Cactus Juice

Danger All About, and a Pit Underfoot

It is an axiom of psychology that a person will maneuver those around her to experience the same emotions she does.  It can provide useful information if you are sitting in a meeting and unexpectedly become angry or anxious- that's a good time to take a step back and assess what is going on across the desk.  It can also be dangerous- mental health care workers can absorb the angst of their patients; those who surround the mentally ill can begin to exhibit similar symptoms even though they are "well."

I've always taken this concept as good wisdom for difficult interpersonal interactions and as useful in business.  Just one more factoid of the "self-help" and "business motivation" category.  Until I tangled with a distressing world view and fell into a pit of despair a few blog posts ago.  It has become painfully clear that I am not hopeful because it is a natural personality trait, or because I have some inborn moral goodness, insofar as hopefulness is moral, but because I stand too near the pit to be anything else.

Meanwhile, Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist saw this principle at work in the events of 9/11.  His novel weave together the dangers of losing one's soul in the interplay between east and west, between one fundamentalism and it's homonym, while at the same time exposing his character to the psychology of the west.  It isn't just the religious zealot that has fundamentalism, and it isn't just the suicide bomber that has necrophilia.

Hamid's protagonist leaves the end of the book deeply scarred, at best.  It is a terrifying warning in a world where the best hope for peace is claimed to be dialog and where the best hope for truth is claimed to be dialectic.  It has been a crashing realization for me that dialog is personally dangerous.  Though even the love-your-neighbor ethic of the New Testament recognizes this and gives precise advice on drawing the line, it is a line that is scoffed at in modern society.  This is not how we do things, because this is not what we believe.

As I fell into the pit, none of rather puzzled friends (How was it that you fell?) that reached out to me could break my fall.  I ended up a mashed up mess, with doctors buzzing over me and propping me up.  Now I look around to a universe that is completely different from what I thought it was.  The lesson I could have learned on 9/11 was squelched by a dozen peace marches and by the blind eye I turned to retribution cloaked in the ethics of justice.  Instead I was shoved off a cliff through the dull everyday experiences of my individual life.  What is this place?  Either it is much more horrible than I had imagined, or my soul will be rehabilitated by those kind friends that gather around me even now and who can only be imagined in the future.  My best guess is some combination of the two.

As promised, I've recently picked up the first volume of Arthur Koestler's  autobiographical work, Arrow in the Blue. In it, he refers to the personal dialectic that he discovered as a young child facing terrifying medical procedures:

...I have learned to outwit my obsessions and anxieties--or at least to come to a kind of modus vivendi with them.  To arrive at an amicable arrangement with one's neuroses sounds like a contradiction in terms--yet I believe that it can be achieved, provided one accepts one's complexes and treats them with respectful courtesy, as it were, instead of fighting them and denying their existence.  It is my profound believe that man has the power to pull himself by his own hair out of the mire.  The Baron in the Bog [a children's story that helped Koestler through his troubles]... has become for me both a symbol and a profession of  faith. (p. 53)

The only hope in this horrible world is that an individual can experience the sanity of one-truth and wholeness in herself.  By pulling the dialectic into herself, she turns it into oneness in her one being.  (That is seconds away from the atheism of much of existential thought, but it doesn't have to be.)  Back to the work of the individual-  Koestler wrote:

The path of excess does not always lead to the palace of wisdom, as Blake held; but there can be as much harmony and rhythm in the oscillations of a pendulum from one extreme to the other as in the turning of a wheel on smooth bearings. (p. 63)

There is a reason to engage the world with openness: to gather up all the dialectic that is possible.  Indeed, people who do that appear considerably more sane (and whole) than those who chose to embody one side of it.  It is true that the dangers are greater than I had understood, but perhaps the final possibilities for personal wholeness are as well.  In the oneness that is a human consciousness, there is the possibility of final synthesis.  It may be only the individual, and not the totality of earthbound interplay, that can have truth.  The unrelentingly damaging and dangerous world of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not my world.  There is not only truth, but also happiness, out there for me yet.

From the Old Testament to AIG: The Financial Crisis We Deserve

Earlier this week a commentator on Marketplace quipped: "You don't go into a financial crisis with the Treasury Secretary you want, you going into a financial crisis with the Treasury Secretary you have."  To continue with pulling war quotes into the financial circle, I'll quote Sarah Palin: "Pray that there is a plan and that it is God's plan."  The sum total of those two statements nicely encapsulate the response to recent events in global finance.  These events are almost universally referred to at this moment as a "crisis," nicely labeling history with the appropriate psychiatric term.

You don't get the financial crisis you want, you get the financial crisis you deserve.  We did not reach this point on accident.  Sure, certain people took advantage of a regulatory structure to get very, very rich and left ruin before, but the regulatory structure did not exist on accident.  We as a society did not accept it on accident.  Rejecting the concept of "risk" (which means: "we have no idea what we are doing", remember that each time a politician says that you should hand over your money to reduce "risk"), where did this actually come from?

