I am suspending (and probably killing) Purple Haze.
Why?
I do not have one opinion per week that is worth taking two or three hours of my time to think it through and write. Nor are enough of them worth four minutes for you to read.
I have some other projects taking up a lot of time.
Thanks for reading, don
A week after the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings, National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre told us the only way to stop a bad man with a gun is with a “good man with a gun.”
Don’t count on it.
Almost 30 years ago, my friend Lieutenant Commander Albert A. Schaufelberger, Jr. was a good man with a gun. In fact, he was an around good man. He was assassinated at the wheel of his car on May 25, 1983. He was deliberately distracted so someone could shoot him in the back of his head.
Al had a .45 Caliber Colt Combat Commander tucked under his right thigh and a Heckler and Koch MP-5 machine pistol on the floor in front of the passenger seat. As a serving U.S. Navy SEAL, he was well trained in the use of these weapons and several others. He had the cocked-and-locked .45 by his gun hand because he was in El Salvador. Al knew that everyone assigned to the U.S. embassy, especially military personnel, were targets of the leftist insurgents— and perhaps rightist terrorists as well.
A good man with a gun, superbly trained and heavily armed, did not survive a carefully planned ambush carried out by a bad man less well armed and less well trained.
What does this tell us about the chances of a “good man with a gun” being able to protect a school full of teachers and children? It tells me that any one man can be ambushed. And if the “bad man with a gun” is willing to murder school children, he is certainly willing to ambush a “good man with a gun.” And if someone as savvy as Al Schaufelberger can be caught unawares in a dangerous place, how is Officer Friendly going to do after three boring years on duty at Happy Valley Elementary?
Sorry, Mr. LaPierre, your “solution” is as valueless as it was predictable. Of course, the National Rifle Association was going to recommend more guns. Just as surely as Democrats want to spend more and Republicans want to spend less, the NRA wants more guns. Just as predictably, costal bien-pensants want a ban on assault rifles. Their assault weapon ban will do not more to protect students than your “good man with a gun.”
Banning assault rifles will not save many lives in the U.S. because assault rifles are used in few murders in the U.S. According to FBI crime statistics for 2011, rifles were used to kill 323 people[1] (out of over 8,583 killed by firearms). The same statistical set[2] tells us that more than twice as may people (769) were killed by “personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.) than were killed by rifles of all types.
Those of you wanting to ban assault weapons are welcome to try. I will not support you because a ban on assault weapons is a solution in search of a problemI will not oppose you because there is no real need for people to have assault rifles if they are not planning assaults.
If you want to join Wayne LaPierre’s good-man-with-a-gun-in-every-school program, I will oppose you. Armed guards will not protect our children[3]. They will cost a lot of money (some of it mine). Worse yet, if the guards are not continually trained to law enforcement standards, they are highly likely to kill more innocents than they save.
[1] 6,220 were killed by handguns
[2] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8
[3] I know there was a police officer at Columbine High School in 1995. He exchanged fire with one or maybe both of the murders. That he kept even more people from being killed is possibly, even probably true. The main point is the same: There was no deterrent in having an armed officer at the school.
I have been puzzled for a long time by the relentless and unreasoned campaign against President Barack Obama.
To me it seems different from the abuse heaped on Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush.
There were palpable, if sometimes over-the-top, reasons for disliking either or both. Bill Clinton was a serial philanderer, liar and almost certainly perjurer. George W. Bush was, at least at first, cocky and smart alecky; he also got us Iraq, which was an unnecessary war (though not obviously so in the beginning) and grotesquely mismanaged.
The grounds for vilifying Obama are less obvious. When I say this, many of my liberal friends check to see if I am serious and then use the voice they reserve for children and the mentally challenged to tell me that it is racism, plain and simple. I don’t buy it. Too many of my Obama-trashing friends are not racist. I have seen them in too many circumstances over too much time to think they are animated by race.
So, it is not race (although there racism is real and animates some). Obama has clearly blundered on some things, has failed to persuade many people of the wisdom of some of his policies and has pulled a few fast ones. Even so, there is not enough there to explain the vituperation heaped upon him.
My theory, for which I have not the slightest evidence, is that President Obama, simply by being president, gives us emphatic evidence that the America of my youth, the America of my elders and the America of my fellow baby boomers is no more.
When I was ten years old (most of 1958), the United States had a budget surplus, an expanding economy and the cost of living was steady or falling. Everywhere an upper or lower middle class white kid looked, he saw people who looked a lot like him (we did not bother to add things like “or her” back then) and they seemed happy. We had three television channels (and maybe “Educational TV, people in big cities might have four and rural cousins might have fewer). The most popular shows presented a Rockwellian view of the standard American family. Father knew best; Ozzie Nelson knew best; Ward Cleaver knew best; Ricky and Lucy slept in separate twin beds and if you enjoyed a hero who was a little reckless, there was Brett Maverick.
