Huffington Post Column 4 - What of What You Are Is No Longer You?

On his website at www.eatingthemoment.com, HP blogger Dr. Pavel Somov says:

Mind is its own hostage. Each belief, each schema, each defense is both an adaptation and a handicap. The very anchors that have helped you feel grounded may now hold you down with all the weight of their historical usefulness… Yes, mind is its own hostage... But mind is also its own search-and-rescue.  Take a look at what of what you are is no longer you…

It may be that this hit me at a particularly opportune time, or maybe I'm so much of a Zen geek that it struck me, but I find myself haunted by this concept.

He prefaces the statement with a quote from a song by Russian musician, Boris Grebenschikov, who is described in Wikipedia as one of the founders of Russian rock music:

"There's only one way out of prison, which is to set your jailer free."

(The Time, Radio Silence, 1989 CBS Records)

which only complicates the matter further. If I'm my hostage to "each belief, each schema, each defense," then how do I "set my jailer free?"

For example, if I have an old, long-established behavior pattern, the more of less standard way to approach that is "well, that's just Ed," and most people in my life kind of accept it with a shrug and a tolerant smile. Yet in another area of my life, where different things are expected of me, the response when that pattern arises is "Ed's not himself today" from people who know me well and "Ed's behaving in an unacceptable way" from those who don't. So which "Ed" is me? In Somov's terms, which is the what I am that is no longer me? I guess it's for me to say.

But hold on, it's not that simple, because this "adaptation and handicap," this "anchor that helped me feel grounded" is what I've historically considered not just "useful," but "me!" It's one thing to declare that that's no longer me, and another to experience it as suddenly alien when it comes up.

The point is that, while I think Somov is right, and have even coached people along just those lines, when I am in the grip of an old pattern I don't experience it as alien to me but rather as exactly how I need to be at that moment. So how do I "set my jailer free" if I don't experience being in jail?

I'm betting that the answer is outside of me. As a coach, I must surrender to being coached; I must find someone I trust completely and bet that when I forget who I am committed to being and think that I'm who I have always been, he or she will know and remind me and return me to how I want to be. In other words the way to set your jailer free is to find someone to aid and abet in the jailbreak.

In my seventh decade of life, I've been actively engaged in my own personal and spiritual development for at least half my life, and I know it's never done, so I'm under no delusion that this will be the end of the story. If (and it really is "if" for me) I beat this particular demon, there will be another, but at least it'll be different.

I'll keep you posted.

Bonanza Column 156 – Nevada Needs Harry Reid

The GOP, both nationally and in Nevada, has Harry Reid in its crosshairs. While I can understand that – they are desperate to break the Democrats' supposed filibuster-proof majority in the Senate – Nevada Republicans' opposition to Reid is not in the best interests of Nevada.

Before we get to the latter, let's look at the "filibuster-proof majority" fantasy. Granted, given Republicans' propensity to vote along party/ideological lines regardless of the merits of the issue, if the GOP had 60 seats, they would have a filibuster-proof majority. Getting the Democrats aligned around any issue is like the proverbial herding of cats – even with 60 seats, Reid is having trouble and will probably fail at putting together 60 votes for a robust public option in the health care reform debate.

But the Republicans aren't going to have 60 seats after the 2010 election, and probably won't even break the Democrats' 60, so that's a moot point.

What is significant is that, regardless of party considerations, Nevada has one senator now. John Ensign is so tainted by his hypocritical actions (see last week's column) that, even if he doesn't resign as he should, he has no voice in the Senate. If Nevada voters are misguided enough to defeat Reid, then in 2010 we will have an impotent senior senator and a junior senator who is, by virtue of his newness, at the bottom of the Senate food chain. Given that, it won't matter which party he comes from, he will have as little influence as the pathetic Ensign.

Whatever you think of Reid's politics on national issues, it's hard to argue that he has not represented Nevada well. He's been a wall on Yucca Mountain, had major accomplishments in energy legislation, sponsored and supported significant health care bills, without even talking about health care reform, extended the Federal deduction for state and local sales taxes, and the list goes on. Space doesn't permit a full list here, but his accomplishments for Nevada are a matter of record.

I'm not saying you should ignore those things he's done or he believes that you disagree with, but I think that, on balance, an objective look at the data will show that, even considering those, on balance he's done a lot of good for Nevada, and a lot of his ability to do that good has been a function of his senior position in the Senate. It would be a mistake to trade this seniority and influence for the sake of adding one faceless name to the GOP numbers.

Nevada Republicans should take the lead among their political brethren in putting the interests of constituents – local, state, and national – above the interests of their party. Only by doing that will they take the GOP back from the domination of mindless, knee-jerk rightists like Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin.

Huffington Post Column 3 – The “Generosity” of Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI has opened the door of the Roman Catholic Church to those in the Anglican Communion (which includes the Episcopal Church in the US, the Church of England, and others) who are disaffected over issues of ordaining gays and women, same-sex marriage, etc. He has even said that these disaffected Anglicans, including married priests, can form their own congregations under the aegis of the Catholic Church and go on as if nothing had happened. Oh – married clergy can't become Catholic Bishops, but that's probably unlikely even for unmarried clergy. (Presumably, given the issues involved, they won't have to deal with what to do with female Anglican Priests, but it would be fun if they did.)

On the face of it, this sounds good – the Pope is willing to have the Catholic Church be a "big tent" to take in those who feel disenfranchised by the progressive views of, particularly, the Episcopal Church in the US. But this is the same Pope who, thus far in his short reign, has on numerous occasions emphasized that while the RC Church is willing to co-exist with other Christian denominations, his commitment that the Catholic way is the only right way is unwavering. So why would he not only reach out to disaffected Anglicans, but even tacitly endorse one of the practices that most distinguishes the two churches, that of allowing clergy to marry?

