Category Archives: soap box

NY Times on the importance of play in early childhood education

A friend sent me an article from today’s Times, making the same point I’ve been trying to make for the last few years.  Play is a key to getting young kids interested in learning and interacting as part of an inventive, inquisitive group.  I was glad to get the piece, which supported my thesis, though it also aggravated me slightly to read it.  

Written by a freelance science writer in the well-balanced style that is the Times’ trademark, it quoted several educational researchers who believe that more play should be part of early schooling, instead of the accelerated academics pushed by our country’s misguided, corporate-driven educational mandates.  “No Child Left Behind” (surrrrrre…), the article suggests, may underestimate the academic value of young children discovering learning in joyful play, rather than by forcing them to do cognitive tasks at an age when they cannot fully understand or participate in them.

True enough.  Play is crucial for a lot of reasons, at all stages of life, but particularly for kids beginning school.  Glad to see the NY Times printing an article about it.  Here’s the thoughtful, well-written piece.

A sardonic tendency, ingrained by my father, no doubt, twitched after reading an article which, to me, stated the painfully obvious and brought this unfortunate analogy to mind:

“Seven-year multimillion dollar Harvard study of 100,00 children and young adults strongly suggests that children forced by abusers to engage in sexual activities are far less likely to be enthusiastic about sexual intimacy later in life.  Researchers debate….”

I know, I know.

We get to the heart of the discussion on play vs. academic tasks for tykes with this paragraph:

The stakes in this debate are considerable. As the skeptics of teacher-led early learning see it, that kind of education will fail to produce people who can discover and innovate, and will merely produce people who are likely to be passive consumers of information, followers rather than inventors. Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?

The answer really depends on who you ask, as many answers do.  Those who profit from a passive, easily manipulated consumer society have a vested interest in keeping masses of Americans as stupid and gullible as possible.  Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?  It depends on who “we” is.  If it’s the good folks who make billions on ever more sophisticated standardized tests for tykes?  No brainer.  If it’s those who believe that democracy can only work properly with an educated, thinking populace able to intelligently discuss and creatively tackle problems?  

Well, you and I know which side we’re on– but then, nobody is paying us the big bucks to be on the side of profiteers at any cost.  Easy to condemn educational profiteers, I suppose, but, on the other hand, everybody’s got to make a living.

Life in Our Democracy

I sat quietly the other night when several people gushed about how much they love President Obama.  I do not love Obama, partly because I have no idea what he actually stands for.   He’s a great speaker, a master salesman, clearly brilliant, but he continues to do many things Bush and Cheney did, hateful things, and he gets a pass from those who love his eloquent thoughtfulness and the way he comes off, somehow, as a cool guy and man of the people.

Obama must get a pass in a certain way, if only because of the fanatical opposition he faces, much of it fueled by barely concealed racist hatred.  Even if he wanted to, there are limits to what a president can do, although, to me, he’s done very few truly positive things while continuing virtually every anti-democratic policy of his unscrupulous predecessors.  

The American president is not all-powerful, it’s true, though Cheney took many brutal steps towards restoring the Unitary Executive.  Among the things presidents can now do without real oversight is create a secret kill list and carry it out,  kill anywhere on earth with missiles fired from robot planes, institute a top secret kidnapping and torture program,  designate anyone as an Enemy Combatant and hold them without charges forever, classify as state secrets anything even remotely compromising, or embarrassing, to the administration, conduct secret data collection on virtually every American’s private communications, severely and publicly punish those who try to expose corruption, torture and other illegality.  

The lack of the transparency necessary for a functioning democracy was striking under Bush and Cheney, the most opaque administration to date — and rightfully so, they had a lot to hide.  The press, with few exceptions, were their tuxedo clad lapdogs, gratefully licking their faces instead of probing for the news that Americans needed to know– like the fact that the entire case for the long, destructive, destabilizing, demoralizing, illegal and immoral multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq, like the extensive torture program, was founded on a tissue of lawyerly bullshit that would not have stood up even in a kangaroo court run by kindergarten kids.  

Things are even more opaque under President Hope and Change, Freedom of Information is much harder to come by and the 1917 Espionage Act has made traitors out of whistle blowers and other people of conscience and put the death penalty on the table as reward for their acts of civic courage.

