Having Some Work Done

Monrovia, California

May 30, 2013

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.  However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters.”

Jane Austen began Pride and Prejudice with these words as they related to wealthy eligible bachelors among the English gentry during the first decades of the 19^th century.  In the context of the story she is about to tell, it is both true and untrue, real and imagined, and most importantly, written from a viewpoint not universal at all, but rather from the perspective of comparatively few people, and most especially, not from that of either of the initial persons in question.  The single man referred to in the opening lines and the wife chosen for him by the world--Mr. Bingley and Jane Bennett--do not marry as planned, and only later are reunited in a rather roundabout way.  Another pair who immediately fit the bill—Mr. Darcy and the heroine Elizabeth Bennett—also marry, though no one expects them to except the reader.  Thus is the initial promise of the novel accomplished, just not in the way the writer would have you expect at first.   

When best wrought in literature, irony accomplishes exactly what Jane Austen’s opening sentences do.  It views the inevitability and essential uncontrolability of the voyage of life from the perspective of those who think they can somehow steer its outcome into a different port, as it were.  It cloaks the varied vagaries of human experience in the blandness of what is generally accepted, so that no matter what happens afterwards, the readers will be both satisfied and left scratching their heads in wonderment when the story unfolds pretty much exactly as it was foretold to do.  Oedipus, in attempting to escape his foretold fate—that he will kill his father and marry his mother—runs right into its arms, but not without a great deal of contrary effort on his part and unwitting cooperation from his parents.  Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, in trying to find a little happiness and respite from the tedious fate he has fallen into by staying in his little village in mediocrity and marrying his hypochondriac cousin, simply achieves a new more wretched version of the same, only with a different cousin.

These examples, and many more that could be recounted here, are literary tales designed to encourage us readers not only to accept our own fates, whatever they may be, but to understand that trying to alter the course of life is essentially an exercise in futility, and furthermore, that attempting to divine what that course might be is equally useless, and usually wrong, apart from the universal understanding that we will all die some day, and if we're fortunate, grow old first.  As such, from both the literary and theological perspectives, irony reinforces the certainty of predestination over the illusion of free will.

Some examples are more elaborate than others, but that’s pretty much the sum of it.  In the Book of Job, it plays out at a cosmic level, as God and Satan engage in a petty contest, the outcome of which we all know in advance.  God knows Job is obedient to his fate, but agrees to let poor Job be tormented in various ways in order to teach Satan who’s boss, as if there’s any doubt about that.  It’s a prime example of the fact that free will is not only an illusion, but an evil one at that.  Only the Devil would try to convince himself or anyone else that the Almighty doesn’t have it all figured out in advance, and that the outcome is anything but inevitable, and that, in effect, God isn't going to bet against himself.  Predestination trumps free will, because if we believe that God is omniscient, even what appears to be free will has been preordained.  Satan and his human victims are the all-time losers because they keep trying to change the outcome. Here, at least, Calvinism got it right over Roman Catholicism.   

Well, I could go on in this wise for pages, and would enjoy doing so.  But by now you might well be wondering what any of this has to do with the hideous examples of plastic surgery depicted above.  It’s the subject of irony that ties it in.  Increasingly throughout the country, and out here in southern California especially, people are prone to trying to alter their appearances for the better by various forms of facial reconstruction, often with disastrous results.  I’m not talking about fixing a cleft lip or grafting skin onto horrible disfigurements caused by burn injuries.  I’m talking about what we like to refer to as “having some work done.”  A generation or two ago this mostly meant the facelift, whereby the sagging folds of skin wrought by age and gravity are stretched and tucked and snipped, usually under or behind the ears where the scars won’t show, and sometimes rhinoplasty, where the nose is trimmed and sculpted to make it smaller, straighter, and more often than not, less interesting.  In the old days this was done with an eye toward conforming to an ideal of beauty in line with that of the northern European Gentile look, as opposed to the conspicuously Levantine look.  It was done to actors and actresses, especially, at the behest of the moguls of the movie industry, who, ironically, were almost all Jewish themselves, from Goldwyn, Mayer, and the Warner brothers of old to Eisner, Katzenberg, and Spielberg of today.

Today elective plastic surgery takes many more forms that it did in its infancy.  Botox injections in the lines of the face, cheek implants, collagen in the lips, breast enhancements, you name it.  But the one thing it all has in common is that it’s usually instantly recognizable, much as even good toupees are.  And though it is meant to enhance the beauty of its subjects it almost always makes them look ridiculous or pathetic and ruins what natural beauty their faces or bodies originally possessed.  Who can look at Cher, for example, without thinking that she’s become a version of the deformed child she mothered in the movie Mask?  Who can behold the mouths of actresses like Goldie Hawn or Nicole Kidman and think that anything other than a cruel joke has been played by whoever convinced them that making their lips look like a cartoon version of a fish has improved their looks?  Who can gaze at the frighteningly smooth and stretched faces of octogenarians like Barbara Walters and Joan Rivers and believe that placing an artificial doll's head upon a superannuated body does anything but mock the wisdom and self-possession that ought to have accompanied their fame as they have aged?

The list of the stretched and puffed and smoothed faces of the aging famous, living and dead, goes on and on.  Michael Jackson, Priscilla Presley, Wayne Newton, Tony Curtis, Mickey Rourke, Dolly Parton, Meg Ryan, Melanie Griffith, Bruce Jenner.  The blubbering lips, the tight slanted eyes, the absurdly round cheeks.  I’m not talking about the discreet tuck here and there, but rather the faces that, to paraphrase Marc Antony in Julius Caesar, make nature stand up and say to all the world, “This is a freak.”

Then there are the regular folks, just walking around at the supermarket, with conspicuously swollen lips and distorted faces.  The lips, especially, are a source of eternal puzzlement to me.  Who in the world ever came up with idea that making someone's lips look fat would enhance their beauty? Well, for those poor folks (not poor in money, just in perspective), it’s more often than not simply a desperate attempt to turn back the hands of time and also to effect at least a partial change in ethnicity in much the same way those with straight hair want to curl it and those with curly hair wish it to be straight.

For the famous, I’m convinced that the urge--the need--for facial plastic surgery stems from a combination of factors.  One, of course, is the complete loss of rational self-image that besets them, actresses especially.  Since their careers often have been founded on their original youthful good looks, when they see the natural effects of age upon their faces they begin to panic, and what follows more often than not is a trip to the plastic surgeon.  Somewhere along the way their images of themselves have merged with what they see of themselves on the screen, covered in beautifying cosmetics and illuminated by flattering lighting, and they become convinced they’ve always looked better than they really have, or that if only one little thing were tweaked, so to speak, they would be damned near perfect.  So plastic surgery, they reason, is like a more permanent version of makeup.  And since they spend most of their time looking at their peers, when they see so many others with blubber lips and Barbie doll noses and cheeks the size of apples, they begin to perceive, however wrongly, that such is the standard of beauty in their profession.  Only imagine, if the modern version of plastic surgery had been around fifty years ago, what a person as insecure as Marilyn Monroe might have wound up looking like. 

Another factor is the surgeons themselves who, as intelligent people, of course know that they’re not really doing anyone but themselves any favors with all this cutting and pasting and filling.  They are like Satan in the Garden of Eden, convincing humans that they can attain more for themselves than comfort followed by peaceful oblivion, and thus leading them to ruin their lives.  There is, after all, absolutely no medical necessity or justification for cosmetic surgery of this kind, and only an evil physician would or could engage in such a practice.

Third is the fact that plastic surgery has become a fad, and moreover, an addictive one.  Get big lips on a small face, and you need bigger cheeks to balance them out.  Get bigger cheeks and you need fewer wrinkles.  Change all that and you need a different nose.  Actors are not, by and large, highly intelligent people, although if they are good actors they can play intelligent people and sometimes fool us into thinking they are smarter than they really are.   But just watch them on talk shows and you can see that they’re usually pretty average in the IQ department.  The brightest and the wittiest of them usually don’t succumb to the blandishments of excessively conspicuous plastic surgery.  They are imitators, and imitating others is what they do best, which I think explains a great deal.  But also, actors tend to do what others tell them to do (which, after all, is what directors are for), and to envy what others have, and so if a competitor is getting work done, they reason, it must be something worth having, more or less for its own sake, like having a fancy home or car.