Here's how I see it, using the adage "follow the money": The roots of the current financial market instability go back to the creation of "pay as you go" social security, followed up by the development of the 401(k) retirement savings plan.  The Roth IRA was then one small step after that.  With this impossible set-up locking away the wealth of the young at the same time as it was promised (but not funded) to the old, a secret way of siphoning money back to the old was required.  Because it had to be secret, it turned into something even more extreme than that: the wealth had to be siphoned into the past.  This was wildly successful, as evidenced by the common perception that the younger generation will never live as well as the previous generation, something that is factually impossible given the total economic growth of our country.

Here is how it worked: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were perceived as government entities, making them required investments for 401(k)s and other pension systems based on prudent investment requirements.  If you have a 401(k) or a pension, you are a Fannie/Freddie shareholder.  Except Fannie/Freddie were failing in order to prop up housing prices, creating a fabulous increase in wealth for some short-term home owners (such as in the Bay Area of California) but also creating an increase in wealth for all long-term home owners.  For the average middle-class homeowner, the increase in home value has been enough to fund half to 100% of a typical retirement.  Voila: the gap is closed.

Until two weeks ago.  Now "they" caused this crisis.  "They" the financial traders?  Who were trading in a system that we set up because we wanted it that way?  Or "they" the less than 1% of homeowners that, even without any change in their income cannot afford their mortgages?  By the way, we have a curious bankruptcy law that actually allows a judge to reschedule an investment mortgage but not a primary residence mortgage- proposed changes to the law don't give over-spenders a new break, they give them the same break that has existed for property investors for some time.  What about the "they" that packed full a 401(k) rising partially on Fannie/Freddie profits, while escaping responsibility for their parents, while not funding social security?  Oh- suddenly "they" is you, and the misdeed isn't just about business, it is straight out of the Ten Commandments.  The financial crisis we deserve.

I don't know that we are in a crisis.  There are very few people who are qualified to actually say, and George Bush is not one of them.  Certain people who recognize this suggest placing people such as Warren Buffett in control of the response.  That's tricky- people like Warren Buffett are qualified to measure business, but part of what caused the collapse is that there were leveraged financial positions that were purely statistical.  It turns out that business isn't statistical- so qualified experts can tell you what should be, but they may or may not be able to evaluate these strange businesses.  And they cannot do what is ultimately our responsibility: determine what the financial structure of the nation will be based on what the social ideals of the nation are.

A crutch that makes the current situation limp along for several more years not only continues to fund the lies that under-gird our regulatory structure, they cripple the opportunity for the rising generation to ever create wealth on their own.  For the young, a sharp correction is the best way for us (I am one) to create our own successful futures.  The Great Depression lasted 9-12 years in the US, depending on how you count.  If you lived through the Great Depression, you still had the opportunity for several decades of wealth increase in your lifespan.  It is entirely possible for a bad bail-out to take away my entire financial future- far more than 12 years.  Considering that, watching the "plans" (given the insanity of the last week, you had better pray!) for a bail-out has been a serious Maalox moment.  The more cautious thinking that has come out the last couple of days has been a relief.

American social structure will never return to patriarchy, in the broadest meaning of the word (or the narrowest, but that is not the issue of the day).  Knowing that about our ideals, I've come to believe that a national pension system is a requirement: people will not save or save appropriately (less than 100% of those who have access to 401(k)s save and less than 20% of those that do are invested appropriately for their planned retirement date).  As much as we can say that they should save, the fact is that an idiot 5 years from retirement who just put 80% of his savings into financial stocks because they couldn't possibly go any lower (true story) needs to be sheltered and fed or he's going to shoot someone and not only that but we'll go to hell if we let him starve to death.

We'll go to hell if we let him starve to death.  Me.  You.  Not "they."  I'm glad the frenetic "crisis" language is slowing enough that perhaps the debate will turn to face the financial implications of our social structure and taking responsibility for creating a financial regulatory structure to match.

From Facebook to AIG: Corporate Responsibility in the Age of Fractured Community

Last Sunday, Facebook changed their user interface.  This became splash page level news on CNN.com as irate facebookers let their opinions be known.  There is an overwrought online petition that you can sign opposing the changes and a corresponding facebook group to join.  I did.  I actually like the Facebook redesign- it makes Facebook do social networking even better.  What I do not like is how poorly Facebook implemented the change- despite massive beta testing the thing is riddled with bugs and crashes and doesn't interface properly with content developers that were already present.  In other words, I'm irritated with Facebook for failing to do their business well.  Those of us who blog on Typepad experienced something similar a few weeks ago when Typepad "improved" their interface.

Also last Sunday, my local newspaper, The Raleigh News and Observer, like many newspapers around the country, distributed the movie Obsession via DVD as a paid newspaper insert.   I am not settled on whether I think including the movie in the paper was appropriate or not.  The existence of the movie is incendiary (Whether the movie itself is I cannot say because I have not seen it, although I note that it has received several credible awards.) and the means of distribution is offensive to the local community.  The newspaper is on the one hand a member of the community, but on the other hand a commercial venture and a struggling one at that.

