Bafflement at the Ballot

I've never gotten used to it, that machine. It is ugly and cramped; its display is a horror of dense, monotonic design. You enter with ideas, doubts, and questions; and you are presented with a dull, labyrinthine grid of lines and switches, the labels crushed together and some choices difficult to find with the eye. Perhaps you've stood in line awhile to get here—perhaps even hours, in some places. It's the end of the day, and you're tired and hungry; or it's the beginning and you've got to catch the 8:40 train to be at the office on time: either way, you're drained or distracted, and not in a contemplative mood. Neither are the people lined up behind you, many of them as pressed and harried and impatient as you may be. You pull the big red lever to one side; the machine makes a grinding noise that seems tinged with imperious demand: flip some switches, make your choices, and move on. This is no time for examining options or contemplating meanings. You should know who or what you want by now—just get on with it.

This, however, is the primary interactive element of the democratic society; and the psychology of it is all wrong. It is a reminder to me that if you're going to build a system, you had better make sure it's capable of doing what it's supposed to do. A system of any kind is meant to respond to the needs of individuals, not the demands of institutions. Inventors, artists, writers, software developers, and even some companies understand this principle and adapt their work to it—that is, to the fluid and shifting needs of people over changing times and cultures.

But the makers of voting machines appear to have missed that lesson: the devices we use to speak the language of democratic choice are abysmally misbegotten to their purpose. It's like passing into a parallel reality where the landscape is strange and the language vaguely familiar, yet distorted. Whether it's a punch-card system or a document arrayed like the assembly instructions that come with Chinese furniture, the variations on the theme of counter-intuition are equally inadequate to their purpose. I often suspect that the ancient Greeks had a better system than ours—tossing colored rocks into an urn.

Good Bye Yellow Brick Toad

We all know the barn door's been wide open at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for about five years running now. It all began with that annoying report with the mysterious title, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Perhaps given the immensity of that primary lapse of attention, it is no wonder that no one in Washington has bothered to try and close the barn door since. Indeed, it has only opened wider from that point on, and is now nearly blown clean off its hinges.

So now we are faced with the hilarious potential for ethics training at the White House. Maria Montessori, where art thou? Ah, dead; and Mr. Rogers too...who could possibly undertake this Herculean task of pedagogy? Well, Daily Rev would like to offer a few candidates on this day before election day; and we would welcome any suggestions you may have for the appointment of Professor of Ethics to this truly remedial class at 1600 Penn.

Our first nominee is Marek Zdansky of the Prague Zoo. He has come up with a scheme for a primate version of Survivor, with gorillas competing against one another for the grand prize of 12 melons. What alliance potential, what hidden depths of studied altruism, might Mr. Zdansky tap by applying his methods to the simian crew at 1600 Penn?

Next up is Sri Lankan presidential candidate Victor Hettigoda, who is offering his own variation on the "chicken in every pot" campaign theme, which is now a cow in every yard. If this man can succeed in restoring a nation's economic and cultural life in the wake of the horrible toll that last year's tsunami took on his nation, just imagine what he and his political strategists could accomplish in educating the ethically clueless with a little barnyard wisdom.

From the quaint realm of Old Europe comes our next contestant, Nicolas Sarkozy, who transformed what had been a decades-old simmering tension into open, outright warfare. Minister Sarkozy has proven the old adage that if peace takes a village, then war simply requires an attitude. He would no doubt be welcomed for his blunt-trauma approach to ethics training, once the Bushies got over their Francophobia.

Well, after all, maybe that ethics training money would be better spent on something that can actually be accomplished with this bunch. Maybe Eric Alterman has once again captured the essence of the moment in another of his signature rants:

You know, I’m getting a little tired of wondering, “How will the Bush cheerleaders spin this one?” every time fresh evidence appears that they were deliberately misleading the nation into war, and that this deception is responsible for the deaths of 2000 Americans, the wounding of more than ten thousand more, and the killings of tens of thousands of others, as well as the torture of who knows how many people, and the hatred of America world-wide, as well as the creation of more terrorists, one of whom, eventually, will attack us, and kill more of us, starting the whole thing again, leading to more excuses by Bush cheerleaders for their deliberate deception.

Perhaps ethics training is a horse that's too far out of the barn for this group, after all. Perhaps we should simply be reviewing the evidence (an excellent source is The Progress Report), and then writing our Senators and Congressmen to let them know that the only ethics training this crowd needs is an impeachment hearing—the sooner, the better.

