Is This a Great Country, or What?

Near one of my writing retreats (Peet’s coffee shop, Menlo Park) a young woman and a young man had set up a sidewalk table stacked with pamphlets and decorated with a poster calling for the impeachment of President Obama, who was pictured sporting a Hitler mustache. The man had on a safari-ish hat and the woman was wearing gray cargo pants. I went over to see whether the Tea Party, or maybe the KKK, had invaded Nancy Pelosiville.

“Why do we want to impeach president Obama?” I asked the woman. She didn’t look scary; she had lovely light cocoa skin and lustrous brown hair. She said that if Obama goes ahead with his plans to bomb Iran and invade Syria, we are going to end up in another war in the Middle East. Oh. Not where I thought this was coming from.

She had a booklet in her hand that she opened to a page calling for the revival of the Glass-Steagall Act. Even Sandy Weill wants it back, she noted. So do I, I said.  We desperately need great infrastructure projects like we used to undertake, she said. These produce jobs. We could bring water from Alaska to the parched lower forty eight. John Kennedy had the vision to put a man on the moon, she said. We did just land Curiosity on Mars, I said. She handed me a flyer saying Obama is anti-science.

I asked with whom we should replace Obama. Mitt Romney? No, not him, she said. He and Obama are both captives of Wall Street and the war machine. We don’t want to replace Obama with a man (or a woman, presumably), she said, but with ideals. She quoted Franklin Roosevelt: “I want to speak not of parties but of universal principles.”

About that time a wiry white-headed guy came up and sized the situation up much faster than I had. He asked her if she was a “LaRouchie.” She said she admired Lyndon LaRouche. He asked if old Lyndon was still in jail (for mail fraud). He was feisty and amusing, a hard-headed pragmatist poking at an idealist. I left them to it.

We aren’t going to elect a universal principle anytime soon, but the encounter was entertaining and, in a whimsical way, heartening. This woman still believes in the power of the people to rise up and shake the system to its foundations.

Or maybe her radical idealism isn’t inspiring at all. Maybe it’s depressing. Think of all those Naderites who took down Al Gore. Think of Rick Perry going out for a run (for president) and shooting the GOP. The thing about zealots, on either end of the political spectrum, is that, to paraphrase the old song, the thinking is over and the preaching has begun.

At that sidewalk table in Menlo Park it was unsettling to see such cultishness and paranoia, such misinformation, living side by side with so many political positions I agree with. It made me wonder how I sound to others. Am I a fanatic too? I don’t think I’m a conspiracy theorist, although now that I think of it the NRA does seem to have more influence than is understandable in the absence of it having J. Edgar Hoover-like files on most members of Congress.

I hardly know what I’m trying to say here, but I think it’s something like: Come on, people, think! We need to be practical. We’re not going to have a revolution, from the right or the left. We are what other countries hope to become with their revolutions. We aren’t children struggling to break free of our parents, we are on our own now. All we have at this point is each other.

This political season we are (again) having what feels like a bloodless civil war. We aren’t shooting at each other, but the ideological lines are drawn and we are flocking to the cultural and economic barricades. Like all civil wars, ours is hurting us. Instead of rebuilding our economy, we are calling each other names. We’re behaving only slightly better than the tribes and sects currently duking it out in the Middle East.

Civil wars always end. People get tired of fighting and pick up the pieces and go on together. But they do a lot of damage while they rage. We know that from watching what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq; we know it from our own Civil War. Nothing unites a divided people like a common enemy, they say. I hate to think we need a real Hitler, not just President Obama made up to look like one, to shock us to our senses, to get us working together again.

Dad's Vulcan Mind Meld

Remember that thing Mr. Spock did on Star Trek, the Vulcan Mind Meld, where he read the thoughts of some imponderable being? I used to do that with my children. I remember it so clearly with Cord, my oldest. Beginning when he was five or six, when some difficulty would come up, we would sit down together, maybe over pancakes, and I would be able to see into him. Like Spock, I felt like we were almost a single mind in those times. With my gentle probing, interspersed with long patient silences, there was no problem we could not solve. (The patient interlocutor is how I remember my part. Cord might say it was more like a breakfast lecture, although I am quite sure he liked the pancakes.)

Spock hasn’t done his mind trick in a long time now, and neither have I. My youngest, Nick, is twenty. It’s tough to get any of them to sit still for a good probing. A pointed silence from me over a meal today is more likely to prompt not a revelation of inner turmoil but a worried look: “Dad, are you okay?”

Adapting, I try to be craftier. On a walk, I might toss off a casual anecdote (never too long) with a thinly veiled moral. To their credit, they rarely roll their eyes anymore. I fear they may no longer feel they need to keep their guards up. They know that I’m toothless, that, as Bob Dylan put it, my sons and my daughter are beyond my command. They usually smile and put their own comic spin on my desperately earnest point. “Yeah, I heard about that guy, Dad. Isn’t he the one who [ended up in jail; flunked out; joined a Satanic cult]?”

