Meals From The Marketplace

            So it wasn’t as bad as they said it might be.  The big bad hurricane that some had described as “the size of Europe,” ended up being a relatively weak storm as these things go, albeit it did enough damage with over 30 lives lost and who knows how many others injured psychically, if not physically.  Property damage, lost business income, and the overall impact on the economy will only be fully evident months from now.

            But Irene was a national event, to be sure.  And coming as it did close to the anniversary of Katrina and the devastation it caused to New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, and only a few weeks from the ten-year anniversary of a different kind of catastrophe, one to be commemorated as an event of its own, it served to remind us of a few lessons and perhaps give us a few thoughts to ponder.

            Among the lessons might be the one concerning “mother nature.”  And the lesson there is that she is not to be fooled with.  Disasters in her eyes are merely a matter of perspective.  Hurricanes and other meteorological phenomena, along with earthquakes, meteor strikes and volcanic eruptions, are just part of the way things are from a purely neutral perspective.

            Only when we humans are affected do those occurrences gain a quality that makes them something to be feared or prepared for or doomed to experience, depending on your general philosophical attitude.  Without us, the physical manifestations of “God’s plan” are nothing more than the way things happen to be at any given point in time.  Indeed, even time has little if any significance, absent the need we (humans) have to relate to it and to note its passing.

            But from our perspective, hurricanes, and all the other “acts of God” that bedevil our existence, are a big deal, especially when they wreak havoc on us and the things (mostly material) that matter to us.

            That lesson isn’t especially significant, but there might be a message contained in it, if you care to think on it.

            A more basic lesson gained from the sincere efforts of government officials to keep those in Irene’s path safe is that we want to protect ourselves from these natural events and the damage they can cause us, even when it means inconveniencing ourselves and spending our tax dollars to do it.

            Governors from all the adversely affected states, even those with Tea Party Republicans in their statehouses, sought and accepted federal assistance to help their residents survive and recover from Irene.  In this kind of circumstance, relief is all that matters.  The cost of that relief, or where it is coming from, is not the slightest concern.

            Irene was a wake-up call to America.  The round-the-clock media coverage was more than just an exciting way to pass the weekend.  Too many people were facing devastation as the storm moved up the coast.  And whether we were in its path or had relatives who were or just empathized with those who might suffer harm in its wake, we felt concern, real anxious concern.

            In fact, most Americans want to help those caught in harm’s way, which is a very positive lesson learned from Irene.  We want to do what is the modern equivalent of building a new barn for our neighbors whose barn was destroyed by the wildfire that spread through the frontier prairie in an earlier time.

            And for most of us, without the ability to help in the building of those new barns ourselves, we expect (or at least accept) that our governments will do it for us.  And, though we may not think about it, we would understand that our tax dollars would be used to build those new barns.

            Or at least most of us would have such an understanding.  Yet, in the immediate aftermath of Irene’s march up the eastern seaboard, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor insisted that any emergency funds used to provide relief and assistance to communities adversely affected by the storm would have to be matched by spending cuts elsewhere.  In other words, Mr. Cantor was boldly declaring, we won’t build the new barns unless we give up some other project we had planned to undertake. 

            There’s no sense of communal sacrifice in the Cantor philosophy, which also happens to be the controlling philosophy of his political party at this point in the nation’s history.  He would gladly recognize purely private initiatives to build the new barns, especially if they had a profit-making element attached to them for those private efforts. 

            But no new government spending, and implicitly, no new taxes, to get those barns built.  That’s the current message from the new Republican/Tea Party.  If it can’t be done with existing resources, it must not be done at all, because … well, just because.  Government spending, you see, kills jobs.  Taxing Americans for things that need to be done kills jobs.  Government action of any kind, be it regulation or authorization or investigation, kills jobs.  Anything that interferes with or places a burden of any kind on the private enterprise of the nation kills jobs.  Even government initiatives that would appear to promote job creation kill jobs.

            At least that is the message that Eric Kantor imparts on behalf of his party with the vehemence of a true believer warning of the wages of sin at a Sunday prayer meeting.

            One wonders just what would constitute the kind of emergency that would justify asking for collective sacrifice to help our neighbors for this man and his party.  

            Americans have good instincts when it comes to coming to the aid of their neighbors.  They have good instincts about the relative importance of private enterprise and collective sacrifice.  They want their leaders to offer help to those in need, and, when asked, they are willing to pay for it.

            That is a lesson from Irene that is worth serious contemplation.  Mr. Kantor and his colleagues in the new political party they are fashioning would do well to understand it.

            Can a book be important, horrific and horrible?  You wouldn’t think so, but Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity” fits that description.

