A Slight Delay

A brief post, albeit one I’d rather not have to write…

By now, a day after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake demolished what was left of already-demolished Port Au Prince, you’ve already seen the visuals, and heard the first faltering attempts at making sense of what’s happened in Haiti. A couple of times already, I’ve commiserated with friends who’ve still got friends and family there, as they try and try again to get word of who’s safe, and who’s lost.

If you’re of a mind to help, there are a number of organizations soliciting donations for disaster relief. While news reports focus on the lack of medical supplies and drinkable water, it should be emphasized that what’s needed most at the moment is cash. In the absence, at least for the short term, of means to distribute supplies, a check–even if only for five bucks–would likely go further than the donation of a case of water. This page on MSNBC.com provides links to a plethora of organizations, including the American Red Cross, UNICEF, and Doctors Without Borders that are on the ground in Haiti and offering assistance.

 The State Department frequently issues travel advisories for various corners of the globe. Since Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, though, you won’t generally see much by way of advisories. This is a bit of a shame, since it would’ve been nice if we’d known before we went that practically the whole island was on strike the day we arrived. The streets of Old San Juan, if not for their distinctive architecture, could easily have been mistaken for a quiet suburb somewhere in Jersey. Both nights we were there, the largest number of people we saw out late at night were a handful of people playing dominoes in the Plaza de Armas. This isn’t to say there wasn’t plenty to do in Puerto Rico. Sure, the museums were mostly shuttered, but once you’ve run the gauntlet of the scores of McDonalds and other chains, there’s plenty to see. A few highlights:

El Morro: This fort is one of a string of fortifications–along with San Cristobal–that defended Old San Juan. If you’re coming to Puerto Rico from the mainland, this can be quite an experience, given that there’s not much on the mainland that’s any older than about three hundred years old, and many of our landmarks are more recent than that. While Puerto Rico has undergone its fair share of development, luckily it hasn’t all been at the expense of a sense of history.

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It’s official. Glenn Beck has lost it. There are splinters in the windmills of his mind. He is completely, utterly, batshit crazy. This, to far too many on the right, is what currently passes for discourse in civil society. Beck talks of “sav[ing] the Republic,” but one could be forgiven for wondering how, exactly, he plans to save himself. Here, courtesy of Daily Kos, is a distillation of a week’s worth of Beck marginalia.

Yet again, I’m going to be fashionably late getting this out, but it’s been sticking in my craw for a little while now, so here goes nothing.

For all the attention paid to the back-and-forth over healthcare, our ongoing difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, an economy that’s still apparently built on feet of clay, and a myriad of other issues, the one thing that’s really beginning to piss me off is the lack of anything resembling intelligent debate coming from the Right. It isn’t as though the proposals currently being floated to resolve any of these problems are so perfect as to not need, or deserve, thorough debate. But what we’ve gotten instead is more smoke than substance. Rather than disrupting, trying to pre-empt, or attempting to shut down, the debate, I would much sooner see something approaching concrete and realistic proposals.

What we’ve gotten instead is… this: Glenn Beck informing people that “Obama has a hatred of white people, of white culture.”

The question is, what “white culture”? I think it’s idiotic to talk about a singular, monolithic “white culture” in the same way I think it’s pretty dumb to put a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton out front as a “black leader.” For all the complaints from the right about multiculturalism, the plain truth is that the United States has, from its earliest times, been multicultural. It isn’t just differences in skin color that create identity; even people who self-identify as Americans without any kind of hyphenated modifier being involved will generally acknowledge that they’re not rooted in some nebulous white-ness, but in a specific set of identifiers. Their ancestry comes from Ireland, Poland, Germany, what-have-you, and while people leave the physical geography behind them, they invariably bring something of the psychological geography—language, cuisine, customs, folkways—with them when they emigrate. (more…)

If you believe NewsBusters (and I, for one, have difficulty putting stock in anything calling itself a news organization when its name conjures images of the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man), not only is “liberal bias” killing newspapers, but this is, somehow, a good thing. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that one should choose one’s news based on accuracy and thoroughness in reporting rather than on ideological grounds, the mass die-offs in our print media are cause for concern, not rejoicing.

