Whine Country

There's  nothing worse than taking a long-awaited vacation in the middle of the Republican National Convention. It's like getting a reservation at the French Laundry, while under doctor's orders to lose weight. I know it isn't good for me to watch the carnage in Tampa, hour-by-hour, but I just can't help myself. I've tried to take short-cuts, like just watching Jon Stewart's version of events, but it's no  more than an amuse-bouche.

It started with David Brooks' recent column in the New York Times, which was widely misunderstood as a take-down of Mitt Romney. The reason why it was widely misunderstood as a takedown of Mitt Romney, was because any fair reading of it took down Mitt Romney. It wasn't just tongue-in-cheek. In order for someone to apprehend that Brooks was not serious, one would have to have roomed with him at University of Chicago, or shared a bed with him, or given birth to him, perhaps. When I read it, I thought someone had either kidnaped Brooks and taken control of his keyboard, or returned his previously unused soul to him.

Gothamist, an on-line snark merchant, apparently broke the news that Brooks was going for satire in that bizarre column. The closest cognate equation to Brooks=Satire was when Tom  Lehrer was once asked why he no longer wrote funny political folk songs, and he replied that when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, there was no longer any need for satire. So here we are. Not only has Apple created complete technological convergence in 2012, but the GOP has merged satire, serious political commentary, and their convention, to create total political convergence. We no longer need political satire: Politics is now satire. Perhaps it began when a bow-tied Tucker Carlson criticized comedian Jon Stewart for not being a fair journalist, apparently missing the unsubtle point that Stewart is, indeed a comedian. The contagion of journalistic, political, and satirical convergence is now complete: Rand Paul has reiterated to  cheering masses his continuing dissent, that the Supreme Court's opinion on Constitutionality is irrelevant, and those that handed him the microphone not only knew he would say it, but expected it. The same masses who lionize American Exceptionalists do not believe that the Supreme Court had anything to do with forging this nation's historic greatness. It must have been States' rights that did so, or the lack of an income tax for the first century. Or something. They're always whining about some time that never was, or something they never actually had, that's been taken  away.

This all reminds me of Woody Allen's ageless quip that Commentary merged with Dissent, and formed Dysentery.

So here I sit, in Forestville, Ca., watching afar with a goblet of American wine, watching a political chain-reaction car accident. It's horrible to see, but I just can't look away. Or maybe I've just spent too many years working on car accident cases. . . .

There Were Giants on the Earth, In Those Days. . . .

I grew up in a world of heroes and villains. As a child, I lived in a household inhabited by images of Thor and Batman, JFK and FDR, Adolf Hitler and Stalin, of a dialectic of good and evil. My late Mother was a skeptic on religion, but a believer nonetheless, in enlightenment, and music, and art, and the power of words and images. My Dad, who fought his way through life from an orphanage to World War II under Omar Bradley, the GI General, led a tempestuous life until he settled down at forty to have a family, adding to my Mother's instant family when I was born.

Shades of grey weren't entirely absent from our lives. My mother was an artist, with a keen appreciation for subtle tones and brushstrokes. Born left-handed, her superstitious, immigrant Mother forced her only to use her right hand. She overcame that radical rewiring to develop gifts at rendering, design, perspective, and composition. We theorized that it made her a little crazy, but she painted so beautifully, it seemed almost an even exchange, at least after I moved out of the house at 18, seldom to return.

I grew up hearing my parents' tales of heroes and villains. My Dad, who never got past the ninth grade, was a voracious reader of history with a terrific memory. He told me stories of Eugene V. Debs, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, of General Bradley, and the Ardennes Forest. My Mother skipped a grade, only to leave school before she got much past 10th Grade, marrying at 17 to get out of a house usurped by her mother's second husband, half-orphaned herself at 15. My mother's heroes were composers, opera singers, painters and sculptors, writers like S. J. Perelman and Saul Bellow, and Flannery O'Connor.

My early heroes were Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and Joe Kubert and Robert Kanigher, Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil, who made my world bigger and clearer and gave it structure. I knew who the heroes and villains were, at 10. A little Roosevelt, a little JFK, some Spiderman, and a smatter of Sgt. Rock. I crafted an ideology of bravery, selflessness, sarcasm, and wonder. A hero was a little smarter, a little more courageous, with power and responsibility. He saw things others couldn't see, and he took hits others couldn't bear. My Dad's heroes were mine, and my Mom's heroes, too.

Joe Kubert died yesterday, at 85. His style was so unmistakeable, I could pick it out of a thousand pages of imitators. He called it a "realistic style of drawing, " but to me it was more than realistic. It cut like a laser through to the essence, the truth of his characters. His stories of war didn't glorify violence, they taught about human dignity, and courage, and fragility. There was a pathos and an ethic to his storytelling. When a talented writer like Bob Kanigher scripted a war story, Joe transformed that script into a vehicle to show the depths of despair, and the zenith of heroism. Every shadow, every expression, was crafted with such delicacy and deliberation, and yet was so natural and unforced.

G-d gifted Joe Kubert with many years to enrich all of us with his tales of Sgt. Rock, Yossel, and the Enemy Ace, of Prophesies and Faxes from Sarajevo. And G-d gifted those of us who knew his inimitable character with the feeling that there were still Giants on the Earth, who number fewer and fewer. He left wonderful children full of character and the bountiful life-force that made him a creative power in this world for more than seventy years. He left thousands of students who hold a spark of the G-d given gifts he displayed. And he left heroes for us all to read about, and wonder over, and villains to revile. We lost one hero yesterday, but we will share in his achievements for many, many years to come.

Saving Public Ryan

This is one of those mornings when you wake up with a great title and then need a blog entry to fit the title. Sometimes the material is lacking. Other times, the material is there, and you are lacking.

