Who put the “con” in consensus?

            With the Democratic ward healers running amok, especially the Senate bunch, the word consensus takes on a brand new meaning.  Now that Bill Safire isn't around anymore, I'll take over.  Consensus comes from the Greek "con" meaning "never tell the truth when a lie will do" plus the Greek "sensus" meaning "at least the amount of sense Olympian Zeus gave a monkey."

            (Enter Politicus)  "We need to have a consensus, even when there's no consense on the one side and damned little on the other."  (Politicus is played by Barack Obama in tonight's performance.)  Okay, we get it!  You want to play nice-nice with the old crepitators on the outré side of the I'll.  Is there any elected official on Capitol Hill who hasn't yet heard that a two-thirds majority—you know, the kind that's absolutely filibuster proof—of Americans favor a Public Option?  You can bet their staffers have heard it.

            So why can't the Democrats write the Public Option into the Bill and get it signed by the President?  Well, I think we ought to ask Max Baucus that one, since it's the Baucus Caucus—otherwise known as the Conservative Wing of the Democratic Party—that's pushing Democrats into line with the feckless Republicans, including that Olympian Snowe job from the frigid north.  Max Baucus, aka: Max Nix, represents the Democratic Party about as much as that fossil from Georgia, Zell Miller, did.

            Trying to find "common ground" with conservatives of any political party is a no-win—just ask the Iranians.  Common ground in American political life means status quo ante (which I shorten and simplify to "sqa", and pronounce like a homonym for a Native American housewife).

            The problem is that all of those ethically-challenged sqas hog all available TV cameras and spout talk designed to demonstrate their toughness and rugged American individualism.  (Mmm, Soundbytes!  Get 'em in your grocer's freezer!)  Common ground should be seen in America the way Commonwealth was seen in apartheid South Africa: Wealth for the whites and Common for the blacks.  Just ask yourself who gets the common and who gets the ground in the current health care debate?

            Toughness!  Who elected Poopdeck Pappy to Congress, anyway?  How about representative democracy?  Ever hear of that one?  Even William F. Buckley era conservatives understood that greed was wrong, and that any conservative government had a social responsibility to lift up the economic lives of its people.  I defy any literate conservative to deny this simple truth, which is proven best by the failure to do so under the right-wing ideological regime of President Bush II, as compared to the old style conservative administrations of all other post-WWII Republican Presidents.

            It's time for Barack Obama to put his popular vote where his mouth was and leverage the voices of the American people who sent him to the White House.  We want a Public Option, and the Baucus Caucus in the Democratic Party should either respect the wishes of the American people, or the senior Senator from Sin City should remove them from responsible positions in the Senate.  Perhaps he should also remove himself, for he seems as useless as a thermometer in Hades.   Conservative Democrats who want to "let them eat cake" should dine with the Tea Baggers—tea and cakes are simply splendid together—WASP soul food, m'dear.

The Wrong America

                It strikes me funny when people suggest that some things come from some places that they can't really have come from.  It's like saying that while Frank Sinatra was from Bayonne, that all Sinatras were.  At some far deeper level, all Sinatras are from Italy, and that may not be deep enough for a few.  "Fitness" fits this idea.

                Modern Americans have fitness on the mind.  I don't, but I'm not a modern American in many ways.  Fitness used to be a byproduct of a certain general level of physical activity undertaken by living.  It was a relationship between work, rest, recreation, and sustenance.  A man would—to paraphrase The Who—put his back into his business to a far greater extent.  Oh, I don't mean some romantic image of the farmer or carpenter as the only examples—there were mailmen and milkmen, too, and how often do we see the former walking or the latter at all.

                More people walked around a generation or two ago; they would be driving today.  People used to mow their own lawns with a push mower.  Kids used to bicycle everywhere.  Cleaning a house and making a meal was not performed with an array of lightweight appliances; you want bread, you knead dough.  People dined out less frequently, and ate less chi-chi finger food then.  My grandfather lived to be 98, and was in damn good health for 96 of those years.  He didn't smoke, he walked to a bus stop to get to work, spent a lot of time on his feet, usually ate lunch at a particular time, and came home to a meal that included meat, starch, and green vegetable, plus an occasional dessert.  He was portly as a man, but suffered neither from diabetes or hypertension.

