R.P. Barr

Born to be riled

Most people would consider patriotism to mean supporting their country.  I have spent more than three decades working under administrations I liked, administrations I couldn't stand, and administrations that didn't have a clue, but the point was to make the system work to greatest extent possible for the citizens and taxpayers--all of them.  However, there is a rancid group of conservatives who believe that obstructing less conservative politicians is more important than the welfare of the republic, or the lives and future of the people who live here. 

During the Clinton years, we saw these flag-waving traitors hound the administration into paralysis. Now, among other initiatives, there is a movement afoot to distract the president by asserting—with no proof whatsoever—that Barak Obama was not born in the United States, and is therefore not qualified to be president. 

Why do they say this? Because someone realized that if they requested a copy of Obama's birth certificate under the Freedom of Information Act the request would be denied. Then, they could claim a conspiracy and cover up. Reactionary yahoos around the country would be quick to pick up the theme and cry that Obama was not legally president. 

Since I have worked in government for a long time, federal and state, I can state concretely that the Freedom of Information Act cannot be used to get personal information on someone other than yourself or a close family member. The government holds a lot of sensitive personal and business information, and will not release it to satisfy anyone’s morbid curiousity. When I worked for the Veterans Administration that agency would block internal agency computer access to a veteran’s records if he became famous. Celebrities and politicians VA records were locked away to preserve confidetiality from unauthorized snooping. 

If you go to the state of Hawaii’s web site (eHawaii.gov) and click your way over to the Department of Health’s screen for ordering vital records. You can read that: 

Certified copies of these records may be issued to authorized individuals…. 

You may order certified copies only of your own birth and marriage certificates or of an immediate family member (e.g., a parent of his/her child's birth or marriage certificate) on this web site. 

Since birth certificates can be used to obtain other documents, and facilitate a lot of mischief in the wrong hands, anyone can see why birth certificates would not be made public.  

In the world of what-if-it-were-true, I would like to point out that George W. Bush, who had the lowest poll ratings of any president in the history of polls, was not impeached for his blatant and obvious crimes. Even Democratic lawmakers declined to raise the issue because they did not want to see the government shut down for the duration of the impeachment procedings. The business of the country takes priority over the satisfactions of justice. Even if someone discovers a foreign birth certificate, no action will be taken to unseat a popular president, especially while his own party controls Congress. 

Of course those people who believe in burning down a house if they don’t like the furniture will disagree. They will agitate to destroy the country in order to avoid the possiblity that someone they don’t like might actually do a good job.

Cartoons and buffoons

By now you’ve probably heard of, or seen, the New York Post cartoon of the dead chimpanzee and the policemen who say that now someone else will have to write the stimulus legislation. The Rev. Al Sharpton has led the charge that the chimpanzee represents Barak Obama and the cartoon is racially offensive. 

I find the cartoon to be tasteless, but not racist. The chimp is clearly a chimp. And, only a fool would think that Barak Obama wrote the stimulus package. He has people who do that, anonymous colorless people. 

In my life, I have been called an ape, a babboon, a monkey and a number of other creatures. Abraham Lincoln was also called an ape. In one of the few areas where I can compare myself with the 16th president, we both have taken our insults in stride. Personally, I have been insulted by more ethnic groups than I care to count—it comes with enforcing laws and regulations. My philosophy was always that the speaker can call me whatever he (or she) likes as long as he keeps his hands to himself. 

Personally, I prefer insults to compliments. When someone calls me a dirty name, I know that whatever lies or misconceptions are behind the insult, this person doesn’t like me. I know where I stand, and that is reassuring. When someone smiles and tells me something sweet, I don’t know the underlying motives. It makes me uncomfortable. 

As far as race goes, there are so many legitimate grievances out there—many of them as hard as the edge between life and death. Why dilute strong arguments over vital matters with trivial, questionable grandstanding? 

I can’t tell people not to feel offended. Feelings are beyond control. But, actions are not. We can choose our battles, and a person is no larger than the fights he chooses. 

There is something else. None of us, regardless of lineage, can achieve anything without the complicity or tolerance of others. Lincoln the ape, described the strategy, “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Constant bluster and bashing are not the tools of success. 

Cartoonists should take care to avoid inadvertant offence, and social activists should avoid arguments that trivialize their causes.

Was the economy that good before the crash?

A couple weeks ago, I sought to reduce my automobile insurance bill by changing companies. Among the companies that promised hundreds of dollars in savings, I found one whose rates seemed the most attractive. I should not have been surprised when the policy arrived with all sorts of little penalties that raised the rate to what my old company charged. I argued several points and won on the biggest one—an accident they claimed was “at fault” when it clearly wasn’t. (Getting rear-ended at a stop light by someone talking on a cell phone is not usually open for debate.) 

In search of other ways to get closer to the quoted price, I took a “mature driver” safety program. My first reaction was that this was the wrong class for me. I have had a driver’s license for 40-plus years: I know how to drive. However, I’ve only been old for a little while, I don’t know how to do that. Further evidence was that everyone else in my class was sent there by the court, and all of them were at least 30 years younger—except for two steel-haired men who apparently hadn’t shaved or combed in the past 30 years. 

