The Next Hurrah

Barbers

by emptypockets

I recall after the September 11th attacks, probably on the 12th or 13th, going for a haircut. I was living in San Francisco at the time and, being originally from the northeast, I remember feeling disconnected, like a great shuffling underground was just out of reach. I was far from family, and California friends didn't feel the way I did. At the barber's, though, something clicked. It was crowded on a midweek afternoon, the TV was turned to CNN, and everyone was quiet and serious. Where coworkers had been chatty, the barber's was meditative.

I revisited those thoughts the other day, at a barber's here in New York. It was a far more normal midweek afternoon, and I was the only customer there until an older guy entered and took the chair beside me. The barber made conversation with him: "How was your Thanksgiving?" "Hm? Oh, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving... hm... not bad..." He was at his sister-in-law's. She's a good cook. "But I'm not having Christmas this year."

The barber let that rattle around the room for a while, and finally gave a nonconfrontational "Okay." Another long pause. "My wife passed away, so that's why." There was the sensation of the little ties that bind human strangers growing tighter. "When did that happen?" "Oh, a long time ago, long time ago..." A bit of a loosening. "June." Tight again.

"Damn, I miss her."

My first thoughts were for the old man and the poignancy of someone lonely but proud, reaching out for human contact but not able to appear to be reaching. My second thoughts were for the other families having a first Christmas without a loved one, or afraid that they will. I thought first of one family I know whose son will be sent soon on his first trip to Iraq, and then, in the abstract, of other families split by the war, and, finally, of families like the old man's, the elderly and infirm. And so, in this little stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I'll stop a bit right now as I go through my usual stressful holiday routines to give thanks that those routines haven't changed, that everyone who is supposed to be near me still is, and I don't have to contemplate a first Christmas "without."

And I think of why others must. I wonder, between that haircut and this one, how many families have been changed by two wars, so many deaths, new economic insecurity, poorer health care, less health research. Personally, I don't have much outrage left. I once derived some comfort from politics and blog posts filled with mockery and scorn, but I feel like I've passed through that and it no longer helps, if it ever really did. What hope and comfort I find now derives from those small vestiges of community, found in odd corners like the barber's, though perhaps increasingly less often.

California Shows the Way

By Mimikatz

This morning's paper reveals that California has made real progress in both reducing energy consumption and reducing greenhouse gas emissions since 1990, while at the same time enjoying overall growth in per capita GDP.  The California Green Innovation Index, a report detailing the state's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, contains some stunning data:

-- The amount of greenhouse gases produced for every Californian has dropped since 1990. At the same time, California's per-capita gross domestic product - the value of the services and goods produced in the state - has risen. The state's economy, in other words, has been thriving despite the reduction in per-person emissions.

-- California emits less greenhouse gas per person than any other state except Rhode Island. California's economy produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions for every dollar of gross domestic product than Germany, Japan or the United Kingdom.

-- Californians pay less on their monthly electricity bills than do residents of many other states. In 2005, for example, California's average monthly electricity bill was $74, compared with $135 in Texas. Although mild weather plays a part, so do tough energy-efficiency standards adopted in the 1970s for buildings and appliances.

-- Those energy-efficiency standards saved California residents and businesses $56 billion between 1975 and 2003.

-- About 22,000 Californians were directly employed by green-tech companies in 2006. In the same year, California's green-tech businesses soaked up 36 percent of all the money venture capitalists spent on the industry within the United States.

My morning paper contains a stunning graph (not in the online version) showing that since 1990 per capita emissions have dropped almost 10 percent while per capita GDP growth has increased 20 percent, despite downturns in 1992-3 and 2001-2002.  Other surprises:  Californians drive less per person than the national average and miles driven per person has dropped since 2002. 

In other words, solid public programs and creative but stringent and science-based, innovative regulation can have a salutary effect.  It is not only possible to have solid economic growth and make progress on environmental issues, the two may just go hand in hand. 

While the report notes that much more needs to be done to make a real dent in global warming, it should help reinforce the idea that improvements in emissions and energy usage can be good economically as well as environmentally.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, the natives are praying for rain.  For those not aware of it, the southeast, not the west, is the region hardest hit by drought in the US.

