Political and Cultural Commentary, and Whatever Else…
The blog will be whisper quiet the next few weeks, as PiV heads to the Old Continent on holiday through Labor Day. I’d like to put up some posts while I’m gone but we’ll see how that goes.
Here’s where I’ll be for most of the time. If you like, play Andrew Sullivan’s View From Your Window contest with it (a favorite in the PiV household); though I suppose I’ve already given a pretty serious clue. Cheers.
In his NYT column today Ross Douthat continues to hone his craft of analytic On-The-Other-Handism, this time on the Cordoba House “controversy.” Ross is always worth reading because he is able to present the best opposing argument on issues on which we disagree. And a debate is never through until one has been forced to grapple with the strongest possible case from the other side.
But I don’t think Ross has done that today.
In explaining the visceral and disparate reactions of Americans to the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan, Ross presents a cultural version of John Edwards’ old socioeconomic “Two Americas” campaign theme. In Ross’s telling, one America is cosmopolitan, pluralist, generous to outsiders, and pro-Cordoba House; the other is nativist, reflexively discriminatory, suspicious of outsiders, and therefore anti-Cordoba:
The first America tends to make the finer-sounding speeches, and the second America often strikes cruder, more xenophobic notes. The first America welcomed the poor, the tired, the huddled masses; the second America demanded that they change their names and drop their native languages, and often threw up hurdles to stop them coming altogether. The first America celebrated religious liberty; the second America persecuted Mormons and discriminated against Catholics.
On the other hand…
But both understandings of this country have real wisdom to offer, and both have been necessary to the American experiment’s success.
So xenophobia and ethnic and religious discrimination were both “necessary” and reflective of “real wisdom”? Well that’s quite generous. How so?
During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation.
And Ross notes that “[t]he same was true in religion.” Religious outliers like Mormons and, at one time, Catholics, were prodded to get in line due to the “steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul….”
So physical intimidation, systematic discrimination, overt intolerance: these are the values that Ross would like replicated to prod Muslim Americans to more fully assimilate?
First of all, Ross’s framing that American Muslims are the next frontier of assimilative tension in this country is a serious anachronism. As Matt Yglesias said today of this whole fake controversy:
[It's a] completely legitimate undertaking that’s being stymied out of a mixture of geographical ignorance, a slanderous attribution of collective responsibility for 9/11 to all Muslims, and political opportunism.
As Ross surely knows, Muslim Americans are on average younger, far better educated, and far more affluent than the national average. Matt’s point about geographical ignorance is right on. It’s just bizarre that Ross would countenance worries of detached, unassimilated Muslims in lower New York City of all places. There are a plethora of American Muslim institutions throughout the country which are fully integrated into U.S. cultural and political life. This ain’t France or Germany or Scandanavia and it’s very important to remember that. Holding up our past history of pressuring immigrant groups to conform through intimidation and marginalization as some sort of example to be replicated is a fine way to make a self-fulfilling prophesy out of the image of a disaffected, non-adaptive, brooding U.S. Muslim population.
But Ross then reveals his real aim to be related to Yglesias’s second point above: an attribution of collective responsibility for 9/11 to all Muslims:
Too often, American Muslim institutions have turned out to be entangled with ideas and groups that most Americans rightly consider beyond the pale. Too often, American Muslim leaders strike ambiguous notes when asked to disassociate themselves completely from illiberal causes.
I left Ross’s links in there, and I fully agree that anyone who promulgates or countenances deeply illiberal causes should indeed be considered beyond the pale. But placing a burden of proof on all American Muslims to show that they are sufficiently disassociated from things we consider beyond the pale is extremely unfair. It’s a standard that we don’t apply to other groups that could just as easily be considered to harbor illiberal instincts. Ross notes:
For Muslim Americans to integrate fully into our national life, they’ll need leaders who don’t describe America as “an accessory to the crime” of 9/11 (as [Cordoba House Imam Feisal Abdul] Rauf did shortly after the 2001 attacks)….
I’m not so sure that that’s a precondition for full integration into our national life. Let’s see if other American religious leaders not named Feisal Abdul Rauf meet the Douthat standard of decency and integration.
A few days after 9/11 deceased charlatan Jerry Falwell had a nice chat with non-deceased charlatan Pat Robertson on the latter’s television program the 700 Club. Just a couple men-of-god denouncing those who were responsible for the immolation of a chunk of lower Manhattan two days prior. Let ‘em have it, boys:
JERRY FALWELL: The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this.