And finally, I am convinced, is what I call the sabotage factor.  Some actresses (being, as I said, not overly bright as a rule) let themselves be talked into having their faces distorted and ruined by others in their profession who stand to gain from their removal from their positions at the front and center of the spotlight of celebrity once they become bizarre caricatures of their former selves.  Or they’re encouraged by fellow actresses who have made the mistake themselves, and whose misery desires company.  In Hollywood, after all, there is comparatively little room at the top of the pyramid of beauty and fame.  And still less room for intelligence and independence.

“Vanity…” says Al Pacino with a chuckle at the end of The Devil's Advocate, “...definitely my favorite sin.” 

Our National Religion

May 10, 2013

Monrovia, California

One of the organizations I support is dedicated to upholding the separation of church and state in this country.  It sends me a monthly magazine detailing the trials and tribulations of fighting this good fight, including articles about the constant assaults upon this national principle by the Religious Right (evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants mostly, with a few conservative Roman Catholics thrown in), a principle most of the people who invented the United States considered essential to the ongoing viability of the country.

This watchdog group keeps track of an almost constant onslaught of clearly unconstitutional laws and practices that violate the separation of church and state which are still being enacted by states and municipalities, and occasionally by the federal government.  Sometimes it joins lawsuits through its small legal staff, as an amicus curiae.  It also celebrates some of the historically significant cases that have helped to reduce the incursion of religion into the workings of our public institutions, mostly schools, courts, and other taxpayer-funded programs.  Incorrigible counties still put the Ten Commandments on courthouse lawns, ignorant cities still put manger scenes in municipal parks, misguided school districts still allow or encourage the recitation of prayers as part of their daily routines, and crazy states try to allow Christian symbols to be printed on license plates.  When lawsuits make it to federal court these practices are almost invariably struck down, but sometimes the money and the will to take the suits that far are lacking.  The organization I support is currently headed by an ordained Methodist minister who, I presume, has no bias against Christianity, but does believe in the freedom of all persons to express their faith, or not, as they see fit, without  encouragement or interference from the government.

Let’s pause here to look at what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they decided that church and state should be separate, and when they pronounced as much on a number of occasions, both within the Constitution—in the First Amendment, of course, and also by the deliberate omission of references to God and religion in the body of the Constitution itself—and in other of their writings.  The omission of any reference to a deity within the Constitution speaks for itself.  Now look at the opening phrase of the First Amendment —“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .”  Many people take this as simply a guarantee of freedom of religion, which indeed it is.  But the political and cultural milieu from which the first Americans came—British subjects all—suggests that the real purpose behind the First Amendment’s “establishment” and “free exercise” clauses was not so much to protect religion as to protect the government from religion, and in particular from the power and tyranny of the clergy over everyone, especially non-Christians, dissenters, agnostics, and atheists.  Religion in the most basic sense of the word is simply a belief in and worship of a God or gods.  In the First Amendment the word did not come with any qualifying adjectives such as "organized" or "recognized" or "accepted."

There is an inherent contradiction in the idea of freedom of religion within a society.  It really amounts to a rejection of the primacy of religion itself in favor of the primacy of laws that everyone knows were invented by humans.  This idea was so at variance with the orthodoxy of the 18^th century as to be novel and practically heretical.  A civil war had been fought in England a century earlier over religious nuances most of us today would consider piddling—Episcopalianism versus Presbyterianism versus Puritanism.  Naturally it had much to do with temporal power and comparatively little to do with God.  Each faction wanted its own version of Protestantism to be the established religion of the realm, although a few people believed that Englishmen should be free to worship as they pleased, as long as they remained Protestant.

Most western religions, at least, claim to have the definitive truth about the relationship of God to the arrangement of the cosmos.  If a religion possesses the only correct path to enlightenment and a right relationship with God, how can a society be governed by anything but that religion?  Nothing else would make sense, would it?  After all, God is greater than any little country.  This of course is the position taken by many Christians today, and is the reason they fight so hard against the First Amendment.

We all assume that what makes religion truly dangerous is not so much the daily bowing and scraping of its humble adherents as the declaration of the absolute truth of things by the leaders of a religion, whether they go by the title of Bishop, Ayatollah, Guru, or the Reverend Billy Jim Bob.  Any time anyone presumes to pronounce the truth about God or about how God wants you to live, you should grab your wallet and go hide somewhere.  And if that person has a position of power in a government, well, you’re in big trouble.  Imagine if the head of the Mormons or the Pope were on the payroll of the U.S. Congress, with a permanent seat in the Senate and the power to mandate and officially interpret the practice of Mormonism or Roman Catholicism throughout the land and to punish or at least disenfranchise those who didn’t practice those beliefs.  Imagine having the President of the United States as the official leader of the Mormons or the Catholics.  Absurd, you say?  Tell me how that differs fundamentally from having the Archbishop of Canterbury on the British government payroll, with a seat in the House of Lords, no less, and the Monarch as the official head of the Church of England.  And although the power of the Archbishop and the Queen he nominally serves are today all but gone (thanks in large part to the examples set by the United States, France, and the Netherlands), back in the 1770s that power was real, and it meant that religion was always going to stick its nose into the workings of the government, not in the sneaky roundabout ways American churches do now, but in an officially sanctioned manner.

I mentioned the fact that the leader of the watchdog group dedicated to maintaining the separation of church and state is an ordained Methodist minister because it bolsters an assumption under which I have operated for many years, namely, that only a religious “insider” can fully understand the power of religion to overreach itself and try to impose its tenets on all people in a society.  Coming from a strongly religious background myself I think I can appreciate this more than my friends who were brought up with comparatively little understanding of the detailed workings of religion, particularly in the context of Christianity.  (No one, on the other hand, has any problem seeing the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism, but few Americans are capable of looking directly into the mirror such excesses hold up to our own theological prejudices.)

Among people who are well-meaning but essentially ignorant of the inherent power and built-in absolutism of much of organized religion are those who are not themselves devout.  They perhaps imagine that Jesus was a Great Teacher and that the religion named for him embodies its more benign ideals.  There are those also who, though not particularly churchy, think of the Bible as a great fount of wisdom, and that reading it from cover to cover might be an exercise that would make them more righteous, or at least more understanding of the thinking of Christians. They do not realize that the Bible, far from being a coherent theological text, is a crazy quilt of myth, legend, history, and pure fiction, which makes it more akin to the kind of badly-written science fiction and fantasy stories that make it onto the silver screen, only with much less continuity and many more absolute contradictions.  These folks think that by studying Christianity in some reasonably organized or scholarly way they can come to understand it. 

To be fully understood, religious belief must be inculcated pretty much from birth, and furthermore, you’re only allotted one serious religion per lifetime.  I will never understand the mindset of a devout Muslim no matter how hard I might endeavor to do so.  Trying to come at a religion and understand it after having been raised outside rarely if ever produces results.  It’s like trying to become blond haired and blue eyed after having been born with brown hair and brown eyes.  You might fool yourself, but you won’t fool anybody else, and you’ll look silly trying.  I therefore assert, somewhat immodestly, that only those of us who were born into the family of True Believers can ever lay claim to understanding the real dark side of such belief.

This latter opinion is supported, I think, by examining the U.S. presidents who have done the most damage to the separation of church and state.  Some of our presidents have been devoutly religious men.  Jimmy Carter comes immediately to mind.  There was also my man John Quincy Adams.  James Garfield had been a minister before he became president.  These men did not mess with the separation of church and state, probably because they respected the full power of religion and knew its potential for tyranny.