OK – time out for a credentials check. I'm a Jew who is married to an Episcopalian and who teaches and writes with my close friend Jim Beebe, an Episcopal Priest. I've made an avocational study of how the first century Jewish group called "followers of the way" came to be a new religion called Christianity and how that new religion and its mother religion came to be persecutor and victim, respectively. We are currently working on a book on this subject. None of that makes me an expert on Catholicism, Anglicanism, or much of anything, but I've probably studied more about the two (plus Judaism) than many, so you can take my views for what you think they're worth.

So to the question I raised at the end of the second paragraph. I think the answer is simple – the Pope's move seems to me transparently calculated to sow dissension in the Anglican Communion and to further polarize it. The leaders in the Anglican debate are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who has taken on the role of trying to resolve it for the benefit of the worldwide Communion, the Presiding Bishop of the United States, Katherine Jefferts Schori, and a number of Anglican Bishops in the US and particularly in Africa. Beginning in the 2008 Lambeth Conference (an every 10 years conference of bishops convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury – 2008 had 800 bishops in attendance and was boycotted by a number of the aforementioned conservative bishops), Williams began to take steps toward finding a solution.

I don't know if a solution can be found. Even if we take the case that the two sides of the Anglican debate are both people of good faith, the polarization is so great that it seems unlikely. Add to that that, in my opinion, the conservative position smells suspiciously of homophobia and sexism cloaked in dubious scripture, and it makes it even less likely. But one of the principles of negotiation is that the more difficult and polarized the parties are, the more you need to cut off alternatives to a solution. If Williams can appeal to both sides as Anglicans and to their commitment to the integrity of the Anglican Communion, he at least has a chance of starting with something both sides can agree on. If the Conservatives in the debate have a place to go and leave the Communion, the chances diminish.

But back to the Pope – why would he do this? Well, maybe, just maybe, he gets two benefits from it – he undermines the integrity of the Anglican Communion and possibly he has a place to move from to bring these disaffected Anglicans gradually into the arms of the RC Church.

In our book, Jim Beebe and I take the view that the institutionalization of Jesus' teachings in dogma and church politics has distorted those teachings beyond recognition. I can't help but find the Pope's "generous" gesture suspect in its piety and more likely to be cynically political.

Tahoe Ticker Column 14: If I ruled the World

Sometimes, usually when I'm driving in the evening after the NPR stations have gone to music, I listen to one or another right-wing talk show. I don't particularly enjoy it, but I feel as a blogger and writer from the left, I need to at least pay attention to what is being said on the right.

I want to live in the world that right-wing radio talkers live in.

That world is run by the left. The left control the media (except for Fox News), professional sports, Academia, and of course the White House. America is run by a president who is all-powerful and runs everything from the government to the press (except for Fox News) and the NFL.

Not only that, but the lefties who are running and ruining the world are really dumb. In point of fact everyone except the talk show host and Rush Limbaugh is dumb to the extent that they don't agree point for point with the speaker, conservative Republicans are dumb because they're actually trying to accomplish something by working with Democrats in Congress, but the dumbest of all are liberal government officials, writers, talk show hosts, etc. Michael Moore is the dumbest of the dumb, along with MSNBC and the Comedy Channel.

But the best part is that the world of these righties is run by Jews and African-Americans, in an unholy alliance with gay men, lesbian women, communists, socialists, nazis, and Muslims. In this world, bankers, insurance executives, and CEOs in general deserve to be richly rewarded as is only their due, and anyone who can't afford insurance, a home, or enough to eat or who is out of a job probably doesn't deserve to live anyhow.

The good part is that as a Jew with lots of African-American, Gay, and Muslim friends and family members (some of whose communist and socialist leanings are very possible), that puts me in charge. So here's the deal – universal health care, amnesty for undocumented aliens, a cap on executive pay, and government food banks for those who can't afford to feed their families.

I have spoken. So let it be written, so let it be done.

Bonanza Column 155 – John Ensign Should Resign, but He Probably Won’t

The "religious right" is neither. Rather, we have seen case after case of people who publicly espouse strict religious/moral/family values while privately doing whatever they want to. This crosses party lines – John Edwards is as egregious an example as Mark Sanford – and it crosses gender preference boundaries – from Mark Foley and Larry Craig to John Ensign.

If you look into this, though, something far more sinister may be afoot. I'm no fan of conspiracy theories, and generally I think they hold as much water as alien abductions and bigfoot sightings. But I recently read a book called "The Family" by Jeff Sharlet that chilled me to the core.

Sharlet is a writer for Vanity Fair and set out to investigate the pervasiveness of the so-called religious right in American politics. He joined a group called "the Family" that has almost a 100-year history in the US, and is in a line of heritage that goes back almost to the revolution. This particular iteration was founded by a Norwegian immigrant pastor who had an epiphany – he decided that mainstream Christianity had it backwards – Jesus' message was not to take care of the downtrodden, but the "uptrodden." Those at the top were put in command by God and we should listen and obey them. (This has not translated into any great outpouring of support for Obama however – apparently God makes mistakes).

The family owns "the house on C Street," where a group of US Senators and Congressmen live together, professing deep Christian faith and morality, and at the same time either engaging in their own and covering up others' extramarital affairs. The former group included our own John Ensign and the now-laughingstock Mark Sanford of South Carolina. To compound the hypocrisy, both have repeatedly refused to resign, even though both called on President Clinton to resign when he got caught in his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Ensign, to the time of this writing, continues to take refuge in legalism, saying "I have done nothing legally wrong." OK, how about ethically? How do you square having an affair with a staffer, using political influence to try to get her cuckolded husband a lobbying job (though legally he can't take such a job until he is off the government payroll for a year), having Ma and Pa Ensign pay almost $100,000 to the couple, presumably to keep them quiet, and the list goes on.