PAT ROBERTSON: Well, yes.
JERRY FALWELL: And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”
PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur….
Uh-oh.
And then there is Pastor John Hagee, who heads the 19,000-strong sheep flock at Cornerstone Church in Texas. He seems to have restrained himself from saying anything insane about 9/11. But he did manage to pin the blame for Hurricane Katrina—a devastation that was quite close in scale to 9/11—on an similar foe:
The newspaper carried the story in our local area, that was not carried nationally, that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it would was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other gay pride parades.
So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the Day of Judgment, and I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.
Now Ross would perhaps agree that these men are deplorable frauds and hucksters, but the fact remains that collectively they speak to and for, and, indeed, enrapture, tens of millions of Americans each week. Now, the folks who hand their money over to these retrograde lunatics, and who fill their pews and nod along to their deranged millenarian conspiracy theories, and who infect their own children with this invidious worldview: are those millions of people “conformed to American norms” as Ross defines them? Should all evangelical Christians be made to first “disassociate themselves” from such “illiberal causes” before they can be considered “fully integrated into our national life”?
Of course, the answer is no. It is far beside the point that I may claim “offense” at the very material existence on earth of Messieurs Robertson, Hagee, and Falwell (the last now existing in a rather diminished material form), as well as at the false equivalencies and distortions uttered by Imam Rauf. But as Christopher Hitchens wrote last week, such an assertion of offense or an appeal to “sensitivity” is not a self-contained argument. We should never allow such craven and opportunistic offense-taking and demogogy as we are now hearing from some quarters to ever lead us to question that most fundamental of our constitutional freedoms.
Wonder what exactly happened last week in that border skirmish between Lebanese and Israeli forces? Of course you do. It’s Friday, and who doesn’t want to delve into the vertiginous nuthouse of Middle East geopolitics?
The best and most engaging account I’ve read of the Aug. 3 incident—which left one Israeli officer and three LAF soldiers and one Lebanese journalist dead—is by Michael Weiss in the excellent British monthly Standpoint.
As you see in the AP photo to the right, Israel was engaged in a little bit of shrubbery maintenance on the physical barrier between the two countries. The foliage was obscuring a sight line for Israeli border security cameras, and the IDF had submitted a request to remove the foliage to a UNIFIL liason officer five days before the planned cleanup. UNIFIL approved the request and then informed the LAF of the upcoming maintenance.
On the appointed day, the problems started when LAF soldiers started shouting to the engineers to walk away from the fence. When they began their work anyway, Lebanese snipers opened fire; but not on the team performing the work, but rather on their military escort that was stationed, as previously disclosed and arranged, 300 meters to the south. This initial sniper fire hit the Israeli senior officer in the head and killed him, precipitating the retaliation from the IDF.
The LAF accuses Israel of breaching its territorial sovereignty in violation of UNSCR 1701 which ended hostilities between the two countries in 2006. The LAF is wrong, as UNIFIL has subsequently pointed out, despite that ostensibly damning picture above. The major point of confusion is this: The physical barrier is NOT the same as the internationally-recognized boundary between the countries, called the Blue Line. The Blue Line and the fence meander at differing lengths from each other all along the border area; don’t ask me why. At this particular juncture the IDF maintenance team was still 200-300 meters away from the Blue Line. Hence, no breach.
See? Vertiginous.
So what no one can figure out is why-oh-why did the LAF army command give orders to use lethal force against an IDF team escorting a routine shrubbery crew? This has led to the big question: Was Hezbollah behind this somehow? Has Hezbollah “infiltrated” the Lebanese Armed Forces?
Michael Totten, who went to Israel last month to provide what he very presciently called “pre-war coverage” of the region, brings to my attention one consequence thus far. The U.S. Congress just placed a hold on $100 million of military aid to the LAF. This is a good thing if you think the LAF has become nothing more than a Hezbollah proxy, and it’s a terrible thing if you think a strong independent LAF is the only way Hezbollah can be marginalized in the long term.