Instead, for the most part it was the presidents who had always taken their religion with a grain of salt who thoughtlessly eroded the separation of church and state.  The first one was numero uno, George Washington himself, a nominal but basically unreligious Anglican with strongly Deist and Unitarian leanings (meaning that he didn’t really believe in the divinity of Jesus and the other supernatural claptrap of his birth religion).  This man, doubtless with the best of intentions but completely heedless of the clear proscription within the Constitution he was swearing to uphold (he was no intellectual philosopher or social architect, like some of his contemporaries), took the very first oath of office with his hand on the Bible, and added, gratuitously, the words “So help me God” at the end, though they did not appear in the prescribed oath.  After that, every president has felt the need to follow suit, lest he break from tradition and look like a heathen and lose votes in the next election or weaken his party.

Another erring president was none other than the revered and beloved Abraham Lincoln, raised by a Bible-thumping Baptist mother but never fond of organized religion and profoundly skeptical of Christian orthodoxy from an early age.  It was he who signed the law that ordered the words “In God We Trust” to be added to our coinage.   (One of his successors, Theodore Roosevelt, tried to have the phrase removed on the grounds that it was sacrilegious to put the word “God” on money, which was honest, at least.)  Lincoln, even though he was never a regular church-goer, got more sappy and sloppy in his references to God as he trudged along through his presidency, thus ignoring “the better angels of his nature,” to borrow one of his own phrases.  Maybe it was the terrible ravages of war, maybe it was the loss of his young son, but whatever it was it made him increasingly weak-minded when it came to the separation of God from government.

A rolling stone may not gather moss, but it does gather momentum, and into the 20^th century the use of the phrase “In God We Trust” became increasingly more prevalent, making it onto paper money and eventually becoming the official motto of the United States.  It also happens to appear in the rarely-sung fourth verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which was approved for use under Woodrow Wilson and became the official national anthem in 1931, under Herbert Hoover.

The third revered president to do significant damage to the separation of church and state was Franklin Roosevelt, an Episcopalian (and more devoutly, an Anglophile) who spent most Sunday mornings at home than at church.  He was the first to employ clergymen to recite prayers at the beginning and end of his presidential inauguration, in 1933.  That has become standard practice ever since, turning what ought to be the greatest national celebration of the rule of secular constitutional law into what amounts to a church service—invocation, liturgy, sermon, benediction.  Though giving lip service to worldwide freedom of religion (probably as a wartime tactic) FDR also declared on a number of occasions that he believed the U.S. to be a Christian, and also essentially Protestant, nation.  True, we were opposing the combined forces of non-Christian enemies in battle at the time, but still, that left little room for much sympathy or hospitality on his part toward the millions of Jews who were being systematically slaughtered under Fascism. 

Under Dwight Eisenhower, another guy who rejected the faith of his mother early on, Congress mandated, and old Ike signed into law, the insertion of the words “under God” into the pledge of allegiance to the flag.  That was done largely at the behest of the Knights of Columbus, but was embraced by the Protestants in the legislature too.  The thinking was that no atheistic Commie could swear an oath of allegiance to the American flag if those words were in there—it would be like asking a vampire to munch on garlic.  Score one for the religious wackos.

And so it went.  In 1973, Richard Nixon, a very severely lapsed Quaker and pretty much irreligious, became the first president to end a major speech to the nation with the words “God bless America,” surely an exercise in cynicism unparalleled in presidential politics, since it was a speech in which he was sidestepping his responsibility in the Watergate scandal.  His successors Ford and Carter (both believers in the Constitution, apparently), declined to use this benediction, but it was picked up again by Ronald Reagan, another guy who gave only lip service to organized religion, and who practically never attended church services.  After that the die was decisively cast, and all his successors have made profligate use of the term “God bless America” after virtually every speech they’ve made.  By the time of our current Chief Executive, Barack Obama (another real dilettante when it comes to organized religion), the phrase had morphed into the more elaborate “God bless the United States of America,” and his inaugurations had become prayer-fests and clerical free-for-alls. 

Small wonder, then, that in spite of the Constitution, the Religious Right is utterly convinced that this has always been a religious country and that there’s no such thing as the separation of church and state, notwithstanding the First Amendment and the crystal clear pronouncements of Madison, Jefferson, and others on the subject.

One conclusion that could be drawn from the sad history of the almost immediate erosion of the separation of church and state in this country is that the leaders we have to fear most are not those whose personal religious beliefs are the strongest and deepest.  Nor should we be that concerned about the shills for the lunatic fringe of the Religious Right—fundamentalist legislators from Southern states and Arch-Catholic members of Opus Dei on the Supreme Court, for instance—those who wear their religion on their sleeves and have an open agenda.  We should instead fear superficially less religious presidents like Lincoln, Nixon, Reagan, and Barack Obama, who think they are doing the nation no harm by invoking the blessings of a nonsectarian deity while completely ignoring the rights of nonbelievers and pandering to the truly religious.  They arrogantly assume that all Americans who really matter believe in God, and not only that, but in a God who watches over and is involved in shaping the future of the country, who blesses us and in whom we should trust.  This is not the separation of church and state at all but a sort of national religion, less formal than Anglicanism, but a religion nonetheless.  Moreover it assumes ideas that are inherent to orthodox Christianity and a number of other religions, even if it does so in a general way, while sweeping aside the rights and beliefs of atheists, humanists, agnostics, and those who profess any number of other “isms” that either do not acknowledge the existence of God or do not think that God actively favors this country or its far-flung ambitions.

In the interest of political expediency, or in selfish moments of personal sentimentality or insecurity, they have weakened one of the pillars on which our government rests.

The Good Old Days

Monrovia, California

April 27, 2013

At the end of the last posting on immigration I referred, in passing, to the subject of ethnic pride.  I thought about putting another paragraph or two there, but decided instead to devote an entire piece to the subject, another of the many hobby horses I ride.

I’ve been trying all month to give this the right tone, not to take away anyone’s little satisfaction in being all or part whatever—Irish, Italian, German, English, Jewish, West African, Chinese, Mexican, Native American, you name it—but to put it into a fresh perspective.  Being a mixture of several fairly easily identifiable ethnic or national groups is more prevalent in the Americas than it is elsewhere, I think.  In the U.S. particularly, we sort of revel in having a little of this and a little of that in our bloodlines.  It ties us to some Old Country which we usually don’t remember.  We’re a nation (and a hemisphere, really) of comparatively recent immigrants, mixed often with much older immigrants.  Mexicans are frequently a mix of Spanish and local Indians or of several Indian groups (though the people who run the Mexico tend to be much closer to “pure” Spanish, and hence whiter, than the masses are).  Down in Argentina they’re a mix of Spanish, Italians, and Germans, with the Indians having been pretty well pushed out.

We’re all descended from immigrants.  “Pure” bloodlines are pure only in a narrow and historically recent sense, compared to the history of the human species.   My target audience is all immigrants (and their descendants) to what is now the United States, past and future, which means all of us, whether we call ourselves native-born Americans or even Native Americans, as if having been here for a certain period of time entitles any of us to call ourselves “native.”  In fact it seems to do just that.  There persists in the human imagination the idea that having been somewhere for a long time (even when it’s just longer than the guy next door) gives people a sort of squatter’s right to call themselves the ones to whom a place belongs.

To reinforce this belief, many groups of humans who have been in one place for a very long time, say thousands of years, actually have religious or mythic beliefs that their ancestors sprang right up from the ground they now occupy, like trees or weeds, or that God, or the gods, placed them in that exact spot on purpose.  This gives them, from their perspective, a right to be there that is superior to that of all other comparative newcomers.  So pervasive is this type of belief that it has its underpinnings in the recesses of a great many national or ethnic belief systems.  It is called “autochthony,” which derives its meaning from the Greek for “originating where found.”

One problem with the concept of autochthony is that it is simply erroneous, and though I think most people understand this at a purely logical level, they tend to behave as if they do accept it in some way when they are defending their turf, or what once was their turf and has now been taken over by others, or when revering those who have been here longer than they have. 