Well, the Family knows how to square it. Men in power are answerable to no one. They were put there by God, and have no accountability except to themselves. Not even to each other. After he was confronted by some of his C Street comrades, Ensign wrote a letter to the woman cutting off the affair and was marched down to Fedex to send it. The next day he called her and told her to ignore the letter, so apparently it's OK to lie to your Family brothers as well as to the rest of us.

When are we as a nation and as voters going to get it? Holier-than-thou types have a very high probability of being hypocrites. I'm not saying all religious people are phonies – far from it – but public officials who loudly and self-righteously proclaim their "faith" seem to keep coming up lousy. There is a reason that the founders went to great lengths to separate church and state, and this is a prime example of it. I'm not condemning them for having "strayed" – the best of us have fallen prey to that – it's being so very sanctimonious about others when they stray and acting as though you have no accountability to anyone. Wasn't it He whom they claim to worship who said "why do you take note of the grain of dust in your brother's eye, but take no note of the bit of wood which is in your eye?"

Huffington Post Column 1: Standing up to the Lies

David Letterman slept with one or more women who worked for him on his show. Threatened with extortion, he went on his show, told the audience what happened with directness, candor, and as much dignity as one can muster when (literally) caught with one's pants down.

David Letterman is an entertainer, a comedian. He's not accountable to the public for anything other than making us laugh. He could have survived this in any number of ways (see Polanski, Roman), he could have let it blow over, he could have blustered and denied, he could have paid the guy off. He didn't do any of these things – he just took responsibility and didn't justify a thing.

John Ensign (R-NV) had an affair with a staffer while employing her husband. He tried to use political influence to find a job for the husband while the affair was going on, he had his parents pay almost $100,000 to his paramour and her husband, and to this day insists on splitting legal hairs ("I did nothing that was legally wrong") in an attempt to evade responsibility for his actions.

John Ensign is a United States Senator. He is supposed to be in Washington to serve his constituents (of which I am one) and to participate in governing the country at the highest level of the Legislative Branch. He is also part of a clique of Senators and Representatives who belong to "The Family," a clandestine group that believes that their take on Christianity puts them above the Constitution and above accountability to anyone but each other, and a leading "family values" Conservative.

When did entertainers become more responsible and accountable than elected representatives?

Apparently some of our elected representatives have decided that their job is to advance their and their friends' views of what should be done rather than to represent their constituents' views. John Boehner (R-OH) says that no one has told him they want a public option in health care reform, and from that he concludes that "[the public option] is about as popular as a garlic milkshake." Even if we accept that that statement is true – no one has said those words to Rep. Boehner – poll after poll has shown that 70 to 80% of Americans support some form of public option, so Mr. Boehner's statement is disingenuous at best.

President Obama travelled to Copenhagen to carry the bid by Chicago and the United States for the 2016 Olympic Games. The IOC voted to send the games to Rio. Within minutes Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele, and others triumphantly declare this a defeat for the President. Limbaugh makes the egregiously false statement that the President has spent eight months traveling all over the world telling people how terrible America is, so "why would they want to send the games to someplace that sucks so bad?" In point of fact, President Obama has spent eight months trying to restore the reputation of America after it was all but destroyed by eight years of George Bush.

I guess not all entertainers are responsible and accountable.

I could go on with example after example of irresponsibility, lack of accountability, and mendacity on the part of our public officials and others such as Limbaugh, Beck, and Steele who have appointed themselves public voices, but you've heard it all. My question is when did we, as a nation, become numbed to this?

Where is the Joseph Welch who will stand up and say "Have you no shame, sir? Have you no decency?" Surely Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy was scarier than Ensign, Limbaugh, et al., so why has no one stood up to them?

Or let's make it more local – when that person down the street or down the hall gives you the benefit of their sincere view that Obama was born in Kenya or that health care reform will mean killing grandma, why do we not call them out for the idiot that they are?

Have we come to the point where we just accept this, or is it just that we are so committed to not making waves that we won't confront blatant lying and hypocrisy? In either case we are in grave danger. Remember the classic statement by Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran Pastor who who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938 and interned in Dachau until 1945:

In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.

This is a no-kidding crucial situation. Unless someone will stand up and (metaphorically) shout "you lie!" to those who are lying, we may find one day that there is no one left to speak for us.

Huffington Post Column 2: The MBTI of the USA

If you've been around the business world you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) - by means of a relatively short set of questions it comes up with a "type" based on four bipolar dimensions:

• Extraversion - Intraversion - basically how you renew your energy - from outside (other people) or by going inside.
  
• Sensing - Intuition - how you process information
  
• Thinking - Feeling - the basis on which you make decisions
  
• Judging - Perceiving - how you make sense of the world
  

From these eight poles you get a four letter profile - E - I, S - N (the I was taken), T - F, and J - P. I, for example am ENTJ and from that, someone who is versed in the MBTI can draw a host of inferences about me.

The remarkable thing about the MBTI is how uncannily accurate and consistent it is. I recently took an abbreviated version on Facebook - just about eight questions - and it came up ENTJ just like the full version. Most people find it at least about 80% accurate, usually better.

So what about us as a nation? As I thought about it, I decided that the USA is ENFJ

• Extraverted - we draw our energy as a people from outside; isolationism has never really gained a foothold here.
  
• Intution - we trust interrelationships, theories, and future possibilities more than we do facts, details, and present realities.
  