Of course, there’s the psychopath test for presidents.  It is impossible to even get on the ballot without raising literally hundreds of millions and showing the ability to kill without hesitation or remorse.   Not only are presidential candidates required to say whatever big donors want to hear said, to raise enormous sums of money for their ad campaigns but, if they are in position to, they must show they will not flinch from doing terrible things.  

If you are a governor, race back to your state to sign the death warrant for a retarded woman who has found Jesus and begs for life in prison instead of the needle.  Tough on crime, I got your Jesus right here, lady.  That murderer who tried to kill himself when the cops closed in, bungled the job and wound up with an IQ of 70?   Strap him into the electric chair yourself, after he saves the pie from his last meal for “later”, pose as you do with a resolute expression the American people will understand.  Enjoy your pie, bitch.

When Bush’s people rewrote the bankruptcy laws they made it impossible to get out of student loan debt, except by the death of the debtor.  Run up the maximum on all your credit cards, buy too many houses, fuck up in any other way, no worries, all that can be discharged in bankruptcy.   Borrow $40,000 from the U.S. government to get a degree at a state school and you will get this email from time to time:

 Dear Borrower,

Your federally owned student loans are running just a few days late.

There is an easy way to bring them current!!

By changing your due date to another day of the month that would better fit into your budget based on your pay date, other bills, etc., we can bring your loans current.

Just choose any date between the 1st to the 15th of the month to better meet your needs.  In doing so you will skip your upcoming payment and resume payments the following month on your new due date.

Please contact us as soon as possible to avoid going into default at (866) 264-9762 orDLCollections@osla.org.  Our Customer Service Representatives are available to take your call M-F from 8am-5pm CST.  You may also manage your account online 24 hours a day at osla.org.

Sincerely,

Default Aversion Team

And they call me every month, too, just a few days after the due date passes.  They remind me, if I ask, that I am paying the historically low 3.75% interest rate, tell me how lucky I am, how wise I was to lock it in.  Some borrowers are paying the government 7% and more on loans they took to get college degrees.  

Liberal lioness Elizabeth Warren is sponsoring legislation to cap student loan repayment at 3.9%.  I love Elizabeth Warren and I watch her struggle to pass a law that will marginally help a few without solving the larger problem and I despair for my country.  Reminds me of Obamacare, applauded by everyone not effected by it as a great step forward, even if possibly a bit of a gift to the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.  

We are a great democracy and an Exceptional People in name only, it goes without saying.  We are a country run by advertisements, slogans and mindless, fanatical cheering for one of two teams who are fierce rivals but almost indistinguishable in their goal: to protect the privilege of the persecuted one percent that finances their campaigns.  

A few random ideas for helping students paying massive interest to the government on education loans made to them:  tie the interest rate on student loans to actual income, let unemployed graduates pay down the principle interest-free until they are earning a living.   Make the repayment rate the same rate banks and corporations pay to borrow from the US Treasury.  

The federal government can spend literally trillions to murder people who pose no threat to Americans, average working people who live thousands of miles from the U.S.  They can spend billions annually on a failed war against a drug that kills almost nobody while alcohol is legal and causes death and destruction everywhere it is abused.   They can’t figure out a way not to gouge a generation of college graduates who get these notices every month, and friendly phone calls, from the Default Aversion Team.  

President Obama was in town last week, wearing a tux and making jokes at dinners where people paid thousands of dollars to eat rubber chicken and shower our brilliant president with love.   Many hate Barack Obama, it’s true, and I like to see him get his love.  But I also have to say:  what the fuck?  This is really the best you can do, my man?

Communist

Back before free markets ruled the world, before freedom was on the march everywhere, before we all enjoyed the true, universal democratic freedom afoot in the world today, there was a serious debate over the most just way to organize societies.   This debate goes back centuries, to the earliest times.  It was formally ended  by Ronald Reagan, already possibly demented, when he caused the Russian Communists to tear down the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War between Capitalism (freedom) and Communism (repression).

During what’s known as the Enlightenment in Europe, after dim centuries of monkish superstition and misery, the lives of human individuals were put at the center of the debate.  For the first time inalienable natural rights were discussed– the rights to life, liberty and, in Jefferson’s felicitous phrase– the pursuit of happiness.  

Rhetorical phrases are just that, and how ironic or accurately descriptive they are depends on experience down here on the ground where most of us are compelled to live.  “Freedom on the March” means something different to those stirred by their president declaring it and those who find themselves homeless and orphaned, lives trampled by the boots of their liberators as freedom, not always graceful, marches in.  