The history of the world, as far as we understand it at present, tends to demonstrate the very opposite of autochthony.  Overwhelmingly people who find themselves in a certain spot have migrated from somewhere else and taken over that piece of ground, either because it was empty of humans at the time or, much more frequently, because they wanted the place and were willing to conquer and kill off or assimilate with the people they found there.

Because written history is recent compared to all of human history, it’s often the case that we’ve lost the hard evidence of these waves of conquerors, so that folks in a given spot may have the sense that once upon a time they were the true and rightful inhabitants of a place.  One area where much evidence of repeated conquests exists in a tracably intact form, however, is the place we now call Great Britain.  What we seem to know about this area is that there were, many tens of thousands of years ago, people inhabiting the island.  Without a doubt they came from somewhere else and were not the first, only the first for which we have evidence.  Then in about 500 B.C. people who go by various names—Celts, Britains, Gaels, or Scots, to name a few—came from somewhere to the east and conquered and took over, raping and pillaging and looting and slaughtering as newcomers have traditionally done.  There remain traces of a pre-Celtic civilization, preserved in aspects of Celtic myths and in old ruins like Stonehenge and in ancient dug-up bones.

A few hundred years after the Celts took over the British Isles, the Romans invaded and ran the place.  Then some Germanic folks (who had also come from somewhere far to the east) calling themselves Angles, Saxons, and Jutes went over, in the 4^th century A.D. or thereabouts, and supplanted the Celts, pushing them into outlying areas--Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall--where Celts continued to hold on and speak versions of the languages they’d brought with them from wherever they came, while the Germanic conquerors began to develop what later became known as the English language.  Then people called Danes, or Norsemen, or Vikings (themselves Germanic cousins of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), began to spread out from northern Europe into the south, going as far as Russia to the east and France to the west, and the Mediterranean to the south.  They of course had originated somewhere else, too.  Eventually some of those same folks also came up into Great Britain from what is now France.  They were by then known as the Normans, which of course means Norsemen, and were assimilated with the mixture of Celtic, Germanic (Frankish), and Roman people who had been there before the Norman conquest of France.  There were no “pure” Frenchmen, any more than there were or are “pure” Englishmen.  As for their neighbors the Spanish, they too are quite a mix in comparatively recent history.  The Celts, Romans, Goths, and Arabs all spent time there, and to greet them were earlier folks like the Basques.

After that the successful invasions of Great Britain more or less stopped, and for a thousand years things have been allowed to just evolve slowly, with distinct differences being recognized between, let’s say, the Welsh and the Scots on the one hand, and English on the other, who seem to be a mixture of Anglo-Saxon Germanic people and the Frenchified Vikings.  This bit of history imparts an idea of how complicated the question of national or ethnic origin can be, and how it tends to go back only so far in human memory.  For instance, if you’re a Scot you perhaps believe your own ancestors were not Anglo-Saxon but rather Celtic, but you don’t remember, on a collective ethnic basis, that those same Celtic ancestors of yours are comparative newcomers, being only about 2500 years old as inhabitants of an area where humans have lived for dozens of millennia.

Overlaying all this is the knowledge that all the white humans who ever occupied Great Britain, including the Neolithic folks, the Druids, the Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Normans, migrated up out of Africa at some very early point in human history, becoming partially albinized and physically changed in other ways for reasons having to do with climate adaptation (probably in order to absorb more nutrients from the comparatively less strong sunlight of the north and to survive in the cold better).

Now let’s come back home to the U.S.  Here we know that people came from Asia between about 12 and 20 thousand years ago, probably in a long series of migrations, and stopped at various points along the western edge of the Pacific, all up and down the coasts of North and South America, while the middle of North America was still covered by glaciers.  They migrated throughout the two American continents, squatting, settling, conquering, and slaughtering.  (And eating one another: ritual and vindictive cannibalism are characteristic of a surprisingly large number of early civilizations all over the globe.)  Then about five hundred years ago a bunch of Europeans—Spanish, French, and English mostly (and we all know how diverse they were, in terms of their own ethnic histories)—began coming to the western hemisphere and slaughtering, displacing, and in some cases assimilating with the people they found there (but, whether not to their credit, devouring very few of them or of each other, except out of nutritional necessity).  These Europeans captured people from West Africa and brought them over as slaves, too, continuing a tradition of enslaving comparatively defenseless people that was practically universal among both their own ancestors and those of the Native Americans they found on this continent.  Eventually, about 250 years ago, the English established political dominance in what is now Canada and the eastern United States, and the Spanish and Portuguese ran the show everywhere else in the hemisphere, the French having been relegated to small portions of eastern Canada and Louisiana. 

Well, what of it?  Here’s what.  For one thing, no matter where you came from or which group of migrants your ancestors were part of, you can be pretty well assured that your people at some point practiced slaughter, mutilation, enslavement, and cannibalism.  There’s no getting around it.  They did it in under the banner of their own sense of superiority over those they persecuted, whether it was in the name of the Pax Romana, Manifest Destiny, or just to betray their neighbors and get their land.  Nevertheless, people just love to take pride in what they see as their ethnic origins.  And a good many of them do so at the expense of those around them, politically or emotionally or morally speaking.  Ethnic pride. 

No one loves to take the moral high ground on the issue of ethnicity more than two groups in particular—those who think they’ve been here the longest and those who have arrived most recently.

When they’ve been here for thousands of years like the Native Americans, well, they really love ethnic pride.  Partly, I'll grant you, that's because the English-speaking dominant group tried to systematically suppress and eliminate that ethnic pride.  Their religions and customs, often animistic, are cast as more righteous than the monotheism of the west, suggesting a quiet symbiosis with the land and their reverence for the trees and mountains and all that.  The vast differences between their many separate groups, from nomads to hunter gatherers to seafaring to agriculturally stable societies, are swept aside.  In reality they all killed to eat and killed to compete and killed to defeat, but that’s okay because it happened a long time ago.  The viciousness with which they slaughtered, enslaved, mutilated, and often ate their neighbors is quietly forgotten.  Why?  Because of the passage of time and because, most importantly, they themselves were later slaughtered by other, equally vicious and technologically more advanced, people.  New slaughter is always worse than ancient slaughter, which time has a tendency mostly to forgive and forget.  So it is on the American continents and so it was on the European and Asian and African continents from which our various peoples came.

Then there’s the ethnic pride of the newcomers.  That’s based principally on nostalgia imparted by the living to their children and grandchildren.  “Nostalgia” comes from two Greek words and means, literally, “aching for homecoming.”  The term was coined only a few centuries ago, and nostalgia was considered a medical condition or a mental illness associated with depression.  Today it has lost this more scientific meaning and has taken on a deceptively benign connotation.  When people have only been here for a generation or so, they are filled with nostalgia for the Old Country, where things were, by God, the way they should be.  Irish pride. Italian pride. African pride. Mexican pride. Asian pride. German pride.  Their ancestors might have lived like cattle, labored under the thumbs of feudal overlords, been driven out because of their beliefs, been sold into slavery by their neighbors, been starved, beaten, or eaten.  Or they might well have done that to others.  But there was some nobility to it, or so they think.  Drinking and drug-taking celebrations, chicken slaughtering rituals, female circumcision—ah, the good old days.  Sometimes nostalgia is incorporated into religious celebrations.  The Jewish bas and bar mitzvahs, for instance, celebrate a time when twelve-year-old girls and thirteen-year-old boys were considered old enough to marry, because, what the hell, life was pretty short, so why waste time.  Similarly the quinceañera, widely practiced among Latin Americans, signifies that at the age of fifteen a girl is ready to become a bride.  In these and many other traditionally agrarian societies it was important for a girl to become some man’s property and begin propagating early, lest, like Ellie Mae Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies, she become an old maid at the age of eighteen.  Cute and quaint. 

Well, to hell with ethnic pride.  In some religious traditions pride is considered a sin, and I think I can see why. Whether it’s for the old civilizations or the comparatively recent ones, for your race or mine, it’s the most useless force in this country today, and has kept more people in perpetual ignorance than any other force, however well-meaning it might seem.  More people have been killed, self-righteously, in this country in over issues of race and heritage than for any other reason I can think of. 

