Across the Great Divide

Bachmann Goes on TV to Demand Privacy.

"Between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up," [Rep. Michele Bachmann] said. "I'm not saying that that's what the administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up."
— Star Tribune

Perfect timing.

Rep. Michele Bachmann gets media play on her stated intention not to complete the U.S. Census Survey. Today, she sends an email blast soliciting donations before the fund raising filing period ends June 30th. An excerpt:

 

She pretty much lays out all her obsessions, but my topic today is the Census. She says:

They don't want you to see me speak out to protect your privacy from invasive census questions. [Actually, we love it, and we understand why you're mad about that mental stability question.]
 
I asked you to read the census for yourself and see what you think.  [Though apparently only Congress members have copies of the new forms, so you'll have to rely on sources like this one: PDF.]
 

Bachmann links to a recent Glenn Beck appearance, in which Beck summons up visions of ACORN members asking Census questions (not true) and the Feds using non-compliance as a "loophole" to take away his gun permit.

Bachmann fumes, "'Are you a U.S. Citizen?' One question they don't ask is resident status."

The short form doesn't ask it, but it appears the longer community survey does. That should satisfy Bachmann's need to estimate the extent of the illegal immigration problem. But she wants it both ways: Let's preserve privacy and root out aliens. But not the way they did it in 1940's with the Japanese, not that I'm saying we would... just that it happened once. I'm not filling it out, but I'm not saying people shouldn't fill it out. But why does the federal government need your phone number?

So ACORN can call you and ask for donations to support terror, of course.

At bottom, this is typical Bachmann — combining fear of the other, paranoia about government, extreme self-righteousness (while criticizing elitists), a demand for personal privacy while refusing it to others and celebrating knownothingism while trying to defeat anything (including the Census) that might challenge this rickety system of self-delusion. Plus asserting a lie forcefully over and over while denying any responsibility should others act in response to the lie.

SEC Discovers Psychology.

Maybe economists will, too. The SEC is considering reinstating an "uptick" rule to curb short selling.

The uptick rule was initially created following the stock market crash of 1929 to prevent bearish investors from ganging up on shares. After years of economic studies that showed the rule wasn't having an impact on market volatility, the SEC abolished it in 2007, around the time financial turmoil was getting under way.

Many traders and others blame the SEC's decision as a factor behind the precipitous declines of some shares over the past two years. Some say that the rule's absence hurt investor psychology, even if it didn't cause market volatility. Reinstating the uptick rule could give the market "a huge shot of confidence," says Brian Bartsch, a trader with Cohen Capital Group.

Even Blind Bigots Find a Nut Once in Awhile.

Next week, I'll be back in Colorado for an extended time, and expect to be providing bulletins from the Colorado Bible Institute otherwise known as the state legislature.

Last week, two back benchers received a measure of notoriety for their remarks about a bill to extend health benefits to the same-sex partners of state employees and one requiring HIV/AIDS testing bill for pregnant women.

Both men immediately drew fire from their political opponents. This excerpt from an email is typical of how their positions are being represented.

That's right. Sen. [Dave] Schultheis really said he hopes babies get AIDS in order to make examples of their mothers.

Sen. Schultheis' comments came just two days after another Colorado Republican, State Sen. Scott Renfroe, on the state Senate floor during a debate, compared homosexuality to murder and suggested that gay people should be "put to death."

I'm no fan of either senator, and I disagree with their positions. But I also disagree with distorting their inarticulate statements into even more extreme positions. Reality is bad enough.

Let's start with Renfroe. He's a small-town jock, who like Sarah Palin, spent each year of college in a new school, managing to emerge with a degree — but apparently without having one's thinking challenged or broadened.

He decried the benefits bill as "just a continuation in the detraction of the family," which is the ordained earthly counterpart to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit — and not the other way around.