But I am hopped up, trying to motivate myself somehow to get on with my day.  A thought, then, and into my work:

My grandmother grew up in a town in the Ukraine where Jews were treated harshly for centuries.   Two decades after she left all the Jews in her town were murdered, some slowly, the rest shot and left in a ravine in the summer of 1943.  When she was a teenager in Vishnevitz, for a brief period, the Russian Revolution brought the promise of freedom, equality and inalienable rights in the form of Communists on horseback, with machine guns mounted on carts, with books and organizers and the burning idea of shaking off centuries of murderous repression.  A bright girl, she seized on this hopeful dream and was, for the rest of her life, in spirit if not in actual party membership, a Communist.

Your grandma was a fucking Commie, you will say.  Yes, I will reply, and she was not wrong.  There was once a debate about the most just way to organize human affairs.  Karl Marx, whatever virtues and flaws were in his idealistic system, underestimated one thing: the fatal resolve of Capitalism.   Regarding the famous apocryphal Lenin quote that capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them with, they will.  Right after they’ve poisoned the last drop of water you will drink to wet your whistle after doing the sweaty deed.

Listening

You have never really been listened to, granted.

I grant you everything.  I grant you the pain of never really ever having been listened to.  It is a primal pain, to feel that when you first spoke, until now, that you have rarely, if ever, been attentively listened to.   Dig it.  Many people, sadly, experience this in life.  It is a trauma that puts a heavy burden on the soul.

I knew a woman who said she loved me, acted very much like she did.   She did very loving things for me, was generous with her love.  I could tell she hurt when I hurt.  She gave me advice sometimes about my life, what she thought I should do to be in less pain.  She told me she was giving me the same advice she had found useful in her life.   When she was dispensing advice she told me she always talked to me the same way she spoke to herself.

I did not doubt this, even as I often resisted some of her advice.  One day, when she tried to insist, I said to her “but sometimes you have talked to yourself and convinced yourself the best thing to do was to put your head in the oven.”  She was quiet.  She had told me of these moments of weakness, the things she had done in desperate moments.  I wasn’t telling her this to make her feel bad, I was reminding her of the difference between us, and how we treat ourselves, to put her advice in perspective.  

“I remind you of this to illustrate as vividly as I can, so you will have no doubt — if someone tried to put my head in an oven I would fight them to the death.   I would never put my own head in an oven.”   Just saying.  She still offered advice from time to time, but I think this perspective stayed with her.

People who care about you will sometimes give you advice, with the best of intentions.  They tell you things meaning very much to help.   They may never have been really listened to themselves.  Many people were not.  They learned as best they could, filled their lives as best they could with the things they needed and never got in life.   They took whatever wisdom they were able to find and they try to share it with you out of concern.   Not all of these people can help you.  In fact, few can actually help you.  

Turns out the thing that probably helps the most is someone listening to you with enough care to hear what you are actually saying.  This kind of listening does not  assume it knows what you are about to say and does not respond to what it thinks you may have said, based on the past.  

Empathy turns out to be the best thing one person can give to another, the best thing we can give ourselves.  It is a question of attention– of asking questions when things are unclear, until you understand.  It is a question of time, being generous with your time to hear what the other person is really concerned about.  In my experience it is almost impossible for  a person who is niggardly with their time or attention to be a valuable friend or even a good person to talk to.

A sufficiently mature person can tolerate being ignored, forgotten, slighted, thought of last, if at all, and can make philosophical accommodations to all these things.  But when a person who claims to care for your well-being does these things, you must not tolerate it.  Care does not include these things.  

So, best to be direct.  I have told you as clearly as I can what hurts me in your actions.  I have told you again.  I have explained it on a third and fourth occasion.  I have given you every fair chance to do better.  You have not done better, you have done worse.  If you have not done worse on purpose, you did it because you were not capable of doing better.  You did not care enough.  I understand your limitations in friendship better than I did before.

You were not taught to care enough, nobody showed you how it should be done.  That is true for many people, no doubt.  It is the rare and blessed person who is shown the way to care for others.  Most of us have to learn it as we go, the best we can.

I am trying hard to be a man of peace, and I succeed more often now than before in my life.   I understand that self-hatred and confusion drive some people to act destructively, to themselves and others.  But understanding the reason for it does not give permission to anyone to act destructively.  Hitler had a horrible childhood, clearly.  But fuck Hitler.