• Feeling - we like our decisions to create harmony even if they're not logical and objective - more McCoy than Spock.
  
• Judging - we orient to the world by making decisions quickly and sticking to them.
  

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One standard work on the MBTI (Working Together by Isachsen and Behrens) calls ENFJ "the Mentor." They describe the Mentor as responsive and responsible, popular and sociable, charismatic, communicative, and warmly enthusiastic.

The weakness of ENFJ is in taking care of oneself and in taking care of details. ENFJ's don't value objectivity overmuch and aren't good at setting priorities and sticking to them. We are frustrated, as a people, by cold, impersonal logic, by being excluded, and by criticism and lack of appreciation. We value cooperation, harmony, and self-determination, and we irritate others by being overly emotional, moralistic, and wanting to be seen as knowing everything.

Viewed in this way, the unhappiness of most Americans with the Bush years makes sense - how Bush/Cheney wanted us to be goes against our national character - isolationist, ignoring reality (why else would we have gone to war in Iraq when the enemy was funded by Bush's friends the Saudis?), making decisions that turned the world against us and sticking to unpopular or illogical choices (climate change, health care, torture, Guantanamo).

Conversely, when you look from here Obama's Nobel Prize makes sense. After eight year of irritating the rest of the world, we now have a President who is an expression of our national character - open, optimistic, communicative, warm, charismatic. We are once again in relationship with others and with ourselves, and oriented toward collaboration and harmony.

As Polonius said, "to thine own self be true, and it follows as the night the day thou canst be false to no man." Maybe he had something there

Tahoe Ticker Column 13: The People of Health Insurance

As I write this I've just finished a 3-day workshop with 40 mid- to upper-level managers of one of the biggest health insurance companies in the US. Since April I've done 4 of these as well as other work here, and have met a lot of these people, and that has affected my view of issues of health care reform greatly.

Don't get me wrong – I'm still solidly for universal health care and, at the very least, the public option. What's changed, though, is that, having worked intensively with these people I really can't abide the demonization of the insurance industry that I hear from others who share my views.

I guess it's possible that there are greedy, rapacious executives who are out to screw the public in the name of outrageous profits, but I haven't met them. I've watched the CEO of this company – a guy who is often quoted in the debate and who is well known in the industry and in Washington – talk with the managers I work with and take their questions, and I believe he's for real when he says he is out to (a) provide the best service to their customers (b)provide that at an affordable price and (c)find a national solution that works for everyone and provides health care for all.

At the end of each 3-day program we ask the participants to write a "letter from the future" based on the idea that it's three years from now and they and the company have achieved success beyond their wildest dreams. None – that's not one – of the 150 people I've worked with so far has written about profits, market share, or denying claims. They write about health, conquering obesity and smoking, and wellness.

Please don't bother writing in to tell me I'm naïve or that I've been coopted unless you've spent as many days as I have interacting as intimately with these people as I do. I know everything that's wrong with business, the capitalist system in general and the health care industry in particular. So do they – when we ask them, before the program, to assess how the company is doing in terms of trust and working with their customers and health care providers, they invariably say "I'm doing well, my immediate work group is doing OK (though not as well as I am individually), and the company is doing terribly." They don't trust "the organization" any more than you or I do, but they are committed to fixing it and to creating a real partnership with customers and providers.

My point is there is no enemy in this fight except maybe those lawmakers and lobbyists who, for whatever reason, seem to think it's their job to take an extreme position and hold it. Nothing is gained by demonizing the people in the industry; like the Beatles' "Nowhere Man," they're a lot like you and me.

Tahoe Ticker Column 12: Denial Isn’t Post-Racialism

Is denial the same as being "post-racial?"

My last column (The Hate that Dare Not Speak Its Name, Tahoe Ticker, September 5) has received more response – on my blog, on Facebook, and by email – than anything I've written in a long time. Some of the responses agreed with what I said and felt it was time it was said out loud. Others, though, were somewhat surprising to me.

The first surprise was that the disagreement was (relatively) rational – none of the vituperation that my columns often draw. The second was the level of what I would characterize as denial that racism is a significant factor in the current political climate.

Let me be clear about this: I don't equate disagreement with the President's policies or ideas with racism. President Obama is a Liberal in the best tradition of Roosevelt and JFK, and as such, Conservatives (in the tradition of Goldwater and Reagan) will disagree with him on his approach to most if not all social and economic issues, just as they disagreed with FDR and JFK. No problem there. That's healthy political/philosophical/economic debate.

But when Glenn Beck calls Obama a "racist with an abiding hatred for white people," when Rush Limbaugh casts a school bus fight as "white kids aren't safe in Obama's America" and calls for segregated buses, when protestors carry pictures of the President with exaggeratedly thick lips and pictures of monkeys and apes, long a symbol of racism, that's not healthy or debate, it's racism.

The other argument is that only some of the protestors are racist. One correspondent said that "cherry picking is dishonest" and that by her estimate only 5 to 10% of the protestors are racist. Well, to call out the racist protestors is, in my view, no more "cherry picking" than to call out those who aren't. I never said they were all racists, but I do think it's more than 10%, and I think it needs to be called out.

Racism has always been a factor in American politics. Just as Obama's legitimacy is questioned by the "birthers" against all common sense, opponents of FDR attempted to undermine his legitimacy by saying he was Jewish and calling him "Franklin Delano Rosenfeld." When I see rallies with caricatures of Obama in whiteface or with exaggerated features I'm reminded of Germany in the 1930's where caricatures of Jews with huge hooked noses and long beards were common. That led to rallies where those same drawings were carried, and that led to a populace that looked the other way as 12 million Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and Catholics were murdered.