Anyway, as I mentally compared the new lessons in how to drive with what I had learned over my lifetime, I became reflective. And, with all the blather about the crumbling economy, I became reflective about that, too. 

When I was a boy, milk was delivered to our front door. If we wrote a check for more than was in our account, someone from the bank would telephone to ask what we wanted done with it. The banks also encouraged children to open accounts by offering metal banks as premiums. I got a bronze bust of Benjamin Franklin with a slot underneath from one bank, and from another, a hockey-puck shaped device that mechanically measured and added the coins that I put into it, showing the total on top. 

Clerks in stores often worked there for decades. They remembered who you were and set things aside if they knew you were interested in them. Stores also offered credit to regular customers without the intervention of credit card companies. There was no health insurance as I recall. Doctor and dentist visits were paid in cash and were affordable for the most part. Hospital stays, could and did bankrupt people, but payment plans could be worked out if the disability was temporary. 

Across the country there were pockets of crushing poverty, and discrimination was commonplace, but middle-class consumers got more service than we we get today.  

So, I look back at the last 50 years and wonder if the economy has improved. Chain and franchise stores didn’t just standardize products and services, they bled off profits from the point of sale. In a mom-and-pop, you paid for the product and the profit went to the pockets of the people in that store. With multi-store companies, the profits had to include distict managers, and buyers, and corporate executives with all of their support people, not to mention the cost of office space and utilities for buildings hundreds of miles from the store where you shopped. No wonder that many products are less durable than in the past, and that retail workers are the most exploited class in America after farm workers. 

Computers also helped ruin service. Don’t brand me as a Luddite; everyone in my house has at least one computer. In addition, I use a network-linked PC at work. The internet is the wonder of the age, more important to our society than the pyramids of Egypt or the Great Wall of China were to their’s. Computers, however, are not forgiving or understanding. If they are not programmed for your problem, then your problem will not be addressed. The employees who work in this new world are often told to defer to the decisions of the computer. I remember once trying to explain that the monthly electric bill for my five-room apartment could not possibly be more than $3,000 as their statement stated, and another time trying to convince the DMV that a check my bank showed as cleared could not have bounced as their screen claimed. In neither case were the employees allowed to correct or even address my complaints. Final resolution took months. I could go on, but you undoubtedly have your own stories. 

My point is that if our economy is better than it was 50 years ago (current recession/depression aside), then why has service deteriorated? Why is everyone and his shadow afraid of litigation to the extent that it paralyzes humane responses to situations larges and small? Most important, if the stimulus package works, why do we want to go back to the way it was two years ago?

An unsatisfactory answer to the riddle

Unless you read BBC on line, you probably missed the little story [“Unstable Politics Plague Israel” 6 February 2009] that explained why there is no peace in Palestine and why it cannot be achieved. What I never realized—mainly because the press prefers playing up the horse race between personalities—is that in Israel, voters do not elect candidates, they vote for parties. The parties then assign whomever they choose to hold seats in the Knesset. Since no party has achieved a majority in the history of the country, minority parties hold the keys to power. The minority parties must be courted in order to form a coalition, and if the minority partner in a coalition takes exception to a given policy, the government falls. This system effectively prevents Israeli moderates from achieving any long range goals, especially peace with Palestinians. 

Reform, meanwhile, is blocked by the same system as single issue minority parties (those representing as little as 2% of the electorate) believe that the larger parties will not pay enough attention to their agendas. Consequently, since the elections are held every year or two as various disputes bring down the coalition du jour, and the same party leaders play musical chairs with government offices--obviating significant change--voter turnout is decreasing. Except for the extremists in whatever causes,  they see their chance for influence increasing. 

For their part, the Palestinians want a government that can successfully negotiate with Israel. Since that is not possible under an Israeli system of government which gives a handful of militant ideologues veto power over mainstream pragmatists, the frustrated Palestinians turn to non-verbal methods of getting the Israelis’ attention. 

And the tragedy continues.

Stimulus is where you find it

Let’s talk stimulus. Whatever plan is used, we’re talking puddle economics (my term). Pour out the money anywhere, and it will spread. If the billions in stimulus funds are spent on liquor and hookers, it will provide employment and the money will flow in streams into and throughout the rest of the system. In short, there is no plan that won’t work. Shovel money out the office windows in Washington, and if people pick it up, there will be stimulus. It’s just that some plans will work better than others.

Robert Reich, a public radio commentator and the 22nd Secretary of Labor (1993-97) says that giving money directly to the people is not the best idea because experience shows that they will not simply spend it. People will also pay down their debts and save it. Won’t that help the banks reduce their exposure on debts and give them more money to loan? 

He also says that they will buy foreign products. True, that will send some money overseas, but look at the seaport workers, the customs brokers and freight forwarders, the truck and railway workers, the wholesalers and domestic offices of foreign producers, the salesmen, and the retailers. Most of the money spent on that Korean wide-screen television will stay right here in the U.S. 