The letters-to-the-editor on the subject this Sunday included this very simple point by Jimmy Hughes of Greensboro:

For all the people disparaging the "Obsession" DVD, is there anything in it that was not true?

That is the question that the newspaper should have addressed.  Including the paid insert was a commercial decision and one within the business prerogative.  But washing their hands of it at that point was where they failed the community, not because of a failure to meet community standards but because of a failure to perform the function of a newspaper.  The newspaper had created a public event, and then failed to report on the event.

Scott Sanders, the writer of the Facebook petition, has been criticized for taking action against a corporation that is providing a free service.  CNN has been criticized for putting the issue at the top of the news.  The creator of the petition is a college student who has the kind of unimpressive public affect that makes us oldsters want to tell him to stand up straight and get a haircut.  It at first has the air of stupid, spoiled college-kid games.  CNN comments have run to the effect that people who care about Facebook should turn their attention to something that matters, like global warming.

I think that the fact that a kid with shaggy hair can create such a social mass that it has become "annoying" to him personally is the best hope we have.  The fact that everything from a free social networking site to a city newspaper turn out substandard products with little comment from the public is sand in all the gears of the coming era.  We hate Microsoft because they give us a pretty good product which, for the place it holds in the market, is simply not good enough.  Even that icon of the modern era, the Blackberry, has some serious issues.  The world we live in is looking more and more like a pasteboard mock-up of the Jetsons rather than the real thing.

And finally, the third event of last weekend: the breakdown of the banking system as heralded by the failure of AIG.  I'll probably be writing more about this in the future on the topic of hidden agendas and who wins and who loses because this is so much more complicated than meets the eye.  It isn't just about greed versus sensibility, or stability vs. instability.  But one thing it is about is business badly done, and business badly done for more than decade, in a way that touches every member of society and yet received little reaction and no societal notice.  Despite the hyper-communication that exists in a stock price changing by the millisecond worldwide, the kind of society-wide discussion of what should come out of the financial system never got off the ground.

At the same thing that we are requiring major corporations to create efficiencies in how we live our daily lives, communication in society has become more fractured and less efficient.  Bowling Alone has turned into Reading the Paper Alone.  A good many of us read The News and Observer, but there is no paper reading community.  Vibrant public debate around what is in the paper?  It doesn't exist. Part of the reason that it doesn't exist is that the commenting feature in the online version of the newspaper is designed (probably not purposefully, but nonetheless specifically) to ensure that it does not facilitate the growth of a community of readers.  When in one town we don't even have a dialog about the city paper, there is no hope for a dialog as complex as is required by the banking issues.

One of the intriguing and disconcerting things about Facebook is that it puts all your friends together in one area, something that you would rarely do in real life.  It can create some cringe-worthy moments and already has for me, but so far I've held firm and haven't deleted anything someone has written to my profile.  This is genuine networking, as opposed to the fragmentation that the internet infamously magnifies.  A world with a greater and greater population naturally has lead to a more and more diffuse response to public events.  Today, increased efficiency of true social networks are as important any other efficiency.  That makes the news about Facebook as important, if not more important, than the latest news about the banking system.

My first triathlon!

Completed the Wilmington Triathlon this morning.  All the details here.  But the short version is there was swimming, there was biking, there was running, and I did all three!

Government and church helping people.

I've been in Philadelphia all week hearing stories of the Fugitive Safe Surrender going on here.  Everything needed to process people with outstanding non-violent warrants have been assembled in a local church, and the fugitives can go in, sort out all their paperwork, and leave with the proper court-dates, meetings with employment councilors and other social service providers, etc.  The benefit for the government is that some of the 68,000 outstanding warrants in the city of Philadelphia can be resolved and leave more law enforcement available to go after the serious criminals.

Having a warrant moves a person into a shadow underclass where they cannot get normal employment, housing, car registration... any of the things required to be a participating member of society.  The people taking advantage of this program, who sometimes arrive in terror surrounding by a support team of friends and family, speak of the complete change of their lives that will be possible by resolving their warrants.  It has been a lovely thing to hear.

The Most Hopeless Thing in the World: Climate Change

Last week I saw that Thomas L. Friedman has come out with a new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded:  Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, so I picked up a copy.  It's a fabulous theory-of-everything book (apparently Isaiah Berlin calls this the "hedgehog" approach), linking global warming and other environmental issues with international politics including middle eastern terrorism and the newly belligerent version of Russia, all in a smart way.  Friedman takes particular note of what is "dumb" and what is "smart," and it's impossible not to give him his due as "smart."  To expand upon that:  When the average deep thinker states their claim as a "citizen of the world," what they actually mean to be doing is renouncing their citizenship responsibilities at some particular place on it.  Friedman, on the other hand, is the real thing.  Which is why I will always read his books.