I haven’t lost my power to see into my children’s thoughts, to guess their plans and schemes, hopes and dreams. What I have lost is the illusion that I have the power to alter them. When Spock came out of those mind-meld trances, he always seemed stunned. He would look gravely at Kirk and say: “I could see his thoughts, Captain. He’s planning…”

Kirk always knew what to do. Maybe he’s the one I should be emulating at this point. The good-hearted man of action. Kirk wasn’t a brooder. I’m sure Spock is on Prozac by now.

What to Tell Your Children About the Future

Tell them that the four men at the table next to me in a Palo Alto coffee shop are planning a venture investment fund they want to start in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where budding engineers and computer scientists are bursting into bloom at the University of Michigan. Tell them that a woman who came by my table to say goodbye is moving to Albany, New York to lead a biomedical research team that SSNY is letting her set up. Tell them that Gabby Douglass won gold in London by leaving home at fourteen to live near her coach in another state, where on some days she felt like the only black person in town.

There are plenty of stories now about college graduates who can’t find work. Plenty more stories about people who are so poor their children don’t get a fair shot. It’s unequal out there. Income and opportunity are not evenly distributed. It would be nice if there were a utopian fix for that, but there is not.

There is that drive within us, though, that makes me hopeful. Given a chance (and sometimes when not, when we have to make one), we want to do things. We want to solve problems. We want to compete. We want to be the best.

So a question I have been asking myself is not why are we like that--I leave that to evolutionary psychologists--but rather what conditions foster and support our being that way, what conditions make it most likely that our society as a whole can benefit from our individual desire to excel.

The answer, I think, is freedom. Freedom to choose. Freedom to take our shot. Freedom to fail and try again. No barriers.

See, that’s what we’ve been telling you, my Tea-Party friends say. And they’re right. I take my freedom for granted. Nothing (but me) has ever blocked my path. Indeed, it is only from the redoubt of my freedom that I am able to urge compassion for the less fortunate.

I’ve read The Road to Serfdom. I can see where Hayek (Granddaddy Libertarian) was coming from. But this is not 1943. Hitler and Mussolini are not running over Europe.

Nevertheless, there are threats to freedom today. Not totaliarinism. Not even spirit-crushing bureaucracy. The threat is symbolized by our Congress. The threat is doing nothing. The threat is not investing in our future. 

It is our national infrastructure that has made us the land of liberty, that has made freedom available to more than the landed gentry. It is our national infrastructure that makes it possible for venture money to flow from Silicon Valley to Michigan. For a Californian to move to New York to build a biomedical research team. For Gabby Douglass to go through Iowa on her way to London.

The underpinnings of our freedom are public safety, a healthy and well educated citizenry, and public support for commerce. Police and fire protection. Roads. The power grid. Clean water. Scientific research. Broadly distributed and affordable food. Good free education. Affordable health care. A little something in a rainy day fund for when you fall on hard times and need a little help getting back on your feet.

If we do not invest in these things, if we do not continue to make them broadly available to the public, they will not disappear, they will simply become attainable by only those who can afford them. Private tutors and private security forces. This is the way things worked in feudal Europe (you remember Europe, the place we don’t want to be like). A time of benevolent (or not) monarchs, toiling peasants, and revolutions. Entertaining to visit in movies, but not a way of life many of us want to return to.

Lady Liberty's New Lover

In 1883 Emma Lazarus wrote the poem “The New Colossus,” which in its closing couplets gave us something like our national soul. With apologies to Ms. Lazarus, and with longing for the sentiment she so beautifully expressed, here is my update.












No longer Mother of Exiles,
Embracing all within these lands.
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates now stands
A timid woman with a torch whose flame
Has dimmed, and her name

Fear’s Courtesan. From her beacon-hand

No light shines; her averted eyes demand

Nothing of those who invoke her name.

“Keep, Suffragettes and Freedom Riders, your storied pomp!” cries she

with hardened lips. “I cannot bear your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses beseeching their brothers.

The wretched refuse of poor health,

The homeless, the tempest-tossed I leave to others.

I turn my face to the caress of wealth.”

Nothing Left to Lose

Where do you stand on consequences? As in suffering the consequences for our choices. Does your answer depend on who is doing the suffering? For most of us, I think the answer is yes. The closer to home, the harder it is to resist stepping in to save the imprudent one.

Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?

Our children are the best examples, of course. We keep them out of trouble for so long that it becomes a hard habit to break. We know they can’t grow and learn fully without making their own mistakes, but still… Fortunately for domestic tranquility, about the time they become the most reckless they go off to college or run away from home so we can’t see what they are doing. Thank goodness for that.

