Perspective

A few days ago I listed to a podcast from The Economist with an episode on doing business in Toronto. Having lived in Toronto for about sixteen years, I was interested in hearing what business people from around the world would be told about visiting the city. One piece of advice that particularly interested me was the warning not to tell Torontonians (or Canadians in general) that they are very much like Americans. To fail to see that Canadians are not like Americans, the commentator said, is likely to make the rest of one's business dealings in Toronto go rather poorly.

It is axiomatic that the more closely two people (or peoples) resemble one another, the more eager they are to have their differences acknowledged. Seen from the perspective of Europe or Asia or Africa, Canadians and Americans probably do look much more like one another than different from one another, just as from a North American perspective Dutch people and Flemish people seem quite similar; after all, they both speak Dutch, and the fact that some of those Dutch speakers live in the Netherlands while the others live in Belgium does not seem like a difference of much significance. The closer one gets to that part of Europe, however, the more it matters to notice subtle differences.

When I was a boy growing up in New Mexico, it was of vital importance to me that people from, say, New England or California know that New Mexicans are not to be confused with their neighbors, the Texans, Arizonans, Coloradans and Oklahomans. Even when I was nearing the age of sixty, I winced every time the friends I had made while living for some fifteen years in Montreal said they imagined I must be very excited to be moving back to my native Arizona. Distinguishing between Arizona and New Mexico was not nearly as important to my dear Canadian friends as noting the vast cultural ocean that divides Montreal from Toronto.

As a general rule, when people are viewed from afar (whether the distance is geographical or cultural), the distance at which they are perceived blurs distinctions that are more apparent from a closer perspective, and there is not much of a price to pay for that blurring. Sometimes, however, failure to notice differences can have disastrous consequences.

An example of a disastrous failure to notice important distinctions that we are all witnessing these days is found in the reaction to many Americans to the proposed Islamic cultural center being planned to be built two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. In the minds of too many Americans, the fact that the people who attacked the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 were Muslims is sufficient reason to be deeply offended that the people proposing to build a cultural center dedicated to world peace are also Muslims. In the minds of some Americans there is no need to distinguish one Muslim from another or one kind of Islam from another. The failure to make that distinction, however, is a tragic triumph of ignorance and prejudice over knowledge and reason.

On the August 27, 2007 podcast edition of the CBC radio program As It Happens there is a segment in which a man who identifies himself as progressive Muslim argues that Canada (and the United States and much of Europe) is endangering itself by failing to find a middle way between two extreme forms of ignorance. One extreme is to regard all Muslims as essentially peace-loving people who are doing their best to fit in and who are entitled to have their differences from everyone else in a pluralistic and tolerant society. The other extreme is to regard all Muslims as belligerent radicals intent on destroying the West and returning civilization to the twelfth century.

The first of those extreme forms of ignorance, associated with the classical European liberal tradition, fails to take into consideration that some people really are malevolent and have every intention of doing harm and feel morally justified to do harm to those whom they see as the enemies of God. Not everyone is equally enthusiastic about democracy and tolerance and freedom of speech.

The second of those extremes, associated with the so-called far right in Europe and the Americas, manifests as the xenophobic fear-mongering that lies behind the virulent opposition to the proposed Islamic cultural center two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.

The middle way consists in recognizing that there really are Muslims who subscribe to a doctrine of armed jihad against forces of unwelcome modernity—just as there really are bellicose Christians who regard abortion as a form of genocide and who feel called by God to bring death to those who provide legal abortions, and just as there really are biblical literalists in Texas who feel obligated to do everything they possibly can to keep scientific hypotheses out of textbooks used in public schools, and just as there really are people so fundamentally frightened and insecure that they believe that homosexuality poses a danger to traditional marriage and immigration poses a threat to American values.

The middle way consists in saying “Yes, Virginia, there really are ignorant people, and ignorance really can be as dangerous as it is ugly, and as tragic as it is laughable, and it really would be a worthwhile undertaking to eliminate ignorant people, not by eliminating the people themselves but by removing their ignorance.”

The middle way consists in looking at issues and events from as many perspectives as possible and recalling that what looks indistinguishably similar from a safe distance can be importantly different when viewed up close, and that sometimes the nature of that difference is precisely the distinction between safety and danger.

I miss getting stung

The first letter I remember writing was a postcard to my father. Written in the scrawl of a three-year-old, the message took up the entire writing space on the card. The message was “I got stung by a bee.” That was a big event and seemed worth writing to my father about. These days, I suppose a three-year-old kid with such an important message would send an SMS on her mobile telephone.

A couple of days ago, I was walking in a nearby city park and admiring the many heads of white clover growing in the grass, and my mind turned back to the painful lesson I had learned at the age of three about walking barefoot on a lawn filled with clover. The prospect of getting stung by a bee freighted the adventure with the thrill that goes with risk. But as I looked out over the clover in the city park a few days ago, I noticed something very odd. There was not a bee to be seen anywhere. Where there should have been hundreds or thousands of bees, there was not one to be seen.

Absences always get my attention, and the absence of the bees in the clover made me go looking at flowering shrubs and bushes that usually attract the critters, and I saw no bees anywhere. Their absence seemed ubiquitous.