            The title tells all, starting with the obvious passion that the author brings to the subject.  At a full 600 pages, plus 30 pages of notes (most of which are cites to referenced works and authorities) and a closing “Thoughts and Thanks” that runs another five pages, the book is ponderous from the outset.

            But the topic of the book is most definitely important, if perhaps not quite as important as Mr. Goldhagen, in his obsession with the subject, would have it be.  The propensity for genocide and its cousin, eliminationism (a word Mr. Goldhagen uses to distinguish non-lethal forms of human violence against other humans), is certainly a major character flaw in the human condition.  To be specific, and Mr. Goldhagen is nothing if not specific, he conservatively accounts for 175 million deaths by genocidal acts in the span of the twentieth century (and the first few years of the twenty-first; the book was published in 2009).

            In chronicling those episodes, the author spares no details.  And that aspect of the book is what earns it the second adjective: horrific.  It’s one thing to relate generally how mass murders were effectuated in the numerous genocides of the last century.  It’s quite another to provide the grisly specifics, to include the blood and guts (literally) spilled by the perpetrators in each of those genocides.

            Thus, for example, we learn of the Hutus genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, which Mr. Goldhagen seemingly delights in describing over and over again, with each description including the fact that the victims were attacked with machetes and made to suffer as body parts and limbs were cut off before they were actually killed, as if the perpetrators were engaged in a form of perverse artistry in their killing.

            Those and countless other forms of mass murder are described ad nauseam throughout the book.  In this regard, the author is presumably intent on making the reader feel the horror of the events he describes.  In that task he succeeds beyond all measure.

            The third adjective – horrible – is intended to describe the actual writing a reader will encounter.  For openers, the book is far too long.  Although it is divided into four discrete parts and eleven distinct chapters, the same ideas permeate most of it.  Those ideas (the horrific quality of these events, how they are perpetrated, why they are perpetrated, how frequently the same patterns lead to their perpetration) are repeated incessantly for the first 515 pages.

            But the book’s length isn’t the only problem.  Mr. Goldhagen also writes excessively long paragraphs; indeed, he seems to revel in them.  Long paragraphs, while occasionally necessary, are a turn off for readers.  They make the reading burdensome.  But in this book, long paragraphs are de rigueur.  Many run over a page, and those that don’t extend to that preposterous length take up the better part of a page.  In almost every instance, they could easily be broken up into three or four separate paragraphs, each with its own obligatory topic sentence.

            But the length problem extends even beyond the long paragraphs.  Mr. Goldhagen, also an apparent lover of long sentences, the kind that often ramble on for in excess of 100 words to offer a description of an event or a study that then morphs into a second thought or secondary idea and that then includes a parenthetical addition, will, only at the very end of the entire monstrosity (assuming the reader has had the patience to stick with the sentence to get that far) provide the necessary verb to tell the reader what the subject of the sentence was doing in the first place. 

            And if you’ve just read the entire previous sentence you have an idea of what I am describing.  Consider how little enjoyment can be gained in reading an entire book that is replete with such sentences (in the aforementioned interminable paragraphs) dealing with the gruesome descriptions that are the heart of the book.

            In addition to these problems, the book also suffers from a lack of clear definitions.  Calling Harry Truman a mass murderer is one thing (he did unleash the horror of atomic weapons in the assault on Japan at the end of World War II, thereby killing a quarter of a million civilians), but equating that decision with the regimes of Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot suggests a lack of clarity.

            Similarly, the Al Qaeda 9/11 attacks, outrageous though they were, probably fall outside of the kind of systematic butchery that characterizes the many full scale genocidal campaigns that the book focuses on.  Yet, not only does the author put Osama bin Ladin (and Harry Truman) in the same general category as history’s genocidal leaders, but he also makes a case for equating the current “political Islam” (another term he creates, preferring it to radical Islam) with Hitler’s Third Reich.

            Those attempts to equate actions and actors run afoul of his more clearly articulated condemnation of the true perpetrators of genocide and of his offer of an explanation for why those acts repeatedly occur throughout history.

            In the last section of his book Mr. Goldhagen provides his solutions to the problem, albeit he still weaves more grotesque historical accounts into even this part of his tome.  His solutions are both simplistic and unrealistic. 

            The simplistic solution is for the civilized nations of the world to condemn eliminationist actions by any who perpetrate them.  He would enlist the media in those countries and thereby call upon the masses to demand action by their governments whenever eliminationist policies are threatened.

            The unrealistic solution calls for dissolving the United Nations (which he regards as completely incompetent and even corrupt) in favor of a body he calls the United Democratic Nations (dictatorships, monarchies and other totalitarian countries would be excluded).  That body would enforce the anti-eliminationist laws of civilized nations. 

            Not much of a payoff for such a heavy read, but it is an important topic.