Conservatives, on the other hand, don’t like infrastructure spending because it’s too long term. Let me set them straight. What is long term is all this debate—remember the puddle theory. Meanwhile, the interstate highway system is a greater economic engine than Wall Street. Our economy is the envy of the world because every agricultural or industrial producer in every corner of the United States can get his product to the national and world markets whether by barge, train, air or truck. Infrastructure improvement and maintenance has been ignored for too long already. If we let that system break down, the economy is truly doomed. 

Likewise, failure to upgrade our water and sanitation systems will lead to health problems that will also bankrupt the country. The past few months in Washington, D.C. have seen one water main break after another. For Congress to allow that in the nation’s capitol is unconscionable. Washington should be America’s showplace. Appearances aside, breaking levies and water mains cost more than their upkeep. Cholera is rampant in other parts of the world. MRSA and norovirus are prevalent here, but not yet plague status. Do we need another 14th century pandemic before we replace the century old pipes underneath our cities? 

So, although I would personally appreciate a tax cut—especially since my employer had to skip cost-of-living increases this year—I doubt that I would spend the extra money filling potholes or buying a section of public water pipe.  Sometimes the individual must give way to the greater good.

War-go-round

A few months ago, I learned that an artist had been so moved by the stories of Vietnam veterans throwing their medals over the White House fence in protest of the war in which they had participated that he created a tile representation of one of these vets and was sending these tiles to like minded veterans.  The purpose, as I understood it was not merely to make and distribute his art, but to create a community and achieve an understanding of these veterans.  Well, as a veteran myself and former veterans counselor, I was touched by what he was trying to do and wrote a blog entry about it. [“Medals” June 15, 2008]

This past week, Alex Irvine, the artist, send me a tile.  I am honored and appreciative.  [Take a look at http://alexirvineceramics.blogspot.com/]

When I was in basic training, back in the hot summer of 1968, I remember the company being seated in a Fort Jackson classroom.  A drill sergeant stepped in front of us and announced that he was going to surprise us.  “You all want to go to Vietnam.”  There were no shouts or applause.  Vietnam was the last place we wanted to find ourselves.  He continued, “Think about it.  Deep down, you all want to test yourselves, to see how you will react.  You want to know what it is like.”

He hit on a major reason why young men go to war. 

Another is that war is simple.  Consider this passage from John Steinbecks’ The Grapes of Wrath:

            And now the squatting men stood up angrily.

            Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the In­dians and drive them away.  And Pa was bom here, and he killed weeds and snakes. Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money.  An' we was bom here.  There in the door—our children born here.  And Pa had to borrow money. The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we raised.

            We know that—all that. [said the men who drove the bulldozers] It's not us, it's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster. 

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land.  We measured it and broke it up.  We were bom on it, and we got killed on it, died on it.  Even if it's no good, its still ours.  That's what makes it ours—being bom on it, working it, dying on it.  That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.                     

            We're sorry.  It’s not us. It’ s the monster.  The bank isn't like a man.

            Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

            No, you're wrong there—quite wrong there.  The bank is something else than men.  It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it.  The bank is something more than men, I tell you.  It’s the monster.  Men made it, but they can't control it.

 

War gives a man someone to shoot.  It may not fix any of the ills of the world, but it solves the immediate problem of survival. 

I tried to be a pacifist back in my pre-draft youth.  I could not understand killing somebody half a world away whose only interest in killing me was because I was in his country uninvited.  After much soul searching, I failed the test for pacifism.  I don’t believe in killing strangers, and that’s not enough.  If someone tries to do violence in my presence, that makes it personal and its enough of an introduction for me do whatever harm it takes to stop him.  I just don’t believe in seeking out these opportunities.

Even in the days when my profession was pursuing bad guys, there was risk, but deadly force situations did not come up.  Life is more complex.

I remember being an MP at an anti-war demonstration when a Vietnam vet, still in the service, looked out at the hundreds of demonstrators and moaned that “We killed women and children in Vietnam, why can’t we do it here?  Just shoot ‘em down.”  The tear in his voice told me that he didn’t want to kill anyone, but coming home had made his life much more complicated.

This past week, figures were released that show the number of suicides by active duty troops is at another record high. 

Coincidentally, I just saw a documentary on the disaster at Chernobyl in 1986.  Soviet soldiers, miners and firemen were sent to bury the radioactive mass.  They had no protective suits and some 20,000 are estimated to have died.  But they saved millions.

The last time that American servicemen and women defended the United States was in 1945.  If we had let North Korea overrun the south, would it have threatened anyone here?  What about Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Kosovo…?  I am not passing judgements on any of the post-WWII conflicts, but they were extentions of U.S. foreign policy, not defence of our freedom or our lives.  Yet, the toll on the fighter is no less.  They battle fear and fatigue, bear the agony of their comrades falling, the helplessness of being separated from family crises, while the rest of us watch the Superbowl and complain about the economy.

Once upon a time, a handful of Vietnam vets returned the medals they earned in combat.  Their gesture may not have changed anything, but at least they tried.