would create a planet "straight out of science fiction."  No doubt it would.

So yes, after years of ambivalence born of apathy and ignorance, this topic is very suddenly starting to alarm me.  I am somewhat embarrassed and ashamed to admit that I had no idea how serious the situation is.

The Interantional Energy Agency ("IEA") just released its annual World Energy Outlook for 2012.  It caught my attention due to its headline-grabbing forecast that by 2020 "the United States is projected to become the largest global oil producer" due to the shale oil boom.  (I am actually quite skeptical of that claim but for present purposes assume it is true.)

What should have grabbed headlines is the IEA's cry of lament that "successive editions of this report have shown that the climate goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius is becoming more difficult and costly with each year that passes."  "Costly" in the sense that more and more drastic cuts to emissions are required with each passing year.  "Costly," in other words, to economic growth -- our country's religion.  (And you thought it was Christianity?)

That statement gave me the idea to go back and look at prior years' reports.

In 2008, the IEA said: "Preventing catastrophic and irreversible damage to the global climate ultimately requires a major decarbonization of the world energy sources."  But since non-carbon forms of energy are utterly inadequate to run civilization the way we have been running it for the past 100 years, this statement seems to mean that we have the choice between global economic collapse (i.e. massive lifestyle sacrifices for ourselves) or leaving a nearly inhospitable planet to our grandchildren.

Gee, I wonder which choice we will make.

In 2011, the IEA stated that "the door to 2 degrees Celsius is closing."  Reading the fine print, however, the door looks for all intents and purposes to already have closed.  Under what the IEA calls its "New Policies Scenario," the planet is heading for an average 3.5 degree temperature increase.  And worse, "without these new policies, we are on an even more dangerous track, for a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius or more."

I am just a lowly history major.  But it sounds to me like the IEA is saying the world will blow past the 2 degree barrier even if nations adopt the recommended "New Policies."  And if we stick with business as usual, as we probably will, we are looking at that planet "straight out of science fiction."

The IEA apparently knows what everyone who follows this knows:  the global-industrial economy is not going to just cut its fossil fuel consumption by 80%.  If anything, global demand is increasing as people across Asia and other previously underdeveloped regions contiune striving for the obscenely high-consumption lifestyles we take for granted in the West.  We simply will not do what is required -- massively reduce our standard of living.  ("Pro-growth" progressives give aid and comfort to the enemy on this score.)

My generation -- to say nothing of the loathesome baby boomers who came immediately before us -- cannot conceive of consuming less.  But consuming less -- much, much, much, much less -- is the only solution.  We won't make that choice.  We will exit the stage having wrecked the joint.  Our grandchildren will hate us and curse us.

This rather depressing thought brings to mind the final stanza of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "Justice Denied in Massachusetts:"

Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children's children this beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till,
With a broken hoe.

Millay was expressing the hopelessness she felt after the Sacco and Vanzetti trial.  But the lines would appear to work well here too. 

Thoughts On The President's Re-Election

Some thoughts on the President's re-election as contained in e-mail correspondence with a client:

Dear ____________ ,

I was intrigued by your comment this afternoon that Michael Barone is predicting a Romney win – mainly because it is so contrary to everything that I have read or seen elsewhere.  Apparently, it's true; Barone has made that prediction.  I don’t watch Fox News very much any more but this is what is on their website:

Last night On the Record, Greta Van Susteren and a panel of political pundits sat down to discuss the Election Day prediction of Washington Examiner columnist and Fox News contributor Michael Barone.

Barone is forecasting that Romney will defeat President Obama by a wide margin, 315 electoral votes to 223. He predicts that Romney will win nearly every swing state, including Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Colorado and Virginia. Barone admitted, however, that he is going out on a limb with some of his calls.

So it looks like Barone admits he is “going out on a limb.”  I would say so.  No one expects Romney to win PA or WI.  I will personally be shocked if he does.  I note that Barone’s forecast of only 223 electoral votes for Obama is about 20 fewer than what most pollsters have calculated as his “safe” or “guaranteed” minimum.  It looks totally crazy to me – like so much of what is on Fox News.

I guess we will all see tomorrow night.  I will eat crow if Obama gets 223 or fewer electoral votes.

__________________________

Post-election follow-up:

Dear _________ ,

Not to pile on, but you might find this link interesting.  Or just aggravating and infuriating:

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/08/ten_right_wingers_who_got_the_election_hilariously_wrong/

You may have assumed that I’m some kind of liberal Democrat.  Not true.  I lean to the right – sharply on some issues.  But in recent years the Republican Party has been taken over by crazy people.  Worse, Fox News and talk radio have created an alternative reality that too many people are getting sucked into.  All those pundits being “certain” that Romney was going to win a landslide – when the hard math was projecting the opposite – is just one example. 

Nate Silver nailed it.  He called all 50 states correctly, and even more amazingly, the margins of victory he was predicting in the swing states, pre-election, were very close to what actually happened.  He is not a psychic and he doesn’t have a crystal ball.  What he has is a solid mathematical model that works despite his liberal views.

You probably think MSNBC's in-house liberal lesbian Rachel Maddow represents everything that is wrong with this country.  I don’t agree with her on very much but I really like her style of commentary and she is absolutely right in this clip:

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/08/must_see_monologue/

If Republicans and conservatives take her advice, I will enthusiastically start voting for their candidates again.  But as long as the Republican Party is the party of people who believe the universe is 6,000 years old, I refuse to pull the lever for them.  (It didn’t help that they nominated a robotic plutocrat with no discernible core values.)

I am not a fan of the President.  But although he had an extremely liberal voting record during his brief stint as a U.S. Senator, and although he probably is very liberal in his core values, he has governed – as President – as a fairly conventional, slightly left-of-center Democrat.  He is not a secret Muslim.  He is not a communist.  He is not the devil.  He looks like a decent family man with some good ideas and a lot of bad ones.

I would like to think conservatives in Congress will work with the President over the next four years – now that his re-election has deprived them of the option of devoting all their energies to making him a one-term President.  The deficit has to be brought under control.  That’s going to take both spending cuts, favored by Republicans, and tax increases on the top 1% to 5%, favored by everyone (excepting rigid ideologues). 

The immediate reactions of right-wing outlets to the election results, however, do not leave me with much hope:

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/alex-massie/2012/11/the-view-from-the-cocoon-of-denial-and-epistemic-closure/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-view-from-the-cocoon-of-denial-and-epistemic-closure

For the record, Michael Barone, who is actually a fairly serious and credible pundit, wrote a heart-felt and classy mea culpa for his terrible call of a Romney landslide.  No word yet from that venal dough-boy Karl Rove or that sleazy buffoon Dick Morris.

Cheers,