           If you saw the recent Republican presidential debate (earlier this summer), you witnessed a remarkable sight.  At one point the moderator asked all eight candidates on the stage if any of them would vote for a budget proposal that had ten times as much spending cuts as tax increases.  Not one of the eight indicated approval for that hypothetical.

           Such is the state of the GOP as it prepares to select its presidential candidate in next year’s primaries and caucuses.  The anti-tax wing of the party has engulfed the pro-spending-cut wing, albeit the two are generally in lock step with each other.  But given the opportunity to embrace a ten to one ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, the entire field of presidential candidates said they wouldn’t accept that plan.  Amazing!

           This week, the most moderate of the candidates, Jon Huntsman, essentially called his competitors unelectable.  He may be right on that point, but by denouncing the likes of Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry (the two current darlings of the Tea Party), Huntsman might as well have announced that he was dropping out of the race.  This Republican Party will never nominate someone who is a “center-right” candidate.

           It’s all enough to make one wonder what Ronald Reagan would say.  Reagan, who won his party’s nomination by beating a candidate who called his economic plan “voodoo economics” and who then picked that same candidate to be his vice-president, was proud that his party was a “big tent,” as he called it.

           And back in the 1960s and 70s, and even in 1980, when Reagan was elected, the Grand Old Party was a big tent, with men like Hugh Scott and Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits respected leaders of their party.  They were all liberals, yes, liberals, who saw the need for an active government and who supported government programs and, yes, government spending.

           Of course, Reagan himself was no liberal, and he spent much of his presidency moving his party as far to the right as he could.  But even he, were he alive today, might wonder what he had wrought.  And those who claim to be his torch-bearers might do well to consider how far to the right of even him they are.

           Reagan, after all, approved numerous tax increases during his presidency and oversaw budget deficits that were massive.  Tax revenues were much higher during his presidency than they are now, and so was government spending.

           But don’t tell that to today’s GOP.  It has been overwhelmed by the Tea Party, or at least by that part of the Tea Party that is figuratively insane, if by insane we mean advocating policies that are against the nation’s interests. 

           The Tea Party demands less spending, claiming that only by cutting spending will jobs be created.  In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth.

           When the private sector doesn’t (or can’t) create jobs, the government must be the employer of last resort.  That fact is basic Econ 101.  The Great Depression provides the model.  When the private sector fell apart—due to an unregulated financial market that imploded on itself (sound familiar?)—the federal government, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, created jobs by spending money.

           The recovery was short lived, not because the government was spending too much money, but because it didn’t spend enough.  In 1937, just as the economy was starting to rebound, Roosevelt tried to get spending “under control.”  The result was a sharp spike in unemployment akin to a double dip (sound familiar?), that was only abetted with the outbreak of World War II, when, of course, government spending went through the roof.  The result was that everyone, either in military uniform or out, was working. 

           The lesson is simple: When private enterprise, for whatever reason, cannot or will not create the jobs that keep the demand for goods and services high, the government must step in.  Otherwise, you have a downward spiral of lowered demand, leading to lowered supply, meaning fewer jobs and less income, which then leads to still lower demand and still lower supply and …

           You don’t have to be a genius to understand this pattern.  Rather, you have to be mentally disabled not to.  Or, if you are a public servant, seeking to lead the country, you have to be insane to espouse less government spending during a severe economic decline such as the country is experiencing now.

           And the effect of taxes is another misunderstood, or ignored, reality.  Taxes are simply a cost of doing business (if you’re a company) or a cost of living factor (if you’re a private individual).  Businesses factor in their costs in setting the wages they pay and the prices they charge.  If taxes are too high, businesses cut other expenses to meet their financial needs.  To this extent, higher taxes can lead to reduced work forces.

           But the reverse does not follow, and recent history proves that it doesn’t.  Lower tax rates do not increase employment.  If they did, we would certainly not be struggling to recover from the current economic crisis, since taxes have been exceedingly low (historically as low as they’ve been in over 60 years) for over ten years now.

           With Fortune 500 companies like General Electric paying zero dollars in taxes while sitting on billions in profits, the claim that lower taxes would stimulate the economy is obviously not true.  Companies hire based on the need to produce.  And if the demand for products is not there, they sit on their profits (i.e., they invest them) and wait for demand to emerge.

           But demand is dependent on income, and those who are unemployed don’t earn income.  And if they don’t earn income they don’t demand goods and services.  (They also don’t pay taxes.)

           Most sane politicians understand all of these facts.  If they are courageous they give speeches about them.

           If they are insane, they claim that we need to spend less and tax less.  And that is the sad state of the Tea Party-led GOP as it prepares to select its next presidential nominee.