Friedman makes the argument that an organized American response to global warming will not only save the world, it will also save the nation- internal "nation-building" he calls it.  All this while agreeing that global warming creates more pessimism the more you understand it.  I recall seeing somewhere else that the pessimism over global warming has reached the point where it has a measurable public health impact- stress over global warming may be killing more Americans than global warming itself.

To expect that a community response can resolve global warming is quite a bit past mere hopefulness.  Friedman says that we should be an 07/04 nation rather than a 9/11 nation, which I think is an excellent point.  However, 07/04 was about events forced into motion by an elite.  An effective response to global warming (if such a thing is possible) would have to be created by an elite.  More on that later.

It is more than the community has ever been asked to do in history- not by a little bit, but by an astounding amount.  Americans accepted war-time privations during the great wars because they could imagine what losing would look like and didn't like it, and they could imagine what winning would look like and see themselves there.  Attacking global warming means accepting privations forever- not just for yourself, but for your great-great-great grandchildren.  It means imagining a success that you will never be a part of, and imagining a failure that the greatest writers of history have never been able to properly describe.  Making it equal to surpassing Sputnik and putting man on the moon is something that both Friedman does in his book and Sarah Palin did in her NRC speech (parts of Palin's speech could have been lifted right out of the book), but it just doesn't come close.

Here's how I see it:  Global warming is going to hurt, a lot.  It's not going to hurt the planet- the planet will do fine with us and if we happen to drive ourselves to extinction it will do fine without us too.  But stopping it is going to hurt wealthy people-- that is all Americans down to the poorest one-- or it is going to eventually hurt poor people.  Environmentalism is humanitarianism.  So, what is it going to take to stop global warming, for real?  I know it's not going to take recycling, offsets, or an electric car and I don't like to be duped by "greenwashing" (Friedman calls it the "green party" --p. 205-- or the "green hallucination" --p. 207-- vs. the "green revolution" that he's advocating, an LOL on p. 326) or by those more Prius than thou.  There's not enough recycling, forest land, or fancy technology in the world to give me the lifestyle I'm leading now and stop global warming.  Not even close.  I think the experts don't want to tell us the answer, because they know we will throw up our hands and turn our backs on them.  They're probably right, but if we don't have a goal there is no way to even begin to hope for success.  Tell me- how many square feet can I live in at what temperature regulation?  How many gallons of gas can I use a year?  How many outfits can I own?  How many calories can I eat?  The answer is going to be terrifying.

But it's even worse than that.  Using resources in a sustainable way will create objects of wealth.  In the mountains of Switzerland and also of north India, extremely poor people live in rather fabulous houses.  The reason is that these are houses of quality construction which have lasted generations; the houses are objects of wealth building.  If we live in a world where the plastic crap of Walmart is wiped out and only the highest efficiency products can be created, all possessions will become items of value.  In an environmentally sustainable world, if your parents and grandparents did not provide you with childhood toys and the tools for living it will be harder, not easier, to get them for your own children.  In this and many other ways, environmental sustainability is hardest on the poor.  Feudalism is perhaps the most environmentally correct political system possible.  We're either going to pick our own system of elitism, or society is going to devolve to create it.  There's some hopeless for you. (The Wall Street Journal reviewer came to the same hopeless conclusion out of Friedman's facts, but then finds that some of the facts are off base and suggests poverty should be faced directly rather than through the indirect global warming issue.)

Friedman quotes David Douglas, vice president for eco-responsibility for Sun Microsystems explaining what it would take to give one billion people one lightbulb:

Each bulb doesn't weigh much --roughly 0.7 ounces with the packaging-- but a billion of them together weight around 20,000 metric tons, or about the same as 15,000 Priuses... Now let's turn them on.  If they're all on at the same time, it'd be 60,000 megawatts.  Luckily, [they] will only use their bulbs four hours per day, so we're down to 10,000 megawatts at any moment.  Yikes!  Looks like we'll still need twenty or so new 500-megawatt coal-burning power plants."

One of my college professors taught at a university in Africa for a semester.  He had to carry his own lightbulb in his briefcase to screw into the ceiling of his classroom when he wanted to teach, and take it with him when he left.   According to Friedman, the average American uses as much resources as 320 Kenyans. (p. 66)  Friedman never gives a goal for how many Kenyans I can equal, for them to each have a lightbulb, and for all of us to reduce our collective greenhouse gases to sustainable levels, and every additional factoid on the matter just makes things seem uglier and uglier.  Friedman does recognize the need for specifics, and gives a set of global standards of which 8 would have to be met to actually stop global warming. (pp. 212-213)  On the one hand he seems to give slight to what an individual can do, even though eventually each of these global items has to fall on our heads.  On the other hand, his list of things actually seem very doable, and not that painful.