But what should a parent do if a child who is no longer a child never quits making bad choices? Should we make up his bed in the spare bedroom? Should we drive him to detox? Should we pay for it? And does the answer depend not just on how much we care for him but also how hard we think he has been trying?

Those questions can be tough to answer when the reckless person is someone you love. What if you don’t even know her? Should you care if she drinks herself to death or abandons her children or lives on the street?

What made me start thinking about this (again) is an email debate I was copied on about whether it would be a good idea to make social security optional. The first question that jumped to my mind was: What do we do about the people who opt out and end up destitute? Do we just let them suffer? Tough luck, mate. You should have been wiser when you were young.

Sometimes it seems we are in the middle of another American Revolution. A surprisingly large number of people despise the government. They long, in Grover Norquist’s words, to shrink it down to the size that it can be drowned in the bathtub. They even call themselves the Tea Party.

Our last revolution (not counting that little squabble over slavery) was to rid ourselves of an exploitive monarch. This uprising feels more like we’re trying to toss out Mary Poppins. Instead of “No Taxation Without Representation,” the rallying cry is “No Nanny State.”

What would we do if we got our wish? Without all those tacky taxes, we’d all have more to spend on our favorite charity: ourselves. Then what? Some of us would be fine. Many would not. Are they just lazy and shiftless? Will they just be getting what they deserve?

The healthcare debate raises the same issue. We hate the mandate, but if we don’t all pay into the kitty there won’t be enough to take care of everyone. Is that okay? Is survival of the fittest really what we want?

So many young people love Ron Paul. That shouldn’t be a big surprise. They are breaking away from their parents. They are libertarians to their cores. They aren’t unkind, though. They help old ladies across the street. They wouldn’t ignore a plea for help from a man who had been stabbed and was bleeding on the sidewalk. What would we think of them if they would? That they were heartless and cruel. Maybe sociopaths. No one steps over a dying man and keeps on walking.

All over the world there are people who are starving and sick. Maybe we can’t help them all, but if we are to call ourselves a nation and have that mean anything it seems to me we must help our fellow countrymen. Does it matter how they came to their misery? How can we know whether they have made poor choices or just had bad luck? How can we know the life of another? We only know what we see, and when we see suffering, if we are to retain our humanity, mustn’t we act to relieve it?

We yearn to be free. Of parents. Of government. Of lovers sometimes. But, as Janice Joplin told us (in Kris Kristofferson’s words): Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. That’s about as nice a turn of phrase as I’ve ever heard. It’s wistful and sad, but it’s also inspirational. Without our ties to one another, there’s not much point to living.

And those ties don’t stop with friends and family, even if we’d like to think they do. They extend to those farthest away from us, to the weakest among us. We are all our own children. Sure, we may get frustrated with their bad behavior, disgusted even, but can we walk away from them? Do we want to be that free? Do we want to have nothing left to lose?

The Truth About My Father

Meg pointed me to a lovely piece in Sunday’s New York Times by Colm Toibin, in which he said, quite beautifully, that of course we write about our families, and of course we embellish them to make them fit into our stories. They say Hemingway had to get a new wife for each new book. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said, “Once a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed.”

The Everett McCord Claytons, I-IV

For years now, in my writing I’ve circled my father like a reluctant jackal, at first timidly nudging his lifeless flesh, lately tearing into it with what others might call savagery but to me feels like love. What other than love could explain why I would make him the starting point for a character in a novel with whom I live for hours every day? Perhaps it is a form of masochism. Or perhaps I long to understand him. Still. After all these years. Even as I am no doubt concurrently creating psychological mysteries for my own children to unravel after I am in the grave.

Toibin suggests that I torture my father for the sake of truth. Is that why, when I can speak so precisely about the gap in his teeth or the way he laughed as if he were sneezing, I swerve from reality and have him do something horrible he would never (I hope, but am not entirely sure) do? Toibin says such twists of actual truth are in service of the more universally understandable truths we are trying to tell with our stories. Not moral truths, but truths about how we are, how we behave. Each of us takes what we will from the behavior of others. One man’s truth is another’s blasphemy.

If you had known my father, you would say the man in the novel I’ve just finished is him. And you would say: Damn, I never knew he did all that awful stuff. The poor bastard. I’ve twisted him and tweaked him and made him party to outrageous behavior. A lot of what I say about the character that starts with him is total fiction. “And if I am lucky,” as Toibin says, “what comes into shape will seem more real and more true, more affecting and enduring, than the facts of the case.”

There is truth to that high-toned rationalization, to the hope that my story will resonate and endure, but it does not fully explain why I write about my father. There are obvious reasons, of course. I write about him because it amuses me, because I like to think back on our times together, good and bad, because I’m still trying to understand him and myself. But those tepid explanations do not go to the heart of the matter. They do not account for my continuing fascination, both loving and morbid, with a man who died forty years ago.