We come in the end to the point where the only question remains:  hand open or hand closed when it bids you peace and go in good health?

Elizabeth Warren

“powerful interests benefit from a system that is complicated and opaque”

Elizabeth Warren was deemed too controversial to head the new federal U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she’d called for.   This agency would investigate complaints by ripped off consumers,  give them a way to get compensated when their powerful fellow-citizens, corporations, take advantage of them in a predatory way.    President Obama decided the confirmation debate on the floor of a Congress intent on thwarting his every idea, even ideas they agreed with, would be futile and politically costly.  He nominated a less controversial person to head the agency, appointed him during a recess and that was the last anyone heard of this bold new agency.  Nobody’s fault, a defender of Mr. Obama could say, just the sad reality of the highly polarized wedge issue politics of the day.

Elizabeth Warren ran a successful campaign for the senate in 2012 and took office in January 2013. I get emails from Senator Warren from time to time.   I like what she has to say very much, and what she consistently seems to fight for.  Here is a great quote from her I heard last night, apparently made over a year ago:  

“I’ve been in the senate for nearly a year and believe as strongly as ever that the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families.  We could talk about a lot of ways the system is rigged: lobbyists, campaign finance, the court system, but I want to raise a specific issue that we need to spotlight:  how much powerful interests benefit from a system that is complicated and opaque.”  

A system that is complicated and opaque.  Well said.  Other adjectives come to mind as well, but she cuts through to the essence, resisting the urge to use words like convoluted, deliberately confusing, obfuscatory, immoral.  Ask a financial genius to describe the industry-wide scam that torpedoed the economy in 2008, the bundling, tranching and reselling of toxic “derivatives” that were somehow swapped for the tremendous profits of few, and the bankruptcies of many, after being rated triple A investments by rating agencies that were essentially paid to give these false and misleading ratings to poison.    The genius would have a hard time describing it in a way anyone not trained in the industry could understand.

Although, the simple fact, after the fact, is that a massive fraud was perpetrated, industry-wide, arguably under cover of complicated and opaque law, and nobody was ever forced to return a dollar of the billions and billions transferred from retirement accounts and life savings to the personal wealth of already very rich executives and investors.  The opaque, complicated and loophole strewn laws these wealthy interests agreed to so that a future tsunami of financial highjinx does not roll over us lack the simplicity and effectiveness of the FDR-era law* they had repealed in order to perpetrate this massive transfer of wealth.  

Glass-Steagall, the repealed law, prevented a major financial crisis for more than 50 years (they’d previously happened every 15 years, culminating in the stock market crash of 1929), until loopholes began appearing under Reagan in the 1980s.  Shortly thereafter we had the Savings and Loan Scandal.  Once the law was repealed (under Bill Clinton’s watchful and practical eye) we had the first world-wide financial disaster since 1929.  An amazing coincidence, no?   

The devil is in the details and if the details are complicated, confusing, opaque, impossible to parse– voila, the devil is free to cavort as much as he likes.  Here’s one that struck me from Elizabeth Warren’s recent email about regulation to curb the interest rates of student loans:

“Since last year, nearly a million more borrowers have fallen behind on their payments. Altogether, students are now struggling with $100 billion MORE debt than they were a year ago.

Student loan debt was an economic emergency last year – and now that emergency is getting worse. That’s why I’m reintroducing the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act. Join me in telling the Senate Republicans: Student loan refinancing can’t wait another year.

” … I don’t kid myself: Refinancing loans won’t fix everything that’s wrong in our higher education system. We need to cut the price of college, to reinvest in public universities, to shore up federal financial aid, to crack down on for-profit colleges, and to provide better protections on student loans.

But let’s start with the $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. Let’s start by cutting back on the interest payments that are sinking young people and holding back this economy. Tell the GOP: Let’s start with Bank on Students.“

The bold proposal that Republicans filibustered last year would limit the interest rate in this trillion dollar government sponsored industry to 3.9%, four times what savings banks pay to depositers, three or four times the interest rates banks are paying for two year CDs.   A quick check of mortgage and other loan rates shows rates below 3.9% for people buying houses or cars, or refinancing homes.   I don’t know what rate investment banks and corporations are paying to borrow money these days (as close as I can tell this is the federal funds rate, lowered to 0.0-0.25% in December of 2008) but I believe the 3.9% interest rate is more than 10 times higher than that, if not infinitely higher.  

