The Sickness

The most tragic sins a country commits are those that involve failures of both one's self-interest and one's love for his fellow children of God. In other words, things that are both stupid and selfish. Some things are just stupid, and some things are just selfish, but when they combine....

With the issue of health care, the self-interest or economic component and the moral component point in the same direction. A tax-funded mandatory health plan for all Americans would give everybody health care and lower the cost per person. Period. Yet and still, it is not done.

Right now, the United States pays by far more per person for health care than any other nation. So, we must have the best quality care, right? No, we have 1/6 of our people uninsured and our nation ranks 38th in the world in terms of quality of care. We rank behind Morocco.

So we pay the highest bill in the world to give 5/6 of our people the 38th best health care on Earth. Stupid? Clearly. Selfish? Yes.

So our first conclusion must be that the system needs radical change, unless we think the above numbers are acceptable, which hardly comports with a chest-thumping or even a humble iteration of pride in this country.

Let's think about car insurance. All drivers (essentially every adult in the nation) are required by law to buy insurance. Whenever any American citizen is inside an automobile, he or she is in a vehicle insured against accidents. Should our very bodies not enjoy the same luxury? You'll fix my oil pump but not my broken leg?

Personally, I have problems with a government mandate to purchase anything from a for-profit company, but that caveat aside, let's consider what this requirement results in.

The result of every driver being insured can be interpreted in two ways. The first way, which is both stupid and selfish, is to say, "why should I, a great driver, be paying for all these idiots who are crashing into each other?" This is a very valid point, and should be recognized as such. But it it also very short sighted.

Taking this approach is akin to urging President Obama to somehow intervene in Iran; it might make us feel righteous, but it accomplishes nothing in the short term and guarantees instability in the long term.

The other way to interpret the auto-insurance mandate is to say, "an insurance pool this large creates an economy of scale which makes the product cheaper for everyone. And even if I never crash into anyone, I know that all my fellow citizens have the security of insurance so that if one of them crashes into ME, I won't be screwed."

And maybe, just maybe, I take pride and joy in the fact that my fellow citizens are protected.

So, what if we applied this logic to health care? We apply it to "defense". Rhode Island has never been invaded by North Korea, but Rhode Islanders pay their part to arm and defend South Korea so as to deter North Korea. Quite a stretch. But we do it.

We apply this logic to schools. I have no children, but I pay my share to fund my neighborhood schools. We apply this logic to fire departments. My house has never caught on fire. Yet and still, I pay my share.

So why don't we apply this logic to health care? Because it will cost too much, we are told. As noted above, we already pay per person more than any other country. So, there's that. Also, aren't some thing worth a trillion dollars?

The Iraq War has cost a trilli so far. In microeconomics, "opportunity cost" represents the loss of the next best thing. So, if I spend 30 minutes blogging, the opportunity cost of that would be the 30 minutes that I could have spent riding my bike or doing something else.

So what if we hadn't invaded Iraq? What would have been the "next best thing"? What was the opportunity cost? Health care for every American?

I'm no communist. I harbor more revulsion for Lenin, Stalin, and Mao than bin Laden and Darth Vader combined times twenty. But I am something of a National Socialist, or a Nazi, if you want to be technical.

The premise of National Socialism was that one's community was important enough to override economic dogma and adopt socialism under certain specific conditions. And before Hitler morphed into the devil, he used this ideology to provide quite a bit for his nation.

I think my nation deserves socialism in certain specific islands. If we adopt National Socialism when we want to pay to kill Iraqis, what does it say about our nation if we refuse to do the same in the interest of curing Americans? Selfish. And Stupid.

Persian Legacy

First of all, doesn't Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini look like a cross between Sean Connery and someone from Lord of the Rings?

Secondly, quick explanation on the name. Ayatollah is a title, like doctor or bishop. Ruhollah is his first name. Khomeini is his last name, which also tells us where he was born. Khomeini means "from Khomein". The current Supreme Leader of Iran is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. So, since the revolution there have been two supreme leaders, Khomeini (ho-MA-nee) and now Khamenei (ha-men-AY).

The post-election protests in Iran have been fascinating to follow on so many levels. It is the rarest of things: it actually deserves the hype. Even if the protests end today, the implications from what we've seen so far are revolutionary in the truest nature of the word.

The last time massive street protests and emerging technological innovations merged to undermine an autocratic government was 30 years ago in...Iran.

Iran is a fascinating place. The only continuous civilizations which can compare in terms of longevity are China, India, and Egypt. Iranian civilization has been in place for about 3,000 years, and has been Muslim for roughly half that time.