          Last month’s horrific terrorist attacks in Norway were perpetrated by a militant Christian extremist who abhors the threat, as he sees it, that multiculturalism and liberalism constitute for his country and its religious majority.  At least that appears to have been the motivation for Anders Behring Breivik’s murderous assault on a summer camp where children and adolescents were vacationing.

          And while it is easy enough to characterize Breivik as a madman, he also represents a growing type of madman in human existence.  Breivik’s manifesto (which he published on his blog just before he carried out his attacks) expresses the views of a devout fundamentalist whose understanding of his religion is at odds with the basic tenets of that religion and whose actions are contrary to those prescribed by his faith.

          In this regard, he is no different than Osama bin Laden, albeit bin Laden was a leader of a movement while Breivik is just a sole individual, more akin to Timothy McVeigh in that respect.  But all three, bin Laden, McVeigh, and now Breivik, used terror to express their deeply held beliefs.  And those beliefs, such as they are, generated the intolerance that, in their minds, justified their acts of terror.

          And while Breivik’s attacks killed fewer than McVeigh’s and far fewer than the 9/11 attacks, the impact on his nation was far greater, relatively speaking, than either of the other two.  To clarify that point, consider that Norway is a country of 5 million, one-sixtieth the population of the United States.  In other words, viewing the two countries’ populations, a death toll of 76 in a population of 5 million would have the same impact as a death toll of 4,560 in a country with a population of 300 million (that of the U.S.).

          But numbers don’t really mean much when a society is as devastated as Norway now has been.  Its security, or more to the point, its sense of security, has been violated, and, just as was the case in America after McVeigh’s bomb exploded in Oklahoma City, and even more so after 9/11, the country will never be the same.  It has lost its collective innocence, that sense that “it can’t happen here.”

          And, on a larger scale, Breivik’s actions should have the same impact in every country, large or small.  Indeed, if it can happen in Norway, a country as seemingly remote in terms of its geography, as isolated in terms of its politics, and as homogeneous in terms of its ethnicity and religious identity as a country can be, it can most certainly happen anywhere.

          And so, apart from the grief that all civilized peoples must feel and the sympathy and empathy that all feeling human beings most assuredly extend to those who have suffered loss in this horrific tragedy, what can we learn?

          What strikes me about this latest episode of terrorism is that it clearly establishes that acts of this kind are hardly confined to any one religion or ideology.  Islam has been condemned by many in the West for the actions of Al Qaeda, as if the religion espouses terrorism or countenances the killing of innocent civilians.  But if that logic is valid, then mustn’t Christianity be similarly condemned when those with extreme views of that religion promulgate acts of terrorism and kill innocent civilians?

          In the end, religious extremism denigrates the value of religion in a society, and, without intending to claim an understanding of the underlying tenets of any religion, I submit that the extremism that results from the most rigidly fundamentalist dogma causes the intolerance that then fosters the terrorist acts.

          Every religion is susceptible of a wide spectrum of beliefs.  Christianity certainly is a prime example of this fact, with the major split between Catholics and Protestants only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the width of that spectrum.  In many respects, Episcopalians are as different from Baptists as they are from Catholics, maybe even more so.  And, with over 100 recognized religions all labeled as Protestant, the span of beliefs under the banner of Christianity is broad indeed. 

          And no one, so far as I am given to understand, who strongly adheres to the beliefs of any of those many versions of Christianity, considers that other Christians are as correct as they are in their understandings of the teachings of Christ.  Muslims are similarly divided regarding the teachings of Mohammed, as are Jews regarding the Torah, and even Buddhists regarding the degree of reverence they accord the Dalai Lama.

          And, just as every religion has its own dogma and all dogmas are subject to interpretation (e.g., whether it should be construed literally or metaphorically, whether it should be followed rigidly or flexibly), so do they all promote a sense of unity within their tents and disunity with all the other tents.

          The result in civilized society is a casual acceptance of the differences in beliefs and practices.  Some celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday, some on Sunday.  Some fast for various periods of the calendar, some do not.  Some attend worship services regularly, some only on specified occasions.  No one is offended by the religious beliefs of a neighbor in civilized society, because everyone recognizes the many vagaries inherent in religious beliefs in the first place.  (How, after all, can we really be certain of anything when it comes to the wholly unknowable?)

          But all of those intellectual niceties are irrelevant to religious fanatics.  Those individuals are intolerant of the beliefs of others.  They know only that theirs is the only path to righteousness, and that those espousing other paths (or ignoring the “correct” path entirely) are heathens at best, and God’s enemies at worst.

          And when those views fester in the mind of a demented soul, they result in the horrors of terrorist attacks such as Anders Breivik wrought in Norway last month.

          Intolerance is the root cause of the acts of terrorism that flow from the religious fanaticism of our age.  And no war on terrorism is going to eliminate it.