                Today, it appears that we recognize the "value" of exercise, and that's why many of us do it.  But defining what the value is is not a simple as it seems.  I'm guessing that there are at least three values we attribute to exercise, but that we only ascribe to one.  Enjoyment may be a close fourth in this horserace, but it does not win, place, or show.

                The first value is "healthfulness".  We believe that since we do not live like even our recent ancestors, we should understand that the body needs to be worked in the same way the mind does.  We exercise to promote healthy living, in the same way that we plug organic foods—and avoid meats—into our diets.  This is an excellent value proposition, and is most likely to be the stated one when a person inquires as to why another person works out.  It's likely that 25% of people who work out actually hold this as the principle value for doing so, even if it's the only one stated.

                The second value is "youthfulness".  People believe that by eating well and exercising that they will remain young.  There are old folks who can dance till dawn, and there are old folks who go to sleep in a chair at dusk, and certainly some of that energy level is related to food and exercise.  Much of it is habitual.  In the final analysis, you're liable to live a better quality of life when you eat well, sleep well, and exercise—that I'll give you.  As to how much ultimate time you buy, that's another matter.

                The third value is "sexuality".  People who work out are attempting to make themselves more sexually attractive for a longer period of time.  They proceed as if they were never going to get a wrinkle or a cavity.  These people are fooling themselves, and it is these people who represent maybe 40% of all addicted work-out types—you know, gym rats as devoted to rowing machines as nuns are to matins.

                Members of this group seems to be the same sort of modern people that believe that being a stock broker is actually an occupation.  Building muscles for no better reason that to look better in a suit is as ludicrous as selling virtual paper with a virtual value to a virtual customer and thinking that, as of market closing, you've actually performed a day's work.

                Exercise is a programmed activity for many people, just like work.  There is no intrinsic joy in it for most people, except in the ambiguous atmosphere of an ends-means argument: I'm doing this crap because it's (good for me / I'll live longer / I'll get to fuck Bill or Nancy).  Those who play sports are different.  They play tennis, or softball, or soccer because they like the game, not because they want to get into shape—although this may be a reason to stay in shape.

                Modern life is reflected in a number of activities.  We don't do any muscle work that is useful to anyone but ourselves—we don't use our muscles as a means of production, even personal production, like mowing the lawn.  We engage in occupations that produce nothing—that benefit no one but themselves in any materially significant way because they are purely transactional middle men.  Taken together—strong muscles that produce no labor, and occupations that produce no tangible product, we begin to define the worst of the modern American healthcare system.

                The healthcare system is essentially an unproductive group of middle men, who stand between you and your health providers, with the power to help or hurt you based purely upon their position in the business cycle.  If you are a modern person who exercises and stays fit, they're happy to have you because you will not ask them to make many serious decisions about your health that will cost them money.  If you're not, then they are happy not to cover you, which converts you to the same sort of person as the exerciser—one for whom a decision to spend revenue need not be made.

                As long as we're on the subject, ask yourself why being "fat" is so stigmatized in America.  First, all the exercisers and organic foodies see "the fat" as unenlightened.  Second, people have bought into the economic argument that fat people are costly to our health care system: it's the argument made by those paragons of social responsibility, the healthcare corporations, and it is their prime rationale for rising health costs.  (How could that be, when so many policies are so easily cancelled—haven't you heard that people who make claims get their policies cancelled before?)  In fact, their rationale that fat people are the reason for increased costs is so oft repeated that it has moved into institutionalization—we assume things about fat people that we also assume about black people (including a diet of fried chicken, chitterlings, and sweet potato pie).