But Iran (Persia is a way cooler and more accurate name) was the first land converted to Islam that was neither ethnically Arab nor Arabic speaking (Persian and Farsi, respectively). Iran has always been distinct from the Arab world to its West the Indian subcontinent to its East.

So Persia is its own distinct place. And 30 years ago it instituted its own distinct form of government. In Farsi it is called the "Vilayet-e Faqih" which means something like the "governance of the prudent". What this means in practice is that religious figures have veto power over every decision the elected government makes. It also has veto power over who many run for office.

So this whole debate over who really won the election is a bit beside the point; since the ayatollahs cleared every candidate, there were, by definition, no real reform candidates running. What has happened here is that the people seem to have leaped far beyond this minutiae and called into question the very legitimacy of the governmental structure itself.

The last time this happened in Iran was 30 years ago. Back then, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets and STAYED on the streets, even after many hundreds of them were shot dead. And ultimately, that was all it took. When crowds refuse to disperse, the number of soldiers willing to fire upon them suffers from the law of diminishing returns.

But there was a piece of cutting edge technology that helped the protestors in 1979. Audio cassette tapes of the Ayatollah Khomeini encouraging the revolution. Small, cheap, easy, portable, these tapes played a huge role in coordinating and motivating people.

Audio tapes now, of course, are fantastically obsolete, but the Persian public is not. The government has shut down all foreign sources of news, but cell phones, digital cameras, and the internet are creating one of the most democratic spectacles the world has ever witnessed, whether it understands this or not.

When else in history has an expulsion of foreign journalists made a negligible impact on a government's ability to handle a rebellion from a PR standpoint? The people are not only putting their lives on the line, they are taking ownership of their own story, which has never really been possible until now.

There is now no filter between the Persian people and the world. Not even CNN, which has been reduced, or should I say elevated, to simply reading facebook postings from Persia as a way of reporting the news. This is a remarkably democratic moment.

There is danger, of couse, and I personally doubt that any serious change will result from this. And lest we hope for a revolution, let us remember what happened 30 years ago.

Just as in the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution was won by moderates who were subsequently murdered and replaced by thugs. Successful revolutions must succeed without brutalizing its participants.

Whether or not that happens, I do know this: the ayatollahs will think twice before firing into these crowds. In any previous time, they would not. Now, they must. Because the people have the ability to tell their story to the world. And that should make us all feel freer and safer than people like us have ever been.

The Pyramid Scheme

There's a lot we can learn about genius from the pyramids. All societies have applied the pyramid concept in one form or another. The United States has been disproportionately successful relative to other nations because it has applied its concept of the pyramid more effectively and broadly than have its competitors. That edge is eroding quickly.

Most elites throughout history have conceived of themselves as being the capstone of society's pyramid, with the vast majority of masonry beneath them, the "commoners" or the "plebs", or however else one might have it, who serve no function other than to support the capstone.

Central to this belief, which dominated the entire world until 1776 and the huge majority of it until 2000 or so, was the surety that no commoner could ascend to the capstone. We can see this conviction manifested to various degrees from the divine right of kings to the underfunding of urban schools.

The flaw in this system is that all progress, all innovation, all civilization must necessarily emanate from the capstone, and the capstone alone. 99% of the pyramid was excluded from any meaningful station. From time to time, people born into the capstone applied their genius effectively, but more often than not the capstone was content with simply being on top. The geniuses and entrepreneurs and prophets from the "lower" 99% were never allowed to contribute to the capstone.

Then America came along and implemented the (at first very narrowly applied) proposition that the capstone should be constructed organically from the best elements of the lower 99%; that there was no "natural" capstone in and of itself. As America progressively overcame exclusionary bigotries, it drew upon ever-larger reservoirs of potential and genius from the lower 99%. And American power expanded accordingly.

Other societies have now caught on, of course, and the American premise has been adopted worldwide. This is good news. But now we must focus on the corollary of the pyramid scheme; if the base is not continually nurtured, the capstone will draw on a shrinking base of talent and will eventually wither into a state of stasis and paranoia.

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is a phrase I've always enjoyed, coined by Rene Descartes. This quote led to the naming of the Descartes mountains on the moon, where Apollo 16 landed in 1972. The concept of the shoulders of giants is always at play; our task as a society is to keep creating giants whose shoulders will support out progeny.