This is beyond respect for the man or the office – it goes to one of the most vile aspects of human nature, dehumanizing someone we disagree with. When that happens, we need to speak up against it, even if only one person (much less 10%) does it. You've heard it before, but it's worth repeating the words of Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoeller, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938 and interned in Dauchau until 1945:

In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.

Tahoe Ticker Column 11: The Hate that Dare not Speak Its Name

OK, it's now officially over the top. When President Bush was criticized, or even just teased for his mangling of the language, the Right said "you can criticize the President, but you must respect the office,"

Now those same people, after calling President Obama a Nazi, a non-citizen, and a socialist, are objecting to his doing a broadcast to schools this week. The socialist agenda he's going to spread? Stay in school and work hard.

It's time we called (you should pardon the expression) a spade a spade. The continuing foaming at the mouth on the part of the Right is not about health care, socialism, or anything else. It's racism, pure and simple. While the majority of the country was ready, willing, and able to elect a liberal African-American to the Presidency, a small but vocal minority is proving unable to live with a Black President.

Respect for the office? Irrelevant. This isn't "Advise and Consent" or "24," this is "Blazing Saddles," and "the sheriff's a *****!"

Those of us who still believe in the America of JFK, RFK, EMK, and MLK need to fight this, and the first step of the fight is to call these people out for what they are – racists and bigots, and stop letting them define the ground for the fight. We can fight them on health care, show them birth certificates, and be outraged at their blocking their children from hearing (and seeing) President Obama, but they'll just go from phony issue to phony issue until the real one is named.

The culture of America has changed sufficiently over the past 50 years that it's no longer OK to be overtly racist – the North, particularly the Northeast has been that way even longer, but now even in the South racism is the hate that dare not speak its name (publicly at least). So we get sly references to monkeys instead, and the use of socially acceptable language such as calling Obama a Socialist, a Liberal, etc. (like those are bad things).

We on the left of center did what it took to get Obama elected; now we need to go on the attack against the hate and hypocrisy so that he has a chance to succeed. Remember, there is more than one kind of assassination, and character assassination may be the worst of all in that it kills not just the man's chances, but his legacy as well.

Tahoe Ticker Column 10 – The Scorpion and the President

President Obama has been in office exactly seven months. During that time he's accomplished a lot, particularly in terms of the stimulus program and the economy is clearly turning around.

But in his campaign Obama was very strong on health care reform, and basically bet on a "daily double" of the economy and health care. No one is quite sure why, but he seems to be faltering on the latter. Common sense to the contrary, the President and his advisors seem underestimated the ability of the Republican Right/Health Insurance/Big Pharma alliance to play dirty. Now we have the same folks who swift-boated John Kerry and who tried to sell the country that Obama is not a citizen trying to ensure that there is no reform.

And make no mistake: the issue is not the public option, or "death panels," or illegal aliens – it's reform itself. Not all Republicans, not all health insurance companies, and not all pharmaceutical companies are against all reform, but enough are, and they have enough money, that they are very close to owning the debate. As happened with Clinton, if Obama loses ownership of the debate, he loses the issue, and that would be tragic.

If you spend any time at all in the Middle East, you'll hear this story: a frog and a scorpion are escaping a grass fire. They come to a river, and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across. The frog demurs, saying he's afraid the scorpion will sting him, but the scorpion points out that if he does that, they'll both die, so the frog agrees. Sure enough, halfway across the scorpion stings the frog and as they both go down the frog asks why. "It's my nature" replies the scorpion.

The point of that parable in this context is that the Left is very close to sharing responsibility with the Right for killing reform. We are starting to hear how disappointed they are, how it's the public option or nothing, and how Obama is proving to be "just another politician." And when they sting Obama, we'll all go down and they will say "it's our nature."

I am 100% for the public option, but I would rather have reform without it than no reform. A number of other countries have instituted universal access without a public option. I don't know if the "pools" is the right option, but nothing shuts down useful debate – debate that can come up with solutions that no one could have thought of before – like a "my way or the highway" approach.

My point is, give the guy a chance. You elected him because he made big, bold promises and he is clearly committed to keeping them. He's as far from "just a politician" as it gets, and he's learning that politics is an art of persuasion, collaboration, and, yes, compromise. With any luck he'll be in office for 96 months. It's been 7. Let's not sting the guy who could carry us to a better shore just because he's not doing it the way we think he should. It's not about the swim, it's about the shore.

Tahoe Ticker Column 9: Whom the Gods Would Destroy

"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad" is an adage the origin of which is lost in antiquity. For a saying to be around as long as this one has, there must be some truth in it, and the antics of today's right wing hopefully will bear it out.

That there is plenty of madness is indisputable; and with any luck at all it is a precursor to the destruction of the far right in this country.

To begin with we have the "birther" non-controversy, complete with a (badly) forged Kenyan birth certificate. WTF? I haven't seen people so impervious to reality since I worked in a state psychiatric hospital in the 1970's.

Then we have the pathological denial that anything about Obama's stimulus plan is working –economic growth, while not yet positive, has reversed and is headed in the right direction. Ditto for unemployment. The "cash for clunkers" program was so wildly successful in stimulating car sales, taking gas guzzlers off the road and putting more fuel-efficient cars on that it ran out of money and had to be re-funded. For the Right Wingnuts this is evidence of the program's failure!

They can't beat health care reform on the merits of their case so they are now invoking boogey men (boogey persons?) – reform will kill your grandmother! It will force you to have abortions! You'll wait in lines! It's the first step toward Communism! Obama is a Nazi (Rush Limbaugh)! And so to combat this spectre of home-grown naziism, let's use Nazi tactics and take over town hall meetings and don't let anyone speak but us. Kind of like the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.