Meanwhile, I've become recalcitrant to environmentalist messages that mean, "Give me what belongs to you."  Friedman makes a joke that Al Gore owes the world an apology for underestimating the effects of global warming.  But the truth is that Al Gore and his absurd mansion have done more to harm the environmental movement than any crackpot on the AM dial (maybe something Friedman doesn't call Gore on because, according to Slate, Friedman has a mansion problem of his own).  Greenwashing makes aluminum recyclers rich as opposed to aluminum miners, at a net wash of environmental impact with some recycling being even worse than source mining, with the few pennies that sway the profitability coming from my unpaid labor.  Don't try to sell me on virtue by lying to me, it only brings out my inner Ayn Rand.

"Drill, baby, drill" chanted at the RNC represented a gutless populism that is continuing in Washington, D.C. this week.  Friedman isn't very impressed by the presidential candidates, Republican and Democrat, who suggested cutting fuel taxes rather than raising them this summer, and I agree with him wholeheartedly on that (Friedman suggests setting a variable oil tax, essentially a minimum oil price --p.  254--, and in a country that sets a minimum sugar price so that we can all be poisoned on HFCS instead, it's difficult to make a free-market argument against a price support that would make the world better rather than worse.).  But when it comes to global warming, there is more than enough gutlessness to go around- Al Gore, here's looking at you.  Meanwhile, feudalism is growing.

Friedman thinks information is creating an economy where environmentalism is part of an egalitarian democracy and part of a vital global capitalism.  He's drunk the innovation cool-aid and gives over the final third of his book to it.  If he is correct, he envisions a bigger trajectory of political history and of scientific development than I have been capable of imagining.  When Friedman links up his idea of our future political and economic development to the greatest moments of American intellectual history, I can almost see it.

------

Friedman's Fresh Air Interview (I haven't heard it.)

Friedman's "Drill, Baby, Drill" column (NYT free log-in required). The title "Making America Stupid," refers back to the "smart" versus "dumb" discussion in the book.

September 11th.

Today I'll be driving all day across the states of Pennsylvania and New York.  I'd rather be in church, except even if I were home I don't think the church I've been going to is having any kind of service.  So instead I put on Bruce Springsteen's The Rising.  I remember when it first came out, I listened to it over and over again.  It was the church service I couldn't get anywhere else.  Yesterday, I listened to it straight through for the first time in a long time.

September 11th is a shared trauma, but for everyone that shares it it is also a personal trauma.  Eleven days earlier, October 31st, my mother had called with the news that she had approximately 24 months to live.  This a miracle of pharmaceutical development- if she had become ill just the previous year, she probably would have lived less than a year.  I had been injured September 10th and was on crutches.  That morning I had sobbed through the drive into work.  Crutching down the long hall to the bathroom I noticed various groups gathered together and thought to myself that there must be a lot of birthdays that day.  It was difficult to find out what was really happening- to this day my heart races when CNN.com won't refresh promptly.  When I went into the doctor's office that afternoon to get a cast for my foot, everyone in the waiting room sat quietly staring into space.

The Risingis all about heartache and loss.  It is meant to express some kind of hope in the continuity of the life-force, with religious overtones.  But for me what is most hopeful about it is the beauty of the songs and the meaning in the sorrow.  I have a tendency to try to negotiate around the bitterness of life, as if it were a mere roadblock to my true path.  Hurry up, plug in the Blackberry GPS, find a better route.  The Rising shows a way through instead.

Those days after September 11th, I felt a sense of community that I may never feel again.  At the time I was married to a foreigner, near enough to that vague "Middle Eastern" that we were both concerned for his safety.  (Indeed, the only man killed in the US a hate crime in the weeks after September 11th was from his country.)  We planned a vacation to rural Tennessee and I called ahead and asked point blank if were were going to have any problems, including to the helicopter pilot that was going to take us sightseeing.  The conversations were honest and I found in each person a dedication to kindness that I would not have otherwise known.  We ate at tiny restaurants in towns tucked into valley walls, and didn't have a single problem.  Back home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I ran up to him in a parking lot and there were at least three people poised to throw themselves in front of me if I were out to create some kind of discomfort.

Upon the death of my mother, three years later rather than two, she was transformed into perfection and so was my family.  I discovered for the first time the peace that comes between the sobs in losing someone very close.  All argumentation and disagreement are over; there is no more reason to tell or wish to tell her that she was wrong about anything.  No remaining disappointment is possible.  I had seen loyalty attached to the dead, bizarre loyalty that passed my understanding.  With the death of my mother, I experienced where it comes from.  For a short time, everything that was perfect about closing my mother's story turned my immediate family into perfection.  Our love for each other was perfect.  Of course, just as the community of September 11th dissipated, so did that perfection.  However, knowing what it had been stays with me even as it marks the imperfection and dissatisfaction of daily life.