No, the real reason I write about him, I think, the reason I hold him up before me and by the light of the window examine him from all angles, like a butterfly specimen on a pin, is that it keeps him alive in me. It’s almost as good as actually having him around. Better perhaps, because I always get the last word.

Not Like Me

My grandson Miles is a clone of his dear old granddad. His other granddad. He doesn’t look a thing like me. And that’s not the only way in which we’re not alike. At age seven, he’s a kid triathlete. My other grandson, Tim, is a dead ringer for his maternal granddad too. He likes to fence (whereas I only like to sit on them) and play the piano (on which I might eke out chopsticks on a good day…after a lot of practice).

I’ve always wished I'd gotten my grandfather’s photographic memory and my mother’s lovely singing voice. Alas, I was blessed with neither. I see the memory trick in my children, though, and a couple of them sing like angels. Luck of the draw, I guess.

Traits I can identify and admire, wish I had, hope my kids do, are only a small part of who we are, though. I used to think our children are a kind of continuation of ourselves, if not clones at least Darwinian conduits. Perhaps they are in some ways, but I now understand that, in terms of how we think of ourselves, when sperm hits egg and all those genes are up for grabs, what is produced is a whole that is different than the sum of its parts. Gait, eye color and chin cleft may be passed along, but the individual is distinct.

I don’t know why this should surprise me. I never thought I was my father or my mother. I never saw any of them in me. Why then should I expect to see myself in my children? Vanity, I suppose. But Mother Nature is not vain; and she apparently believes that to be anything other than an apple orchard, we must not only be a little different, but we must think we are a lot different.

We all feel this individuality within ourselves. We feel unique, set apart from others. This strong sense of self gives us the courage to chart a course for ourselves in a confusing and difficult world. Eventually we may come to realize that we’re not really that different, that we’re more like apples than we’d like to admit, but certainly for the first half of our lives we think we’re special, that we can make a difference. Most of us think we know best about most things. You need that self-confidence to boldly go.

Our questing, our dreaming, has been the source of our collective strength, with each of us functioning like individual genes to make up a dynamic organism. Nature’s little practical joke, though, is that all that self-confidence, all that knowing we are right, all that pursuing our own truth, makes it hard for us to get along. In a world that is no longer uncharted, in which we are so crowded together that cooperation has become an essential survival skill, the egocentricity that made us great explorers is getting in the way of our becoming good collaborators.

Watch This!

I spent the afternoon in the Rodin Sculpture Garden at Stanford a few days ago. Courtesy of Gerald Cantor, there are twenty Rodin bronzes displayed in a charming garden reminiscent of the crushed stone promenades of the Tuileries. They are all just sitting out, open to the sun and the moon and the touch of anyone who wants to place her hands on the graceful and powerful nudes to try to imagine how the artist created such beauty.

On a bench near me, three young men sat sketching the statutes (inspiring my scribble). Families and couples came and went. A large group of young school children wearing identical yellow t-shirts played among the sculptures, touching the bronzes, flitting on and off a low landscaping wall like canaries.

It’s amazing to me that we have such a gift. I’ve been there dozens of times, mostly with Meg, mostly in the moonlight, and I’ve never seen even a candy wrapper on the ground. There are no guards to speak of. The garden is open to everyone, all the time, day and night. In this world of graffiti tags on every public place, such completely accessible pristine beauty is something of a miracle.

I always learn something when I go there. I never tire of contemplating The Gates of Hell, for instance. Whatever your religious views (or not), the downfall of man is a fascinating subject. Here’s what I learned on my last visit:

1.     Rodin was an ass man. I knew that, but I was especially taken by the feeling this time. Beautiful smooth curves for the women, powerful haunches for the men.

2.     Kids are lucky. Those yellow-breasted schoolchildren were completely absorbed in the experience of being there together. Nothing existed for them but their group in that time and place.

The older one gets, the harder it is to recapture that feeling. Sex produces it, but it’s hard to sustain that for a whole afternoon in a crowded garden. Alcohol (and no doubt other substances) produces something like it, but not the real thing, something synthetic that is more like alert dreaming, a kind of self-conscious unselfconsciousness.

Watching those children, I did not feel the loss of their heedless innocence so much as the loss of my mother, who died four years ago. I’ve been wondering lately why I miss her so much. We were close near the end of her life, but not unusually so. My father was the one I idolized. When he died, forty years ago, I missed him but somehow not as much as I miss Mom now. Why is that?

My grandparents lived to be almost a hundred. Even after Dad’s death, his father and my mother’s father were there for me, along with my mom and both my grandmothers. By the time Mom died, though, she was the last of those who came before me. The last of those I knew would save me from myself. The last of those I could call out to as I jumped from the base of a Rodin sculpture I shouldn’t be climbing and say, “Watch this!”