Oh, and let's call everyone racists – Sonia Sotomayor, Henry Louis Gates, and especially Barack Obama. And let's invoke integrity, "family values" and "what would Jesus do" while (a) resigning a public trust and getting divorced (Palin), (b) carrying on extramarital affairs (Ensign, Sanford, et al), (c) putting a mistress's son on the party payroll (Ensign), (d) lying through your teeth (RNCC staffers who claimed not to have known of Ensign's doings when they were discussing them in emails at the time; Limbaugh making up parallels between Hitler and Obama)

So the evidence of madness, whether from the gods or otherwise, abounds. Now let's see if this means that the far right is on the road to destruction. One can only hope.

An Extraordinary Evening (Letter to the Editor of NLTB)

About 45 years ago I sat in the second row of the Eastman Theater to hear Yehudi Menuhin play the Beethoven Violin Concerto. It was an experience I treasure and one I never thought would be equalled.

Last night I sat in St. Patrick's Church and heard Elizabeth Pitcairn play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto on the "Red Mendelssohn Stradivarius," and my experience in the '60s was surpassed. What a talent this young woman is, and what a career she has ahead of her.

We are fortunate beyond measure to have a symphony orchestra and chorus like TOCCATA here in Incline - in a place with extraordinary music programs and talents, TOCCATA and its driving forces James and Nancy Rawie, stand out. That they could get a world-class talent like Ms Pitcairn and her extraordinary instrument and that they could assemble the musical talent that they have is remarkable.

If you missed "A Mountain of Mendelssohn," you missed a remarkable evening, but watch for future TOCCATA programs - they deserve our support.

Turning Over the Rocks

July is only ¾ over and it's already been a singularly bad month for news on the ethics front.

At the top of the list we have "The house on C Street," where a group of US Senators and Congressmen live together, professing deep Christian faith and morality, and at the same time either engaging in their own and covering up others' extramarital affairs. The former group included the sanctimonious John Ensign of Nevada and the now-laughingstock Mark Sanford of South Carolina. To compound the hypocrisy, both have announced they have no intention of resigning, even though both called on President Clinton to resign when he got caught in his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

When are we as a nation and as voters going to get it? These holier-than-thou types have a very high probability of being hypocrites. I'm not saying all religious people are phonies – far from it – but public officials who trumpet their "faith" seem to keep coming up lousy. There is a reason that the founders went to great lengths to separate church and state, and this is a prime example of it. I'm not condemning them for having "strayed" – the best of us have fallen prey to that – it's being so damned sanctimonious about others. Wasn't it He whom they claim to worship who said "why do you take note of the grain of dust in your brother's eye, but take no note of the bit of wood which is in your eye?"

Then we have a double-header – the eminent scholar Henry Louis Gates is arrested after the police were called by someone who saw him "breaking into" his own home in Cambridge, and a member of the traveling troupe of Porgy and Bess, staying at a private home in San Francisco, has the police called when she goes into the house and again when she lingers in her car to complete a phone call. Both their "crimes" seem to be GATBWB (going about their business while black).

After the last election, much was made of our having entered a "post-racial" era – an era when race will not be a factor in our lives and racism is over. There's no question that the election of Barack Obama signaled a sea change in American culture, but folks, it ain't over. When a black man in his own home who objects to the police being present is arrested for "tumultuous behavior" and when a black woman can't enter a house where she is a guest without being under suspicion, just how "post-racial" are we?

And finally, we have 44 politicians, civilians, and clergy arrested in New Jersey after a ten-year corruption investigation involving money laundering, influence peddling, etc. Again, we have public figures including Rabbis (lest you think this is peculiar to fundamentalist Christians) espousing high morality while operating immorally.

What the hell is going on? I'd like to think (and this may be whistling in the dark) that, with Bush, Cheney, et al. out of power, we're starting to restore honest to public life, and that these things are coming to light as the rocks of integrity get turned over. Let's hope so.

An Interesting Story

A traveler  is flying from Asia to the UK in the first class cabin of a 747, en route they stop at Mumbai where an elderly lady joins the flight and sits next to our traveler. He does not particularly want to engage in any conversation with the lady, and is a bit put off by the fact that despite lots of space on the plane, she is seated in the same row as he is.In fact,
he does not understand how she is there at all as she does not look like she has any wealth at all. The lady asks, "who are you" he replies with his name reluctantly, then she asks "and what do you do?" - determined to close this conversation off, the traveler informs her that he is a senior executive of a global oil distributor and that he is returning from a significant business trip - unimpressed, the lady asks "yes, but what do you do that matters?" 

The person who related that story to an audience at Impact Development group in 2005 then informed the audience that he realized that this was in fact Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and that challenge made him re-assess his life and purpose, within a year of that flight he had left Shell and became a regional director of Business In the Community. 

The King is Dead, but…

Throughout history there have been individuals with prodigious musical talent – Mozart and Beethoven in the Classical Age, Duke Ellington and Eubie Blake in the Jazz Age, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in Folk, Leadbelly in Blues, the list goes on and on.

But when did musical talent, even genius, become the object of veneration and idolatry? In my own lifetime I can remember that Sinatra was idolized, but his various character flaws were not overlooked, Elvis was certainly the object of fan mania, but no one overlooked his drug problems in assessing his character.

Now we have the one some would characterize as Elvis' successor – from the King of Rock 'n' Roll to the King of Pop. He died at age 50. From the viewpoint of my advanced age, I can go along with characterizing that as "untimely" or "dying young." The cause of death is, as of this writing, still open, but there are indications that his known addiction to prescription drugs may have been a factor. His character is certainly open to question. Allegations of child molestation were never subjected to legal test, and it seems that payment to the accusers may have kept them from going to trial. He certainly was not a model of good judgment, dangling a baby from a Berlin hotel window and stating publicly that he saw no problem with sharing his bed with young boys.