A Journalist in Paris

Disorder in action is usually reflected in disorder in perception; when there is a breakdown—in a person or in an entire culture—it is rarely possible to understand it, because that consciousness of chaos transmits itself to those who are observing and reporting on it. We tend to rush to conclusions and forced corrections (that often wind up being as entropic as the disorder to which we're responding), in our anxiety to restore order. As we have seen, it happens in government and in journalism all the time, even occasionally in science.

There is thus obviously a great deal of confusion and misstatement over what's happening in Paris these past ten days—as to both the events and their meaning. The New York Post has proclaimed that it's all the fault of the Islamic community there, and barely stopped short of declaring it all an al Qaeda plot. Today, MSNBC is reporting that the rioting has reached the center of the city ("Arson spreads into central Paris").

So I visited the home site of Eric Francis, a colleague of mine who has published some of my work at his online journals. Eric is an American from here in New York who did a lot of valuable environmental journalism back in the '70's and '80's. He is now stationed in Paris, where he's worked for a few years as a journalist and an astrologer. Now before you tune out at the mention of that last term, review the following articulate and sober assessment that Eric wrote today. I think if you read it carefully, you'll realize that this is no New Age fruitcake but a professional journalist who knows that dramatic headlines and unsupported accusations do not aid the cause of truth. Note that his very first sentence calls into question the MSNBC report, and that his brief summary of the background to these riots puts the lie to the New York Post's spin.

Central Paris and any of the neighborhoods I've visited have been quiet.

The uprising was prompted by the electrocution deaths of two teenagers who were, according to reports of witnesses [reported in the press, not that I talked to], being chased by police and tried to take refuge in an electrical substation on Oct. 27. The police deny this.

The deaths occurred in the area of massive housing projects called Cités, where there has long been tension between police and a lot of young people who have absolutely nothing to do and nowhere constructive to vent their energies -- a very old problem.

Cités exist all along the northern edge of the city, where there is horrendous unemployment (20% to 50%, the worse if you're younger), and a general state of desperation, lack of community, lack of easy transit in to the center of town, and a lot of police presence. The whole thing reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, the Stanley Kubrick film. Except it must be noted that the Cités are entirely black and North African in population, where generations of immigrant population and their children have been stashed away by the government. So they are ghettoes in the true definition of that word.

Late last week, the riots and protests began rapidly spreading across France, in part provoked by a right-wing interior minister named Nicolas Sarkozy, who is basically using this as an occasion to look tough and stir up support among supporters of his would-be presidential campaign -- including those supporters of a guy named LePen, who has dominated ultra-conservative politics here for many years and has in the past decade become something of a mainstream phenomenon. LePen, however, is getting old and I guess Sarkozy considers himself a viable candidate for president.

But if it's any indication, I was photographing a butcher carving up a wild boar Saturday morning at Maubert Marketplace, with a long line of posh Parisites waiting for dibs. He called the pig Sarkozy as he sliced away and whacked some ribs with a big meat cleaver; I started laughing; everyone else stood there with a poker face.

The real Sarkozy, who is a major focus of attention now, used the word racaille to describe the youth in the Cités, a mean word loosely translating to scum, not something that a government official should be saying in public. It was either a super-bad judgment error (dubious), or blatant race baiting (my impression). Meanwhile, he is threatening long jail sentences for rioters.

Despite this, one night last week, nearly 1,000 cars were burned; the next night, about 20 buses; business are getting torched, and so on. It's really out of control, a truly ugly scene compared with the utter (almost satiric) calm and civility of central Paris, verging on an outright revolt that has the feeling of a civil war. And now, like Iraq, the war zone is occupied by thousands of riot police. So there is a lot of pressure being exerted by both 'sides' in this struggle. The truth is, the government really has no way to improve things; there is nothing much anyone can do to solve generations-old problems overnight; and there is apparently an on-the-ground political movement that is keeping the situation stirred up among the youth.

Central Paris and the city itself have been quiet -- you would not know something was up except for media reports. However, the protests seem destined to spread to the campuses at some point, though I doubt there will be rioting in the city itself. The anger is just not here basically because the money, jobs, culture and good life are here. It would be encouraging to see some real solidarity within the city with the plight of those on the outside -- but I don't think it would go over well with most people, who may have some sympathy for the rioters but mostly see them as trouble.

There have been some peace marches in the Cités, calling for an end to the violence.

That's what I can tell you for now.

If you'd like to keep track of what's really going on in Paris, you may wish to bookmark Eric's site and even open a subscription. He's also been working on a book, which you can have a taste of here.

At all events, be as careful with what you're reading in the American mass media about Paris as I hope you are about what you're getting from them about Iraq, the economy, and Plamegate. When you're online, seek out journalists like Eric Francis, who are on or close to the scene of what you'd like to learn about, and who display the objectivity and insight called for in their professional ethic.