Lonely Boy

I’m just a lonely boy. Lonely and blue.

I’m all alone. With nothing to do.
--Paul Anka

Love songs are always like that. Love lost. Glorious suffering. We love them. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because we’ve all been there and, mostly, we’ve all survived. Don’t worry, bro, you’ll find another.

But what if instead of love it is your job that you’ve lost?  Nowadays it’s not so clear that another one is going to come along. Or if it does, it’s not likely to be as loving as the one that got away. There’s no more company man. You can’t just be loyal and put in your time and expect a pension and a gold watch. Those days, and those jobs in the manufacturing sector that built America in the twentieth century, are gone.

Public sector jobs have taken up some of the slack, but now they too are under pressure. Local, state and federal governments can’t afford all the workers they have hired. And they really can’t afford the pensions they have promised them. A tectonic shift is underway. When the plates come to rest again, many will look out over a landscape they no longer recognize. The places they used to work will be gone. The loyalties they had will mean nothing. It’s like waking up and finding a note of goodbye from your lover. Sure, you knew some of the old passion was gone, but you never expected to be alone.

I once read that we need three things to make us happy: someone to love; something to do; and something to look forward to. The last two are closely related, of course, at least on the downside: if you don’t have work, it’s hard to see what you have to look forward to.

Country songs are full of men moaning about how their lives are over because their babies have left them. They’ll drown their sorrows for a while, maybe take a long drive in their trucks, and someone else will come along to mend their broken hearts. That’s not happening on the jobs front, though. And it doesn’t look like it will for a while.

Even as stubbornly optimistic as I am about the economic future of America, it’s hard to see where the new jobs are going to come from. In manufacturing, we are aiming higher, trying to invent new, more highly skilled processes. Those aren’t going to result in Henry Ford’s mass production lines, not anytime soon anyway. In the public sector, we are cutting back, making do with less government. That may be a healthy thing in some ways---unless you are one of the government workers who loses your job.

It looks like we may be looking at a long period filled with a lot of lonely people with nothing to do. They are going to be depressed. Their health will suffer. Their home lives will suffer. Their children will suffer. My question is this: What does that mean for the rest of us?

One thing it means, of course, it that it will be harder for the overall economy to start growing robustly again. Two thirds of our economy derives from consumer spending, and those folks who are out of work aren’t spending. So we’re all going to have to adjust to that new reality, at least for a while.

But what about the personal cost to others? What is our collective responsibility for that? What a pal loses his girl, we might try to fix him up with someone. At least we can buy him a few beers while he looks for himself. You can live without a girlfriend or boyfriend longer than you can live without a job, though. A few beers isn’t going to solve the jobs problem.

Maybe there is nothing we can do. Maybe this is just one of those times of great change and dislocation, like when the country went from agrarian to industrial. But in the past, except for the depression, we have always been growing. There has always been the hope of upward mobility.

In the 1930’s, when the economic tragedy was at its worst, Roosevelt put the nation to work building roads and dams and parks. There were bread lines. There were soup kitchens. There were hobo jungles. It wasn’t pretty, but we seemed to care about one another. We seemed to want to help one another.

Perhaps because this period of job loss has not been as bad as it was in the depression, we seem not to have been jolted into that same broadly felt empathy. Or maybe we think the people who are suffering are mostly illegal aliens who should just go home. Or gay men who should just go fuck themselves.

Tough times can be when our national character shows its strength, but the political season seems to bring out the worst in us. We’re all feeling beat up by the long years of economic torpor, and we want to blame someone: the government, Wall Street, taxes, loss of moral character. There is blame enough to go around, but the truth is that there have always been business cycles. We have always gone on periodic credit binges. We have a bad hangover this time.

The people who are not to blame, however, are our neighbors who are out of work. They deserve our help in whatever way we can give it: private charity; public works projects; unemployment benefits; taking our old clothes to Goodwill. The one thing they don’t deserve is to be ignored while they wake up each morning with nothing to do.

There Ain't Nothing Like Her Nowhere

There was the time we came home from work at two in the morning in separate convertibles, tops down on a hot L.A. night, riding side by side on the deserted freeway, giddy with our work and each other, teasing off ties and bows, acting out a Randy Newman song that we were writing for ourselves: “I Love L.A.” meets “You Can Leave Your Hat On.”

There was the time we hiked in the woods together and fell into each other’s arms in a bed of poison ivy that we had to treat for weeks with daily doses of champagne. There were the flowers from Milo Bixby that we gave each other, outrageous spring extravaganzas that Monet would have died to have painted. There were the twenty-four hour trips to Laguna Beach that felt like weeks in paradise.

There were days in hospitals with babies who were too young to have to be there. Nights of too much work, too much pressure, too much success, too much failure. Just too much. Days on the farm swimming in the pond, feeding cows, beginning her first novel as the snow hushed the land and the wood stove warmed her. Years more of hacking a winding path through one wilderness or another to be able to write and be with our boys.