So why is he being idolized in death, while his character flaws are being minimized? Suddenly he is a hero to African-Americans who resented his changing his appearance with the effect, whatever the intent, of looking more Caucasian. Fans are praising him to the skies as a fallen hero. Frankly, I don't get it.

He was talented and made a career of entertainment innovation. He was definitely entertaining. He was also deeply flawed. His celebrity and his wealth allowed him to buy his way out of trouble (for $25 million in one case), but that does not make his action less heinous. So why, in the days following his death of as yet undetermined causes, were we subjected to adulation unbalanced by any response to his character? And why do I have the feeling that no matter how balanced I try to be in this column, I will be resented for even mentioning his faults? Have we, as a culture, descended to the point where if someone entertains us, we don't care about anything else?

Ticker Column 5: Sexual Hypocrisy

For politicians, sexual peccadilloes cross party lines. We had John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, and Jim McGreevey on the D side (and of course Bill Clinton – even St. Jimmy Carter "lusted in his heart," which may be his only working organ – certainly his brain is vestigial). On the GOP side we have most recently had Mark Sanford, and also Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, David Vitter, and locally John Ensign and the dimwit governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons.

So what's the difference? Well for me it's that the Republicans who can't keep it in their pants seem to be so bizarre about it and to do such an awful job of going public with it. Take Ensign – this guy has been as sanctimonious as an Irish priest about "family values," while he's having an affair with a campaign staffer and employing (and buying off) her family. Ditto Gingrich. Gibbons, faced with hundreds of text messages to his paramour, expects the public to buy that nothing was going on. The prize, of course, goes to Craig (he of the "wide stance") voting piously against any legislation with a whiff of treating GLBT folks as human while cruising men's rooms. So what is it all about?

I'm not one to take a moral stance on this – my history is such that a road to Damascus conversion this late in life would be disingenuous. What people, including politicians, do is their private business. But there are a couple of things I don't think it's too much to ask of people who would style themselves leaders of society. First, if you screw up (pun intended), have the decency to come clean responsibly. Don't drag your wife and family in front of the cameras to pretend they're forgiving and supporting you. Don't insult the public's intelligence with idiotic denials like the guy caught in flagrante delicto by his wife who says "are you going to believe me or those lying eyes of yours?" Finally, be consistent – if you're gay, whether you come out is up to you, but don't persecute others in the GLBT community by speaking against them and voting against their rights. If you're straight, don't preach fidelity and then go to your mistress's bed. Really – is that too much to ask?

And finally, if you are going to engage in any of that hypocrisy, when you're exposed as the hypocrite you are, have the decency to resign and go away.

Proposition 8 and the Constitution

The trouble with a bi-weekly column is that you sometimes get a bit behind the news. As everyone knows by now, the California Supreme Court upheld the legality of Proposition 8, which effectively bans same-sex marriage. It seems to me that this august body is reading the law through some lens other than its sworn duty to uphold and protect the Constitution.

The First Amendment to the Constitution leads with a simple but clear statement: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

This means that US citizens are free to practice any religion they choose or to practice no religion if they so choose, and it means that no one can impose their religious beliefs through law on anyone else and that a person's religious choice cannot be used as a qualifier for public office.

When the Constitution was written, slavery was legal and widely accepted; when slavery was no longer accepted, the Constitution was amended to reflect that change in the public will and consciousness. Similarly for voting rights, taxation, and other issues. Where the public will proved to be misguided (i.e. prohibition), the process of amendment set it right. Works pretty well, don't you think?

Notwithstanding that, we are seeing some serious attempts to subvert these Constitutional fundamentals. The so-called Religious Right believes that its moral values should stand above the Constitution and that these values, though manifestly religious in nature, should be the law of the land. They would impose their values on all of us, most recently their values around the institution of marriage.

Marriage is a funny thing in a country without an established church. Fundamentally it's a civil contract between two people. Period. In a country that, besides having no established church also has the free expression of religion, marriage may also be a religious sacrament. In this country, for the sake of convenience, the civil power has been delegated, though not exclusively, to clergy so that people don't have to have two ceremonies. The ultimate power, though, resides with the civil authority, as witness Nevada's requiring a State license for anyone, including clergy to perform marriages. Civilly, there is no basis for saying that the contract must be between persons of opposite gender any more than, a hundred years ago, there was a basis for saying the persons must be of the same race.

The only point that should be at issue in the same-sex marriage debate (which shouldn't be a debate at all) is equality. A religious institution has the right to proffer or deny its sacraments to anyone it chooses, presumably based on its system of beliefs. In fact, that right is generally strongly protected – if a practitioner of Santeria sacrifices an animal as part of their religious ritual, they are exempt from prosecution under animal cruelty laws. If a Native American group takes peyote as part of their rites, they are similarly exempt from the drug laws. So if a religious groups wishes to bar same-sex couples from the sacrament of marriage in their church, they have that right and the right is and should be inviolable. But the government operates (or should operate) under a different ethic, the ethic of equality. This is no less true for same-sex marriage than it is for cases of discrimination in housing or public accommodations. In short, the government should operate according to legislated regulations, not religiously dictated morality.

The Religious Right have a Constitutionally guaranteed right to their beliefs. They do not have the right to impose their values on the Constitution, and yet they try – as they are trying with abortion, stem cell research, and as they will try with other things. They can try – the Constitution guarantees them that right also – but they can't do it, and whatever your religious or moral beliefs about these issues are, you can't afford to let them.