Another frightening potential consequence: Is the LAF corrupted to such a degree as to make it and Hezbollah indistinguishable in the eyes of the IDF if and when the next war occurs? During the 2006 war, though Israel very foolishly, and perhaps criminally, hit some non-Hezbollah affiliated infrastructure targets, including the Beirut airport, they made very clear that their enemy was the illegal theocratic Iranian-backed Shia militia itself and not the people of Lebanon nor the Lebanese Armed Forces. The LAF in turn stayed completely on the sidelines during the war, no doubt secretly wishing that the IDF would uproot and obliterate Hezbollah once and for all. But this most recent hostile action may very well lead Israel to designate the LAF as a combatant and belligerent when the next big conflict hits. This would be a disaster.
Juan Cole, Middle East expert at the University of Michigan, is not on board with the infiltration argument:
The allegation, which originates in propaganda offices in Israel, that the Lebanese armed forces have somehow been taken over by or infiltrated by Hizbullah is frankly ridiculous. The most powerful officers [in the LAF] are Maronite Christians, and President Michel Sulaiman had been chief of staff before becoming president. Hint: Michel is not a Muslim name.
Cole may be overlooking a few things. First, I don’t see why confessional differences within the government preclude a shared trans-sectarian nationalism in the face of perceived (I said perceived!) Israeli aggression. For instance, Michael Weiss’s piece notes that after the Aug. 3 skirmish, President Michel “Not-A-Muslim” Sulaiman “entreated the LAF and the entire nation to ‘stand up to Israel’s violation of Resolution 1701, whatever the price’.” I’m sure Hassan Nasrallah was nodding along in complete agreement. (Cole’s imputation that seemingly disparate sectarian groups cannot make tactical alliances is doubly weird: The largest coalition partner in Hezbollah’s March 8 parliamentary bloc is the Free Patriotic Movement, led by Michel “Not a Muslim Name” Aoun. Also in the bloc is an Armenian party and a crazy racist Syrian nationalist party.)
And Cole doesn’t see anything strange about the killed Lebanese journalist, who works for a pro-Hezbollah newspaper, and who was serendipitously present at this obscure juncture of the border at the appointed time? It certainly gives credence to the idea that this was a planned, made-for-media ambush and not a one-off event committed by a few rogue trigger-happy officers.
Another important point to make is that there can be geographical pockets of Hezbollah supporters or sympathizers within the LAF without there being a forces-wide infiltration or take-over. At his blog at CNAS, Abu Muqawama (né Andrew Exum) makes a good point on how sectarian affiliation works within the LAF:
[O]ne of the quirks of the LAF is that with a little wasta [clout], you can get stationed close to where your family lives. (This is actually not that much different than the U.S. military: at Fort Drum, we had a disproportionately high number of soldiers from New York and New England.) Thus the sectarian complexion of units in the LAF tends to reflect, more or less, the sectarian make-up of the area in which they operate. […]
Even if there is no overt coordination between the LAF and Hizballah, Lebanese soldiers in southern Lebanon are statistically more likely to be openly sympathetic on an individual basis to Hizballah.
And consequently more susceptible to general Jew-killing behavior.
I have absolutely no idea the extent to which Hezbollah had knowledge of or was responsible for the recent hostilities. They’ve certainly earned a presumption of 
complicity any time people die on that border. And even if Hezbollah hasn’t fully “infiltrated” the LAF, and they’re only overrepresented in their natural strongholds which include the southern border region, that’s a huge problem.
I do hope Michael Totten’s premonition of war is unfounded; but if war comes, I sincerely hope Hezbollah does not again bring death and destruction to the innocents in its own country as it purports to “resist” in their honor. But then again, that’s all Hezbollah does.
So some Republican members of Congress have decided to push for a change to the part of the 14th Amendment that outlines birthright citizenship. But those leading the charge don’t seem to have a problem with jus soli in principle; they just want to bite around the edges a bit and rescind the privilege from just a few types of people. Hmm, I wonder which types they have in mind….
[Senator Lindsey] Graham’s proposal takes aim at two sets of people: children who are born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants and those born to “birth tourists,” foreigners who obtain 90-day tourist visas for the express purpose of giving birth in the U.S. so their children can become citizens.
The second group—pregnant tourists who come to the U.S. to give birth—was recently profiled in a fascinating Washington Post article which focused on the growing popularity of the phenomenon in China:
What can $14,750 buy you in modern China? Not a Tiffany diamond or a mini-sedan, say Robert Zhou and Daisy Chao. But for that price, they guarantee you something more lasting, with unquestioned future benefits: a U.S. passport and citizenship for your new baby.
Zhou and Chao, a husband and wife from Taiwan who now live in Shanghai, run one of China’s oldest and most successful consultancies helping well-heeled expectant Chinese mothers travel to the United States to give birth.