A Next Hurrah Gossip Extravaganza

By DHinMI

OK, the average Next Hurrah reader probably isn't much for celebrity gossip.  But the Washington Post's Reliable Source column isn't your typical gossip column, focusing as it does on what passes for celebrity in Washington.  So occasionally the Reliable Source has something of interest.  But I doubt they'll ever again pack so much gossip interesting to Next Hurrah readers in to one column as they managed to do this morning:

• Patrick Fitzgerald is engaged
• When Valarie Plame's boss at the CIA saw her Vanity Fair glam shot, she was given "a really good chewing out."
• But best of all, a film about a Judy Miller-esque reporter thrown in jail for not divulging her source on a CIA-related story, will star...Kate Beckinsale.  Yup, when I look at Kate Beckinsale, I think Judy Miller.  This is my favorite casting decision since Nicole Kidman played a differently-named Jessica Stern. 

As a service to our readers who care about such things, you should also know that Wayne Newton canceled a gig in suburban Virginia but still managed to appear on Dancing With the Stars.  I can't tell you how he was on Dancing With the Stars, as I forgot to set my TiVo. 

"Catholics Hate Kerry...uh, Giuliani"; Repubs & Fundies to Divorce?

By DHinMI

Remember back in 2004 when the news media and the wingers were all atwitter about how John Kerry, because he supported a separation of church and state and upholding the Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade, was supposedly a rotten Roman Catholic and was under siege by the Roman Catholic Church?  Well, the stories were always wildly overblown, and usually ignored the important fact that the few Bishops who mouthed off about denying communion to Kerry were acting as free agents, because the American Bishops voted 183-6 against adopting an official policy of denying communion to politicians who supported abortion rights or any other social policies in conflict with the Church’s teachings.  As you should expect,  this fact was almost completely ignored by the press. 

The "priests will deny communion to pro-choice politicians" story has returned, but this time with a twist: it’s about a Republican, Rudy Giuliani:

My Annual Post: The PTA vs. P&G

by Trapper John

Hi, it's Trapper.  I figure I need to get a post in here once a year or so to justify my name on the masthead.  And this isn't much of a post -- in fact, it's a bleg, of sorts. But it's a bleg for a worthy cause that I have absolutely no personal interest in, and it won't cost anyone other than American Express a dime.

You may have seen American Express's ads for its Members Project, which will award $5 million to a worthy non-profit voted on by Amex cardholders. The two leading vote-getters right now are A) a "children's safe drinking water" project funded by Proctor and Gamble to the point where its budget is over $380 million/year, and B) DonorsChoose, a fantastic little non-profit that funds small proposals (generally less than $1000) made by public school teachers in big-city systems, including NYC and DC. Essentially, DonorsChoose works like a micro-NSF/NEH, dispensing tiny grants to educators who can turn a $300 investment into a world of discovery for their pupils. Here's a representative proposal, from a pre-K teacher at Butler Bilingual in DC. She's looking for $547 to buy paints and art supplies for her kids -- because arts funding has become "an afterthought in most school curricula." Imagine how important a basic art program is to the developing mind of a four year-old. Imagine what $5 million would mean to an organization that funds such modest, yet critical, projects.

So if you have an Amex card, I urge you to take 2 minutes and vote for DonorsChoose at the Members Project. Someone's going to win that $5 million -- and while clean drinking water is critical, P&G has their back. Let's get the back of the hard-working teachers of DC and NYC. God knows, they won't let a dime of that $5 million go to waste.

The Wages of Inequality

By Mimikatz

The Times has a piece this morning entitled "Why Are There So Many Single Americans?" in which we learn that a bare majority (51%) of adult women are not living with a spouse, and nearly as many (49%) men are not.  The fact that women live longer, and thus typically live as widows for several years is one factor.  But the main factors appear to be class and its surrogate, education.  It used to be that educated women were considered unmarriageable.  (Remember that canard?)  Not so.  It turns out that educated men do want someone with whom they can talk intelligently after all (or at least, someone intelligent to raise the children). 

Statistics show that college educated women are more likely to marry than non-college educated women — although they marry, on average, two years later. The popular image might have been true even 20 years ago — though generally speaking, most women probably didn’t boil the bunny rabbit the way Ms. Close’s character [in "Fatal Attraction"] did in 1987. In the past, less educated women often “married up.” In “Working Girl,” Melanie Griffith triumphs. Now, marriage has become more one of equals; when more highly educated men marry, it tends to be more highly educated women.   

Educated women also seem not only more likely to evntually marry, but to stay married.  Why does this "marriage gap" between the classes rise with age? 