Ah, go fight City Hall, it’s complicated and opaque, you know what I’m saying?  But let us end with Elizabeth Warren’s succinct 2011 refutation of the Libertarian worldview and her answer to the charge that in advocating for higher tax rates on the wealthy she is engaging in “class warfare”:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. … You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

source

NOTES

*  [in 1987] Thomas Theobald, then vice chairman of Citicorp, argues that three “outside checks” on corporate misbehavior had emerged since 1933: “a very effective” SEC; knowledgeable investors, and “very sophisticated” rating agencies. Volcker is unconvinced, and expresses his fear that lenders will recklessly lower loan standards in pursuit of lucrative securities offerings and market bad loans to the public. For many critics, it boiled down to the issue of two different cultures – a culture of risk which was the securities business, and a culture of protection of deposits which was the culture of banking.  

(and from the end of the PBS piece)

Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal [October, 1999], Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill’s chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told [noted corporate cocksucker] Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, “You’re buying the government?”

source 

Another glimpse at Perfection

If your point is that American politicians are hopelessly corrupt, and the voters a bunch of easily whipped up partisan dupes, and that since government is ineffective, at best, and  should be curtailed and kept small enough to drown in a bathtub, imagine if you could do this.

Contribute unlimited money, tax-deductibly, to organizations created under the odd provisions of a certain law’s section 501(c) (4) to run unlimited ads ensuring that politicians who oppose your agenda know they will be voted out of office if they don’t go along with your program.  If they’re conservatives, threaten ’em from the right.  If they’re liberals, shoot, it’s even easier to primary those bastards.  

The result?  A pliable bunch of hopelessly compromised and corrupt American politicians  committed only to staying in office, playing to easily whipped up partisan dupes who are already mad as hell and waiting to do something about it.  The resulting ineffective government will cause even those who believe in the importance of democracy to cry out to drown the bastards, every one of them, in a bathtub.

A kind of sickening perfection, you have to admit.

Quick, Snide Note to My Fellow Americans

Americans are arguably (and we will argue, by God, and the dumber the argument the readier we are to fuck somebody up over it) the world’s most competitive,  unhealthiest, most easily manipulated, most vi0lent, most ill-informed, most opinionated, most likely to kill each other with a gun, most likely to defend the right to kill somebody with a gun, most prone to suicide with a gun, most materialistic, most optimistic, greediest, most distracted and self-involved population, probably of all time.  I’m leaving most fearful off the list, and angriest, because while those might also be true, they’re matters of opinion and hard to verify.  I’m also leaving off most kind-hearted, idealistic and trusting, for the same reason.

Of course, we Americans are free to fight about any one or all of these snidely unflattering characterizations.  We have that freedom here, unlike citizens of a lot of other places.  And God bless these United States.   I defend our right to be all of these things and more.  

Worldwide consumers of fast food and violent American films should not feel smug about America’s faults.   We come by them honestly:  our national religion is the acquisition of wealth and the refinement of the machine that assists in that acquisition.  Wealth, or lack of it, is the measure of everything here– as it is fast becoming everywhere.   America was the land where unlimited wealth was advertised, our streets paved with gold; the chance to have more money than anyone else remains a big part of the American Dream, the global dream.  The right to compete was guaranteed to all Americans, even if it is, arguably, not always enforced fairly.  

This dream was sold to Americans living here and used to lure needed workers here over the years.  It was sold deliberately, skillfully, to excellent advantage, from our earliest days.  America pioneered Public Relations and modern Advertising, the increasingly sophisticated use of the mass media to shape public perceptions, frame debate, package, brand and sell products, instill values and consumer loyalty.  We are the masters of it.  Nobody else, until very recently, was even in second place.  

As adults most of us can sing many catchy ad jingles we remember from childhood.  Few of us can quote a line of Shakespeare or anything from the Bible, but most of us who were around at the time can sing “The One and Only Cereal That Comes In The Shapes of Animals” and know exactly what we’re singing about.

So while it’s true we may be dumber than shit, and arguably in steep decline, as a nation and culture, we’re very, very rich and we can still fuck you up.  Yeah.  And we will too.  What are you gonna do about it?

