Meals From The Marketplace

            When I originally wrote this column, seven years ago, I was more in touch with the steady drumbeat of time than I was with the inevitability of death.  The two are, as I’ve since come to realize, much more closely linked than we may appreciate as we scurry along with the day-to-day business of our lives.

            But life and death are marked by time, and the passages of our lives, while often less dramatic than academic graduations, are steps in time leading to its inevitable conclusion.  With than less that sanguine thought, I offer this reprise of a far more sanguine essay.

            Over the years, I’ve discovered that most rites of passage are easier to appreciate when someone else is the person celebrating the event.  So it was last month that I found ample reason to reflect on the significance of graduation ceremonies, as I attended the commencement exercises at the law school where I teach (Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law) and at my older son’s college graduation (from the University of California at Berkeley).  In both instances, the standard number of speeches by students, faculty, administrators and keynote speakers reminded me of the line that if all the graduation speakers were laid end to end, it would be a good thing.

            But apart from the levity, and let’s acknowledge that we can never have too much of that, there is, in the celebration of an academic accomplishment, something universal, something that I think extends beyond scholarly achievement.  We don’t have caps and gowns and pomp and circumstance for life’s non-academic passages, but the similarities are there, nonetheless.

            As I watched our older son receive his bachelor’s degree, I recalled the first of his graduation ceremonies.  He was five, and he was “graduating” from pre-school.  My wife and I had just purchased a video-camera that weighed about twenty pounds, and I struggled mightily to record the entire event, which, as I recall, included a tape of Elgar’s famous Enigma variation and several songs sung by the five year olds, including “Climb Every Mountain,” or maybe it was “The Impossible Dream.”

            Seven years later, he graduated again, this time from elementary school, and that year I recall that he sang a solo on one of the two aforementioned songs.  (Sorry, I can’t remember which, but they are really interchangeable, aren’t they?)  And then, in another two years, he was graduating from middle school, then in another four from high school, and now, four years later, from college. 

            College graduations are variously referred to as “exercises,” “ceremonies” and, almost universally, as “commencements.”  Each of these words connotes a different significance.  Exercise suggests a form of practice or a procedure that leads to something more important.  Ceremonies are unique and, in a way, unreal.  And commencement clearly indicates the beginning of something, even though, for the graduate, it is more meaningfully the end of something else.

            Certainly, academic graduations can mark the end of the “practice” phase of life, to the extent, at least, that book learning is the preparation for the real world.  (Oddly, the major professions, including law, are commonly referred to as “practices,” suggesting, perhaps, an ongoing education that extends beyond the classroom and, in effect, never ends.)  And they assuredly mark the end of a unique and, quite literally, “un-real world,” as graduates prepare to encounter the “real” world where making a living, creating a career, establishing an identity become the focus. 

            And academic graduations (especially past the middle school variety) may certainly mark the point at which the rest of a life begins or commences.  But so does the start of every new day in the sense that the phrase from Alcoholics Anonymous intends it.  “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” reads the message, suggesting that what has passed is behind and what lies ahead starts now.  “Commencement: an act of commencing; beginning,” says my dictionary.

            The A.A. goal is to treat each day as an opportunity and to regard every successful opportunity as a graduation of sorts.  A.A. members graduate when they stand up and say that they are alcoholics and it has been so many days/weeks/months/years since their last drink.  They pass their tests every time they turn away from the temptation of another drink, and for anyone who has ever had an addiction, to booze or any other chemical substance, those tests are as tough as they come.

            Most of us manage to avoid a life of addiction, at least of the more devastating variety.  Still, we are tested regularly.  Some of these tests are imposed on us by outside events.  (I refer here to the “acts of God” that seem to be randomly dispensed without rhyme or reason, and they can be devastating beyond all reason.)  But many others are the tests we impose on ourselves, and they too can be far more difficult than any academic exam.  “Life is hard,” I tell my law students.  “Law school is optional.” 

            Life is hard.  Personal fulfillment is optional.  We can choose to drift, feeling content to survive and avoiding the stress that self-imposed goals or needs create.  But to live life fully, goals (however paltry they may seem to others) are essential.  And we set them for ourselves because, innately, we understand the need to push ourselves, in one way or another. 

            In this regard, retirement without any plan to pursue something unique to oneself is probably the quickest way to one’s grave.  Only in striving for something yet to be achieved do we find the kind of meaning that makes life special.

            And so we graduate.  Every day in the struggle to survive brings new challenges.  Every year in the journey of life brings new tests.  Each passage contains its own risks and its own rewards.  True, no one will play “Pomp and Circumstance” for us.  No one will cheer our name as we cross a stage.  But the stage is still there, and the pomp and circumstance of life compel us to move forward, seeking always to climb every mountain and to reach the unreachable star.