I’ve written about this previously (you can read the original piece here, if you’d like), and rather than reiterate what I’ve said–to say nothing of what others have stated better, and at more length–I’d like to quote a bit from a study published by the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. It’s titled Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post. While anecdotal evidence (and recent surveys like this one from Pew) suggest that newspapers have become an increasingly marginal means of getting the news, study authors Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido argue that even with diminished circulation, newspapers have an impact far beyond their sales figures:
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Or, Why I Predict the War On Drugs Will Not End in My Lifetime.

A few days ago in this space, I took up the issue of the “Drug War” as it’s currently being waged, and one of the solutions–namely, legalization–that’s been offered as a means to end it. While I think that there’s tremendous public benefit in solving the drug problem, I have reason–call it my cynical side tempering my idealism–to think that it won’t happen any time soon.

It’s not that the means don’t exist, or that they’re some kind of state secret. Tightening legal loopholes, making better use of existing laws, and going–for once–after the right targets all have the potential to radically alter not only the discussion of this problem, but also (more importantly) its ultimate solubility.

The present methods don’t work. There’s evidence enough on the news, and in any number of cities and suburbs. Multimillion dollar seizures of guns and dope, and the arrest of a handful of hapless small-time dealers make for magnificent theater. But at the end of the day, that theater is about as important–if as expensive and elaborately staged–as a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. The seizures that take place are more theraputic in nature than practical, allowing politicians and law enforcement to congratulate themselves on how wisely they’ve spent your money. They have not, in the meantime, stopped the flow of drugs, nor have they made our neighborhoods one iota safer. They’ve driven a black-market economy that much further underground, and driven prices just that much higher, with all the attendant mayhem. (more…)

We’ve just barely passed the halfway point of Obama’s first hundred days, and his presidency still has that new administration smell. One side effect of this is the fact that a host of old issues have become newsworthy again. Last week, a trial balloon went up in the discussion of integrating gays fully into the military; on Monday, the administration revisited the Bush administration’s de facto ban on stem cell research; and with the naming of Seattle police Chief Gil Kerlikowske as his new Drug Czar (as well as demoting the post from cabinet level, where it’d been during the Bush years), the President has signaled his willingness to bring some fresh thinking to drug policy.

The New York Times notes, and many who are advocating for sensible drug policy hope, that this may mean a shift in emphasis from arrests and prosecution to treating the drug issue, and all the baggage appended to it, as a public health crisis. While some concern has been voiced about the choice of Kerlikowske–those in favor of legalization, or at least of liberalization, are a bit wary of a cop in the post–a closer examination of his record could be cause for relief rather than alarm. Kerlikowske gave a wide berth to his officers in Seattle, leaving treatment and education programs as options for drug offenders rather than just prison time. In a further wrinkle (one that, I expect, the GOP will make no small use of), the soon-to-be-Czar’s experience with drugs is close to home; the fact that his stepson has a history with substance abuse might well lead to a more nuanced and thoughtful approach to this issue than we’ve seen up to this point.

Even the mainstream media have chimed in, raising the specter of legalization. They’ve argued that legalization may be the only way to end a “war” that is costly, pointless, and nearly as damaging to the fabric of our society as the scourge it aims to combat. Consider this recent example from an article calling for legalization as a means to stop the War on Drugs:

[A drug-free world] is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenangers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

Whence came this bit of heresy? High Times? The Nation? Try again. The not-exactly-liberal Economist ran this in the leader of a special section on the current state of the War on Drugs. And this is where things get interesting. (more…)

At any time, coming out of anyone’s mouth, it’d be outrageous, even unthinkable. Why, then, has the GOP’s desire for Barack Obama to fail–not at the ballot box, mind you, but as President and Commander in Chief–become not just more hot air from commentator Rush Limbaugh, but a talking point and Conservative shibboleth?