Heh, I thought so…

Just watched a JFK documentary on PBS

And watched him deliver, in black and white movie footage, these words from Ireland, in the early summer of 1963, the last summer of his life:

George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life.  “Other people,” he said, “see things and say ‘why?’.   But I dream things that never were, and I say ‘why not?’”    
 
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities.  We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask “why not?”
 
Dig it.

Do You Get It?

Talking approvingly about the progress among the compromises made by the Obama administration to pass the puckishly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the context of America 2015: driven by profit, corporations as people with feelings too, money as speech, ad buys win campaigns, politicians vying at the corporate trough, etc. is like talking about the success of advocates against the spread of slavery in 1856.

“Half of the new territories won’t allow slaves as a result of our hard work here today,” the successful advocate would say proudly, “that’s progress.  Not ideal, I know, but given the facts on the ground:  slavery perfectly legal under the Constitution, constitutional amendment impossible in a nation divided 50/50 into partisan camps that hate each other, wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an armed war between these two gun toting factions protecting their interests… we were LUCKY to convince Congress not to allow slavery in half the new territories.  That’s success today, and we should celebrate instead of looking at the damn glass half empty.  Hell, we have enough problems trying to wipe out the buffalo herds so we can destroy the Indian culture on the prairies that we need for Manifest Destiny….”

“Do you fucking have fucking Tourette’s?” she asked me.

“Maybe,” I said, “but doesn’t everybody?”

A Foolish Belief in Democracy?

The young Thomas Jefferson, shortly after he married the widow of Bathurst Skelton, three years before becoming the Author of Liberty, increased his wealth threefold.  He became the master of Bathurst’s 135 slaves [1]  (Jefferson had inherited only 50 from his parents) and added 11,000 acres of property formerly held by Bathurst [2] to the 5,000 he had previously inherited.   To say that young Thomas Jefferson was born booted and spurred to ride the backs of his saddled countrymen would not be entirely unfair.  His marriage to the wealthy young widow added luster to both boot and spur.

With all this inherited wealth, and in spite of an eloquently expressed life long hatred of tyranny,  which compelled him to risk being hanged as a revolutionary, and his deep moral opposition to slavery, the Author of Liberty should have had the luxury, more than fifty years later, of freeing his remaining 130 slaves in his will, as the Father of our Country had done.  Sadly, that luxury was denied to him.  John Adams, who comes down to us far less heroically than Washington and Jefferson, and not nearly the moral equal of either (in the simplistic popular imagination), never owned a slave.  But that is another rant for someone else to go on about some other time.

Fictional, aspirational president Josiah Bartlet, of  The West Wing TV series, is fond of learned quotes.   He quoted Jefferson some time toward the end of season six.   “A man’s management of his own purse speaks volumes about character,” he said.   And it struck me anew: motherfucker!  

The reason Jefferson could not free his slaves, as he heartbrokenly regretted he could not do toward the end of his life, is that in spite of his great inherited wealth, his management of his own purse was less than perfect.  His love of luxury far exceeded his  ability to pay for shipments of the most expensive French wine, the finest Italian furnishings, the clothes made for him by the greatest tailors in Europe, the magnificent horses he rode, the no expense spared constant remodeling of his gracious and beautiful home, Monticello.

He had racked up impressive debts over the years of his long, luxurious life as a philosopher king.  If he had freed his slaves, instead of bequeathing them as property to his daughters, he would have left his progeny penniless.  The shame of that outweighed any other qualms he might have had.  Even leaving aside the several slave children he fathered with the illegitimate half-sister of his late wife, his long-time slave mistress Sally, (unacknowledged during his life and indignantly denied on his legacy’s behalf for a century and a half after his death) let us say, in unison: motherfucker.   History is kinder to him, by far, than I am.  No doubt.

My meditation on the man who bravely declared the self-evident truth of human equality leads me to wonder about my ongoing belief in the idealistic democracy he played such a large role in shaping.  I continue to believe in the importance of our public institutions.  Most large steps forward as a People were the product of principled government initiative in response to overwhelming events and popular agitation. Think about the use of the Interstate Commerce Clause and the courage and determination of both activists and jurists in the federal courts to end centuries of racism at law.  (Much work remains to be done there, but that’s not the point.  The laws needed to be changed, the government acted to change and, in some cases, even enforce the laws.  A triumph of democracy.)