Bonanza Column 155 – Memorial Day

The National Memorial Day Concert from the Mall in Washington, D.C., is as much a part of the holiday as picnics, a day off, and flying the flag. This year's concert was the 20^th annual, and if you missed it you missed something really special.

The annual concert has all the elements – patriotic songs, flags and uniforms, moving tributes, and most of all the memory of those who served and gave their lives. This year's concert also focused on those who, while they may have physically survived their combat, will never be the same. A case in point is José Pequeño, a Staff Sergeant in the New Hampshire National Guard who volunteered to deploy to Iraq. While on duty, he was calling in about a suicide bomber when an insurgent tossed a grenade into his Humvee. He lost the bottom two lobes of the left side of his brain, and doctors held out very little hope for his recovery. His mother Nellie and sister Elizabeth went immediately to his side and remain there over three years later. At the concert they were front-row center.

As with most severely brain-damaged patients, it was very hard to tell how much of the proceedings José was taking in. His body is stiff and contorted, his head twisted to the side, his mouth open. His mother and his sister were in physical contact with him the whole time and talking to him as he was praised and saluted, standing as a symbol of all the severely injured and disabled veterans, and particularly of those with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

I have no use for war as an instrument of foreign policy; at the same time I recognize that, from time to time, wars will be fought, young men will die, and those who live will be forever changed. I'm not a pacifist. I believe that we must defend ourselves, our freedom, and our way of life when it is attacked. Moral choices are not always easy choices, but they must be made.

At the same time, I believe that wars of aggression, wars of pre-emption, are profoundly immoral. In hindsight it's easy to say that we would have been justified had we attacked the Empire of Japan before December 7, 1941, but it's easy to be right in hindsight, and we still hold that particular pre-emptive strike as one of the most immoral acts of warfare ever – would it have been less immoral if we attacked them instead? I think not.

The war in Iraq, where Sgt. Pequeño gave what amounts to the last full measure of devotion to his country and his comrades – where his young life effectively ended – is a war born of a pre-emption that was questionable at best. Everyone but the very few diehard defenders of the war has admitted that the intelligence was flawed, to put the absolute best case forward – falsified is closer to the mark.

Until 1950 almost all the wars fought by the United States were fought to throw off the yoke of tyranny (the Revolution), to meet aggression (the War of 1812, WW 1, WW 2), or to preserve the values on which the country was founded (the Civil War). In every one of these cases we emerged from the horror of the wars stronger and sounder as a nation. We had done the right thing, respecting the cost but not stopped by it. There were a few aggressive wars in there – the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War – and we can't say that these left us better as a country. Since 1950 we have had a series of wars of questionable provenance – Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, and now Iraq.

When the moral compass of those in power wavers and becomes shaky, young men like José Pequeño pay the price. In the small town where I grew up there was a statue of a WW 1 Doughboy inscribed "Lest We Forget." If we do forget, then the sacrifices of the José Pequeños will be in vain, and that will be the end of us as a nation.

Tahoe Ticker Column 3: Climate Change

I've worked in a number of areas over the years (decades?), but they've all had something in common. In every case, the people who were most prominent and respected in the various fields were those who stuck very close to the evidence.

I began my career in brain research, and that's kind of a no-brainer. You do what you do, measure what happens, analyze the data, and report out on what it shows. As a clinical psychologist it was a little less clear, but I quickly learned that therapy was most effective when it dealt with what was actually happening in the patient's life, and interpretations and advice worked best when they stayed close to the facts.

In business consulting, one of the most highly respected books in the field is "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. I've talked to Collins about the research and writing that went into that book, and what struck me was the integrity of his sticking to the data even when it didn't go where he expected it to go. One of the major findings in that book is the importance of leadership in moving companies from being good and solid to being great. Jim had believed that leadership was an overrated concept, and was chagrined, annoyed even, when the data said otherwise.

So why is it that when the conservative forces in this country and the so-called Christian Right have a problem with an issue of science, evidence and the scientific method suddenly don't matter? Take climate change. The data are not 100% on either side of the question. If the 20^th Century taught us anything, it is that science doesn't allow for absolute certainty. So scientific inquiry proceeds based on the preponderance of the evidence, not "beyond a reasonable doubt."

I'm not an expert on climate control, so when I want to learn about it I go to those who are – climatologists, geologists, earth scientists, marine scientists, etc. As a scientist myself, I look with great skepticism at, say, an economist making statements about climatology. The Right, apparently, has no such problem. Those on the Right who would have us believe that climate change isn't a problem, or that human activity is not a factor in what from the evidence looks like a potentially disastrous trend toward warming seem willing to quote economists, government professors, doctors, pretty much anyone who will say what they want to hear. On the scientific side of the argument, the alarm is being raised by people whom we would expect to know what they're talking about – who have done the research, gathered the data, and who, to my relatively untutored eye, don't seem to be straying too far from the evidence. Yet the Right seems to want to play "we have as many 'experts' as you do," and expects that to carry the argument.

With a bit of a twist, the situation is the same with stem cell research, Scientifically, there is no question that stem cells hold the possibility of great medical advances. Many people oppose stem cell research on what amount to moral grounds, particularly where the cells are derived from embryos. I don't agree with them, but I can respect their moral convictions without endorsing them. What I can't respect is cloaking those moral arguments in arguments about the efficacy of stem cells, arguments the data simply do not support.

And don't get me started on evolution vs. creationism. If you want to believe in creationism, great, but don't try to use science's always being open to new evidence to cloak what is, at root, a religious, not a scientific position.

The point is, let's stick to the data.