When I was a child, I had a white Arabian horse named Knyght.  I spent my difficult teenage years crying into his mane, or standing with my check pressed against his forehead as he leaned into me.  The one time I thought to run away, Knyght came with me.  The artist Pamela Parker created a painting titled The Babysitter which shows a horse very much like Knyght being led by a small girl.  My mother found it on a greeting card shortly before she died and sent it to me.  I purchased a large print, but haven't found the time to have it framed.  Some time when I do, I want to put it in a place in my house where I can sit and feel complete and loved in a moment of perfection.  When I need to remember what perfect love feels like, I close my eyes and think of the things that are no longer with me but are now perfect.  Those things have been my greatest suffering, but they also point toward the greatest hope I have.

Loss.

Tomorrow will be a day to discuss loss.  Here is one of my latest heartaches.  When I was a small child, my mother bought a parrot for my sister.  Parrots, however, pick their own people and Chris picked my father.  He had a particular smell, a certain way of clutching your finger with his cold foot, a certain calculation in what he wanted and who to get it from.  Some animals seem wise and kind and give you the sense you understand God in being around them.  Chris was more Hindu sub-god than Christian deity- a playful troublemaker in the lives of the humans.  He died 13 August 2008 in my father's arms at about the age of 26, not terribly old for a Red-lored Amazon.  Dad buried him on the hillside where we scattered my mother's ashes.

Truthfulness, today.

One thing that being married to someone who was born and raised in another country taught me is that cultural differences are real.  It's peculiar that people tend to come back from my ex-husband's native land talking about all the ways they were ripped off, while my ex and his compatriots come to America and spend their first few years having the same experience.  It was a full time job getting my ex's money back from the get-rich-quick schemes, the car repair shops, even a dentist!  And just when I thought I had it under control along came the warning letter from the Postmaster about a pyramid letter.

My ex came from an over-populated and under-resourced country where you get ahead or you die.  Getting ahead by your wits is okay, and getting ahead by using your wits on American tourists is even better.  The people who do so are then hurt and baffled when the Americans think that something unfair has happened.  Americans are so rich and so successful, how is it possible for them to be so stupid as to fall for my tricks, and then to not only be stupid but to blame me for it?

Upon arriving in America, these wily foreigners are told that things don't work the same way in this country.  In this country, we have very strict laws and a culture of fairness.  Honesty is valued.  It appears to be a totally different landscape and so the same person who had an appropriate level of caution in his home country becomes an easy mark in America.

How is it that we view other cultures as less truthful than our own, when our own culture falls so far short?  Definition of truthfulness is central.  For example, if a pharmaceutical company advertises that a drug is 80% effective at treating a chronic condition after three months of use, we expect that to be absolutely true.  What if the drug is only 70% effective at four months, is it still true?  In general, we would say yes.  What if the drug is only 5% effective at four months?  At that point, we start to think we've been lied to, even though the statement itself is still true.  A statement being true in and of itself is not enough for it to meet our cultural standard of truthfulness.  We expect more out of truthfulness.  Or, as Bill Clinton said while evading truthfulness, "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is."

Apparently a Pennsylvania college professor has decided to take his own dabble into the subject of American truthfulness in The Ethics of the Lie.  I came across this bookforum review via Arts and Letters Daily just as I was saddened to watch Andrew Sullivan's credibility wilt in his London Times article on the topic of Sarah Palin.  Reading some other reviews that were more about the book made the book seem potentially dull, but the bookforum review remains a delightful little conversation starter and reminded me of my interest in the topic.

One of my primary influences in discovering what I think truthfulness means is the philosopher Douglas N. Walton, who has written an excellent series of books on argumentation and logic (and, as an aside, a fabulous book titled Courage: A Philosophical Investigation which I would encourage anyone to read).  What I discovered reading his books is that first of all truthfulness takes a considerable investment of time.  Truthfully imparting information requires a commitment to time in dialog which I realized I do not have even for my best friends.  And that pharmaceutical company?  If they are going to tell me the truth they need to give me the entire dose response curve and also I have to pay attention.  Neither of those things are going to happen.

Putting a deadline on communication is the deathblow to truthfulness.  A thirty-second advertisement is either art or a lie- it is more about all the things it does not and cannot say than about the one thing it chooses to say.  Chat rooms are doomed from the start.  And election day brings out the very worst.

Truthfulness comes in the context of other values.  The heroes that march up the steps of congress to blow the whistle on some particular nefarious action represent a certain kind of ethical failure- the only moral good left is truth.  I think we a Americans have a very difficult time seeing that.  For us, the person with nothing but truthfulness left is seen as a kind of a saint rather than a crazed zealot who could not possibly have actual truth.  When someone makes a career of promoting truthfulness after one of these appearances, they have cut themselves free of ethics.  Ethics is the balance of values against each other- truthfulness, but also things like compassion, courage and loyalty.  If you could have them all in perfect harmony, there would be no need for ethics.  When only one exists, ethics is dead.

I find the bumper sticker "Well behaved women seldom make history," now the title of a book by the originator of the phrase, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, particularly repellent.  It is exactly well-behaved women- Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, to name a few of my heroes- who have made history.  I should add Gandhi, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks as heroic, regardless of gender.  They exhibited commitment, and also dignity.  Two attributes required to carry truth. (Apparently Dr. Ulrich cites some of the same examples in her book and book reviewers have pointed out the same conflict.)