Fifty years before the Crips and Bloods, we had juvenile delinquents—the Sharks and the Jets. When “West Side Story” stages a gang fight, the first killing is with a switchblade and it is an accident. In the mid-fifties switchblades were horrifying enough. If delinquents needed guns, they had to make them (“zip guns”). Tattooed gangs with automatic weapons were never imagined or contemplated, no more than we imagined middle class kids using marijuana. When I graduated from high school in 1965 in a class of about 750, I had never been in school with a black kid, did not suspect that any of my classmates used any kind of illegal drug and was more-or-less shocked when two or three girls “got in trouble” and had to drop out of school. I am not aware that any student of any age was ever injured by anything more deadly than a fist[1].
Of course, all these good things were for white people. Signs reading “Colored Restrooms” and less directly “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone” were part of the landscape in much of the country. The University of Texas won the 1970 national football championship with an all-white team.
We all know the America we live in today, but I’ll just recap a few of the things that are dramatically different:
· You can say “hell,” “damn,” “butt,” “boobs,” and “fart” on broadcast television in prime time. There is no limit on what you can say or do on pay cable.
· The state university costs about 50 times as much as it did in 1958[2].
· Women openly drink, swear, demand birth control devices from public funds and no one “has to” get married.
· In my youth, practically every voter was white. This week about 30 percent of voters were not whites of European descent.
· American has lost one war and after ten years of trying has failed to deliver knock-out punches in tiny countries with populations smaller than many of our states.
· Working moms were very rare, as were divorces.
For too many Americans born before about 1960, we recall the simplicity of our lives (and do not remember our simplistic understanding of the world) when we were young.
For far too many of us, numbed by our pasteurized and homogenized nostalgia, the end of the good old days could not be more completely symbolized than by a president named Barack Hussein Obama– the child of a white woman and an African, born in Hawaii (which was barely a state).
My analysis may not be true, but it is more plausible than the idea that our President is a Manchurian/Kenyan candidate sent to destroy American on behalf of Muslims intent on world domination.
[1] This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. No doubt those who lived on the coasts at that time were probably more involved in “the sixties,” which did not come to Oklahoma until the almost the seventies.
[2] I am not exaggerating. When I graduated high school, in-state tuition at the University of Oklahoma was $7.00 per semester hour; a student carrying 13 hours would pay $182 annually. Now annual tuition is $8705.50.
Friends are celebrating or bemoaning the elections. I am not. As Thomas Friedman wrote the other day, either the center-left or the center-right won. Yet, the fringes of our body politic have driven themselves and many ordinary citizen into a frenzy over differences smaller than that mythical Pomeranian grenadier[1].
Perhaps the elections have exhausted our political class to the point that they will work on big things. I doubt it, but here are some things they might consider:
1. How can we keep medical and other entitlements from swallowing all public funds? Neither Obamacare nor its repeal will do so.
2. What can we do to make our educational system more effective? The nostrums of the past decades are not making much of a difference.We have been slinging the same ideas around for 20 years without result. The seminal report “A Nation at Risk,” told us that our education system is so bad that an enemy might have imposed it upon us. That report came out during the Carter Administration. Since then, no one has accomplished anything worthy of mention.
3. How can we return to thinking big? President Obama gave us high-speed rail, an ambition worthy of Abraham Lincoln.
4. Governor Romney is upset that our navy is smaller than the one created by Theodore Roosevelt.
Where are the big ideas?
5. What about self-driving cars? The prototypes are out there. This promises a revolution as large as that effected by the automobile a hundred years ago. How are we going to deal with the regulatory issues? A little national leadership would be nice.
6. Our defense budget is larger than the world’s 25 next largest defense budgets combined. Many of the budgets two through 25 belong to formal allies of the United States. This cannot have arisen from an assessment of the threats we face. Congress must stop treating the Department of Defense as a combination piñata and a job creation program. Why does the Department of Defense conduct breast cancer research? Why must major weapons systems have subcontractors in 435 Congressional districts?
The chance that Congress and either a Romney or Obama administration will work together to deal with such issues is vanishingly small.
The problem is not who is in the White House. The problem is that our political class that understands governance better than campaigning. They are supported by a body politic that confuses politics and reality TV.
[1] Otto von Bismark once said the whole of the Balkans was not worth the bones of one Pomeranian Grenadier.
Dear Readers,
There are so many political/policy messages flying around I have decided to shut up until after the election. Sorry I did not post this sooner.
Thank you, don
Maybe you thought Obamacare invented “Death Panels”[1]? Nope, they have been around for a long time and you have one. Nobody pays someone else’s expenses without some kind of control. Even billionaires and kings put limits on their children[2].
Who operates your death panel?
Over 65? Medicare has a federal death panel that decides which treatments will be funded.
Private Insurance? Your insurance company is your death panel.
Poor? It is your state government.