For example, any scientist who makes a breakthrough in physics, for example, is standing on the shoulders of giants because he or she is simply adding a capstone to the pyramid of knowledge constructed by his or her predecessors. The reason science has advanced so rapidly recently is that the knowledge of the giants has been available to an enormous pool of commoners, a pool whose size alone will guarantee the emergence of more giants.

For the pyramid to continue to aspire to new heights, the manna of every new capstone must trickle down to the entire base, so that the largest pool possible sends its giants up the pyramid to add yet another level to the capstone. But what happens when the discoveries made at the capstone, the new knowledge, does not trickle down to the base of the pyramid? This is what is happening in America today.

In America today, a large portion of the base of the pyramid does not receive the knowledge trickling from the top. If a third of our children do not receive an adequate education, how many giants have we chopped off at the knees?

America has been the world's richest nation since 1880, and it will continue to be so until at least 2080. But what is happening to the American pyramid does not bode well. For wealth alone does not accurately portray a society's health. Distribution of that wealth is far more telling.

This is not a Marxist argument; it is an architectural one. If the base of the pyramid is cracking, what does it matter how smooth or how high the capstone is? For any society to succeed in the long run, it must have a secure pyramid, with a capstone accessible to all and a healthy base. Our country today and in the foreseeable future resembles less the pyramids than it does the Washington monument.

The Prince and the Prophet

There's alot we can learn from India. When I think of the countries that are most like our own, India comes in about 5th, behind England, Israel, France, and Germany. But that's another blog.

There is one specific parallel from Indian history that we can see today in our country. All movements have two types of leaders: princes and prophets.

Prince are executive or military leaders, subject to all the powers and pitfalls of those positions. Prophets, on the other hand, don't have the burden of leadership, so their clear and articulated conscience serves as a motivation for, or a warning to, the princes.

In India, the prince was Nehru and the prophet was Gandhi.

Gandhi's prophecy was so powerful that he actually achieved the ends usually reserved for princes: he expelled the occupier. He did so without official office and without force. But once this was achieved, somebody had to run this continent masquerading as a country. A prince was needed.

India's prince was Nehru. While imprisoned by the British, Nehru wrote a 5,000 page history of the world which became a bestseller in the West after his release. He had access to zero books while he wrote. Yeah.

So anyway, Nehru takes over and, lo and behold, is immediately confronted with difficult decisions. Decisions which often did not offer any option that would be approved of by the prophet. And this is the price of power.

Once power is seized in a democracy, ideals lose all practical value. By definition, all democracy is compromise. Even if all 300 million Americans want pizza, we probably don't all want the same topping. Governing is compromising.

This compromise is often taken for treachery by "purists", but compromise is literally the most human impulse after survival. Gandhi was a pacifist. But Nehru had to govern a country surrounded by well-armed antagonists. Peace out, pacifism, time to arm.

America's prophet and prince did not coexist as did India's, but there are some interesting parallels.

Gandhi and King led the largest successful non-violent political movements in history, and they did so against the most well-armed adversaries imaginable in both cases. In a very real sense, both men liberated "their" people with remarkably little bloodshed and were subsequently assassinated before they could witness the fruits (or the horrors) of their triumphs.

Suffice it to say, Gandhi and King were great men, and among the very few great men with no blood on their hands. Nehru was a great man as well, a man mostly unknown in this country but whose influence outweighs many historical figures who we know well.

And as for the Ameican version of the prince, Obama is no Nehru. Not yet. This blog is actually directed at those who made the mistake of mistaking Obama for King redux. Obama is no prophet. He never was one. He could, however, become a prince.

The first clue that Obama is a prospective prince rather than a prophet is that he decided to run for president. Let us not underestimate the level of je ne ce quas that it takes to make that decision. It's not arrogance or egomania necessarily, but it is obviously a willingness to compromise.

When a person decides to run for president, he or she has implicitly sacrificed his or her ideals by choosing to lead a democratic government which will necessarily compromise on everything, even if it is ruled by a single party.

Obama is not a revolutionary. He is not a prophet. King was. Can we imagine King running for president? No. And not just because he couldn't have been elected in his time. King would never have held any political office. Martin Luther King wouldn't have run for mayor in an all-black Baptist village in Georgia.

And if King had been president, rest assured, he would have found it very difficult to "end" the immoral war he would have inherited, a war which he had opposed from the beginning, an ideological and moral lobotomy launched by a reckless Texan. No, something tells me that King's 1969 Vietnam policy would look a lot like Obama's 2009 Iraq policy.