I suppose it's not totally inaccurate to say Renfroe suggested "that gay people should be 'put to death'" when he quoted a minor Old Testament prophet. But I think this quote from his senate floor statement better captures his tangled reasoning:

When we create laws against what Biblically we're supposed to stand for, I think we are agreeing or allowing to go forward a sin which should not be treated by government as something that is legal... We are taking sins and making them to be legally okay, and that is wrong. That is an abomination according to scripture. And I'm not saying this is the only sin that's out there. Obviously, we have sin, we have murder, we have... we have all sorts of sins. We have adultery and we don't make laws making those legal and we would  never think to make murder legal. But what I'm saying that for is all sin is equal. That sin there is as equal to any other sin that's in the Bible — to having wandering eyes, to coveting your neighbor's things. Whatever you do, that sin is equal and it can be forgiven because of that.

The problem with legislators like Renfroe is their Biblical fundamentalism functions as a quasi-Constitutional authority. Whatever stray bit he can dredge out of Leviticus doesn't just guide his life. He believes the rest of us ought to submit to the Bible, too.

I'm inclined to cut a bit more slack for Schultheis, who has been pilloried for this statement to a reporter:

"What I’m hoping is that, yes, that person may have AIDS, have it seriously as a baby and when they grow up, but the mother will begin to feel guilt as a result of that,” he said. “The family will see the negative consequences of that promiscuity and it may make a number of people over the coming years begin to realize that there are negative consequences and maybe they should adjust their behavior.”

This strikes me as one of those comments that can occur when you start answering a question without fully forming the thought. I don't think "What I’m hoping" is anything more than a preamble as he   constructs a response on the fly.

Yes, he's hung up on sex and not very well informed about how HIV/AIDS spreads. The senator thinks promiscuity is bad and he hopes that people draw lessons from bad outcomes. But his written explanation makes more clear, his position is also based on the principle that "the role of government should not be to protect individuals from negative consequences of their actions."

That's actually a discussion worth having — and also whether government has a proper role in protecting others from the negative consequences of an individual's actions.

Mandating medical testing can conflict with informed consent and doing it "to protect the unborn baby" seems to forget that the mother has a big stake in the outcome, too. 

And so the real outrage, and irony, is that apparently not one person stood up for a woman’s right to dignity and autonomy, and that the only correct vote on SB-179 was cast by an ignorant bigot for all the wrong reasons.

Name calling and further simplifying simplistic thinking doesn't get us to the meat of issues.

Tragic Mutual Incomprehension.

[Mike Connell, Karl Rove's chief IT consultant] had recently said he was afraid George Bush and Dick Cheney would "throw [him] under the bus." Cliff Arnebeck had also previously alerted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to alleged threats from Karl Rove to Connell if he refused to "take the fall."

– Rove's IT Guru Warned of Sabotage Before Fatal Plane Crash; Was Set to Testify

A man is ready to talk about the Ohio 2004 election, the White House email system and his efforts on behalf of Karl Rove. He's been deposed on the Ohio voting fraud case and has told his lawyer and a reporter that he was afraid.

On Friday, he doesn't go under a bus, but his private plane does go down into an Akron neighborhood as he attempts a flight to Washington, DC.

I am not one of those Wellstone plane crash conspiracy theorists, and I don't have any reason to believe there was sabotage here, either. Small planes do tend to crash. But this is going to put quite a crimp into several investigations.

*****
I guess the good thing about Karl Rove and Dick Cheney not being convicted of anything is that the president can't pardon them on his way out the door.  The unitary executive pardoning the crimes of the unitary executive branch would be a fitting close to a disastrous era, though.

*****

Speaking of pardons, now Galileo gets rehabilitated.

The Vatican didn't have a bus to throw him under — that they didn't, even during the Inquisition, is a measure of his moral gravity and celebrity, not to mention that he didn't do stem cell research —  so Galileo just got home detention for his heresy.

In 1992, Pope John Paul declared that the ruling against Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension."

Across the Great Divide is a bit catchier than Tragic Mutual Incomprehension, so I think I'll stick with the current name, but I may cop the term.

[The head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture] said Galileo's writings offered a "path" to explore how faith and reason were not incompatible.

You can easily read those writings nearly 400 years later, which, assuming we still have readers around four centuries hence, is unlikely to happen to anything being written today. His work is not, however, available on Kindle.

Rick Warren Protestors are Picking the Wrong Battle.

Last night the dinner conversation came around to Barack Obama's invitation to pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural. Among the six of us, we counted a gay son, a sister, a college roommate and best man, a nephew, next door neighbors and best friends — some of whom are greatly aggrieved by Obama's decision.