Each of these systems groups has a mechanism for controlling medical costs. That mechanism has drawn a line somewhere. That line leaves some treatments uncovered. That treatment will be too expensive for some individuals and some of them will die because they are on the wrong side of the line.
Where is the line? It depends on your death panel.
With Medicare, the patients are largely disconnected from the costs. Private insurers and Medicaid (where the rules are set by the states) are generally more tight-fisted.
Arizona has stopped paying for many organ transplants. Indiana called a thymus transplant for an infant “experimental” (and thus not covered by Medicaid) although 60 have been done with a 75% survival rate[3].
Call them “death panels” or “Independent Payment Advisory Panels” or something else. The name matters not. Someone has decided if this or that treatment is covered under your plan. “Decisions on funding treatments,” sounds harmless until the decision denies treatment to your father, your son, your spouse.
As we work our way toward improving our health care system, we need to think first, then decide what to do.
We can leave things as they are, with decisions varying by age, by insurance plan, by income level[4] or by state of residence.
We can decide whom we most trust: Unelected bureaucrats applying rules created by elected politicians? Corporate drones applying rules created by profit seekers?
This menu is not appetizing, but it is imposed by the reality of death and the likelihood that it will be preceded by illness.
I would contribute to, volunteer and vote for a candidate who would start with reality and propose practices[5] consistent with the human condition. I do not see one just now.
[1] I have embraced Sara Palin’s term because it is vivid and is closer to the issue than “Independent Payment Advisory Board,” the term used in Obamacare. I use “Obamacare” because it is handier than “The Affordable Health Care Act.” “Death Panel” and “Obamacare” have a pejorative cast, but they are memorable. “Obamacare,” if it survives this election, will be come a mere descriptor. “Death Panel” is too unpleasant to become a widely used and neutral term.
[2] Although the limits can be absurdly high—a $50,000 toddler’s birthday party?
[3] The infant in question was saved by a private donation.
[4] As always, the mega-wealthy get to do what they want.
[5] I say “practices” because there is no solution to final illness. If you do not die violently, you are going to have a final illness. We used to say, “died of old age,” but the medical-industrial complex does not allow that to be put on your death certificate. You must die of something.
The owner of Chick-fil-A, Dan T. Cathy, is a staunch Baptist. Unlike many who describe themselves as fundamentalists, Mr. Cathy acts as if he believes all the commandments matter, including the one about honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy. That is why he foregoes millions in sales by closing his restaurants on Sunday.
Why is anyone surprised that someone of such traditional views opposes gay marriage?
It appears Mr. Cathy shocked untold thousands by expressing his opposition to same-sex marriage. He was never, so to speak, in the closet. Turns out that Mr. Cathy and his organization have donated millions of dollars to support traditional marriage and to “cure” homosexuality.
I disagree with Mr. Cathy on this matter and all others who believe every word of both testaments of the Bible is literally true. Yes, the Bible explicitly and vividly condemns homosexuality, but the Bible’s disgust with adultery is more prominent, since it is among the 10 commandments. Literalists generally ignore Biblically prescribed punishments for sins. Like most Americans, they are not prepared to stone Newt Gingrich to death for his infidelities. Nor are they eager to emulate the patriarchs and become polygamists—a practice never repudiated in the Bible.
Even so, I find no reason to boycott Mr. Cathy’s restaurants. I have never heard that Chick-fil-A refuses service to homosexuals, refuses to hire homosexuals or undertakes any effort that palpably harms homosexuals. I think it is silly to boycott Chick-fil-A because its owner believes homosexuals are sinners.
I oppose whimsical boycotts. For a time, I boycotted Jane Fonda movies, but decided that was silly. I came to realize that most actors are ill educated—especially on political issues. There political views are meaningless to me. I watch actors to see them act.
The silliness is not confined to actors.
In 1981, I was at dinner with a fellow Foreign Service Office who refused to drink Chilean wine because Pinochet was a “murderer and torturer.” She ordered Stolichnaya, a Russian vodka. I asked if she preferred to support Soviet lead Leonid Brezhnev. She huffed a bit and asked if I supported Pinochet. I replied that I thought him a thug and a murderer, but unable to compete with Brezhnev in thuggery. After all, Brezhnev was the KGB’s action officer when the Soviet Union crushed Hungary’s quest for liberty in 1956.[1]
In 2011, the CEO of Whole Foods wrote a Wall Street Journal piece condemning Obamacare and offering a more market-oriented program. Many of his customers expressed outrage at his conservatism. Why? Had it not occurred to them that someone who sells organic produce could be a capitalist?
Nor do I stand with those who galloped out to eat a chicken sandwich on August 1 (Chick-fil-A appreciation day). One person I know said she went to Chick-fil-A to support the Bible. She is entitled to her opinion, but I do not believe God’s spirits rose because Chick-fil-A sold a record number of sandwiches.
[1] We never ate dinner together again. We never put forward a reason, but could have described ourselves as alcoholically incompatible.