The problem with American politics today is that princes and prophets have become indistinguishable and, as a result, we are left with a deficit of both.

aRougeAgency Says What?

It's been a real treat watching this water boarding business unfold. Such spineless equivocating, such translucent straw men, such shameless diversion from the matter at hand....it really does make for good theater until you realize the actors are the elite cadre of a supposedly great nation.

This Pelosi business....did she know people were being water boarded? Well, let's think short and hard about whether that really matters. It would be like insisting upon prosecuting a casual viewer of a crime (as in the finale of Seinfeld) rather than the criminal. Of course Pelosi knew. She's obviously full of shit. But so is everyone else. If these people had enemas, you could fit them into a cigarette pack.

First of all, this obsession upon the specific tactic of water boarding obscures the fact that thousands of detainees have been abused, if not tortured, by American spies and soldiers. The Pentagon (not the op-ed board of the Daily Worker....the fucking Pentagon) has acknowledged upwards of 20 murders of detainees by Americans.

But what of water boarding? Well, we now know that this torture tactic was used not to prevent an imminent attack on the United States. Rather, the CIA was ordered to torture detainees in order to elicit "confessions" regarding Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD and ties to al Qaeda. Neither of those propositions were true, of course.

So, torture was not used to prevent violence upon Americans. It was used to justify violence perpetrated by Americans upon people who had never attacked them. How Henry the 8th of US.

We tortured people in order to get them to confess to things that weren't true, which is historically the most common motivation of torture.

500 years ago, the "Holy" Church would torture people until they "admitted" that they sun revolved around the Earth.

400 years ago, "civilized" countries would torture people until they "admitted" that they were possessed by the Devil.

70 years ago, Stalin would torture people until they "admitted" that they were American spies.

60 years ago, Chinese and North Koreans tortured American soldiers until they "admitted" that they were war criminals and that North Korea was a socialist paradise.

6 years ago, we tortured detainees until they "admitted" that they had been trained by Saddam Hussein in chemical weaponry.

So, there's that. All this ticking bomb business? Yes, the bomb was ticking. But the bomb was in Baghdad. And its fuse was lit in Washington.

And as for the CIA, let us examine their contention that they told Pelosi they were torturing (as is that would make it legal). The whole point of this clusterfuck is that we will NEVER know who was told what because of the very rules, or lack thereof, surrounding the CIA.

The CIA is the only government agency whose budget, employees, and operations are not public. In other words, it operates entirely beyond public purview, which violates every premise of a free country. Is it a necessary evil? Perhaps.

But still, consider the arrangement. When the CIA decides to do something (or, as is more common, is told to do something) it is required to inform a handful of senators. The catch is, no notes or any other form of recording are allowed at these briefings. It doesn't take much imagination to see how this creates opportunities for nefarious ploys of all sorts.

The CIA is, by definition, a rogue agency. The common trope is that the CIA's successes are secret but that its failures are public. Perhaps.

Since we can never know about these "private successes", let us consider some of their public failures. Out intelligence agency has failed to predict in my lifetime: the fall of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam's very advanced WMD program in 1991, Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons, the 9/11 attacks, the location of Osama bin Laden, Saddam's total lack of WMD in 2003. That's the short list.

So we know the public failures. And that's all we know. And we're supposed to be scandalized by the proposition that the CIA misled a member of Congress in a secret and unrecorded briefing?

Perhaps I'm being too hard on the CIA. Surely they do good work. Maybe they saved us from Martian invasion last month. Too bad they wouldn't be allowed to tell us if they did. Keep those successes private, boys.

Golden Garbage

What do you do when some of the best art you've ever experienced comes swathed in shit? Personally, I choose to love it anyway. If I didn't I couldn't possibly be the conisseur of rap that I have become.

But the difficult thing about being a rap fan is squaring the love of the art form with the contempt most decent people would feel for most of the content. It's a constant intellectual and cultural and moral and racial battle. But great art always emerges.

And Eminem has emerged from this turmoil. There are several ways to gague a rapper's strengths, but if the standard were rhyming, Eminem would be in a league of his own, with Lil' Wayne an extremely respectable 2nd place.

There is rhyming. There is content. There is flow. There is production. There is wit. There is voice. And so on. But in terms of rhyming, Eminem bends the English language to its most improbable limits.

The content is usually utterly worthless. But the genius is undeniable. How do we square that circle?

