Japan: Words are Inadequate

Between human beings there may be no silence as loud as the silence of death.. . . The breath goes out and does not come in again. No one knows it was the last until it is gone, and the silence that follows it is like no other sound in the world. (pp. 36-37)

Some of the most effective language in the world leads you up to the brink of Silence and leaves you there, with the soft surf of the unsayable lapping at your feet. (p. 113)

~ Barbara Brown Taylor, When God is Silent

In that time, there is no possibility of thinking, of explanations, resolutions. I can't remember much sense of panic, much feeling about the agony going on a couple hundred yards away. . . It was an empty space. I don't want to forget that, as feeling returns in various ways. We don't know what goes on when, in the middle of terror or pain, this emptiness and anaesthesia set in (it happens in plenty of contexts.) But somehow the emptiness 'resources' us. Not to run too fast to explore the feelings and recover the words seems important.

Simone Weil said that the danger of imagination was that it filled up the void when what we need is to learn how to live in the presence of the void.

~ Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust: After September 11 (p. 10)

 

Photo information:

The hand of a victim is seen among jumbled concrete sea barriers in Toyoma, northern Japan | AP

The GOP and "class warfare"

This about sums up what has been happening economically for the past few years:

[Tom] Barrett [mayor of Milwaukee] recounted a parable making the rounds among Wisconsin Democrats, telling of a room in which “a zillionaire, a Tea Party person and a union member” confront a plate of 12 cookies: “The zillionaire takes 11 of the cookies, and says to the other two, ‘That guy is trying to steal your cookie.’ ”

Thanks to E.J. Dionne for the story in today's Washington Post.

The GOP Assault On Jobs

During the past few weeks much of the focus in the media has been on the GOP's union-busting activities.

These assaults on middle class workers have taken a wide range of forms:

– Stripping public employees of their right to negotiate effective contracts (Wisconsin);

– Downsizing the unions by converting employees to "at will" status when the union contract comes due for renegotiation (New Hampshire);

– Creation of state-appointed "emergency financial managers" who can dissolve legal agreements including (surprise) union contracts and take over cities and school districts (Michigan);

– An attempt by Maine's Republican governor to dismantle a union-history mural installed in the state's Department of Labor;

– Even an attempt to intimidate a university history professor (Wisconsin).

In all this, the party that rolled to victory in 2010 by saying its agenda was to create jobs has not made an effective case that explains how union-busting and worker intimidation create even one real job.

The Republicans focus on budget cuts instead of infrastructure investment (which contributes to our country's long-term growth.)  They act as if helping people get jobs with decent pay and benefits is fiscal madness – even though such actions would help these workers buy things and pay taxes again (as opposed to drawing unemployment benefits or depleting their remaining retirement savings.)

Of course, if people went back to work and bought things and paid taxes then the economy itself would pick up, more jobs would be created and more revenue would flow into government coffers – federal, state and local. Then there would be a budget problem – but not a budget crisis.  And the GOP needs everyone to believe there's a crisis so the voters will be afraid and Republicans will win big in the upcoming 2012 elections.

At least, that's how they're acting.  And their "jobs program" backs up this skepticism.

Robert Reich, Clinton's former Labor secretary, focuses on the "big lies" Republicans put out there as their jobs "program":  Tax Cuts for truly wealthy individuals ($1 million +); Corporate Income Tax Cuts; Cuts in Wages and Benefits; and Elimination of Regulations.  They claim these four actions will create jobs – when history proves they actually increase the deficit, undermine middle class earning power, and deplete our ability to maintain our nation's infrastructure. 

These "ideas" are not new; they are a reintroduction of Reagan era trickle-down voodoo economics. They didn't create jobs in the 1980s and they were a downright failure in the 2000s.  The tax cuts (exaggerated by two unfunded wars) have led to a "budget crisis" which the GOP claims only more tax cuts, regulatory cuts, and lowered wages will "solve."  Wage and benefit cuts have led to a major loss of real income for the middle class and working poor.  De-regulation led to the worst economic recession since the 1930s and the Gulf oil spill disaster.

Rachel Maddow says clearly "It's not about the budget."

This is about a lot of things. This is not about a budget. This is using or fabricating crisis to push for an agenda you'd never be able to sell under normal circumstances. And so you have to convince everyone that these are not normal circumstances. These are desperate circumstances and your desperate measures are therefore somehow required.

Given this situation, it's time for President Obama to call the Republican bluff.  He needs to say clearly that the budget "crisis" continues into the future primarily because revenue is down.  There are two primary reasons for the reduced inflow of cash:

– Unemployed people don't pay taxes; and people who earn less (due to frozen or cut salaries) pay less tax.