It's the Wealth, Stupid

Government should be (and, I am told, used to be) a middle class, lunchpail type of profession. There should be very little room for aristocrats, because wealth and justice tend to be the oil and water of public life.

I wrote about this a little last month, but it is a point that's difficult to belabor, given the fact that it gets so little attention from the mass media. Recently, however, some have begun to notice: see this tallying of the Bush Ivy League Society by David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

We're going to have to reach a point where we clearly perceive that stable and responsive government is not truly served by wealth, and then demand, with our votes and our voices, that some measure of modesty is restored to leadership.

Excess cannot lead well, because its conditioned response is to grasp. It cannot serve, because it has been taught to rule. Wealth, in our culture, is accumulated via force, and maintained through the intimidating pressure of competition. Thus Lao Tzu wrote some 2,600 years ago:

The best leader is himself led
He builds consensus, achieves his aim,
And then departs.
Force and intimidation
Are neither his means nor his end.


This was a man who lived in a culture much like ours—one ruled by wealth and driven by excess. Here's how he described it in another of his poems:

The palace in the capital
Is bathed in opulence,
While the fields without lie barren,
And the granary is left untended.

They array themselves in lustrous gowns
And gleaming weapons at their sides.
They eat, but are not nourished;
They drink, yet thirst consumes them.
Their lives are bloated with the stuff of wealth.


Isn't it amazing to think how little has changed in 2,600 years, and how small the difference in human madness between East and West?

Today, we have a President whose cheek still bears the mark of the silver spoon; and he has never outgrown it. His Vice-President is a corporate kingpin, the former CEO of a company that has profited lustily on the war in Iraq and the other acts of economic opportunism that have defined this administration, from post-Katrina rebuilding to tax cuts for the greatest profiteers of history.

The problem with wealth, from a pragmatic standpoint, is the same as the problem with tyranny. The latter we have discussed frequently (most recently here); and we have touched briefly before on the former. As Cervantes' character Sancho Panza was fond of reminding us, "greed always bursts the bag." He meant that excess winds up burying itself under the weight of its own overabundance, and thus we see supposedly intelligent people doing the most incomprehensibly stupid things.

Why did Martha resort to insider trading that she knew was illegal, when the loss she would have incurred otherwise would have been as a fly on an elephant's back, given her massive wealth? Why did Mr. Ebbers allow his organization to spin out of control into a mudpit of corruption, when he had both the influence and the money to rein it all in? Why did Mr. Abramoff fall from the idealistic heights of his youth to the aberrant depravity of his years as a Congressional lobbyist? What is the thread that connects all these sordid tales of waste, criminality, and arrogance?

I think it's the unconscious mind: these people undermined themselves in an unconscious act of emergent body-wisdom. Something in them recognized that they had so far overreached the boundaries of natural behavior as to make them inwardly sick, such is the revulsion that excess inevitably creates within the true self. Many criminologists will tell you the same thing: every crook secretly wishes to be caught.

Perhaps that is the dynamic being played out now in Washington. If this is so, then we should not force it; for to attack or oppose would be to deliver a fresh wave of energy to those we wish to bring down. So let us encourage it instead—with words (to our leaders and our media) and with our votes. But the best encouragement we can give to the restoration of balance in our government is to let our own lives provide leadership by example. Examine your life and find the excess it contains, wherever it may have been allowed to accumulate. Then, discard it.

Examine Your Homework, Kids

One night not too long ago, my daughter asked me, "Poppy, what are the names of the four hemispheres?" I laughed and said that there can be no such thing as four hemispheres. She insisted that there were, because her Social Studies teacher had told her class so that very day.

Clearly, this was a Daily Revolution moment—a time for examining assumptions and understanding the meanings of the words we toss around in our discourse. It's what we do here on the blog, and one goal of Daily Rev is to encourage folks to do it at home and work as well. So I suggested that Maria look up the word "hemisphere" in the dictionary, which she did. I explained the roots of the word (ancient Greek hemisphairon, or half a sphere), and that the prefix hemi- indicates "half," as in one of two parts of a whole. How can something that has only two parts be divided into four?

Children are taught to do their homework, and we adults are told to do our jobs. I am not against homework, jobs, or the performance of personal obligations in general. I would simply like for us to question, to examine what we are given to do, before we blindly try and do it. This practice of examining obligations before we undertake them actually improves our performance. Action that is fed by a questioning spirit tends to be more exact, more efficient, than action that simply does something for the sake of being seen doing something. Look back over some significant actions in your own life, and sort in your mind those that were nourished by prior examination from those that you carried out under pressure or in mere ignorance. How can any action meet the need of its moment if we haven't first clarified what we intend to do and why, through the process of asking some basic questions?