We could all do without Warren on stage, and truth be told, without any invocation whatsoever. Those fatuous prayers are about as deep and meaningful as the "Your call is important to us" recordings you get when a company doesn't devote enough resources to answer your call.

If you watched the Democratic National Convention's daily bookends, the invocations and benedictions were where the party paid homage to all the constituencies that would never make the main event. I remember in particular an interminable and barely comprehensible benediction from a Korean pastoral couple.

Given the fact that someone had to draw the duty, and they had to provide some doctrinal balance and contrast with the speaker at the other end, why get so upset?

It's unacceptable. A political blunder. But most importantly and bottom line, it is morally reprehensible. It goes counter to everything that Obama stood for along the road to the White House. I am more than disgusted by it; I am utterly and thoroughly disenchanted.

Really? "It goes counter to everything that Obama stood for"? Does that mean we're bombing Iran on January 21st, too? Dude, the invocation is the rhetorical equivalent of the centerpiece at a holiday dinner!

I don't agree with Warren's position on Prop. 8, but I also don't agree he's the monster some of these protests make him out to be. He's a pastor, for Christ's sake, of an evangelical church, subject to all the  myopia of a man who bases his world view on the Bible. 

You wonder, as with all these guys, how selectively he reads it. Warren says: "I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage." Which, according to my reading of the first 3,000 years or so would indicate that marriage is a union of one man and as many women as he can get his hands on.

There's a lot of that religious mindset going around, and if you're going to president for the entire country, you might as well acknowledge it, because you aren't going to change it by calling them out. And if you're going to lead a social transformation in this country, you're going to have to involve churches, because they are one of the major non-tax-funded sources of good works we have going for us.

The premise of Obama's administration has been that he will uphold his own beliefs, while agreeing to disagree in order to find other areas of common ground. America is a very long way from electing a president who reflects my nonreligious orientation, but we've come very close to getting one that reflects Across the Great Dividism.

When Time for the Future is a Frill.

We tend to elect people based on narrow factors. A position on a key issue, political affiliation, "heroism," charisma. But even when we step back and look more expansively, we may get stuck at ideology.

What the world needs now from its leaders is systems thinkers, people capable of seeing the interrelationships in the world as they exist — and not as they fit in their predetermined categories.

By this measure, the Staggering Mavericks — whose thought processes seem untethered and whose interest in the future seems based on the past — are spectacularly unsuitable. The Hopeful President is better in terms of how he approaches problems, but as yet has not yet talked about the developing future that more and more of us can see.

In Sunday's New York Times, Michael Pollan offers an example of the creative thinking we really need from our leaders in his open letter to the next president.

[W]ith a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close.

[...]

[M]ake the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate . Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study.

Food, oil, health, transportation, housing, water, environment, trade, world peace — it's all there, all connected.

The typical major party politician would not touch this. (Maybe you can find me one who has — and has actually been elected to do something about it.) The framing makes the problem too large, too frightening and too antithetical to a comfortable way of life to bring this kind of discussion forward.

I have met people in various government jobs who are starting to think in these terms, but they are overwhelmed with the day to day. In this patch-the-boat era of governing, the future is a frill.

But eventually, it becomes the present.

The Intergalactic Bailout.

You may recall I talked to a former teacher last month who told me October 14th was going to be a big day in the history of the earth.

Three days, actually. That's how long the giant space ship will hover over the earth and bring its message of peace and hope.

So Monday would be a good day to get back in the market, I'm thinking.

Just remember, unless you are a total freak, you heard it here first.

Josh Hamilton Walks with God.

It's true that I'm not a religious person, and I've been critical here about aspects of religiosity — especially the prosperity gospel and religious posturing by politicians and sports figures. But I've also communicated with followers of Kenneth Copeland and Mac Hammond, and I know they responded to the larger message, not just the money part.

So I don't usually ridicule religion or faith as it really plays out in most people's lives, because it works for them — often in situations where other interventions simply don't.

For a moment last night — after Josh Hamilton put on an amazing display of hitting in an otherwise meaningless pre-All Star Game Home Run Derby and then credited his savior — I was tempted to do a satirical news item about Obama calling for an end to players injecting God in baseball .