I admit to taking those values and then finding myself at a loss on precisely what I am supposed to do with them.  The issue always comes down to time.  Last week a crazed woman screamed at me in a parking garage.  My options were to ignore her, which was really the reason she was screaming at me to start with, or to engage her in a longer conversation about what was going on, which neither of us had time for and which, in the state of decompensation she had arrived at, would have likely resulted in her getting arrested.  The "ignore" choice had dignity (for both of us), but it did not have commitment and it did not have truth.  I'm still working on this.

(This post approved by the ex-husband discussed.)

Executive or Secretary: judging Palin as super-woman or capable sister.

One of my first jobs out of college was as a receptionist at a privately funded think tank associated with one of the top business schools in the country.  Our chaired thinkers would pop across the lawn to the school to lecture, and the students would come back over to work on their projects and flesh out their business ideas.

One day an MBA student showed up for a meeting of some kind and spoke with me for a moment.  He quickly decided I wasn't suited to the secretarial role and suggested I go to college.

"I have a college degree."

"Oh, from..." (He named a nearby commuter college better known for on-campus violence than academic excellence.)

"No, from here."

He had no idea what to say next.  He couldn't fathom how the two of us could both come out of top universities, one to be a secretary and the other to be among the next masters of the universe.

The thing is, I wasn't supposed to be a "secretary."  I was a member of the administrative staff, doing the administrative work that kept the place ticking.  Sure, I made the coffee and ordered the file folders, but with a degree in philosophy and an acceptable grasp of the English language, I started out with some copy editing.  Then I moved into setting up elaborate Excel spreadsheets to track our Byzantine array of grant funding.  And soon enough I designed a database to capture some of the unique intellectual capital that was laying around in card catalogs and graduate student projects.  But even when I was done sitting at the front door and making the coffee, I could neither escape the vicious territoriality of the secretaries, nor enter the sphere of the male technical assistants.

I eventually used my new skills to escape the secretarial track and move to a new environment where my value is judged by what I produce.  I could say that part of the difference is that no one in this industry ever saw me as the secretary.  However, administrative assistants actually do move into professional and eventually management roles where I work.  I could say that the difference is female management, except that at the think tank the top management and chairs included women and fair-minded men.  In fact, these were men and women who I admire very much and who would likely be somewhere between hurt, offended, and baffled to realize that they had presided over a fundamentally sexist institution.

My current industry has a shortage of thousands of trained people and the shortage is only expected to grow in the coming years.  We have no room for any employees that don't want to be anything else, and limitless possibilities for those who do.  For any given corporation to survive, it has to take advantage of every skilled and trainable hand in the shop.  Such a situation isn't limited to my industry: the sudden growth in the worldwide consumption of sushi means that suddenly females are welcome on many sushi lines, and the absence of male workers during the great wars brought women into the factories.

The difference between my two workplaces was about the scarcity of resources and the subsequent willingness to value the work contribution of women.  The secretarial pool (and the nursing staff pool, and the teacher pool) has a limitless supply of women willing to sell their time and their dignity for a dead-end career path and bottom level payment for a variety of reasons.  For as long as three years after I left my final secretarial track job, I could still go back to each place where I had worked and find women sitting at the same desks, involved in the same cat fights, saying that no one had given them a chance to be anything else.  So long as they weren't willing to be anything else there would be no chances; so long as women are willing to undersell themselves there will be no equality in the market place and no respect for "womens jobs."

When the men returned after World War II, women did not leave the workforce; instead, they left their community and family activities.  Volunteerism amongst women dropped significantly and never recovered.  Despite a nation of women driven by uppers (as opposed to the downers required by the previous century of women) through a life of economic and community/family service, womens work output is actually not a bottomless resource.  Something has to give.  A woman who can't get ahead while simultaneously digging her grave under her own feet is seen as just not quite enough, but eventually there is just nothing else women can do and society as a whole suffers for it.

As I've mentioned before, this issue is taken as a point of national policy by the government of Singapore, which has realized that in order to get ahead economically the gifts of women must be mined along with the gifts of men (something other developing nations such as Afghanistan are ruthlessly pressed to do by the worldwide economic community).  However, Singapore has also realized that in order to get the full economic contribution of women, their family and community obligations must also be shifted.  This is about realizing the full economic contribution these woman can give: these are not matters of feminism and have nothing to do with the wellbeing of the women themselves.  Nonetheless, the acknowledgment that womens work is limited and therefore has value is a precept required for any kind of feminist advance.

Just as the women and men at that think tank could not overcome the forces shaping the culture of the secretarial pool, well-meaning people have trouble countering those forces on a personal level.  The New York Times reported that couples who try to create equal marriages find themselves swimming against the tide- both internal to the relationship and external.  As one male friend put it, "I want to marry an intelligent woman with a good career, but I realize that I also expect her to pick up my socks."  We don't expect a bachelor to pick up his own socks because he is busy, but we do expect a working women to be the only contact number a school keeps track of.