            Did you know that President Obama ordered to have a bust of Winston Churchill removed from the Oval Office?  That piece of information – phrased in those inflammatory terms – was sent to me by a reader who has had nothing but disdain for this president since his election. 

            This reader, and many others like him, still believes Obama was born in Kenya or Malaysia or somewhere other than Hawaii, where his birth records show he was born.  The reader also believes Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian as Obama clearly states he is in his autobiography, and that Obama is a socialist (or a communist, or maybe a fascist), notwithstanding his valiant efforts to save capitalist icons like General Motors and Bank of America.

            This reader, who disparagingly refers to the president as obummer, is convinced the country is being controlled by a rabid anti-American radical who will do anything to destroy what the reader regards as America’s greatness. 

            Mr. Obama has now served one-third of his four-year term.  His performance to this point in his presidency has featured the normal, albeit regrettable, learning curve that all new presidents go through (there is, after all, no real training ground for the position), and he has definitely had his share of missteps and miscalculations. 

            But is he really showing anything like a hidden plan to destroy the country?  Is anything he has done or championed so far out of the mainstream of reasonable options then available to qualify as grossly incompetent, let alone treasonous?

            I would submit that any objective review of the president’s first sixteen months in office would reveal him to be a moderately effective national leader.  He isn’t going to go down, based on what we’ve seen so far, as one of the country’s greatest presidents, but he isn’t headed for the ignominious status of a Buchanan or a Harding either.

            So why the hatred for this particular president?  Is it all about the color of his skin?  Or does it go deeper?

            Some of it may be based on latent racism, but I believe most of it emanates from a sense of what America is supposed to be.  This image goes back to the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the United States had established itself as the leading democracy in the world, a true super-power to combat the perceived evil intentions of the Soviet Union.

            Coupled with that status (and the responsibility that went with it) was the country’s emergence as an economic powerhouse.  The end of the war allowed the engines of the capitalist system (that had, ironically, been ignited by the non-capitalist war-time economy that eschewed personal wealth and corporate profits for a larger national goal) to fire on all cylinders.  The result was a consumer-driven economy that produced abundance for all (at least when measured against the struggling economies of war-ravaged Europe and Asia).

            The 1950s were a time to feel good about being an American, at least if you were a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) or something close thereto (a second or third generation American with European roots would do).

            Yes, it was that kind of country.  Bigotry abounded, but it wasn’t an issue; it was just the way it was.  Catholics and Jews weren’t allowed to join the country clubs or to ascend to top corporate positions.  Blacks and Asians were treated even more shabbily.  Hispanics were consigned to the “other side of the tracks,” as were Armenians (my people) and other ethnic minorities.

            But, if you were part of the great majority of Americans, it was a good time to be an American.  Everyone was making a good living, providing the newest gadgets (televisions, stereos, refrigerators) in the nicest new homes with the hope that things would only continue to get better.

            And it was a bad time to be anti-American.  Everyone was a patriot, because the country was fighting the great Cold War against communist imperialism.  The pledge of allegiance was required of all students at the start of every school day, and it was even amended to include the phrase, “under God,” because surely everyone believed in God.

            The economy hummed along without a whole lot of government interference.  These were the days long before OSHA and environmental impact reports became de rigueur.  Unions were largely ineffective, when they weren’t completely corrupt, and most corporate board rooms were controlled by profit-seeking men (women were nowhere to be seen) who cared first and foremost about the bottom line (employee benefits weren’t yet a significant cost factor).

            The war-making machinery that had set the economy on track in the previous decade now turned into the “military-industrial complex,” as the retiring president dubbed it in 1960.  It was the new engine for both economic expansion and the foreign policy that ultimately led to the disastrous war in Viet Nam.  That war saw the first signs of disillusionment, and a period of significant “malaise” (so dubbed by a later president) followed.

            Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 was truly a retro event, because Reagan brought back that feel-good feeling of the 1950s.  Patriotic fervor swept the land once again, and this time Catholics and Jews (and women) were mostly welcome to the dance (blacks, Asians and Hispanics, not so much).

            Reagan ushered in a novel idea that was quickly embraced: taxes were anti-American.  No one should have his or her hard-earned money taken for government programs that supported those who didn’t work. 

            That concept, based entirely on a faulty understanding of fiscal policy, quickly caught on and became the rallying cry for a neo-conservative movement that has spawned right-wing radio, Fox News and, most recently, the tea bagger movement.

            Obama is none of that.  He is trying to govern a wholly different country in a wholly different time.  The America of the 1950s is long gone; ditto the one from the 1980s.  Some folks don’t want to accept that fact.  Obama does.

            And that’s why he is hated by people who are shocked that he doesn’t want a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office.