Want to know why I passed up on what could have been a funny bit? And it has nothing to do with this.

Yes, But Which Movie?

The tornado shook their house, and minutes later they emerged to see devastation everywhere.

"I've never seen anything like it," she said Sunday night outside Oneka Elementary School in Hugo, where evacuees were gathering. "It was surreal, like a movie."

— "After the storm, a scene of pandemonium, 'like a movie,'" Star Tribune

I would never wish a tornado on anyone — although some apparently do — but just once I'd like to see the media interview a victim who was a poet.

Reality happens and some witnesses compare it to fiction that imitates reality. Natural forces unfurl, the economy takes a tumble and others can only divine the hand of God.

Narcissism and the Commons.

Last week, Shankar Vedantam wrote a Washington Post column titled, "Clinton, Obama and the Narcissist's Tale." It appeared yesterday under a different Star Tribune headline, "Democrats face a classic 'tragedy of the commons.'" One emphasizes the self-absorption required of politicians; the other highlights its effects.

I'm more interested the commons metaphor and how it relates beyond the current presidential race because I think it helps define the great dividing line of our time. Parties and candidates have clustered at the poles of the real divisions among us — whether to value the big picture over the short run and place collective interest on at least a par with self-interest.

Vedantam invokes the tragedy of the commons to explain the dangerous trap of this "fault line" between individual and collective interest:

Individuals embroiled in similar dilemmas find them impossible to solve on their own, because they are confronted by a Hobson's Choice: Act selfishly and cause collective disaster, or act altruistically and aid someone else who is acting selfishly. Either way, selfishness wins.

"The way the system is set up, the more-selfish person has a higher probability of winning," social psychologist W. Keith Campbell said of the Democratic primary. "You end up with the more narcissistic, belligerent candidate."

He cites an experiment by Campbell in which volunteers were tasked as timber companies to manage a forest in perpetuity.

[Since] the volunteers did not know whether their kindness would be reciprocated by others or exploited by competitors, people raced to cut as much timber as they could and quickly razed the forests to the ground. Groups with volunteers more willing to think about the collective good preserved their forests longer. But selfish people within these groups had a field day exploiting the altruists — and the forests perished anyway.

Much of the conflict in the public domain mirrors this dynamic. Free market vs. government regulation. Energy development vs. conservation. The individual or family vs. the collective. The castle vs. the commons.

Government and other social institutions, especially religion, have developed to regulate or redirect behavior from the destructive effects of selfishness. But Reaganism has led an all-out assault on the notion of "the commons," associating it with failed socialist states instead of with managing, in Jedediah Purdy's* phrase,  "the things that we cannot avoid having in common and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all." That is, the legal system, the economy, public health and the natural world to name a few.

The attack on the commons has been prosecuted against and through those very institutions charged with keeping it — school boards, churches, local governments and federal agencies — abetted by think tanks, pundits and pollsters who retail to the public simpleminded formulations of complex problems and then pretend to discover them as the will of the people.

Public opinion, Purdy says, "has become shorthand for uninformed attitudes dignified by statistical aggregation." And the "Public,"  he says, is increasingly defined in Libertarian terms to be whatever government provides to people who are too lazy or weak to get a share of the "Private."

Although unregulated behavior can be modeled and the consequences predicted, before they will act, cultures of heightened self-interest demand proof, which practically means collapse of fisheries or financial systems. In Garrett Hardin's term, "intrinsic responsibility" can be clearly grasped when an act is straightforward and the consequences are immediate. But those who most loudly espouse personal responsibility and accountability for actions rarely see their own complicity in causing harm when the effects are indirect — through consumption, financial manipulation, disinvestment or discrimination.

We cannot and should not legislate away self-interest, but neither can we blithely continue to grow population, consume energy and amass wealth as if we were the planet's sole occupants — or, alternatively, as if we all have our own personal savior waiting in the wings.

Until we learn to see the systems we live within, we contribute to their ruin. And even then...

_______

* I could've sworn I'd written before about Jedediah Purdy's book, For Common Things, but apparently not. (Naturally, libertarians didn't like it; nor did  Caleb Crain. But here's another view that there are worse sins than being privileged, earnest and young.)