If the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus’s New Colossus poem stand for anything at all, it’s that we come here to start a new life, one dedicated in principal at least to the equality of the sexes and races, the liberty to make one’s own life decisions, the right of a female to survive infancy, the right to obtain an education and develop a sense of worth based on something beyond the ability to reproduce and work for someone else.  And above all, respect for the rule of law over the rule of religion and ethnic tradition and vendetta.  Many of these ideals were missing in whole or in part from the places from which the immigrants came.  The fact that my readers might react cynically to this recitation of ideals means only that we haven’t achieved them yet, but still believe they are worth working for.

I don’t care whether your ancestors were Aztec warriors or Irish kings or English adventurers or African chieftains (notice that nobody’s ancestors seem to have been just plain folks).  If Ireland, under the thumb of priests, had been that great, you wouldn’t be here.  If Mexico, controlled and benighted by bureaucratic corruption and drug lords, had been that great, you wouldn’t be here.  If China’s wise politburo had been that far-seeing and humane, you wouldn’t be here.  If Bulgaria, or Vietnam, or India had been paradise on earth, you wouldn’t be here.  Forget all that.  Just bring your best food and music and leave the good old days back in the old country.  If they’d been that good you wouldn’t be here.

The Golden Door

March 28, 2013

Monrovia, California

I guess it’s time I weighed in on the subject of immigration into the United States.  Hell, everybody else has, even though hardly anyone has said anything meaningful about it.  There’s only one opinion about immigration that seems unequivocal, and that’s from those who say we should seal our borders and not let anyone else in.  I acknowledge the honesty of those who feel this way, even though I disagree with their opinion.  At least they know what they believe.  Also to be acknowledged, though not applauded, are the voices of the capitalists and agribusiness people who believe in simply continuing our laissez faire policy regarding illegal immigration so they can have a continuing source of low-level workers to exploit.

As for just about everyone else—moderates, liberals, progressives, or whatever those who are not absolutely xenophobic or rapacious wish to call themselves, well, their opinions seem to be a sad mishmash of wishful thinking and compromise and “promise” and “hope” with nothing to show for all their collective hand wringing and tongue wagging.  Like, let’s legitimize those who came here before they were two years old, or some such shit.  Let’s give people a chance to work their asses off for next to nothing then reward them with citizenship.  Let’s start the whole project next term, under the next president, or maybe in the next decade.  Let’s do something, but we’re not sure quite what.  I think of a line from Yeats from his poem The Second Coming when I hear stuff like that:  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

The problem as I see it is that we are laboring under the misapprehension that we have an “immigration problem” in the first place.  The fault is not in our national stars, but in our national selves.  A long time ago, when this country was filled with racism and hatred and misogyny and intolerance at a level far greater than it is today, the nation of France gave us a statue to celebrate our centennial.  The citizens of that country continue to look down their long Gallic noses at us, as they did then, and not without some reason, even though their own history has been as brutal and intolerant as ours has regarding many things, and over many more centuries.  But they meant well at the time they gave us the statue, and they continue to mean well, and they are today a much more decent and humane bunch than they once were.  And their food is far better than ours. 

When the Statue of Liberty made its way across the ocean a few years later people bolted the thing together and stuck it on an island in New York Harbor, and several years after that began to think about something to put on a plaque on its pedestal.  A young woman, an aspiring novelist and poet whose ancestors had been here since colonial days, even though she was not a WASP but of Jewish heritage, wrote a sonnet and entered it in a contest for that purpose in 1883.  She died four years later, at the age of 38, but eventually her poem gained some traction in some circles, despite the fact that it was just a tad too militant for the tastes of upper class New Yorkers who were still trying to finance the pedestal project.  Finally in the early 20^th century they put the poem on a plaque on the base.  The woman’s name was Emma Lazarus, and here is her sonnet, which is rarely quoted in full or taught to school children, though it should be, if only to show that this country from time to time stands for something good:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles.  From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips.  “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Here let me indulge in a bit of pedagogy.  As a poem Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus is pretty much a product of its time.  A bit overwrought some might say.  Certainly hortatory and high Victorian and wonderfully suited to the era, when memorization and declamation of the long epic poems of Longfellow, the love poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the doggerel of Kipling were in vogue.  It’s no Ozymandias, nor as elegant as many of Shakespeare’s sonnets or Milton’s On His Blindness, to be sure, but nevertheless it is precise and well-constructed along Petrarchan lines—a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d-c-d-c-d.  English teachers take note.

One reason it doesn’t get quoted in full very often is that the octave (the first eight lines) has become a bit arcane.  The author is evoking the Colossus of Rhodes (its title is after all The New Colossus), and the study of the seven wonders of the ancient world has given way to more modern and urgent subjects.  In addition, the “air-bridged harbor” over which the statue’s mild eyes look now has one big bridge across it, and a few tunnels under it as well, and the “twin cities” to which she refers are Brooklyn and Manhattan, merged a decade after her death along with three other boroughs into the greater City of New York.

Still, the arresting and really provocative thing about the sonnet is that it begins with the word “Not.”  Immediately the author stakes out her opposition to something else.  This won't be just another Colossus, but a far different Colossus, similar only superficially on account of its immensity and the fact that it acts as a sort of lighthouse.  She immediately casts aside the glorified mythos embodied in the ancient Greek representation of the sun god, and the bellicosity of the entire world, by describing an essentially gentle, welcoming, and peaceful national persona she calls Mother of Exiles.  She thumbs her nose not only at classicism and neoclassicism, but at sexism and the time-honored assumption that might makes right.  Not, I’ll wager, precisely what the Frenchman Frederic Bartholdi had in mind when he conceived and executed this idealized effigy of Liberty.

But the sonnet’s sestet (the last six lines), really packs the punch and the message.  It is frankly and strongly critical of the Europe from which the immigrants to this country had been streaming for generations, and began to do in much greater numbers in the latter part of the 19^th century.  It says, in effect, “To hell with you and your supposedly glorious past and your sanctified history of oppression and feudalism and warfare and intolerance.  We’ll be happy to take the people you don’t want and the ones you treat like shit, you pigs.”  Today we read the lines with a bit more equanimity, but back then you can be sure the message did not go unnoticed on either side of the Atlantic.  Really, it’s the same message we send today, by implication, to the institutionally inept and corrupt governments and cultures of the Spanish-speaking countries south of our border and to those of the Asians and the Africans as well, where politics and religion and wealth and brutality conspire to keep people in thralldom and contribute to the age-old mistreatment of women and children and poor people generally.  Or at least it’s the message we should be sending.  And with that, back to my immigration thesis.

Here’s the main thing, and it’s the same thing as when Emma Lazarus wrote her sonnet in 1883.  People are not streaming out of the United States.  They’re streaming into it.  That should tell anyone with half a brain something about the state of the places from which the immigrants are coming.  Yeah, we wish this country were better that it is, and some of us are trying to improve it, but comparatively speaking (except compared to much of western Europe and Canada and Australia, probably), it could be a lot worse.  This fact should not be a source of pride in the U.S. so much as a reason for sadness about the nature of things elsewhere, but there it is.  Anyway I sincerely hope the reason people want to come here isn’t just for the burgers and fries and video games. 

Now here’s another thing.  Do we—do you—want to be responsible for forcing people to remain in places where they’re not wanted except as perpetual chattel, and where they’ll starve or get killed by disease or warfare or religious fanaticism?  Do you want to leave people in places where they routinely abort female fetuses and where women have to walk around in shrouds and are raped on general principles?  Didn't think so.  Neither do I.