            Has anyone figured out exactly what the Tea Party stands for?  How did it even get to the point of requiring those upper case letters, as if it’s some kind of official political party?  Unless I’m missing something in the “breaking news” reports that the various cable news networks constantly deliver, the Tea Party has yet to field a single slate of candidates in any contested election anywhere in the country. 

            In fact, the Tea Party hasn’t even had a formal party designation in any election anywhere in the country.  In other words, no candidate has run as a Tea Party candidate on any ballot.  But the designation has caught on with the media, which must mean we are now dealing with a legitimate third party in American politics, right?

            Well, maybe not.  Maybe the title is capitalized because it’s just a big deal right now, kind of like the Civil Rights Movement was back in the sixties or the New Deal became in the thirties or the Cold War was for most of the latter half of the last century.  Maybe we’re just dealing with a movement that has achieved legitimate mainstream acceptance, thereby moving beyond the level of a cult or a splinter group or a sect.

            But whether it’s a formal political party or a less formal, but still legitimate, political movement, the question still remains: what is it that these folks want?

            The simple answer, and indeed, maybe the most correct answer, would be less government.  That goal, however, would not really distinguish it from libertarians, either of the informal (represented by the traditional libertarian philosophy) or the formal (identified with particular politicians) variety. 

            But the Tea Party movement may be more focused on economic issues.  Tea Party rallies seem to focus on the economy generally and the current budget deficit specifically.  Tea Party enthusiasts (“members” is probably not the right word, since we haven’t yet identified a formal organization to be a member of) rail against excessive government spending.  They hate the health care reform bill and strongly disapprove of the stimulus package.  In both instances, they seem to regard with disdain the intrusion of the federal government into what they believe should be purely private enterprises.  Many Tea Party members appear to believe that Citibank and General Motors should have been allowed to fail, instead of being “saved” by the federal government.

            Tea Party members also appear to disapprove of the pending legislation to regulate the lending industry, which again suggests a strong libertarian bias.  Indeed, former Tea Party hero Scott Brown (the new Massachusetts Senator) has recently been declared a traitor for supporting that legislation.

            Of course, Tea Party members also like their guns, as evidenced by their display of them at their rallies (and at your local Starbucks).

            Rand Paul, the recent victor in the Republican primary for the Senate race in Kentucky, has been embraced by the Tea Party (note I did not say endorsed, since the “Party” is not recognized to have the ability to formally endorse candidates).  Dr. Paul (he’s an ophthalmologist) is a staunch libertarian, or, as he describes himself, a “constitutional conservative.”

            Paul, whose father, Ron Paul, was also embraced by the Tea Party during his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in ’08, sounded very happy with his Tea Party support in his victory speech last week.  “I have a message, a message from the Tea Party,” he said.  “We’ve come to take our government back.”  

            If Dr. Paul is a true Tea Party candidate, it certainly suggests a close link with libertarian principles.  But political movements are fickle: one day a hero, the next a villain (as witness Scott Brown).  Dr. Paul may find his support from the movement will be short-lived.  He is certainly giving those who thought he was their ideal candidate reason to think twice.

            On the evening following his large victory in the Kentucky primary, Dr. Paul appeared as a guest on Rachel Maddow’s program on MSNBC.  There he indicated that he opposed the principal thrust of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (requiring privately-owned retail businesses to desegregate). 

            Dr. Paul one-upped himself the following day when he declared that it was “un-American” of President Obama to attack BP (the company responsible for the massive oil spill that is severely damaging the marsh lands in Louisiana).  It was just an “accident,” he said, and “sometimes accidents happen.”

            Are these positions the Tea Party will support?  Do they represent the philosophy the movement is seeking to implement?  Are they part of what Dr. Paul meant when he said, “We’ve come to take our government back”?

            Think about that line for a moment.  Just what does it mean?  Presumably it means that the reins of government – the means by which government policy is effectuated – will be secured by people (elected representatives and other public servants) who have a different agenda from those currently in control. 

            Well and good.  That’s what elections are about in this country.  We elect the folks we think can do the work we want them to do, and when they show us that either they can’t or won’t, we throw them out in favor of a different group of folks whom we think can and will.  But when we elect those folks, we generally know what they stand for.

            In the case of the Tea Party, what it wants its government to be is far from clear.  Dr. Paul says the movement wants to “take our government back.”  Take it back where? 

            Does the Tea Party really want the country to return to Jim Crow-style segregation?  Does it really want a government that ignores “accidents” like the one that is currently threatening a large section of the Gulf?

            These questions, and many more that will undoubtedly arise during the coming campaign season, will be pressed on candidates who associate themselves with the Tea Party, and they should be. 

            Because it isn’t enough to say you are going to “take our government back.”  You have to tell the people whose votes you want exactly where you want to take it.