The importance of principled government action is confirmed for me over and over as I watch the ongoing failure of profit-driven business, our so-called Free Market, to solve any of the pressing problems of our society.  Exponentially increasing the wealth of a few makes the country’s wealth look good on paper, but human lives, like baseball games, are not played on paper. Wall Street’s health in most cases has little to do with healthy lives on Main Street.  

Without a pragmatic and honest government to unite and inspire us we have no hope of solving the biggest challenges we face as a nation, as a species, as a planet.  I am probably even in the majority in this opinion, of those with the leisure to consider the question seriously, and who do not stand to lose wealth by taking this position.  Not that it makes much difference, if my belief in democracy is a silly as other fond beliefs of childhood.

Leave aside the damning fact that our highest court has decided that, Constitutionally speaking, and as intended by the Framers, money is speech in a land where 97% of all political campaigns are won by the side that spends the most money speaking.  Has there ever been anything like democracy for most of the history of this nation, the world’s first modern experiment in government of the People, by the People and for the People?   At isolated moments, perhaps, the best aspirations and highest motives of our citizens have become enshrined in our laws.  Sometimes these isolated moments are decades or centuries in the making.

Slavery and lynching, two practices long protected by American law, the former embedded, obscurely but robustly, in our Constitution, the latter winkingly left up to the states to, er … uh, regulate, are now universally reviled.  Today nobody but the hybrid of a moral cretin and a talking jackass would make an argument in favor of slavery or lynching, though both were the law of the land for generations.  Medicare, once unthinkably controversial, is now something even the Tea Baggers want the government to keep their hands off of.  Social Security too, at one time renounced as part of a Socialist plot, has become something most retired people rely on, at least in part, and value as part of a decent society’s social safety net. Not long ago homosexuals were hunted down and locked up, today they legally marry in many states. Millions are in jail today for preferring marijuana to alcohol as their drug of choice. [OK, I know, an exaggeration, please see note… 3]  Democracy does over time move forward, although more often than not only after excruciatingly long struggles against powerful, organized, determined, well-funded forces. 

In light of all this, can I really be angry at a president who campaigned by appealing to the highest ideals and hopes of many of our citizens and continues to talk the talk, though often obliged to speak less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, while ruling in slavish obedience to the corporate bottom line?  Sure I can, but I don’t know how fair it is.  He is not the only “sell-out” to find life much more complicated as the indebted to campaign donors leader of the free world than he may have wished it to be.  Bill Clinton is often considered the greatest Republican president of the last fifty years, though he was relentlessly attacked as a liberal.  Heck of a liberal Bill was, really.

If Jefferson could have freed his slaves, you just know he would have done the right thing, even as the management of his purse showed most of what we need to know about the actual content of his character.

It bears repeating, as was done a few times on The West Wing:  we campaign in poetry but govern in prose.  Call me strict, but I believe  the Author of Liberty should be judged by his own formulation– ditto this well-spoken idealist we have in there now.  

When someone who talks like a psychopath, or a slave holder, acts like one, I know how to react.  I am mobilized, adrenaline flows.  I’m angry, maybe, but not hurt.   I certainly feel no surprise, no betrayal of principle or trust.  When someone talks like a true and compassionate friend, and acts exactly like the guy who talks like a psychopath, and people around me act like he’s still our true friend — it robs me of hope.  It crushes my soul just a little bit more.   Makes me feel something I strongly resist believing:  that my faith in democracy, in the power of the  People to see the truth and walk toward the light, may be entirely foolish.

I don’t believe that, deep down, but, damn, these complicatedly nuanced idealist motherfuckers who eloquently speak our fondest hopes make it hård.

 

 

[1] These 135 slaves were inherited from Martha’s father John Wayles, not Bathurst Skelton, and in 1773.  Among the slaves was Betty Hemings and her last daughter by John Wayles (she had six of his children), the baby Sally.

[2] He inherited the 11,000 acres from Wayles, too.  I just like writing Bathurst Skelton and didn’t have my copy of Fawn M. Brodie’s excellent, groundbreaking 1974 Thomas Jefferson; An Intimate Biography at hand when I wrote the post earlier today.  (see W.W. Norton softcover, pp. 80-87)

[3] Fine, not millions locked up for pot.  But read these shameful statistics.   Could a democracy spend the more than $51,000,000,000 annually that goes to the endless, senseless “War On Drugs” any more wisely?  How about 10% of it to make sure no old Americans are ever forced to be cold, or homeless, or eat cat food?