All that said, consider the ferocious precision of this rhyme:

I'm just a hooligan who's used to usin halucenogens
CAUsin illusions again, BRAin contusions again
CUttin and bruisin the skin
RAzors, scissors and pins
JEsus when does it end?
PHAses that I go through
DAzed and I'm so confused
DAys that I don't know who
GAve these molecules to
ME what am I gonna do?
Pay the prodigal son, The Diabolical one
Very methodical when I slaughter them

Who Cares?

There are certain issues that do not receive nearly the adequate amount of attention or level of impassioned debate in our culture. Among the issues taken far too lightly are foreign policy, energy policy, and health care. There are other issues, however, which receive far too much attention when weighed against their actual import.

These other issues, which become obsessions for many, are gun rights, abortion, and gay marriage.

I understand the importance of gun rights (it is, after all, the 2nd amendment to the constitution) and I understand the intense emotion surrounding abortion (after all, if you take a certain view of what life is, abortion is murder, pure and simple), but these issues are often used as political bludgeons, the "solutions" to which are beyond the horizon; they simply serve as campaign fodder every few years.

Gay marriage is in this vein. People who are passionate about gay marriage one way or another suffer from a tunnel vision that utterly distorts the larger importance of this issue. Put simply, who cares? Why do we need to be concerned with 2 men or 2 women getting married?

The first justification for being passionately anti-gay marriage is biblical. And that's fine. If you take a literal reading of the Old and New Testaments, and if you think gay marriage is supremely important, you are well within your rights to refuse to perform marriages for gays in your private church.

But that should have absolutely nothing to do with civil statutes, with the law of the land. The dictates of religion obviously inform some of our laws (e.g., no killing), but these laws would be obvious even without religion, as such. Even god-hating bohemians require safe streets.

The problem with using the Bible to "guide" the ban on gay marriage as it "guides" the bans on theft and murder is that there is NO non-biblical reason to discriminate against gays. As noted above, there ARE non-biblical reasons to ban murder and theft. No so for gay rights.

If any church in this country thinks the Bible should explicitly and directly be reflected in our civil statutes, they should move to 15th century England. Or at least start paying taxes.

So, religion is out. That leaves civil reasons. There are certain moral precepts which are legislated by civil authorities, despite the common canard that it's impossible to "legislate morality".

For example, a man can only have one wife at a time. That is a restriction on the liberty of polygamists in the interest of broader order, a reasonable sacrifice of individual liberty in the interest of the whole if their ever was one.

Allowing two men to marry each other would not upset that precept of monogamy, long accepted throughout most cultures on earth, a staggeringly consistent practice across space and time and cultures. Marriage would still be between just 2 people. Laws regarding the minutiae of taxation, inheritance, divorce proceedings and so forth would not have to be changed at all.

So there really is no purely civic rationale for preventing two adult men or women from marrying in a civil ceremony (or in a friendly church, if one can be found). The only remaining rationale, therefore is social.

This is a familiar beast, this ritualized and normalized and "scientific" and "natural" order in even the most civilized countries where certain people are treated as second-class citizens with the most casual moral certitude.

"Scientific" and "psychological" constructs of gays have been discarded just as "scientific" and "eugenic" constructs of blacks were discarded. The only "reason" remaining for their insult is the unfortunate truth that society as a whole has contempt, if not hatred, for them.

Alot of people, especially men, hate gay people. And if they don't hate them, they feel like a "good" white southerner would have felt between 1776 and 1965: "I don't mind the blacks...they're not bad folks....I just wish they wouldn't be so loud about everything".

Dignity, of course, is just about the only thing worth being loud about, and the critical mass of Americans has yet to see the gay rights issues through that prism, seeing it instead as gays seeking "special" dispensations, akin to feeling that the right to vote for blacks 40 years ago was some sort of gift granted by a benevolent dictator.

I acknowledge my own discomfort with many aspects of the gay lifestyle. To be perfectly honest, the idea of two men being sexually intimate with each other turns my stomach. It does. And I have seen many displays of the "homosexual lifestyle", especially on college campuses, where "free speech", "gay rights", and utterly inappropriate sexually explicit material in public were blurred together in a shameless erection of straw men (pun intended).

But my own hang-ups have nothing to do with whether gay men should enjoy the same rights I do. Of course they should.

Freedom is not about respecting the rights of others to do things that you approve of; people have that "freedom" in North Korea. Freedom is about the charity and the discipline to accept all the beautiful and confusing and absorbing and distasteful things that make up human beings and to accept that each individual is free to be exactly what he or she was born to be unless and until he or she threatens the life or property of another.

It's as simple as that. You don't have to like it. But you must defend it.