Let me preemptively address some potential objections:

1. If you’re worried about criminals coming into this country, remember that Georgia was once a prison colony (and is still filled, like the rest of the South, with people who are essentially dissolute and amoral).  Remember also that most of the earliest white settlers in this continent were outcasts.
2. If you think an immigrant is going to take your job away from you, then by all means go to work pulling guts in a slaughterhouse, or bending over to pick strawberries, or cleaning rooms in a hotel, or trimming bushes for rich folks, or tarring roofs in one hundred degree heat.  The work is there for you.
3. If you think some new religion is going to take over the country, remember that that has happened already numerous times, starting with the Pilgrims, and continuing with the Baptists and the Mormons and the whacked-out snake-handling Pentecostals and lots of others.  Remember also that there are regular church-going natural-born citizens all over this country already who think the earth was created in six days in the year 4004 B.C. or that some old dipshit in a white suit and slippers in Rome receives his wisdom directly from God Almighty.
4. If you are worried that brown people are going to outnumber white people, recall that this continent was filled with brown people before the Europeans came, and that we imported brown people into the South for hundreds of years on purpose and that some of your ancestors fought in the Civil War because they thought that was a good idea.
5. If you are concerned that English is no longer going to be spoken in this country, consider this:  the white guys who settled this place five hundred years ago didn’t speak English and none of the native inhabitants of the continent they discovered spoke English.  Nevertheless, since the U.S. has come into being as an English-speaking country, untold millions of people who came here from other countries didn’t know a word of English.  Despite this, most of them who came at a reasonably young age and all their children who were born here learned to speak English, and that continues to be the case today.  English isn’t just the language of our past, it’s the language of our future, though no language lasts forever.  But as a worldwide means of communicating I'll put my money on English over Spanish any day.

What’s all this leading up to?  Well, just this.  Here’s my proposed solution to the immigration problem, and it’s really quite simple, and very workable.  Every soul who wishes to come into this country and become a citizen should be able to do so.  Period.  And dispense with all that crap about making them memorize the Bill of Rights or name the planets or recite pi out to the tenth digit past the decimal point.  Just let them be citizens.  They'll get with the program, and probably do a better job of letting go of the darker sides of their ethnic pride than the New York Italians and the Boston Irish have.  Ban illegal immigration and replace it with unrestricted legal immigration.  Open the door and take it off its hinges and throw it away.

If we believe in liberty, then let’s put our belief to the ultimate test, and let people decide for themselves where they wish to live.  It will be a good lesson for us to teach, by example, to our children and to the rest of the so-called civilized world.

Putting America To Work

Monrovia, California

March 7, 2013

They say that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, hoping for different results.  This I believe, but I also believe that insanity can consist of, or be brought on by, the first part only—doing the same thing over and over.  By this definition a great deal of work in the modern world is a form of insanity.  Socialists call it wage slavery; most others call it something like drudgery, tedium, or the daily grind. 

On the other hand, the maintenance of sanity does require that things be predictable to a large extent.  No one is comfortable mentally when things are constantly changing in ways that are beyond his control.  The predictable things of life—hunger, pain, emotional responses of all kinds, sleep—do lend some stability and are, after all, what get most of us from one end of existence to the other more or less intact.  Going back only a few centuries, the task of most people was pure survival—struggle to obtain food, protect themselves and their families from danger, and to reproduce and carry on the species.  This was repetitious to be sure, but it was usually fulfilling when it was done successfully.  Why was it fulfilling?  Because the results were tangible and immediate and, with any luck, lasting, and because the alternative was oblivion.    

By contrast, pure repetition within a smaller context breeds an insanity and instability of its own kind, especially when the results are less immediately and existentially tangible.  I suspect that the idea of variety being the spice of life is for most of humanity a comparatively new and frivolous concept.  It may have arisen because people are not really mentally equipped to work in the modern sense of the idea of work, that is, to go somewhere and devote all their time to the performance of specified duties in the service of others, whether it be things as disparate as waiting on customers, stamping out parts on an assembly line, caring for sick patients, or repeatedly representing people before the law.  This kind of work came about as a result of the needs of a wider society which made specialization and compartmentalization of tasks more necessary, and fit into what became known as the Social Contract--the idea that a sovereign (now usually called a government) would assume the tasks of protecting people from imminent harm against enemies from without (other invading governments, for example) and within (crime, fire, disease, etc.), in exchange for service and payment to the sovereign.

When the lives of ordinary people were no longer simply a matter of day-to-day survival against the elements and predatory animals and humans, work started to become narrower and more specialized.  Instead of all persons doing a little of everything to stay alive, most people began to do a lot of only one thing in exchange for the currency with which to purchase all the other things necessary to stay alive, like food and shelter. 

This kind of modern work is just about all we think of when we say “work.” In fact, pure survivalists and  hunter-gatherers aren’t even referred to as or grouped together with “workers.”  We don’t say, when referring to primitive folks in the jungles of New Guinea or the Amazon, for instance, that they go about their day working at jobs.  We imagine they live simple (and oftentimes dangerous) lives, but we don’t call them workers.  We call them people.  We call them this the way we call cats cats or elephants elephants.  It's not meant as an insult, but instead to convey the idea that they are behaving as they are required to do to exist as a species.  And when it comes to cats and elephants we usually don't presume to expect them to do anything other than to be themselves. 

People who appear to perform ground-level survival tasks within a modern society that is supposedly operated under the Social Contract--those we call the “homeless” or “panhandlers”--are not grouped with other workers either, even though they often spend many hours a day trying to accumulate a little of the same money the rest of us utilize to live our lives.  We say they are unemployed.  Indeed, they usually characterize themselves as such because they attempt to exist within a larger society that only values the kind of repetitious work I referred to above.  A guy at the end of the freeway exit holds up a sign that reads, usually somewhat apologetically, “Homeless, no job, need work, have children to support,” and so on.  Such a person is doing pretty much the same thing the rest of us do to make a living—performing the same task over and over again for money.  The fact that the money travels directly from the pockets of the givers into their pockets without benefit of paychecks or taxes does not alter the plain fact that they’re out there trying to earn a living by means of a specialized endeavor.  That endeavor might consist of holding up a sign or collecting returnable bottles and cans, but it’s a job nonetheless, and a hard job any way you slice it.  Try standing in one place holding a sign for hours at a time enduring scorn and collecting your pay a quarter or a dollar at a time.  Try picking through dumpsters and trash cans and pushing a shopping cart filled with returnable items and miscellaneous potentially-useful stuff around all day, protecting it and yourself from others who want what you have.  Tell me that trying to stay clear of the police—heavily armed men who don’t want you around—isn’t a dangerous proposition, no matter where you live.  Thus, I suppose, those who live at the margins of society are both workers and hunter-gatherers, fighting for the right to literally survive every day, while trying to survive the way the rest of us do, by collecting money to use to buy things they can’t produce themselves.

Which brings me back to my original thesis, namely, that work goes hand in hand with insanity.  It is well known by those who study the so-called “homeless,” by which term is meant those who do not have a traditional regular indoor place of their own to sleep or hang around in, that many of them are mentally ill.  Partly this is because, in the name of humaneness (and also to save lots of money), governments have closed their mental institutions and turned people out onto the streets.  Many suffer from various psychoses, meaning that they perhaps don’t possess the mental organizational skills necessary to perform what we call regular work, which for most of us consists of the often maddening process of doing the same thing over and over again hoping for different results, or at least hoping for relief from the monotony of it all.

Examining such street folks is instructive.  It shows that work both produces insanity, but also that if insanity rises to a sufficient level, work becomes impossible.  And it also reminds us of the insanity of the persons with whom and for whom people work—the imperious and whimsical bosses in the case of traditional workers and the selfish potential alms-givers in the case of panhandlers and bums.  Virtually every person who comes into contact with a beggar is essentially his boss, who can hire or fire him at will.  Add to that the grim fact that in some cases beggars aren’t independent contractors, but work for more highly-placed persons (like the kids who worked for Fagin in Oliver Twist) who put them on the street to earn for them then take some of what they gather each day.  After a while it becomes nearly impossible to tell the difference between traditional work and the marginal work of the street people.