I've spent the morning reading pundits from the far left to the far right, gathering a lot of heat and a little light about Paul Ryan. Alternatively, he's proof that small-government Conservatives have captured the GOP; he's proof that Romney is desperate; he's proof that Romney is a self-assured, mature candidate, who made his choice in naming a running mate who reflects his true ideology; he is the best hope of the Democratic Party; he's the hope of the GOP, because he will deliver Wisconsin; he's the second VP candidate in a row chosen by Bill Kristol; he's the most relevant indicator of from where Romney will govern; he's utterly irrelevant, because the only relevant VP in the last hundred years was Dick Cheney, and he's no Dick Cheney; he's amazingly relevant because Romney is just as weak as George W. Bush was on policy and ideology, and like Cheney, Ryan is strong on policy and ideology.

I have no idea what the candidacy of Paul Ryan means. I only know what I want it to mean. I want it to mean to voters that they have the right and responsibility to make him relevant. The public has a choice to believe what candidates say, and hold them to it. When Paul Ryan spends more than a decade doing his damnedest to dismantle social programs, believe that he will go further if elected. When Paul Ryan votes against every single environmentalist initiative, believe that he will go further if elected to the Executive Branch. When Paul Ryan promises to privatize Social Security and Medicare, not just as an accounting trick, but because he believes the private sector will do it better, believe him. First read, "Too Big To Fail," "Liars Poker," and "No One Would Listen," and then place your medical treatment options if old or disabled, as well as your nest-egg, in the hands of an unregulated private sector. Paul Ryan has spent his forty-two years on this Earth struggling to be ever more relevant to you. Let him win: Make him relevant, and believe, against all cynicism, that he will do what he promises to do.

I often feel that we have left the Enlightenment in America, and re-entered the Era of Belief. Rather than learn from even recent history, many of us simply choose to believe in all manner of stuff. I have a friend on Facebook who wakes up every morning, and republishes every right-wing editorial in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, ostensibly as a patriotic act. Forget, for a moment, that the latter is owned by a mad Korean cleric who presides over arranged mass-marriages of his acolytes and has been convicted of tax fraud. Forget that the former is owned by an Australian plutocrat whose entire news empire has been tainted irreversibly by ethical lapses that border on the absurd. Her belief is that our Founding Fathers find modern expression through the pens of people who owe more to Hayek than Hobbes, and more to Pat Buchanan than John Stuart Mill. Me, I take my lessons about limited government, checks and balances, and civic responsibility from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. I tend to avoid investment advice from them, however. Their knowledge of credit-default swaps and derivatives was sorely lacking. They did feed their slaves adequately, though. Soon we'll find out from a WSJ Editorial that their slaves had longer life expectancies than freeholders, so therefore slavery was a benefit that our hallowed Founding Fathers conferred on them.

But back to belief. Paul Ryan's raison d'etre for government service was a coded message from Ayn Rand. Mitt Romney's was a coded message from the Angel Moroni, and a fierce commitment to win the Office his father lost, perhaps because he as a bit too genuine and too honest about who he was back in 1968. George Romney's unguarded moment conceded to brainwashing on Vietnam, by Generals and Congressmen. From that uncoded message,  a young Mitt drew the lesson that he should simultaneously vigorously and publically campaign for the war, and seek a deferment through his ministry as a missionary in France. His heroic attempts to win converts in France failed, so he returned to America, infused with the new gospel of venture capital. I have no doubt that Barack Obama received a few coded messages from his late father and his Minister of many years, but he seems to have ignored those messasges assiduously in favor of those of John Maynard Keynes and two Roosevelts.

Ayn Rand wrote fiction, and as we've learned from Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, fiction is a poor foundation for government. Adam Smith's, "The Wealth of Nations,." although a work of non-fiction, is only slightly better as a foundation for government, because it wasn't meant to be about government, after all, it was meant to be about money. I'm not sure what to make of "The Road to Serfdom," quite frankly: I'll call it an exercise in  Truthiness, neither fact, nor fiction.

In the end, both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are united in belief. It is their belief that government and money are as one. It's a balance sheet, and all policy is just an entry on a balance sheet. If you can show a profit to your shareholders, then  you have succeeded. We are all equal shareholders; but in Romney and Ryan's world. . . . some shareholders are more equal than others. After the safety net is dismantled, "we'll think of something," perhaps in one of Mitt's "quiet rooms," where serious people discuss issues too serious for the unserious public to witness or participate, apparently.

In the next three months, Paul Ryan will be marketed to the public as an affable, intellectual, serious thinker with a compelling personal story. He is none of those things. He has a BA in Economics, with no post-graduate studies. He has less formal learning in Economics than I do, which is pathetic for a man who is claimed to be the intellectual leader of the economic wing of his Party. He has never worked outside of a summer job in the Private Sector (consultant to his family business for two years? Give me a break.). The lesson he took from investing his Social Security Survivor Benefits in a private college education was that Social Security would work better through privatization, a lesson he doubled down on after the entire financial sector crashed during his watch in Congress.

Public Ryan is a handsome, steely-eyed ideologue, a poster-child for Belief, over Experience. Experience would restore Glass-Steagall, roll back institutions too big to fail, overhaul the SEC, FTC, and other market watchdogs to efficiently regulate our markets. The forces of Belief revise history to tell us Roosevelt was wrong (hell, both of them!), Cheney was right (If only I had invested my FICA with Bernard Madoff instead of the Federal Government, I'd be set for old age) and the next coming boom will raise all boats, if only we let the bubble inflate.

The media will spend the next three months Saving Public Ryan. He's attractive, glib, specific, and new, unlike his running mate. Me, I hope he does well as a private citizen.