Why have things changed so much for women who don’t have the choices that educated women have? While marriage used to be something you did before launching a life or career, now it is seen as something you do after you’re financially stable — when you can buy a house, say. The same is true for all classes. But the less educated may not get there.

“Women are saying, ‘I’m not ready, I want to work for a while, the guys I hang around with don’t make enough money and they don’t want a commitment,’ ” Mr. Jencks said. “It’s the same thing a lot of African-American women in poor neighborhoods are saying."

The marriage gap between the classes is not so great among younger men.  Both educated and uneducated young men are typically averse to commitment, the author states.  But after 35, the percentage of married, educated men is 12 percentage points higher than the percentage of married but uneducated men. 

Why should we care?  Among other reasons, because marriage attaches a person to society as a whole, and unattached males are much more likely to engage in anti-social behavior than women or attached men.  Marriage, by contrast, makes people happier (on average) and more stable.  (It has reportedly even been used to defuse terrorists.)  By making marriage difficult for less educated (read, lower class) people, we are creating yet another source of social instability.  (Interestingly, this is also the best policy argument for gay marriage--if marriage is good (on balance) for individuals and society, why deny its benefits to a whole class of people?   Doesn't this actually hurt society as well as the individuals involved?)   

The decline of marriage among the less educated creates philosophical dilemmas for both liberals and conservatives.  The difficulties in entering into and remaining in a marriage are psychological and cultural as well as economic, but economics surely plays a major role.  For conservatives who see marriage as the core social institution, supporting economic policies that provide a safety net and are more family-friendly brings them into direct conflict with pro-business free marketeers.

But the studies that document the stabilizing effects of marriage on adults as well as children may give pause to liberals as well.  Witness the turnaroud on divorce among educated women, 65% of whom now think divorce should be made more difficult.  And it also exposes the lie at the core of libertarianism--we are not islands, but social beings who need connection and thrive in communities.   

Liberals and Libertarians: Why the Twain Will Never Meet

By Mimikatz

As Ezra over at TAPPED  and Kevin Drum have noted, many folks are discussing an article by Brink Lindsey at TNR on whether a fusion is possible between Libertarians and Liberals, to create a sort of neo-progressivism.   Not being a subscriber to TNR and having no desire to join, I haven't read the article itself.  However, this is a pretty old debate, and the reasons why the twain will never meet should be clear to anyone who has thought about the issues seriously.  As both Ezra and Kevin note, the easy part is agreeing on the socially liberal positions.  Libertarians are basically "leave me alone" types who dislike government interference period, so naturally they value individual privacy and do not like government prohibitions on personal conduct, such as drug laws, even if movements to expand the private sphere are mostly issues championed by the Left. 

But there is a very fundamental difference between libertarians and liberals (and especially progressives) once one veers into the economic area.  Although both words have their root in the Latin word for free, "liberal" comes from "liberalis," which meant "suitable for a free man," and has always been a synonym for generous.  Libertarianism, on the other hand, focuses on individual liberty.  Not to put too fine a point on it, libertarianism is a glorified synonym for selfishness, and therein lies the unbridgeable difference.   

The Continuing Woody Guthrification of Bob Dylan

by emptypockets

Doonesbury, circa 1985:

Mark Slackmeyer: "It's three o'clock in the morning, and do you know where the children of the sixties are? Do you care? Dr. Dan Asher does, and as the baby boom's Boswell, he's back to give us the latest on everyone's favorite generation!"[...]

Doctor Dan: "You see, Mark, a truly cohesive generation only comes along once or twice a century. That's why the boomers will be tracked for the rest of their lives. This generation is like a great comet, blazing through the firmament, carrying with it a dream as boundless as the universe itself!"

MS: "Whew... How will we know when it's over?"

DD: "'Esquire' will run a piece on the hot new funeral homes."

... and Bob Dylan will be turned into a Broadway musical.

That musical, "The Times They Are A Changin'," choreographed by Twyla Tharp who successfully turned out the oeuvre of Billy Joel onto the Great White Way, closed this week after just 28 performances and 35 previews. Unlike her Billy Joelography, the adaptation of Dylan to the conceits of modern dance -- conceits including a circus, a man dressed as a dog, and cardboard guitars -- just didn't work.

But was it a failure for Dylan? Since his teens he has followed in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie. But in the post-mortems of the Arts section, I have yet to see that connection made -- because, you know, Woody once did the music for a modern dance piece, too, and had some trouble.