I listen to quite a few science programs on the radio, broadcast by National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (a radio and television network funded by the Canadian government and based on the belief that there are people scattered around the country who would actually like to be informed and to hear intelligent discussion on important issues—think of it as the antithesis of Fox News and MSNBC). A few weeks ago on one of the several science programs I regularly listen to, there was a feature on an Australian biologist who has dedicated his life to studying all kinds of bees. He was talking about the dramatic worldwide drop in the populations of just about every species of bee. Whether one looks at North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Europe or Australia, bees are dropping like flies.

The decline of bees is very worrying, given that a large percentage of the food crops that the human race has become dependent on growing and eating are pollinated almost exclusively by bees. While it's true that pollen attaches to the hair of cats and dogs and other furry quadrupeds, nothing is as efficient as bees at delivering pollen to where it does the most good in fertilizing plants. It's not just that bees are fun to watch and add a touch of adventure to walking barefoot through the clover. Our lives depend on them. We will miss them, but not for long. Most of us will die before we have had a chance to cultivate protracted nostalgia.

So what accounts for the silence of the bees? There are numerous theories. Some say they are succumbing to pesticides. But pesticides have been around for many decades without having dramatic effects on the bee population. It could be that pesticides have cooperated with the general degradation of the environment to produce a critical mass of stress factors that have finally overwhelmed the bees. The Australian scientist I heard suspects something else: cell phones. All over the world there has been a steady rise in the use of mobile telephones, and in most parts of the most heavily populated parts of the world, transmission towers are popping up every few hundred meters. As a result, all of us are being exposed to large amounts of electromagnetic radiation and frequencies that are no doubt having some effect on our health, although we may not know how exactly the waves are affecting us until the damgae has been done.

Meanwhile studies have been done that suggest that the frequency of waves used to transmit all those terribly important text messages and telephone conversations being conducted via mobile telephones has a serious effect on the biological navigation systems of most kinds of bee. Because of impaired navigation abilities, bees are unable to find their way back to their colonies. They are not reproducing as frequently as they used to do, and they are not able to care for their young. One account of this effect is on the website of Institute of Science in Society.

There is so much to worry about these days. Will Sarah Palin attend her daughter's wedding with Levi? Who can worry about bees while such major issues as that are weighing on our minds? Still, one can't help hoping that the word will gradually get out that our addiction to cell phones is helping our addiction to oil to make our current way of life untenable.

May I request that if you do decide to help spread the word about the possibly deleterious effect of cell phones on bees, you use some medium other than an SMS?

A sign of the times

A few days ago I saw a bus on the streets of Albuquerque bearing a large sign that read “Abortion is an Obama Nation.” Being a fan of country music, I enjoy clever plays on words and puns, so I had to admire the play on the word abomination. On the other hand, I am also a fan of accuracy, and I prefer information to distortion. Whatever one may think of the morality of abortion, there is no truth whatsoever to the claim, implied on the sign on the bus, that President Obama is promoting or facilitating abortion. It is not true that the health care bill passed this past winter is going to enable tax-payer dollars to pay for abortions. That claim is another of the many examples of shameless emotional manipulation that has taken the place of rational political debate in the United States.

But what if the new health care bill did provide funds for women seeking legal abortions? Would that be any reason to oppose the bill? It is in the nature of health insurance policies of all kinds that people who require medical attention and who have insurance policies can have legal medical procedures at least partially paid for through their insurance plans. This means that careful drivers help pay for the medical procedures needed by those who are injured in accidents caused by careless drivers. It means that non-smokers pay for the illness acquired by smokers, that thin people for for diseases acquired by obese people, that joggers and people who routinely work out at the gym pay for the illnesses of couch potatoes, that vegetarians pay for medicare care of meat eaters, and that pacifists help pay for people who are wounded as a result of participating in wars they have volunteered to fight. That is how insurance works. It ceases to work as soon as some policy-holders refuse to allow their premiums to pay for medical care needed by other people with different lifestyles, political views or social values.

Public health insurance, such as Medicare, does not and cannot allow non-smoking tee-totaling contributors to opt out of the plan because their contributions are paying for smokers and those who have used alcohol. Public health insurance schemes work just like all other health insurance schemes in this respect. Those who opt to be covered for medical care they may need someday cannot elect which other people can receive medical care, nor can they determine the circumstances under which other subscribers will be covered.

The fact that it has come to be seen as a legitimate issue that some insurance policies may cover medical procedures that some policy-holders do not approve of is one of the many signs of the decline of skill in thinking clearly. This decline has reached epidemic proportions. Clear thinking is hardly encouraged by anyone in the commercial world, because people who think clearly do not buy products they do not need or really want, and when people stop buying what they do not need, many an unnecessary business enterprise suffers.

Clear thinking is also not encouraged by politicians of any major party, since clear-thinking people are unlikely to support politicians who are mostly funded by commercial enterprises that encourage policies that serve the interests only of the stockholders who invest in businesses and neglect the interests of consumers, workers, the environment and people in general. Sloppy thinking is essential to maintaining the status quo in American commercial and political life. And so slogans replace discussion; implications replace evidence; and deception replaces information.