And now, as our sons make their way into the world, trips to Paris where the light on the Seine at dusk is almost as beautiful as her face, uplifted to me as I hold her in my arms and wonder if Randy Newman knew when he wrote those songs what he was offering to someone like me, someone who wanted to live them and never stop, who had a woman who made that possible, a woman who made everything possible.

Roll down the window, put down the top
Crank up the Beach Boys, baby
Don’t let the music stop
We’re gonna ride it till we just can’t ride it no more.

Happy anniversary, lover.

Seven Reasons to Vote for Mitt Romney

The Supreme Court upheld Obamacare this morning. Thank goodness for Mitt Romney. He learned his lesson in Massachusetts. What was he thinking back then? If elected president he promises to do what SCOTUS wouldn’t: get rid of the Affordable Care Act.

You want what?

Get behind him. Get out the vote. This is what his election will mean for you:

1.     If you get seriously ill, you may not have to add expensive health insurance premiums to your woes. Your insurance may well be cancelled.

2.     If you lose your health insurance and you’ve been sick in the past (and not too sick at that), you won’t have to worry about wading through the confusing morass of health plans. You won’t be able to get one.

3.     If one of your kids decides to move back home from the commune, you won’t have to argue with her about whether she should pay for health coverage on your plan until age 26. She won’t be able to get on it.

4.     If you have coverage, you can take comfort that your insurer will always be there for you as there will be no limit on the premium increases it can demand to boost its profits.

5.     If you get a chance to experience the joy of shopping for your own individual insurance plan, you will not be deprived of the character-building rigors of arduous study. Insurance exchanges that make it easy to compare prices for policies that are all required to offer certain basic features, like 100% coverage for annual physicals, won’t exist.

6.     When you get old (say it ain’t so) and are on a Medicare prescription drug plan, your donuts will still have holes.

7.     You won’t be deprived of one of your main cocktail party grouses: high health insurance premiums. Without all those young healthy people mucking about in the insurance pool, you can continue to pay the high price of exclusivity.

Before the Court’s ruling, polls showed that two-thirds of Americans wanted the Court to strike down Obamacare. There we go again (as Reagan might have put it). An activist Court has gotten out of step with the popular culture. Take heart, though, with all the good reasons I’ve set forth above, I’m optimistic that we can rise up and elect a Congress and president who can do what we want them to. That is what we want, isn’t it?

Sowing and Reaping: the Fear Edition

As a father, I always felt terrible when I frightened my children. I was not much more than a child myself when I had my first son, and sometimes I acted like it. He and I both had temper tantrums. I had been raised with spankings, so I passed them along now and then. Over the years I mellowed, and by the time I had my last son, twenty-five years after the first, I was a shadow of my old terrifying self. My youngest son even shamed me into dropping spankings. They weren’t much more than occasional irritated swats by then, but he wouldn’t put up with them. It’s wrong to hit people, he told me, with withering moral clarity, at age four. That was the last one.

None of the moments of which I am proud as a father involved making my children fear me. So I was shocked to see a brass plaque set in the large patio of a church in my neighborhood that contained, in bold letters, the following inscription: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

Really? In my experience, the only thing people who are taught to fear learn is to be afraid. Well, that’s the first thing they learn. After not too long, they learn other things as well. They learn to lie. They learn to hide from the one they fear. They learn to hate. Of course, hating your earthly father is (usually) less risky than hating your heavenly father, the one you have been taught will meet you at the pearly gates with a thumbs up or down for eternity.

If you fear someone you can’t afford to hate, you look around for some other target, someone else to blame for the dreadful conflict you feel inside. Non-believers are obvious candidates for this transference. Gays. Abortionists. Catholics. Jews. Muslims. Take your pick. Anyone who isn’t afraid of the same god you are, anyone who isn’t suffering for his faith as reverently as you.

I haven’t been religious for a long time, but I was an altar boy and my great grandfather was an Episcopal minister, so I thought I had a grip on what religion, at least protestant and protestant-like religions in America, were all about. Love your neighbor. Turn the other cheek. The Golden Rule. That sort of thing. I knew about the wrathful god of the Old Testament (even thought he was kind of cool in a Terminator sort of way, with all that smiting of firstborn and parting of waters), but I understood he had been put on the shelf as vain and somewhat unstable, like the gods of pagans. I thought he had been replaced by the kinder, gentler message of the man my great grandfather believed was god’s son.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve come to see that I was wrong. There is still a lot of religious anger out there. And it’s not confined to fanatics who strap on suicide vests and blow themselves to kingdom come. You can see it in the contorted faces of a crowd of Evangelical Christians confronting abortionists or gays. You can feel it in the Catholic Bishops’ bitter condemnation of their own progressive nuns.