"It's A Very Disturbing Trend"

by DemFromCT

The Washington Post has an interesting and important article (not that it's the first best thing on the topic, but it's a reminder of the context that the Schiavo fiasco took place and the ongoing presence of this issue) on the rise of assertive religious conscience in the practice of health care.

In Chicago, an ambulance driver refused to transport a patient for an abortion. In California, fertility specialists rebuffed a gay woman seeking artificial insemination. In Texas, a pharmacist turned away a rape victim seeking the morning-after pill.

Around the United States, health workers and patients are clashing when providers balk at giving care that they feel violates their beliefs, sparking an intense, complex and often bitter debate over religious freedom vs. patients' rights.

I won't rehash every incident and example (see Trapper John's Pharmacists Against Medicine from March '05), but given the current state of affairs of religion in public life, this is a topic that's bound to get more and not less contentious the closer we get to election season. One thing that might put the brakes on this at the national level is the disastrous Terry Schiavo debate in Congress. While Americans of all faiths and stripes want freedom of religion, the vast majority of voters want this out of their bedrooms and homes.

The unseemly sight of Bush cancelling vacation plans and rushing to DC (not for Katrina, not for Middle East war, not for Iraq but for a religious right overreach in meddling with the Schiavo family's personal affairs) has put the breaks on aggressive GOP Congressional action. In the 11/05 Pew Poll, only 17% thought Congress "did the right thing" and 72% thought Congress "should have stayed out".

But at the local level, there's clearly room for some expression of faith and conscience. Doctors are not required to perform abortions nor are they required to help the state execute prisoners. In fact, Missouri can't find a doc to perform the process of lethal injection.

The Missouri Department of Corrections established its first written procedure for lethal injections Friday but was unable to meet a federal judge’s Saturday deadline to find an anesthesiologist willing to perform lethal injections.

The issue is that of whether the health professional (including nurses or pharmacists) or the patient comes first. Many times, there's room for compromise (such as transferring a nurse out of an abortion suite, or agreeing that City Hospital and not St. Elsewhere would perform the procedure). But with the advent of Plan B and simpler technology, moving the issue from the large institutions (hospitals, city government) to the arena of small business (e.g.,. pharmacies or free-standing medical offices) is inevitably going to cause conflicts and flare-ups. Small business doesn't have a history and tradition of ethics committees and other institutional proicess to resolve such contentious issues, and throwing it to either the courts or the local political process is both inevitable and predictable (see Missouri and stem cell research for what happens).

To many socially conservative Republicans and religious leaders in Missouri, however, a new political campaign to legalize and protect such research is an evil to be fought in courtrooms, churches and polling stations.

Lawrence Weber, executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference, called it "morally reprehensible science." Bishops instructed priests to deliver pointed homilies.

Voters may be asked to decide. After the courts weigh in, that is.

Religion belongs in the public arena, but it needs restraint and secular compromise to allow the body politic to function. Secularists need to understand that people of faith are rquired to follow their conscience, but not to the extent that the public is put at risk.

The idea that this will be worked out with comity and sober realism in an era of Republican pandering to the religious right to stay in power is, alas, impossible for these current Republicans to implement. And while Democrats are used to major internal battles on policy, the ones that don't take place on the Republican side are often worse for the country than the ones that do amongst Dems.

"l'm a dreamer, a speaker, and a writer...

...I fight on the working folks' side." -- Woody Guthrie

by emptypockets

Woody wrote that line in Vanzetti's letter. He has Vanzetti saying it, but you can see why Woody chose to speak through him. You can also see how badly we need a Woody Guthrie today:

"We do not believe, sir, that torture, beatings, and killings and pains
Will lift man's eyes to a highest of view and break his bilbos and chains.
We believe that you must struggle for freedom before your freedom you'll gain,
Freedom from fear, sir, and greed, sir, and your freedom to think higher things."

Tonight, PBS will begin airing an installment of its American Masters series focused on Woody's life. I don't need much of an excuse to talk about Woody. He was a womanizer, a drunk, a genius, a hero. His childlike wonder and helplessness recall the luminary mathemetician Paul Erdos. His empathic bond with the downtrodden invisibles of his country bring to mind Che Guevera. His uncontrollable, compulsive acts of creation are uniquely his own but find common kin in Bob Dylan and a generation of followers.