I hasten to add that I have no overweening sympathy for panhandlers.  I don’t feel sorry for them, but I certainly wish them no ill, and will often give them some spare change or a dollar bill if they ask.  But I don’t really like the ones who try to play on my heartstrings by declaring themselves to have fallen upon especially hard times or to be somehow more deserving of my largesse because of their status as, say, military veterans or family men or former ordinary wage slaves.  I am invariably reminded when I see the placards of such individuals (certainly geared to the same mushy mentality that causes people to buy everything else in our society) of the classic New Yorker cartoon of the guy sitting on the sidewalk holding a sign reading, "I am blind and my dog is dead."  Asking for money from strangers should be a quick honest transaction based upon a request simply for the money itself and not for buy-in to someone's personal drama.  It should call for just a yes or no (or a look away without slowing down) on the part of the would-be donor.  My motto is “Ask and ye may receive, but spare me the sob stories and bullshit.”  And I don’t care what they intend to use the money for, either.  Drink it up, stick it in your arm, buy food, whatever.  Not one of my employers ever asked me what I was going to use my money for, so what right have I to ask a panhandler the same question?

But as readers of the blog know, I have a bit of an agenda.  Given the inherent insanity of all forms of work, from wage slavery to panhandling, maybe the sanest and most honest way to get money, if one really needs it, is simply to receive it from the government for doing nothing, if one is without sufficient funds to make ends meet.  How could that be less madness-producing than what goes on now?  In my scenario those who do happen to work for a living in the generally accepted way, paying taxes and all that, ensure, through the government, that some of their money goes to support those who don’t make as much.  The richer we are, the greater percentage of our excess money should go to such support.  Properly administered on a progressive basis that wouldn't make those of us who are well off any less so, but it would make many other people less poor.

What could possibly be wrong with that?  It is, I think, a natural function of the Social Contract, wherein the sovereign agrees to provide protection to the people in exchange for certain payments, in the form of civic service, obedience to laws reasonably calculated to preserve public order, and in the form of money from those who have it.  And, despite the dire predictions of the lying liars who run our capitalist economy and the millions who thoughtlessly believe them, there will still be plenty of people who will wish to engage in the modern insane form of work in exchange for money.  Oh my God, socialism! you gasp.  Well, we should be so lucky as to have a system that guarantees an equal or even moderately equitable distribution of resources to all, but for now how about just a system that doesn't require that we all trot along behind the Walrus and the Carpenter until they're ready to feed?

Far from being the cure-all for our national economy, encouraging everyone to work for a living has and will continue to produce an excess of superfluous commerce—far too many retailers selling the same merchandise, far too many choices for simple things like coffee and sandwiches and fried chicken, and far too much utterly useless crap.  We hate to walk down the street and see beggar after beggar, but we somehow don’t mind passing endless stores that sell the same shit, whose employees or owners are trained to try to convince us that their shit is, for some reason, better than that of the guy next door to them.  But since it's done under the banner of free enterprise we tolerate it.  Nonsense.  We suffer from such a surfeit of consumer goods and services that we are in this country like the very opposite of those beleaguered denizens of the Stalinist dictatorships of yore who waited in long lines for shoes and nylons and meat and such.  The jobs our politicians say we need, or that we should all get off our asses and go out and get, are for the most parts jobs in this already repetitive and glutted and low-paying area of commerce.  On the other hand, look at the inherent efficiency of a government properly run.  When roads are needed and must be paid for by tax dollars, people don’t say, “Hey, let’s build five times as many roads as we need, and let the public choose which of them to drive on.”  When teachers and police and firemen (government employees all) are needed we don't say, "Let's hire ten times as many as we can afford to and let them loose to compete with each other for students, or to invent new crimes to prevent, or to set fires so they can extinguish them."  But that’s exactly what happens when it comes to blue jeans and toys and cups of fancy coffee and television sets.  

  

The word "entitlement" has been given an almost pornographic connotation in our society.  But we are a citizenry founded on the outrageous principle that we are entitled to things.  Life, liberty, and equality, for example.  Freedom of expression, freedom to worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.  How much more presumptuous as a society can we get?  Yet the people who run the economy wish to deny us virtually all these entitlements, substituting instead freedom to express our preference for who should win on American Idol, freedom to worship money, freedom to want everything, and freedom to fear everyone.

The practical consideration underlying my modest economic proposal is that there simply isn't enough actual necessary work to be done by everyone in our country.  Take away the extra claims on our income by repetitious retailers of consumer goods and services, and many of us would have more money to spend, or to give, and many many more of us would be unemployed.  What then, you ask?  Well, take away even a modest bit of the enormous accumulated wealth of the top ten percent of the population and there would be enough for everyone--enough to feed them, clothe them, educate them, and provide them with medical care.  Even enough to maintain our worldwide imperial military presence, if we remain foolish and arrogant enough to wish to do so.  

During the Great Depression, as people love to wistfully call it, the government attempted to give people jobs, to get them a bit of money for doing a bit of something.  The critics of the day (i.e., Republicans) called these "make-work" jobs, implying that they were an unnecessary and veiled form of welfare, as if welfare were something inherently evil.  But look. Over the past two centuries we've dedicated ourselves in our nobler moments as a country to eliminating chattel slavery, to eliminating child labor, to reducing peonage, and we've tried to make occupations like coal mining and vegetable picking and laboring in sweatshops easier and less dangerous and backbreaking.  Why not take the next step and look at work itself?

Experts and opinonmakers are fond of saying that work is inherently good and ennobling, but so far nobody has really proved that.  Ask a wealthy heiress if it's true; ask a lettuce picker if it's true; ask a child if it's true; ask your pet cat if it's true. I'm reminded of a quip I saw tacked to the inside of a person's cubicle somewhere:  "Nobody on his death bed ever said, 'I wish I'd spent more time at the office.'"

You want fries with that?

Democracy In Action

February 17, 2013

Monrovia, California

Every week I get at least one or two urgent email messages, typically from Africans, typically living in England, who are having trouble getting access to their fortunes, tied up in the bureaucracy or turmoil of some civil war down in their mother country, and need me to help.  All these emailers generally require from me is certain personal information, such as my bank account number, the routing number, my ATM card number, or maybe just a small monetary deposit, and I will be rewarded with millions!  Sometimes they are sick and dying, and have no heirs.  One woman described in detail how her throat was rotting out from cancer, how her husband not only died young but also had a low sperm count and left her with no children, and how she now wished only to give the bulk of her fortune to the church, to help the poor starving orphans in her native country.  My job would be to facilitate this, her last task on earth, for which I would be well-compensated.  (A few come from even more rarefied realms.  For instance just yesterday I got one from someone identifying himself as "The Rt Hon David Cameron MP, Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service British Government," offering me an immense sum, apparently just for being me.) Sometimes there’s no explanation, as if I’ve just won the lottery without buying so much as a single ticket.  But they’re willing to give me a few million for helping them out with a bit of personal information!  

I often ask myself: What prompts such generosity from strangers? And more to the point, from whence comes this vast British and African monetary wealth?  For centuries Europeans, Arabs, and Americans have been plying the sub-Saharan regions of the great Dark Continent, taking at will the resources they contain—precious metals, diamonds, slaves, you name it.  Now it seems the Africans are having their day—assuming the authors of the spam emails are indeed Africans.  I suspect that many are speakers of English as a second language, from the stilted and often comical syntax of their messages.  They're at last reaping some of the vast wealth of the Western world, most particularly that of the United States, where people are correctly known for having a great deal more money than sense.  As with Indian gambling here at home, this might be viewed as an excellent, albeit less aboveboard, example of the adage that turnabout is fair play.