All this anger isn’t doing a thing for our relationships with one another. Anger is corrosive enough to eat away even the strong love of a child for a parent. Imagine how quickly it can dispense with regard for someone you don’t even know, someone for whom your hatred has little cost to you. Hating should be hard. It should be painful.

I don’t know what is being preached in churches, temples and mosques today, but I hope it isn’t fear. If I could go to my neighborhood church and dig up that plaque, I would replace it with one that offers not a prescription for wisdom but a warning: Fear of the Lord is the beginning of intolerance.

Knowing and Remembering

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
--George Santayana

One of my grown sons is carefree about his children. The other is cautious. One lets his son jump off cliffs (metaphorically speaking), the other encourages his to enjoy more tranquil pursuits. One has children who have never been sick or had accidents. The other spent way too much time in neonatal intensive care units with premature babies. Think you can match the personal history with the protective parenting? It’s not that hard, right? Most of us would be the same way. Once burned, and all that.

It’s no accident, I think, that the Great Recession of 2008 did not happen while my grandfather was still alive. He and my grandmother rented out rooms in their house to make ends meet in the 1930s; and they were among the lucky ones. The crash of 1929, just after he became a stockbroker, and the ensuing depression, changed my grandfather forever. You couldn’t get him to borrow too much if you paid him.

The forerunner to the Great Depression was wild stock speculation fueled by easy credit. Economists are still not entirely sure why the bursting of the stock bubble triggered a depression, but I know what my grandfather thought. He believed it was the result of too much greed, too much debt, and then, as the edifice tumbled, blind panic. People grabbed their money from banks, many of which failed; commerce ground to a halt; nobody could find a job. It took WW II to jolt the economy back to life.

The Great Recession of 2008, which everyone seems to agree was pre-ordained by over-borrowing, had to wait for my grandfather’s generation to hand over the helm of the economy. Didn’t the people who came after him know the same things he did? Yes, but they didn’t feel them.

Economists like to assume we are all rational actors, but neuroscientists tell us we are not. New studies show that our economic behavior, just like some of our more basic drives, is strongly influenced by biology. Hedge-fund traders get a rush of adrenaline and dopamine when they are on the hunt. It makes them feel invincible. It enables outsized risk-taking. The other end of the neurological spectrum is the fear of debt my grandfather felt. His brain had been sensitized by financial trauma, just as a trader’s is doped by the prospect of a killing in the market. Much of the time we are acting no more rationally in the conduct of our financial affairs than a teenaged boy trying to get laid, or a rabbit running from the shadow of a hawk.

I’m not sure there is anything to be done about all this. Short of some modern “Total Recall” serum that could implant fear of stupid risks, it seems we just have to live with the limits of our experience. Perhaps economists should take that into account when they try to model future behavior. How has the population changed? Is there anyone still around who lived through that last disaster, or has our collective response been reset to naïve?

Remembering is different than knowing. The experiences we have change us in ways that reading about them cannot. They inoculate us like a flu shot, or sensitize us like a bee sting. Perhaps George Santayana understood the semantically subtle but physiologically powerful difference between knowing and remembering. As for me, I did not. I assumed that societies kept records and passed them along and that each new generation possessed the cumulative wisdom of all who came before. Not so, apparently; or at least not always.

For all who, like me, desperately want to believe we can learn from the mistakes of the past, I offer this sobering modification to Santayana’s dictum: Those who have not themselves experienced the pain of the past are doomed to plan the future with the innocence of children.

War is the Answer

I was having dinner with a friend who is smart about business and I asked him what he thought was needed, what with the Euro crisis, America’s anemic recovery and China’s slowing growth, to get the global economy going again. His answer was one word: war.

It is true that periods of great growth often follow wars. There’s all that rebuilding to do, and fewer people to do it. It’s kind of depressing, though, to think that war is the only way back to prosperity. My friend suggested that a worldwide plague might also do the trick. Anything that would reduce the number of workers, so that those who remain have more to do.

Another approach, he said, would be to figure out how to get Africa to buy more stuff. Jobs and wealth come from making and selling things, and the worldwide supply of buyers is not growing fast enough. Getting a continent like Africa rich enough to buy iPads may be tough, though, when it isn’t currently rich enough even to eat.

What we have here, to paraphrase the old movie line, is a failure to innovate. I’m not talking about microprocessor speed or social networks, I’m talking about economic systems. We’ve got the oldest system in the world, the only one really: producing and selling. A half century ago, John Kenneth Galbraith said we needed to develop something different, not to replace production as the means of economic growth, but to supplement it. He suggested public works. Build roads and schools, improve electric grids, desalinate seawater, vaccinate against disease.