                Modern Americans are not live-and-let-live people who also share some sort of shared social contract.  Instead, they are about physical egomania and occupational self-promotional greed.  In India, fat people are mocked just as here, but people do not see them as deficient in some important way.  No, America is a nation where self-interest rules and the social contract is not worth the blood it was written in.  Exercisers, Healthcare Conglomerates, and Wall Streeters are the new America; they are the ones with a set of shared values.  They are the ones for whom looking good replaces doing good. 

                Let's hope that this aberrant strain of modern America, this growth on America's testicles, is about to dust away, because it's as ugly as a Mississippi democrat.

What Do You Call That Thing? A Rose?

"…I am deterred by the knowledge that conservatives, under the stress of our times, have had to invite all kinds of people into their ranks to help with the job at hand, and…to treat such people not as janissaries, but as equals; and so, empirically, it becomes difficult to see behind the khaki, to know surely whether that is a conservative over there doing what needs to be done, or a radical, or merely a noisemaker, or pyrotechnician."

William F. Buckley, in 1963, as quoted in The Death of Conservatism, Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 2009.

Buckley's quote could have been written last week rather than 46 years ago! In Sam Tanenhaus' excellent and deeply considered book (above), he differentiates between Classical Conservatism (CC) that seeks to conserve what is important about government and correct what needs correcting, and Movement Conservatism (MC), which ignores everything but its ideology.

In CC, the law of politics is that the majority must be heard and that leaders must lead them pragmatically. That is why pragmatists are seen as "flip-floppers" (a ridiculous phrase that grates on my ears) over the course of a long political career; they understand that they are elected as representatives of the people, and when their constituency changes, they must follow to lead. This is not crass politics, but truly reflects representative government, and has been deeply considered and discussed by scholars since before the American Revolution.

CC also employs the other part of the equation: it demands we assist the lower strata of society who need the kind of social programs often equated with liberal administrations in America. What service does government provide to the rich, after all (although the greed of unregulated corporate management is certainly related to acquisitiveness)? It's this second feature of CC that moderates the first—a majority of a minority of people (whites in the antebellum South) can want to continue such institutions as slavery, but there is no way to pursue such an institution as both a pragmatist and as a social programmer—health care for slaves does not liberate them, and perpetuates their enslavement!

In sharp contrast are the MC adherents. We see them every day on Fox News; hear them on Talk Radio, and at Congressional press conferences. They are wedded to an ideology that demonstrates that they care neither about the economic engine of American society (these were the representatives and commentators who were against the financial bailout despite the absolute need to deploy it to continue to have a functioning society), nor do they care about the public ("No" on any Health Care Reform proposal that increases the budget, the bureaucracy, or contains a "public option").

The MC wants to shrink government, as is the case with Ron Paul and other Libertarians, while remaining oblivious to the fact that government employs millions of people who, in the end, do render important services. Have we asked ourselves what the MCs vision of a small government is? Do you think we have unemployment problems today, or that the States could support the full cost of their operating programs on their budgets, alone? This contrasts the CC, who may not have wanted a government as big as the one they have, but recognize that most of it renders important services. Theirs is the path of improvement, not destruction.

William Buckley's quote reflects the trouble with modern conservatism: that in order to get more people into the fold, they have given full membership to fools and fundamentalists, which is why the level of conservative discourse is so low, and why the breadth of conservative opinion is so narrow. The brains of CC have not found a home among the ideologues of MC.

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, ably assisted by Bobby Jhindal (as a representative of MC at the gubernatorial level) and the likes of Newt Gingrich's left-behinds in Congress, have emerged as the MC voices of record. Arlen Specter, a CC, woke up one morning and found that he was far more at home in Obama's Democratic Party than he was in Bohner's Republican Party. That leads to the real point of this note on conservatism.

By the standards established herein, I am a conservative of the classical kind. I believe in using the resources of the central government to provide needed services to the American People. I believe that we need to conserve what is right about our governmental practices—both domestically and in the context of foreign policy—and change what is wrong. I believe that the gulf between the rich and the poor needs to be narrowed, and I believe that ideology puts constraints on problem-solving and other creative functions. These could not be further from the beliefs held by Movement Conservatives, and represent a measuring tool by which I can define myself.