The couple’s service, outlined in a PowerPoint presentation, includes connecting the expectant mothers with one of three Chinese-owned “baby care centers” in California. For the $14,750 basic fee, Zhou and Chao will arrange for a three-month stay in a center — two months before the birth and a month after. A room with cable TV and a wireless Internet connection, plus three meals, starts at $35 a day. The doctors and staff all speak Chinese. There are shopping and sightseeing trips.
The mothers must pay their own airfare and are responsible for getting a U.S. visa, although Zhou and Chao will help them fill out the application form.
As the article notes, these parents are all from China’s elite urban professional class and are all very affluent. They want U.S. citizenship for their children because the U.S. has better and cheaper education resourses, and citizenship will provide the children with better access to top American universities when the time comes.
This is perfectly legal behavior and State Department policy has no provisions which treat pregnant visa applicants differently from non-pregnant ones, or women in late pregnancy differently from those in early pregnancy. Such a provision would be as impracticable as it is inhumane.
I do understand why people might be unsettled by this phenomenon, as it seems to devalue the very notion of what citizenshp means, and evinces a certain disregard or mockery of its definitional and aspirational responsibilities. These parents are not seeking to instill in their children the principles of American civic virtue or an appreciation and reverence for our Constitutional rights and protections, beyond those granted in one narrow clause of the 14th amendment.
But in that case, our ideal of what citizenship means is already devalued because we mint new members of our national club in a very capricious way to begin with. There is of course no requirement that natural-born Americans have any knowledge or understanding whatsoever of the history or tenets of our representative democracy. A recent survey found that 42% of high school graduates in Oklahoma were unable to pass the basic citizenship exam that we force immigrants to take. Do these Oklahomans “deserve” their status as citizens, bestowed upon them by sheer accident of birth? How should a nation state decide how to distribute coveted club memberships?
Will Wilkinson writes a lot about nation states and conceptions of citizenship. He just wrote a provocative piece arguing against birthright citizenship, but as a means toward greater human liberty and mobility and prosperity in the long run. Last year he wrote this in a blog post:
[M]y contention is that nation states really are just a special kind of club. This isn’t even a metaphor. It’s exact. Nation states are clubs. Citizenships are club memberships. Visas are club guest passes. Immigration debates are always at bottom about clubbability. It’s really not all that different to be told “Welcome home” by the U.S. immigration officer and to be kicked out by the Myanmar immigration officer. The point is that some people are members and some people aren’t, that some non-members are welcome as guests and some people aren’t.
It would be immensely useful and clarifying if we would start being explicit about the club structrure of the globe, and the assumptions about the naturalness or inevitability of exclusive clubs at the very foundation of political philosophy.
The only thing “unfair” about birthright citizenship is that it irrationally advantages people who are here already or who have the means to get here easily. None of us “deserve” it in any earned sense of the word. I had a birth right to U.S. citizenship because my parents and grandparents are citizens, and they’re citizens because my great-grandparents decided to emigrate from Czarist Russia. I had no part in their decision yet I reap the benefits of it for the rest of my life. We must—must—agree to acknowledge that this status quo is completely arbitrary and capricious from a moral justice standpoint before we deign to demonize any other outsider who wants in.
I think I agree with Will in this post from yesterday that it would be helpful to more starkly decouple the concepts of citizenship rights and labor migration rights. The question of who gets full membership to the club and by what process is a moral and political morass. More people want membership than is practically feasible so we have to ration our membership cards somehow. As Will says, we could mitigate the arbitrary injustice of that rationing scheme by greatly liberalizing—that is to say obliterating—the constraints for human beings to travel and associate freely and contract their skills and labor to the highest mutual benefit.
One final point on the anti-birthright crusaders. Their arguments seem to center around that most specious of all bullshit rationalizations: founder intention. Here’s Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee:
When it was enacted in 1868, there were no illegal immigrants in the United States because there were no immigration laws until 1875. So drafters of the Amendment could not have intended to benefit those in our country illegally.
This is loopy. By the same logic, perhaps the drafters of the Amendment “could not have intended” there to ever be any immigration laws, since neither they nor their predecessors saw fit to include any in our founding documents. Does Rep. Smith wish to go through all the other constitutional amendments to sift out those provisions that have evolved beyond what the founders originally intended? I assure him that such an exercise would not always yield support for his stated policy preferences.