            It has not been a good spring for the proponents of economic deregulation.  Consider the following:

            Item: Goldman Sachs has been accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of defrauding investors by creating a complicated bundle of toxic mortgage securities and then deliberately selling them to investors while secretly investing against the securities because they believed the bonds in the bundle would fail.

            Item: A coal mine operated by Massey Energy experienced a catastrophic fire that claimed the lives of 29 miners.  Massey had a history of safety violations before this disaster struck.  Its CEO, Don Blankenship, had spent millions to get a judge elected, who then ruled against the plaintiffs in a suit claiming Massey had engaged in fraud.

            Item: An oil drilling rig operated by BP (British Petroleum) exploded in the Gulf of Mexico causing a massive oil spill that threatens coastal marsh lands and wildlife across the entire Gulf region.  The resulting leak allegedly could have been prevented had BP installed a safety device that is required in many other countries (but not the United States).

            Notice a pattern here?  If you are a tea-bagger, you probably notice that the government didn’t protect us.  You would therefore claim that these incidents are another example of a broken system of our democracy and would then start looking for government agencies or elected politicians to blame.  You’d focus in particular on the Democrats since they are the ones who got elected in 2008 (led by the guy whom you aren’t entirely convinced is even an American citizen). 

            You’d end up believing firmly that the only way to get things back the way they should be is to demand your right to be free of taxes, free of government interference, and free to carry your guns with you to political rallies and Starbucks.

            On the other hand, if you are a thinking and concerned American citizen, you notice that each of these disasters occurred because of loose or non-existent government oversight and regulation of the industries that were the real culprits in the events.  And you also are aware that the real issue turns on whether policy makers favor or oppose such a role for government.

            The patterns of the picture may be perceived differently, but that fact doesn’t mean that both are accurate perceptions.  In fact, the tea-bagger perception is based on ignorance and prejudice and is not deserving of serious discussion, notwithstanding that it gets a lot of what would otherwise appear to be serious discussion on Fox News and right-wing talk radio.

            Part of the problem that confronts the country in this era of institutional distrust is the willingness of many Americans to pay the most attention to the message that has the most appealing ring to it.  Ronald Reagan came to this realization early on in his political career, and he built his legacy on it.

            Thus, he spoke of “morning in America,” as if he had discovered a long lost secret about the country.  In reality, all he was doing with that, and other emotional, flag-waving sound-bites, was cloaking a radical policy prescription in feel-good language.  And it didn’t hurt one bit that he was calling Americans out of the “malaise” that had developed after a decade marked by the Viet Nam War, the Watergate scandal, and the Iran-hostage crisis. 

            The country was longing for a sense of patriotic fervor, and Reagan deftly supplied it.  And, to make his prescription even easier to take, he told everyone that the country would be better off with less taxation, thereby introducing the tax revolt that has become the mantra of the “re-born” Republican Party he spawned.

            George W. Bush took Reagan’s approach to the next level.  He used the flag and love of country in a way even Reagan hadn’t considered “doable.”  He took the country to war under its banner.  “Freedom” became the catchword of the decade, and it, too, was an easy sell, since everyone wants to be free (never mind how the word is defined) and since no one wants to live in fear of terrorism, which Bush conveniently and cleverly linked to an absence of freedom.

            And so, he led us into a war that never should have been fought, while at the same time pushing the corporatist economic policies that have now come home to roost fully, as evidenced by this spring’s trifecta of disasters.

            And it was all cloaked in “freedom”: freedom, as in “freedom from government intrusion” (never mind the illegal wiretapping that Bush inaugurated under the amended Patriot Act); and “freedom from government bureaucracies” (never mind the Katrina disaster in which government bureaucracies remained inert while thousands lost everything they had); and “freedom from government regulations” (never mind the financial crisis that resulted from unregulated lending institutions that bet ours farms on their portfolios).

            And, of course, it was that last “freedom” that led to the economic meltdown that has the country struggling with the worst unemployment in almost 30 years, for which tea-bagger types are all too ready to blame Obama and the Democrats. 

            And while they’re at it, they are happily trying to label the oil spill in the Gulf as Obama’s Katrina.  This kind of simplistic reasoning, if it can be called reasoning at all, typifies the tea-bagger mentality.  Katrina was a natural disaster that the federal government exacerbated by ignoring its role.  The oil spill is a disaster caused by corporate greed and a lack of government regulation.  Anyone who finds meaningful similarities in the two probably thinks the mine disaster in West Virginia last month was caused by the Obama administration, too.

            The truth can be hard to discern if you aren’t paying attention, but it isn’t all that hard to see if you are.

            And the truth is that within the last month, the three disasters that have occurred (or come to light in the case of Goldman Sachs) are the payback for policies that may sound in “freedom” but are in fact born of a far less noble sentiment: it’s called pure, unadulterated (and unregulated) greed.