Supporting the current administration's agenda is, in some sense, the operational definition of a liberal of whatever stripe. If, by comparison to the fools lording over the GOP's worst nature, I am reclassified as a classical conservative rather than a liberal, so be it. The label means nothing to me.

I believe that President Obama believes exactly the same things as I do, which makes him a classical conservative too. Live with it!

Iran's Nuclear Program

                Iran's nuclear program is a source of fear for far more people than those of us who live in the United States and Israel. 

                Until the Khomeinist revolution of the late 1970's, few Iranians reviled Israel and far more saw it as an arm's length ally of Iran against the Arabs, a traditional foe, if not downright enemy, of Persia and the Persians.  America, while seen as a self-interested meddler, was not as unpopular with the "man on the street" as generally thought.  It was the U.S. government that Iranians did not like, not the American people.  That changed under Khomeini, who sought to Arabize Iran, liberate it from demonic forces (Americans and Jews, plus a few selected Europeans), and destroy Iran as a nation-state, which he saw as an anti-Islamic and uniquely Western governmental form.

                Today, in Iran, Khomeinist as well as pro-Persian (that is to say counter-revolutionary) factions embrace the nuclear weapons program.  The revolutionaries see the bomb as a path to creating its role as the leading voice in worldwide Islam, irrespective of the fact that the vast majority—a number approaching 90%—of Muslims, worldwide, are Sunni, and Iran is almost all Shi'ah.  The revolutionary government in Iran, by most accounts, is committed to the weapons program out of a sense of holy mission.  Shi'ahs are messianic, like Christians, and the rhetoric often applied to the born-again Christian fundamentalists who, via conservative political policies of the Bush Administration, were suspected of trying to hasten "end times" also applies to their Shi'ah brethren.

                Many suspect the Khomeinists are a regime that is willing to use a nuclear weapon as a threat, or worse.  Iranians would be naïve to think that—even if there were no evidence that a nuclear weapon detonated in Israel or the United States originated in Iran, they wouldn't be sitting on the hot seat.  In all likelihood, the retaliation would be awful, and would include Teheran, Qom, Mashhad and other Iranian cities, plus the oil fields in the south.

                The pro-Persian Iranians, who provided abundant opposition to the recent re-election of President Ahmadinejad, also favor the bomb program, but for different reasons.  They see it as a point of national pride, as have the Indians, Pakistanis, and North Koreans (not to paint with too broad a brush).  There is no reason to believe that this portion of the Iranian public has any intention to use a nuclear weapon—they just want to demonstrate the scientific capacity to create one, and they want to be taken seriously as a modern player and deal-broker in the larger Middle East region where they abide.

                The Arabs of the so-called "confrontation states"—those within reach of Israeli retaliation—are also living in fear of a Shi'ite nuclear threat.  In their minds, only a fool would seek to push the Israelis, with a purported 200-300 such weapons, into an existential conflict which would surely not be limited to Iran, but would involve Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, Yemen, the Gulf States, and Saudi Arabia, at a minimum.  The question the Saudis must ask is whether, in addition to their major urban areas and their oil fields in the Eastern Province, the Israelis will also target Mecca, Islam's holiest place.  The guess is absolutely "yes".

                The Saudis, by far the richest state in the entire region, were afraid of Iran when the Shah was still in power.  Field artillery emplacements are located on the western side of the main north-south road running past the town of Qatif, and Qatif is to the east of that road.  Those gun emplacements are aimed at Qatif, home to Saudi Arabia's chief Shi'ah community, and the site of many a bulldozing of local Shi'ah mosques.  What was the Shah's air force as compared to "heretics with a nuke?"  If the Israelis preemptively struck Iran's reprocessing plants, the Saudis would praise them privately before excoriating them publicly.

                There is no way that the United States, or the United Nations for that matter, can control what the Iranian government wants to do inside its own borders.  We might as well come to grips with that fact now.  What we can do, however, is seek sanctions to destabilize this fundamentalist and corrupt regime in favor of a regime that could muster honest popular electoral support.  Don't ask me who.