– The tax rate on those industries which gained during the past decade (such as banking, finance and energy) is too low; they aren't covering the cost of government services that benefit them (energy subsidies, bank bail-outs, lax regulations and enforcement.)

Obama needs to change the conversation back to real Job Creation.  As long as he goes along with the budget "crisis" argument, he is missing the larger issue: the corporate assault on working Americans. 

The American people understand this as two March 2011 polls show:

– The CBS News poll identified the Economy/Jobs as the number one national priority (51%); Budget deficit/national debt came in a distant second (7%)

– Bloomberg: Unemployment and jobs were number one with 43%, Federal deficit and spending gets 29%, more votes, but still second place.

Candidate Obama knew this too:

…Real change isn't another four years of defending lobbyists who don't represent real Americans - it's standing with working Americans who have seen their jobs disappear and their wages decline and their hope for the future slip further and further away.  

– Spartanburg, SC | November 03, 2007

I look forward to hearing President Obama reaffirm this commitment to the country's top priority: meaningful jobs for all those who want and need to work.

Photo credit

Sally Fields, Norma Rae, released by 20th Century Fox, 1979.

Huckabee – Three Strikes??

All this time I thought former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was a fairly level-headed guy – for a Fox News host. But over the period of a few days, he got caught up in the idea that he had to "make news" on his book tour and he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. 

Strike 1, February 28, 2011, Huckabee said the following in response to a question about President Obama's birth certificate:

I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough.. . .

If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

Anyone who has read Obama's 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, knows this is false.  Obama was born in Hawaii; his father left when he was two years old and his parents divorced.  He grew up with his mother and her parents – without his father (although Obama Senior did make one visit around the holidays in 1971.)  Later, his mother remarried and he spent some time in Indonesia with his step father's family. He eventually returned to Hawaii and lived with his mother's Kansan parents.  He did not learn about Kenya or the British imperialists or the Mau Mau Revolution at his Kenyan grandfather's knee. The only grandfather Obama ever knew is the one who appears on the cover of Obama's book.

Huckabee compounded this misrepresentation by saying he "misspoke" – he meant Indonesia, not Kenya.  Of course, he didn't address how Obama's grandfather and the Mau Mau's made it all that way from Africa to Indonesia.  Instead Huckabee blamed the New York Times for sensationalizing the story.

Strike 2, March 2nd, while on another radio talk show, Huckabee engaged in this exchange:

Fischer: "You seem to think that there is some validity to the fact that there may be some fundamental anti-Americanism in this president."

Huckabee: "Well, that's exactly the point that I make in the book. And I don't know why these reporters -- maybe they can't read... And I have said many times publicly, that I do think [Obama] has a different worldview and I think it's, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas."

This statement is so-o-o-o loaded.  Not only does it imply that Obama has fundamentalist Muslim connections.  It implies that neither Hawaii nor Indonesia has Boy Scouts – or Rotary Clubs.  As of December, 2010, Indonesia has 17.1 million Boy Scouts (7.2% of the nation's population) and the USA has 3.97 million (1.3% of estimated population.)  The Rotary Youth Exchange is one of the primary sponsors of foreign exchange students in the world. Rotary International has chapters in Indonesia and Malaysia, both Muslim nations.  So it's quite likely, whether he spent time in Hawaii or Indonesia, that Obama was exposed to Scouting as well as Rotary International.

Strike 3, February 28th (again), in another radio exchange – this time about the Oscars (which had taken place the night before):

Medved: . . .However, there was - there was one moment where a very brilliant and admirable actress named Natalie Portman won Best Actress. . . But in any event, she got up, she was very visibly pregnant, and it's really it's a problem because she's about seven months pregnant, it's her first pregnancy, and she and the baby's father aren't married, and before two billion people, Natalie Portman says, 'Oh I want to thank my love and he's given me the most wonderful gift.' He didn't give her the most wonderful gift, which would be a wedding ring! [Huckabee chuckles] And it just seems to me that sending that kind of message is problematic.

Huckabee:  You know Michael, one of the things that's troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, 'Hey look, you know, we're having children, we're not married, but we're having these children, and they're doing just fine.' But there aren't really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie. And I think it gives a distorted image that yes, not everybody hires nannies, and caretakers, and nurses. Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that's the story that we're not seeing, and it's unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of children wedlock [sic].

You know, right now, 75 percent of black kids in this country are born out of wedlock. 61 percent of Hispanic kids -- across the board, 41 percent of all live births in America are out of wedlock births. And the cost of that is simply staggering.

Shades of Dan Quayle and "Murphy Brown" with a little tinge of racism thrown in for good measure.  What Huckabee doesn't mention in his discussion of the birth demographics is the finding that over two thirds (67.7%) of births to single mothers are white.  