Why did this nation go to war in Iraq? Because we were told that there were mushroom clouds and poisonous gases in our very near future if we didn't act to stop those who were collecting these WMDs that we all heard about, and the stories of which our mass media vapidly, unquestioningly accepted and advertised to a frightened nation.

Nearly three years; over 2,000 dead GIs and some 15,000 wounded; tens of thousands of dead and maimed innocent Iraqis; and about $200 billion dollars later, we now understand that all the reasons we were given for urgent, immediate, and violent action were lies. All because those in power and too few of our prominent citizens and journalists bothered to remember that first step in preparing for action: examine what you are about to do and why you are being told to do it. We will be paying the price for this stupidity—in human lives, shattered families, international estrangement, and economic disaster—for years to come.

In yesterday's blog, Terry McKenna warned that we probably can't afford to spend on education as we should in this country. We can't afford to pay teachers what they're worth and help them to retire with a decent pension at a reasonable age. And to that I say "horsefeathers." How many 500 pound bombs would it take to pay such a teacher through to retirement?

Well, according to my research, your average 500 pound "guided weapon" would run around $19,000. This is perhaps a third of what we'd like to pay a good teacher at our school as her annual salary. 3 bombs, one year's pay for a teacher.

Now, how many bombs have been dropped in Iraq since the start of the war? Well, I don't have the time to properly research this question, but I found a conservative estimate of about 25,000 in 2003 alone. Let's do the math: 25,000 bombs at around $20K per bomb (most that are used are far more expensive than the one I'm citing as an example)—I get half a billion dollars from that.

All right, now let's get back to our teacher, making about 60 grand a year for a 20 year career, with another 20% for benefits and pension. The salary comes to $1.2 million, with another quarter million or so for bens and pension. Let's say our total cost for this teacher is $1.5 million.

Now let's say we decided, after thoroughly examining our assumptions before acting, that we didn't need to buy those bombs after all. Guess what, we just paid roughly 350 teachers for a lifetime of service to our kids.

Now smarter heads than mine can go into the details on all this, but to me it boils down to how we use our available resources. If we had asked some serious and searching questions about our reasons for going to war ahead of time, we never would have started this disaster. We can ask the same kinds of questions about the reasons we give for teaching our kids, and what standards we will hold ourselves and them to in forming the practical foundation and economic support for our education system. There is nothing—and I mean nothing, Terry—that we can't afford if we first involve ourselves in questioning, planning, and prioritizing our actions.

This is what we elect leaders to do in a democracy, and we the people had better start reminding these leaders in very blunt terms that we expect them to commit themselves to this process. We also have to insist that they show the capacity to admit their errors when they make them, and reveal to them that we can forgive mistakes that are made by leaders who are dedicated to forming decisions that reflect our values—the principles we elect them to represent, whether it's at a city council meeting or at the Capitol Building in Washington.

Granted, some mistakes are unforgivable: these include mass murder on a global scale such as the Bush administration has perpetrated in Iraq, along with torture at various points around the globe. This is the stinking breath of failure: failure is not the result of good effort meeting bad luck. Failure is the disaster that occurs when someone obstinately refuses to admit his errors and then learn from them. Denial is the fuel of failure, and if I were to choose one word to characterize the Bush presidency, it would be denial.

So now the Democrats on Capitol Hill are pushing the panic button, shutting the doors and demanding an accounting of this failure. They are being led by Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Barbara Boxer, and others who have had enough of seeing their questions and demands for accountability from the Bushies shunted aside with spin and dogma and Scott McLellan's vapid one-line response to any challenge ("we've been over this before and have nothing more to say about it").

Now if the heat generated by this challenge is too much for Dr. Frist to bear without him wringing his hands and whining about what an insult this is, then he'd better step aside and let some people who are ready and able to lead take charge of this debate. He'll be busy enough dealing with those difficult question that the SEC is starting to ask him about where he's getting his stock tips.

The bottom line point here is that if we accept Terry's fatalistic brand of realism—whether it's about the implacability of gerrymandering or the impassable economic obstructions to properly educating our kids—then we're going to see this nation become a third-rate shadow of its former self within a generation. In other words, America will be a dismal place to live by the time my daughter has reached her 40's.

You'll forgive me if I refuse to accept such a realism, and the resultant downward spiraling of our nation into the Western hemisphere's version of post-Soviet Russia. Oh, and speaking of hemispheres, my kid raised that point about the impossibility of having four hemispheres with her Social Studies teacher, and he was delighted by her critical thinking. Now that's a fellow who deserves three bombs a year and an early retirement.