Politics, especially in its many American guises, has never been a particularly polite business. Political discourse isn’t generally something reserved for genteel gatherings over cucumber sandwiches; it’s rough-and-tumble stuff, as anyone who’s turned on a television on pretty much any day in the last seventeen years or longer will tell you. But with this particular meme, the chattering class in the GOP has hit a strident new low. While many commentators on the left–those at The Nation, Daily Kos, and pretty much anyone on MSNBC besides Joe Scarborough, for instance–were absolutely merciless toward George W. Bush for the last eight years, none suggested that it’d be in their best interests, much less the country’s, should he fail. (more…)

With the inauguration of Barack Obama looming, and soon-to-be ex-president Bush embarking on a round of image rehabilitation and retroactive whitewashing, it seems as good a time as any to look back over the Bush legacy and look ahead–create a wishlist, if you will–to what one might hope from the Obama administration. Thousands, if not millions, of words have been written over both the past eight years, and America’s prospects for the future. While it’s true that only the passage of time will provide sufficient perspective on all that we’ve experienced since November of 2000, we still have to live in the present with the consequences of all that’s been done since.

The aftermath of the Bush presidency, for the short term, has been an evisceration of the Constitution, of our rights, and of our civil liberties. Those on the Right seem to have been concerned with the Second Amendment, but precious little else; we’ve seen the Bill of Rights otherwise consigned to the shredder. The NSA and the government’s wiretapping programs have given the lie to the Fourth Amendment; the holding of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without the right to trial, and without access even to counsel, makes a mockery of both the Fifth and Sixth Amendments; and the First Amendment–the “first freedom,” as Nat Hentoff once dubbed it–has been honored more in the breach.

It’s against this backdrop–a dismal near past, and what one would hope would be a brighter future–that we take up two books published half a century apart. The first, Henry Steele Commager’s Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent, was published at the height of McCarthy-inspired hysteria and anticommunist witch-hunts; the second, Anthony Lewis’s Freedom for the Thought We Hate, appeared just shy of two years ago. (more…)

Those of you who contributed so generously last year to the floating hospital have probably wondered what became of the money. I was speaking on this subject only last week at our up-town branch, and, after the meeting, a dear little old lady, dressed all in lavendar, came up on the platform, and, laying her hand on my arm, said: “Mr. So-and-so (calling me by name) Mr. So-and-so, what the hell did you do with all the money we gave you last year?” Well, I just laughed and pushed her off the platform, but it has occurred to the committee that perhaps some of you, like that little old lady, would be interested in knowing the disposition of the funds. –Robert Benchley, from “The Treasurer’s Report,” 1928.

Every time someone mentions the bailout lately, this quotation’s the first thing that comes to mind. I can’t help it, especially since nobody knows where in the hell the money’s gone, or is going.

Could we try asking our bankers? I’m not talking about the teller at your local CitiBank; what I’d love to do, instead, is to sit the CEO, CFO, and whatever other CO’s we can muster down in front of a town hall meeting. Or better still, a series of town hall meetings, from one end of the country to the other. Let anyone who’d like to do so grill the living hell out of their banker of choice. It’d make for great television, and would probably also be the first time PollStar showed a group of wayward businessmen selling more tickets than Bruce Springsteen.

I bring this up for a simple reason. Since the first disbursement of Federal aid went to the banks, various and sundry media outlets have tried to figure out where the money’s going. It’s been hard going, since nobody who’s received funds seems to want to say what, exactly, they’ve done with all that money. We’ve heard of AIG’s cries of poverty drowned out by the shouts of joy at their company party, plus the usual round of bonus payouts, mergers, and acquisitions. Before long, we’ll need a bailout from the bailout…