Musing's musings

Will they heed the warnings?

President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership more generally have, I argue, been overlooking or ignoring significant warning signals over the last few months. That's dangerous at any time in modern politics, but even more so as we are already in the early stages of the runup to the midterm elections. Unless the president and the rest of the party leaders wake up quickly, I fear we are not going to see a third election cycle wherein the Democrats pick up seats in Congress.

The start of the slump, in my mind, was this summer. When the wingnuts were out having their fun pretending to be patriots and interrupting anyone they didn't like (which was just about everyone in politics), the Democrats largely let them have the news cycles. We woke up eventually and took some reparative steps, but by that time the damage had already been done. The initial slippage continued as we headed into the autumn, with the health-insurance reform package (where we started out from a disadvantageous position and then compromised gave in to our opponents on virtually every point). Both the president and the party leadership were largely absent from the fall election season, particularly as regards Question 1 in Maine, which should have been a no-brainer.

Once the elections were over, with their mixed results, the party leadership largely seemed to conclude that the message being sent by the voters was not (as it should have been) "stick to the principles you said you believed in and for which we voted in 2008," but rather "try to become more like Republicans than you already are." Suddenly, all questions of progressive issues were being kicked down the road--when the pressure should have been all the greater to get precisely those things taken care of, before the momentum from the 2008 elections wore off.

I would hope that the declining approval numbers for both President Obama and the Democratic Party would be a matter of concern in party leadership circles in and of themselves. But even if they are not, then this should be:

But a bigger indicator of peril comes from a new survey question added [to] the DK tracking poll for the first time this week. The poll now includes a rather simple indicator of baseline voter enthusiasm for the year 2010. The question offered to respondents is a simple question about their intentions for 2010:

QUESTION: In the 2010 Congressional elections will you definitely vote, probably vote, not likely vote, or definitely will not vote?

The results were, to put it mildly, shocking:

Voter Intensity: Definitely + Probably Voting/Not Likely + Not Voting

Republican Voters: 81/14
Independent Voters: 65/23
DEMOCRATIC VOTERS: 56/40

Two in five Democratic voters either consider themselves unlikely to vote at this point in time, or have already made the firm decision to remove themselves from the 2010 electorate pool. Indeed, Democrats were three times more likely to say that they will "definitely not vote" in 2010 than are Republicans.

Sweating the small stuff

Sometimes you have to. In my job, I spend a lot of time sweating the small stuff--because it's what I get paid to do, and because if I don't, it will be harder for the people I work with to get their research funded.

As always, however, the trick is to know when and how much--and as I look around at what's been going on around the country and the world, far too many people have been sweating far too much small stuff, and all at the wrong time. Consider the hoo-ha over President Obama's bow last week to the emperor of Japan. OMG, the president of the United States demonstrated manners and common courtesy in public in a diplomatic situation? What's the world coming to?

This week, the wingnuts are clutching their pearls and groping for their fainting couches at the prospect that people we've detained as terrorists might actually be tried and, if convicted, imprisoned on American soil. Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that eight years is probably not what the Framers had in mind when they enshrined the right to a "speedy and public trial" in the Sixth Amendment, I should think the fact that as of June 2008 we had locked up some 2.3 million people would constitute sufficient evidence that we've gotten pretty good at doing so. I see no particular reason to feel alarmed at the possibility that people from Guantanamo Bay might be brought to the continental U.S. and put on trial for what we are claiming they did. Nor do I feel any heightened anxiety at the possibility that the federal government is considering buying an under-used maximum security state prison not all that far away from where I live and using it to house those very criminals, should they be convicted. The mouth-breathers are all wetting their pants, but that seems to be their raison d'être; myself, I just don't enjoy the practice much.

The Catholic Church is also getting into the fearmongering and small-stuff sweating game, though I really do wish the Holy Spirit would rigorously apply the Cosmic Clue-by-Four to the backs of a few bishops' heads starting any day now. Of all the problems in the world the bishops could choose to care about, they're worried about who is boffing whom? Worse yet, rather than face the possibility that they might not be able to discriminate quite as freely against their LGBT flock as they are accustomed to doing, the Washington archdiocese has threatened to shut down all of its charitable institutions in the city, cutting off food and shelter and health care to the poor and the elderly. I know I'm not the only Catholic in America who is simply livid at the very idea; I'm also pretty sure I remember reading something, once upon a time, in a pretty important book, something about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked... Oh, yeah, it was this:

Ὅταν δὲ ἔλθῃ ὁ υἱὸς τῶν ἀνθρώπου ἐν τῇ δόξῃ αὐτοῦ καὶ πάντες οἱ ἄγγελοι μετ' αὐτοῦ, τότε καθίσει ἐπὶ θρόνου δόξης αὐτοῦ· καὶ συναχθήσονται ἔμπροσθεν αὐτοῦ πάντα τὰ ἔθνη, καὶ ἀφορίσει αὐτοὺς ἀπ' ἀλλήλων, ὥσπερ ὁ ποιμὴν ἀφορίζει τὰ πρόβατα ἀπὸ τῶν ἐρίφων, καὶ στήσει τὰ μὲν πρόβατα ἐκ δεξιῶν αὐτοῦ, τὰ δὲ ἐρίφια ἐξ εὐωνύμων. τότε ἐρεῖ ὁ βασιλεὺς τοῖς ἐκ δεξιῶν αὐτοῦ· δεῦτε οἱ εὐλογημένοι τοῦ πατρός μου, κληρονομήσατε τὴν ἡτοιμασμένην ὑμῖν βασιλείαν ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου. ἐπείνασα γὰρ καὶ ἐδώκατέ μοι φαγεῖν, ἐδίψησα καὶ ἐποτίσατέ με, ξένος ἤμην καὶ συνηγάγετέ με, γυμνὸς καὶ περιεβάλετέ με, ἠσθένησα καὶ ἐπεσκέψασθέ με, ἐν φυλακῇ ἤμην καὶ ἤλθατε πρὸς με. τότε ἀποκριθήσονται αὐτῷ οἱ δίκαιοι λέγοντες· κύριε, πότε σε εἴδομεν πεινῶντα καὶ ἐθρέψαμεν, ἢ διψῶντα καὶ ἐποτίσαμεν; πότε δέ σε εἴδομεν ξένον καὶ συνηγάγομεν, ἢ γυμνὸν καὶ περιεβάλομεν; πότε δὲ σε εἴδομεν ἀσθενοῦντα ἢ ἐν φυλακῇ καὶ ἤλθομεν πρός σε; καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐρεῖ αὐτοῖς· ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐφ' ὅσον ἐποιήσατε ἑνὶ τούτων τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου τῶν ἐλαχίστων, ἐμοὶ ἐποιήσατε.

Whenever the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, at that time he will sit upon the throne of his glory and all the peoples shall be gathered together before him and he will separate them one from another, just as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He shall place the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left. And then the ruler will say to those at his right hand, "Come here, you who are blessed of my Father; inherit the realm that was prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked, and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me, in prison, and you came to visit me." At this point the just will respond to him and say, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty, and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and come to you?" The Ruler will say to them in answer, "Amen I tell you, as often as you did it for one of the least of these my brothers and my sisters, you did it for me."

--Matthew 25:31-40, my translation from the original Greek

Should the archbishop decide to follow through on his threat, I would recommend that he read the rest of that pericope first. I don't think he's going to like how it ends. Jesus never said a single word about homosexuality (hardly surprising, given that neither the term nor the concept had come into being in his day), but he had quite a bit to say about taking care of the last and the least among us--and what those who neglected that most important task could look forward to when they came to face him at the end of their days. In fact, there's another passage from Matthew's Gospel that the archbishop might want to include in his lectio divina: it's Matthew 23:13-33. Verse 23 seems particularly appropriate.

Good-bye to all that (I hope)

Fourscore and eleven years ago, at this hour, the guns fell silent at the end of the war that was supposed to end all wars, forever. Regrettably, that hope did not materialize. Indeed, a far bloodier and more brutal war would erupt in Europe barely a generation later, to be followed by countless skirmishes, "police actions," and undeclared strife of all kinds.

It is traditional in much of the world to remember the day by wearing a poppy flower or a representation thereof:

Regrettably, along with tending to forget the holiday itself, that tradition also seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur in the United States. I remember in my salad days that the VFW or one of its auxiliary organizations still made and provided the poppies for Veterans Day. I can't tell you the last time I saw anyone actually offering them to people, though I was pleased to see, over the last week or so, most of the coaches and other bench staff in the National Hockey League wearing them in their buttonholes during games.

The tradition of the poppies comes from the poem "In Flanders Fields," written in 1915 by Lt. Col. John McCrae, MD, during the Second Battle of Ypres. He would die himself before the war's end, of pneumonia in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in January 1918. The poem was very nearly not published: McCrae was not satisfied with it and at one point threw it away. A fellow officer retrieved it, and it was published anonymously in Punch just about a month after the Armistice.

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Thanks to all veterans for their honorable service, including my father, my stepfather, whole rafts of other relatives, and three very distant, long-dead cousins who signed up to fight for this country before it even truly existed, one of whom paid the last full measure of devotion, in Lincoln's immortal words, that horrible winter at Valley Forge. You are not forgotten.

On the public...and options

Apologies for my long absence. To make a long story short, too much to do, too much to think about, too much that makes me angry, and not a lot of energy for blogging.

Several of the things that have been making me angry and giving me food for thought are coming together in this post. I was flabbergasted this past weekend to see that more than forty so-called Democrats cast their votes for the Stupak amendment to the health insurance reform bill (to give it its proper name: it isn't reforming health care, it's reforming health insurance--and that just barely). Among the more common rationalizations and excuses offered for those votes is the notion that people shouldn't be asked to support, through their tax dollars, things which they personally do not approve of.

The thing that burns my onion is that the only time anyone ever seems to think that's a good or an important idea is when the matter in question is allowing men to control what a woman does with her body (i.e., abortion). It's not an altogether unreasonable idea, but before I could get behind it as a principle of government, it would have to apply to everything that our taxes fund.

For example, earlier this evening the Commonwealth of Virginia executed judicially murdered John Allen Muhammad, who was one of the two snipers who terrorized the Washington, D.C. area seven years ago last month. That's certainly something I don't support, and that I don't like to think about funding with my taxes. Another thing that was boosting my blood pressure was the tenor of some of the comments on Muhammad's pending execution that I encountered on allegedly progressive web sites: comments to the effect that he deserved what he was going to get, that he was worthless, and similar drivel that I would have expected from a right-wing site, but not at places where I spend time online.

One of those comments argued that unless one had been part of the community that Muhammad and his accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo terrorized through random violence, one was somehow not entitled to have or to express an opinion about what would, or would not, bring closure to the families of the victims. As I pointed out in response to that comment, this is precisely why we have a justice system. We do not allow the victims of crimes (or their relatives) to determine the fates of those charged with committing crimes against them, because they lack the necessary objectivity.