Infrastructure investments usually don’t make money quickly enough to attract private capital, so they depend on government funding. That’s a tough sell these days, with austerity being the buzzword in many capitals. Even those who want to invest in public works have a hard time finding the money. In the midst of recession or fragile recovery, not many have the stomach for raising taxes. So I’m not holding my breath for a surge in public projects that would employ current workers and lay the foundations for a better society for their children.

On Memorial Day we mourn those who have fallen in combat. We pray others will not die as they have. My friend doesn’t think war is the preferable answer, he just thinks it may be the inevitable one. If populations continue to grow worldwide without sufficient economic support, they will end up fighting over resources. They will end up at war. That will be good for business, but little else.

If we really want to honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, we must face the reality that governments have to invest in their people, in their future. If they don’t, scarcity will be dealt with the way it always has been: the strong will take, the weak will surrender, and many will die in the process.

The Garden of Love and Trust

Not long ago I was leaning on someone I didn’t know well to pay money he owed me, and he said he was offended that I didn’t trust him. It made me wonder about myself. Am I just too cynical? When someone gets offended that I don’t trust him, my first instinct is to reach for my wallet to be sure it is still in my back pocket.

Every day here in Paris, Meg and I encounter young girls who ask us to sign a petition they carry on clipboards. They are pretty and slight. They smile and point to a paper that already has a few signatures. The way they gesture without speaking gives the impression that they may be deaf or mute and seeking support for some organization that would help them. We’re not Parisians, so we assumed our signatures would be of no use to them. After being approached many times, though, we became curious and asked a security person in the Tuileries what the girls wanted. Your money, he said. They are pickpockets.

Every little forest dweller comes out at the time of day when it is safest and goes about his business with one eye out for predators. Just about the first thing we tell our children when we send them out to play is not to take candy from strangers. It’s a dangerous world out there. Trust is almost unnatural.

We humans give it our best shot. Children trust their parents, for a while; Darwin set that up. Lovers trust their mates, until they don’t, until a careless gesture or hint of indifference causes a shiver of doubt, the way an open window lets in a chill.

Remember the lyrics of that old Linda Ronstadt song? “Love is a rose, but you better not pick it, it only grows when it’s on the vine.” Well, trust is a gardenia. It grows in the same garden as love. And in all but the most tender conditions, its beautiful white petals turn brown. If you are lucky enough to find it in bloom, enjoy it while you can.

Talk This Way

As far as I can tell, other countries developed their languages so that I could make an idiot of myself for their personal amusement. I’m in Paris now, butchering their beautiful French. I know a little Italian and Spanish too, and, under pressure, I find myself saying buongiorno and de nada as often as merci beaucoup. It’s embarrassing. I must say, the French are good sports. They never laugh out loud. Their smiles are rueful and indulgent, the way one might regard the naiveté of a child.

"Do you understand the words
coming out of my mouth?"

When I’m not trying to talk to Parisians, I watch them: walking in the park, kissing, holding hands, tucking a blanket around a baby. They do all that stuff the same way I do. So do Czechs, Germans, Mexicans and Italians (except, in the case of Italians, for that thing they do with their hands when they speak, which I love but am too repressed to be any good at).

Somehow, humans all over the world have evolved to do everything the same except speaking. You might think that, given our common ancestry, the genetic expression that results in so many identical physical traits would also have supported a common language. I have no idea why it did not, but the differences are startling: Mandarin is not one bit like English; Italian couldn’t be farther from Russian.

Which brings me to this question: Are our thoughts as different as our languages?

Do you remember that discussion you had with your friends when you were young about whether when you each say you are seeing the color red you are in fact both seeing the same thing? Or whether you are merely calling something you see differently by the same name? In the absence of seeing through another’s eyes (and brain), the best anyone can say about that is that there is no way to know.

So when I describe a feeling I am having as anger or sadness, how can you and I know that what I am actually feeling is the same thing you feel when you say you are angry or sad? If the parts of our brains where speech is developed produce such different languages, might not the underlying thoughts be just as different?

In America, we’re having a particularly tough time lately getting along with the Muslim world. Our languages are very different, but we think that when we speak through translators we can understand each other. We know, of course, that cultural differences will remain even after the words are known, but what if there is more to it than that? What if our differences go beyond culture, all the way down to how the neurons in our brains talk to one another. What if speaking or thinking our respective words for “god” or “wife” or “loyalty” causes fundamentally different activity in our brains? Different connections, different triggers of base instincts, different adrenal responses, different passions.

Sometimes when I’m trying to make myself understood in another language, I slow my speech and exaggerate my syllables, maybe even throw in a little Franglish. I’m sure my efforts are comical, and I’m pleased to do my part to entertain others by being a hapless American. In matters weightier than ordering a cup of coffee or finding the bathroom, though, our language barriers may be more serious. If our words don’t mean the same things to us, if they affect us emotionally in fundamentally different ways, even with the best translation we may never understand or be understood.