This is the problem with runaway originalism, and the absurdity of claiming a divination of the intentions of men who have been dead for two hundred years. It’s goverment by necromancy; and last I checked, that ain’t one of the civic virtues they expect you to affirm on the citizenship exam.
If you haven’t read Atul Gawande’s new essay in the New Yorker on end-of-life care in America, go for it. Gawande talks about modern medicine’s ability to put off death at the expense of quality of life for both the patients and their families:
Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy, three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care, five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and no one is good at knowing when to stop.
But he highlights a few studies showing that those terminally ill patients who choose to stop earlier live better, healthier, and happier than those who cling to aggressive treatments to the end. The different paths all seem to trace to a simple discussion—or the absense of one—between the doctor, the patient, and the family on the patient’s options and wishes for end-of-life care. In one study, two-thirds of terminal cancer patients reported never having had such a discussion, even though on average they were four months from death. The other one-third who did have the discussion:
were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive-care unit. Two-thirds enrolled in hospice. These patients suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. Moreover, six months after the patients died their family members were much less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation, and to spare their family anguish.
Or to put it the other way round:
[T]erminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression.
The simple discussion, well before the onset of serious disease, made people far more likely to enroll in hospice care and/or forego aggressive treatments in their last days. Gawande highlights the extraordinary story of La Crosse, Wisconsin, where twenty years ago it became routine for anyone admitted to a town hospital, nursing home, or assisted-living facility to fill out a four-question survey on their end-of-life wishes. Due to this simple innovation, in their last six months of life the town’s elderly now spend half as many days in the hospital as the national average. The town’s end-of-life costs are half the national average, and life expectancy outpaces the national mean by one year.
Wait, I’m remembering something about these nefarious end-of-life conversations from the health care reform debate last year. What was it…. Oh yes:
The new health-reform act was to have added Medicare coverage for these conversations, until it was deemed funding for “death panels” and stripped out of the legislation.
That’s about as political as Gawande gets in his essay, and it’s only a parenthetical aside at that. But in a critique of Gawande’s essay over at National Review, Avik Roy doesn’t like it:
One of the great slanders of the last year was that conservative opposition to Obamacare’s end-of-life provisions was demagogic and dishonest. […]
Amazingly enough, there are ways to improve the quality of end-of-life care in America that don’t involve a government program. […]
[S]uch improvements come not from Olympian government officials, throwing lengthy pronouncements down from D.C. office buildings, but from the accumulation of thousands of small innovations by individual doctors, nurses, and administrators.
There are legislative reforms that can help address these problems. But they involve reducing, not expanding, government control of the health-care system. They involve letting patients decide for themselves, with the aid of their doctors and their families, how best to negotiate their last days on earth. If a free country can’t be about that, it can’t be about much.
We’ll forgive the literal incoherence of that last line. And I do appreciate Roy’s manic flourish about Olympian government officials (??) throwing pronouncements down from office buildings; but as Gawande said, all the health care provision did was give the end-of-life conversation its own Medicare code so doctors could bill for it separately. And the entire point of Gawande’s essay is that it’s best for patients to "decide for themselves, with the aid of their doctors and their families, how best to negotiate their last days on earth." There’s no disagreement here. But that doesn’t stop Roy. He sets up a straw man—an Olympian one, if I may—whereby the "state-run system" envisioned by Obamacare won’t allow Americans to decide these things for themselves. It’s nonsense.
Government intrusion in end-of-life decisions. Appalling isn’t it? Kind of like when the magazine in which Avik Roy is published, National Review, editorialized in 2005 in favor of a Republican Congressional subpoena aimed at forestalling the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, against the adamant wishes of her husband.
Avik Roy does manage to eke out one good question, in a moment when the fog of hyperbole and partisanship which otherwise engulfs his reason seems to lift:
Why do we need a government program to pay doctors to have thoughtful conversations about their patients’ eschatological desires — something they should be doing already, and that doesn’t cost a dime?
Now this is a challenge not to Gawande, nor to government officials, Olympian or otherwise, but to physicians. As the experience of the cancer patients above shows, doctors are NOT having these conversations with anywhere near the frequency they should be. I do agree with Roy that we shouldn’t have to financially incentivize such a crucial and consequential service; one that leads to far more humane and successful outcomes for patients and their families. The price of an office visit should suffice. But I highly doubt that doctors who regularly deal with the terminally ill are eschewing these conversations because they’ve deemed it not worth their while financially.