Now we are faced with a female Vice Presidential candidate who apparently has the career and picks up the socks. And she is hot (Although some of the hotness is apparently faked for various reasons, including a plethora of websites where you can now purchase swimsuits just like those shown on the VPILF!).  This is a woman who can do it all, plus dress a moose, and "still look like she got her eight hours on a sleep number bed" (blog BwP).  She is also in hot water for dismissing Obama as a "community organizer" in her convention speech.

Sarah Palin wasn't incorrect to highlight the difference between the community organizer and the person with real executive responsibility, however she was stupid to flippantly wave off community organizing experience rather than highlight her own growth from community organizer to mayor and state executive.  In her dismissal of her own roots, there is an unspoken dismissal of the powerless which is inherently racist and sexist and, in its sexism, feeds the fear women have that a successful woman views herself as someone who has actual evolved out of her own gender.  This is why so many woman hate Hillary Clinton: She wants to beat the boys at their own game and she has. However, her winning only serves to prove that women can be men.  In the gender-neutral global economy, we already know that and it has made us tired and cranky.

Gov. Palin thinks to appeal to women voters through her insistence on her femaleness being primary even to her accomplishments.  Blogger Alias Athena described it perfectly:

...she identifies not only FIRST as a mother but almost EXCLUSIVELY as a mother.  It's a little weird, and a little hard to believe given that controversial plane ride, but the fact is she is not running as the Gov. of Alaska but as a "hockey mother" turned politician, phrased as though it were just a step or two away from the PTA.  It's where her beauty queen status, reinforcing all the "transitional" stereotypes about what a really successful woman not only DOES but LOOKS LIKE, reminds people that she is "us" and furthermore, the "best" of us.  It's where it starts to really matter that she's had as many kinds as she had and still manages a baby with Down's while does an incredibly demanding job.  She isn't a super-politician, she's supermom from the paper towel commercials.

You know what the difference between a soccer mom and a hockey mom is?  One is more similar to a pit bull than you are.  Some women are starting to call Palin the "mean girl" brought in to be the pit bull for the campaign.  She has better watch out: this isn't high school any more and women are tired of being run into the ground while simultaneously being told that they aren't good enough.

Gov. Palin needs to get back to talking about executive experience.  Assumptions about the scalability of skills have always underestimated women's skills and dangerously overestimated those of men.  Red Cross founder Clara Barton and Mother Theresa are viewed with amazed respect for their feminine attributes of caring and service, but their executive skills are rarely mentioned.  Clara Barton ran the Red Cross for 23 years after founding the institution at age 60, after exhausting herself to near-death serving the wounded of the Civil War.  Mother Theresa successful replicated her ideals into almost 6,000 nuns, brothers and priests and countless lay associates working in more than 100 countries worldwide.  Both of these women had only managed classrooms prior to beginning their great works.  On the other hand, the inability of a horse show organizer known to his boss as "Brownie" to manage the Federal Emergency Management Agency resulted in the death of almost as many people as the biggest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.  While the horrors caused by men advanced beyond their ability are countless, we have yet to get the female leaders from past centuries and millennia their due. Gov. Palin really cannot waste any time making sure she gets hers.

Andrew Sullivan has been on a multi-day tirade against Gov. Palin, posting so frequently that one wonders if he stops to eat and so voraciously that he will surely be embarrassed about some of his choices once he does.  (Multiple posts about her rumored affair culminate in a post where the rumor is on the post and only after clicking the link do you find that it goes to the primary evidence that this is a non-story, and he's linking to "trooper-gate" even though he surely knows better by today.  He is an intellectual, not a partisan fool, and these things are an embarrassment.).  He made this offensive statement about the excitement over the Obama life narrative vs. that of Gov. Palin:

...Obama earned it; Palin was given it.

If there is one thing I can tell Mr. Sullivan with absolute certainty, it is that a woman does not develop from beauty queen to business woman, PTA president (word to the boys: "mean girls" wouldn't have let that happen if she wasn't someone special), mayor and governor, while having five children, because someone gave it to her.  She may be a pretty face, but she's also a damn impressive human being.

Regarding the likelihood of Gov. Palin's ability to manage her aspired-to VP role (and the very real possibility she could end up as President), David Frum blogged a letter from an Air Force officer discussing his first experience of combat and ending:

In the end, no one can be prepared for the crucible of combat or presidential power and responsibility until they are in the role due to its dynamic and unpredictable nature.  In the end we must base such a decision on potential.

It is legitimate to question the depth of Gov. Palin's experience.  She has been governor of Alaska for less than two years.  It is not legitimate to question her potential.  A governor can become President; there is no legitimate reason to question whether one can become Vice President, especially when running against a Presidential candidate who himself has never been an executive.  She is not the secretary of Alaska.