Or that "Hispanic" is an imprecise number, because there are Hispanic mothers in both the Black and White data.  For example, 35.7% of white births are to single white mothers. If you back out the mothers who are white Hispanics, this rate drops to 28.7%.  The reverse is true for black births (71.8% of all live black births are to single mothers; it's 72.3% for non-Hispanic black births.)  My calculations show that 52.6% of Hispanic live births are to single mothers.  American Indian/Native Alaskan births to single mothers account for 65.8% of that group's newborns; while Asian/Pacific Islanders are only 16.9%. 

Or that if you consider the actual birth rate – births per 1,000 – rather than raw number of births, one finds the number dropping significantly for all groups (14% overall since 1989; 28% among black births) except Cuban/Hispanics (rose about 2%).

Something is going on.  In general, the number of births among single mothers is rising.  But the assumption that this is occurring only for poor, uneducated women surviving on government assistance is a Reagan-era stereotype that doesn't necessarily match the data.  Since none of the many data tables on this topic identify maternal income or education levels, I can only surmise that someone's biases are showing in Huckabee's comments.  "Ain't it awful" is not an intelligent or effective policy statement – unless the policy is to sell books to true believers.

Book Cover Information:
Pictured in left-hand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in right-hand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).

O'Keefe Oversteps – Again

As you may have surmised, I'm not a fan of Glenn Beck.  So when his website The Blaze conducted a comprehensive analysis of the latest hit job from James O'Keefe – and found it "questionable"  – you can count me among the surprised.

O'Keefe released an edited version of a  lunch conversation between National Public Radio executives and two of his "investigators" pretending to be fundamentalist Muslims looking to contribute $5 million to NPR. One of the executives was heard to be saying terrible things about the Tea Party and the GOP – heaven forbid! The honchos at NPR promptly asked him to resign.

Because the group (ironically called Project Veritas) had been accused of manipulative editing in the past (see ACORN.) O'Keefe had the full uncut tape posted to the site as well.  Most media outlets, including The Blaze, initially posted the edited version of the materials.  However, the Beck team followed up and compared the source material to the more widely circulated tape and found several instances of "unethical" conduct by the O'Keefe editor(s). 

So, hats off to the team at The Blaze!  And Bronx cheers to any other legitimate media outlet that takes O'Keefe videos and airs them without reviewing them for accuracy. 

What's that old adage?  "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

Of course, there are the Republican variations: 

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you."  Rep. Virginia Foxx, NC-5, 2009

"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." President George W. Bush, TX, 2002.

Update:  NPR's "On the Media" subsequently interviewed O'Keefe.  I encourage you to listen to the edited version first (about 12 minutes) in which they play a bit with the tape (near the end) to demonstrate how false impressions can be created when truth is left on the cutting room floor.  The full 45+ minute interview is also available. At the same site.


James Poniewozik at Time.com has a wonderful piece on this topic:

"To the James O'Keefes of the world, the news is a war in which mainstream journalists must cautiously wield X-Acto knives and he gets to bring an axe."

Peter J. Gomes



Peter J. Gomes
1942 - 2011



I would love to see the day when we would be prepared to try living out what we know to be our better nature, what we understand in our hearts to be our ideal image as created in God's image. I know we want to be better than we are. I know we want a world better than the one we have. I know we want to do better things than the things we seem trapped into doing. If we only had the courage to try that, it would be an amazing phenomenon.

I remain hopeful that there are enough people who will look at themselves in the mirror and say, "I do not want to be this person. I want to become somebody else. I want to be the person God meant me." As long as there are people who think that way, I remain hopeful. I remain hopeful because I'm that way. I look at myself and I say, "Gomes, I want to be what God meant me to be."

I've done some interesting things and they've been fun and sometimes even productive, but I believe my best days are ahead of me. I believe that God is not finished with me. Extraordinary things to happen, and I can't wait to find out what they're going to be.

– December 14, 2007, in an interview conducted by Tavis Smiley

The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes was Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Every year, his sermons greeted the new freshmen and launched the graduating seniors.  A prominent conservative Republican, he gave the benediction at President Reagan’s second inauguration and delivered the National Cathedral sermon for George H. W. Bush's inauguration four years later.  In 1991, in response to anti-gay commentary in a campus magazine, he shared that he was homosexual.  Subsequently, he used his considerable theological and rhetorical skills to present the case for religious tolerance of diversity.  In 2006, the Baptist minister switched political parties and supported Deval Patrick, the Democrat, for governor of Massachusetts.

He passed away on February 28, 2011.  He had planned to retire in 2012, after more than 40 years at Harvard.

Sample sermons can be found at the Memorial Church web site.  Gomes was also the author of several best-selling books.  He will be missed by those he touched.