So why then aren’t more doctors doing it on their own? Despite Roy’s libel that Dr. Gawande doesn’t consider the question, Gawande has an extended elegant passage where he indeed does consider it:
[T]he issue isn’t merely a matter of financing. It arises from a still unresolved argument about what the function of medicine really is—what, in other words, we should and should not be paying for doctors to do.
The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.
More often, these days, medicine seems to supply neither Custers nor Lees. We [doctors] are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, “You let me know when you want to stop.” All-out treatment, we tell the terminally ill, is a train you can get off at any time—just say when. But for most patients and their families this is asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. But our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw upon. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and to escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.
The best poem about death is by Philip Larkin. It’s called Aubade and in it, he finds himself awakened at 4am, horrified and fearful at "Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,/Making all thought impossible but how/And where and when I shall myself die."
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
You can read the whole poem here. I was reminded of that last line, "Death is no different whined at than withstood", by this new piece in Vanity Fair by Christopher Hitchens, on his own diagnosis with terminal cancer and his ongoing chemo treatments. Hitch declares, "In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist."
This is a depressing midweek post. To end slightly better: A good companion poem to Larkin’s is Walt Whitman’s This Compost, in which he too is startled and depressed by a sad thought:
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?
But then he starts cheering up some, and his old ecstatic voice builds, when he realizes that nature uses our "distemper’d corpses" as vital compost to create new life, and it leaves no trace of the disease and sickness of our "sour dead." By the end he is not depressed at all, but awed:
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.
I was watching a clip of a news show this morning and the host was talking about the gruesome July jobs numbers that are to be released later this week. Unemployment is not expected to budge much, the host explained. "But on the brighter side," he said, "corporate profits are really taking off!" He was being unironic but his co-host looked over at him with a sort of quizzical look before she went on to another story.
Of course, in any context corporate profits taking off is better than corporate profits not taking off. But using the profitability of a handful of large global corporations as a proxy for the health of the national economy as a whole is a common error and a very limiting brand of analysis. And it’s even worse when the national economy is conflated with whatever the Dow Jones is doing. A new piece in Time Magazine by Zachary Karabell makes this point well. Karabell says such facile narratives "distort reality":
Stocks are no longer mirrors of national economies; they are not — as is so commonly said — magical forecasting mechanisms. They are small slices of ownership in specific companies, and today, those companies have less connection to any one national economy than ever before.
[…]
As companies report their earnings for the second quarter of 2010, it will be harder than ever to escape the fact that corporations now inhabit their own thriving economy, unencumbered by many of the ills of nation-states. That may be exhilarating (if you’re an investor) or troubling (if you’re a citizen), but either way, it’s time to let go of the false belief that as goes the economy, so go companies and their stocks.
Indeed, though the Dow is pretty flat for the year, it was up over 7% in July. And as Karabell says, that is very good for investors but not particularly good for job-seekers. So who are these investors? Well around 50% of American households are somehow invested in the stock market; a majority do so only through an employer-sponsored retirement program. Only about 20% of households own any stock outside of their employer-sponsored program. I think it’s safe to say that the 20% of households that own stock correlate pretty highly with households in the top 20% of income. Extrapolating from Census data, if you’re a top 20% income household you’re making around $85k and above.
Are the fortunes of these households a good bellweather for the national economy?
Well, here’s the unemployment rate across household income brackets. The data is from last winter:
Range of incomes Unemployment rate
—————– —————
$12,160 or less 30.8%
$12,160-$20,725 19.1%
$20,725-$29,680 15.3%
$29,680-$39,000 12.2%
$39,000-$50,000 9.0%
$50,000-$63,000 7.8%
$63,000-$79,100 6.4%
$79,100-$100,500 5.0%
$100,150-$138,700 4.0%
$138,700+ 3.2%
So households in the top 20% of income–$85k or above—are experiencing an unemployment rate of 5% or below. In other words, full employment. Obviously people with more education and more skills have more stable employment situations, and that’s great. But these are the people with extra money left over to invest in the stock market, and who benefit most from Apple Inc.’s stock being up 20% this year. Now certainly if Apple employees and shareholders have more money, they can spend more money and that has a system-wide stimulative effect. But Steve Jobs selling a ton of iPads primarily helps Steve Jobs. You should really tune out anybody who indulges in lazy narratives predicated on the fallacy that as goes Wall Street so goes the country.