Of course this African wealth doesn't really lie in helpless repose in some bank in Nigeria or the Ivory Coast, captive to the whims of yet another in long line of Idi Amin-style dictators or Tupac t-shirt-wearing AK47-wielding warlords.  It comes from right here in our very own mother country, siphoned from the savings of the elderly, the simple-minded, and the greedy.  Con schemes like this are as old as bank accounts themselves, going by various names in various countries, but they always have one thing in common, which is that they “prey” on people who are themselves of a somewhat predatory turn of mind--greedy, in other words.  Like hungry game fish that ought to have learned, individually or collectively, not to bite at brightly-colored lures when the shadow of a boat darkens the waters above them, the “victims” of these cons are people who are attracted to the promise of something that any child could tell them is simply too good to be true.  It is not folks who lack wealth, I submit, who comprise the primary target audience of the Nigerian Scam (as it is most commonly known), but those who already possess a modicum of money, and whose exchequers are worth looting.  Oh sure, if you cast a wide enough net (altering the fishing metaphor just a bit) you will get both big fish and little ones, and if you’re hungry enough you’ll eat a lot of smelt instead of a few fat cod or mackerels.  But the victims we read about most often aren’t hand-to-mouth pensioners from the 47% but retirees from the suburbs who lose thousands of dollars.  Over $5,000 per pigeon on average, if you believe the experts.  As for the poor, well, when you ain’t got nothin’ you got nothin’ to lose, so you cash your Social Security check and go to the casino to give it away a quarter at a time.

 

As a means to the accumulation of wealth, this confidence game, as unscrupulous as it may seem to many, is in the finest and most time-honored tradition of money makers everywhere, whether they be Wall Street or London brokers or sellers of Amway products.  Find a customer base with at least a little money to burn, but with the desire to have even more of it.  What despicable crooks these scammers are, many say.  But for some reason I tend not to blame the con men so much as their marks.  This feeling might spring from the same well of admiration I have for the wolf over the sheep or the lion over the gazelle.  I’m not sure. Foolishness, in any event, never garners as much sympathy as do other universal human conditions such as poverty and illness.

You have to ask yourself, are these victims just dumb chumps?  Who could be so naive as to believe that out of the blue they have been chosen to receive, say, $10 million for helping someone liberate a sum twice that size from a bank somewhere?  Few of us would mind having that much money.  But if someone tells you that you can have a fortune just by giving out your bank account number, and you already possess the native intelligence and basic skills necessary to use a computer, can you really fall for such a line of bullshit?  The answer should be a resounding no, of course, but it isn’t.  Experts estimate that hundreds of millions of dollars are made each year through such schemes,  a great number of which emanate from the U.K. and Nigeria.  Someone with a computer and a list of email addresses and some patience and cunning can rake it in.  For some reason it puts me in mind of what Willy Loman’s brother said in Death of a Salesman: “When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle.  When I walked out I was twenty-one.  And, by God, I was rich!”

Now, to wade into deeper philosophical waters, I strongly suspect that a person who believes there is a pot of gold waiting at the end of the Nigerian rainbow is likely to be the same person who is convinced that a reward greater than all the earth’s riches will be there for him after he dies.  Of course I can’t be as certain about the realistic chances that the latter reward exists as I am about the former.  My only prayer is, Lord, if you’re up there, don’t make me foolish enough to answer an email from a dying African millionaire, and when I die, keep me on the other side of the streets of gold from the likes of Billy Graham and Pat Roberston.  In fact, keep me here on the wider and more friendly road to Perdition.

My mind easily slips from these well-known email scams to my regular mail, the great majority of which begs me to help end diseases and inequities of all kinds, and features grotesque photos of cleft-palated children and the bloated stomachs of the skeletal, starving kids of Africa.  Please help, the little waifs beseech with their enormous flyblown eyes and crusted lips.  Here, I hope, the inducements are more legitimate.  I give to the disease-fighters and the doctors who treat the wretched refuse of the earth, but not without some pangs of doubt or absent some concerns about the way the solicitors of the donations go about their business.

I have some pet peeves about these do-gooders.  For instance, why don’t they all leave off the postage on the return envelopes?  (Some do, I know.)  What person of even moderate generosity, once induced by conscience or a sense of social duty to contribute a few dollars, would begrudge a charity another few cents for postage?  And why must they give away so much crap along with their requests for contributions—gaudy floral return address labels I wouldn’t be caught dead using, greeting cards, wrapping paper, silly trinkets allegedly made by Indians, or blankets so thin and flimsy they can be vacuum wrapped into packages the size of postcards?  Then there are the ones that send actual money, usually a nickel, in the envelope.  From those I tear out the nickel and promptly throw away the envelope.  That, to me, is a particularly counter-intuitive way to solicit money from potential donors, and I have no respect whatever for those charities.  “Here’s a nickel.  Now how can you possibly refuse us?”  It’s like a beggar in the street offering YOU money in exchange for a donation, or the ones who say, "Will work for food."  And what type of work would that be?  Cutting up corrugated cardboard into sign-sized pieces?  My  point is, if you want some of my money, just ask.  The worst I can do is to refuse you, and I'll be the one who decides whether it's worth my while to give.  Giving, whether it be to weighty causes or merely alms to the guy at the end of the freeway exit, should be a free act of generosity, period.  Psychologists who are paid by  solicitors for charities probably say that sending trinkets and nickels actually works, and increases returns, but it doesn't work on me.  Its tawdriness, not to mention silliness, is so off-putting that I wouldn’t even think of giving to such an organization.  But thanks for the nickels anyway.

Most irritating to me is the sheer volume of solicitations I get—not, that is, from all of them combined, but from each one of them.  If they took the trouble to check their records they’d know I give to each of them just once a year, usually in the same month.  They could send me an envelope once a year at the same time and save the paper, postage, and whatever else they stuff into the letters.  And please don’t tell me they don’t possess the electronic technology to do just that.  They buy and sell my name and address to one another, they have me typed according to my donative proclivities, so surely they could keep track of when and how often I give. Think of how much more money there would be for the sick and dying if they just economized a bit more and paid attention to the giving patterns of their donors.  When they dun me with three or four requests a month, notwithstanding that I only give once a year, they waste their money and my time, and wear down my patience.  That’s okay if you’re running a scam, where the wider you cast the net the better your chances of reeling in a fat fish, but it’s a bit unseemly when the likes of Oxfam or UNICEF use the same approach.  

So now I’m fantasizing about a world where the Nigerian Scam and the efforts of Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children are united into one grand enterprise.  I can imagine it being a topic during the Prime Minister’s Questions on CSPAN, one of my favorite shows.  (If you’re unfamiliar with the Prime Minister’s questions, you probably won’t quite get this.)  The well-dressed men and women sit on the long shiny green benches of the House of Commons, as "The Rt Hon David Cameron MP, Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service British Government" (and those indeed, true to my spam email of yesterday, are some of his titles) rises and sits, rises and sits, fielding friendly and unfriendly questions with his notebook in his hand, while the zany gowned Speaker calls out “Order!, order!” from the head of the table.

I picture it this way: The member from Baggley Wells is recognized by the Speaker and rises.  This question will be a friendly one for the Prime Minister.  “Would my Right Honourable friend agree that all moneys he collects from his email scam, and for that matter all moneys from all the email scams perpetrated by our own people and by our Nigerian friends here in the United Kingdom, ought to be donated to causes which are dedicated to the alleviation of starvation and disease throughout the African continent?”  The Right Honourable Mr. David Cameron, Prime Minister, rises and places his portfolio upon the table with an emphatic slap, not bothering to look down at it.  “My Honourable friend is absolutely correct, and indeed, as he knows, this government has consistently advocated such generosity and has encouraged the raising of millions of pounds for such relief efforts,” (murmurs of “hear, hear” resound from the Conservative back benches), “notwithstanding,” and here the Prime Minister looks directly across the table at the Labour leader and his shadow cabinet, amid jeers from the opposition benches, his voice rising above the din, “notwithstanding the efforts of the other party to stifle this spirit of generosity by characterizing such scams as crimes, and advocating, yet again,” (more jeers from the Labourites and shouts from the Conservatives and cries of “order, order” from the Speaker) “the intrusion of the government into what should remain the private charitable efforts of both the scammers and their victims!”  With this the Prime Minister takes his notebook and sits down, looking to his left and right for nods of approval from his own ministers.

Ah yes, democracy in action in the Western world, a world where right thinking leaders have always fought fiercely in the causes of both unbridled theft and unfettered generosity.