Just about everything in contemporary American life has become an abomination. The United States is a country in steep decline. There are some of us who are still waiting for the Obama nation that the Democratic party promised us during the election season of 2008, but to hope for a liberal or progressive government is to hope against all evidence. Sadly, the Obama nation has proven to be more of the same old abomination we came to expect under the leadership of Presidents Reagan, Bush pére, Clinton and Bush fils.

At least we still have country music filled with clever wordplay to amuse us as we slip steadily into the abominations of mediocrity.

Sanitized at last!

Readers of The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will recall the reference to telephone sanitizers—people whose task it was to keep pay telephones clean so that no one would pick up a dreadful disease from the earpiece. The advent of the mobile telephone has pretty much eliminated pay telephones from the landscape, so professional telephone sanitizers have gone the way of steam locomotive engineers.

I have recently discovered where all those unemployed telephone sanitizers have gone. Yesterday, as I was getting my shopping cart at the local grocery store, I noticed a small red basket filled with discarded plastic wipes. Above the basket was a dispenser of little plastic rags, apparently saturated with some chemical that presumably proves lethal to germs, or at least renders them temporarily stupid. On the dispenser was a neat sign explaining to shoppers that they could use the wipes to clean the parts of a shopping cart that some part of the human body might touch. I stood by and watched several shoppers carefully wiping down the push bars of their grocery carts so that they could enjoy the experience of shopping without having to worry about acquiring some fatal or debilitating disease from germs carelessly left there by previous customers.

I felt a slight adrenalin rush as I embarked on the risk-filled adventure of shopping without a sanitized grocery buggy. The thrill of the adventure was muted somewhat by feelings of dismay as I thought of all the plastic being added to landfill sites by chemical-saturated plastic sheets that were used once and then thrown away. Surely, I thought, shoppers who are worried about picking up contagious diseases from shopping carts might be advised to purchase their own hazmat suits before entering the grocery store. It is probably only a matter of a year or two before we are treated to the sight of shoppers wearing ventilators and astronaut suits as they pick their way through the potential dangers of the produce section.

A few months ago, on one of the science programs I listen to on the radio, I happened to hear a scientist talking about how much more compromised the natural immune systems of Americans are compared to those of Europeans, Asians and Africans. The prime suspect in the decline of the ability of Americans to fight off infections and viruses, said the scientist, is our collective obsession with sanitation. Everywhere one goes these days, dozens of precautions are taken to shield customers from stray germs. People preparing sandwiches wear latex gloves, plastic caps covering all their head hair, and even plastic cups to contain their beards, if they be beard-sporting sorts of people. Salad bars and buffets are covered with Plexiglas shields placed at a height making the fetching of a leaf of spinach require performing awkward contortions for anyone more than 125cm (49 inches) tall. Americans proudly pay for their food with germ-laden paper money bearing the slogan “In God We Trust”, but they are careful not to let any stray bacteria land on their dinner plates, just in case God can't be trusted to protect them from contagion. Ironically, it could well be precisely their unwillingness to let their natural immune systems have a bit of a workout that is making their immune systems too flabby to fight off the common cold.

Every now and then someone from the Tea Party manages to say something that almost makes sense. A couple of days ago I heard a Tea Party-backed candidate say that what is wrong with America is that Americans have become so obsessed with innocuous trivialities that they overlook the truly dangerous factors of life. I could not agree more, although I suspect the Tea Party and I might have some disagreements about details as to what is an innocuous triviality and what is a true danger. (The candidate from the Mad Hatter's Tea Party did go on to say that one of the gravest dangers facing America is illegal aliens from Mexico, whereas I would be more inclined to say that the most serious threat to America is the people who are already living here legally and who established their hold on the land by a skillfully executed combination of genocide, treachery, larceny and environmental devastation, all fueled by unrestrained greed and selfishness. But aside from that silly little detail, there is room for broad agreement between me and the Tea Party analyst of the American condition.)

There is more to say on this topic, but I find myself growing faint as I consider all the germs that are no doubt entering my immunity-deficient bloodstream through my fingertips as I touch the keyboard of a computer that may have been walked on, or perhaps sneezed upon, by one of the cats while I was out shopping. The cat might well have caught and eaten a mouse carrying hantavirus and then slobbered on my space key. I can't write any more before I check myself into the emergency care unit at the nearest hospital.

Pray for me, eh?

"Spill, baby, spill!"

The world has failed to meet its target to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, set under the 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity, according to a report released Monday by the convention secretariat.

Based on about 120 national reports, the third edition of Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) acknowledged the failure to meet all 21 specific goals, including "status of threatened species improved."

In grades of 1 to 5, the best score was 3 for four targets. Three targets were given 1. (Asahi Shimbun)

As the world has helplessly been watching oil spurting upwards from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico at alarming rates, reactions from various quarters have been spewing into the airwaves. Some have sought to minimize the disaster—the most notorious being from Rush Limbaugh who first opined that since petroleum is a natural substance, there is no reason to be alarmed by an oil spill, and then recommended that the Sierra Club should be made to pay for the clean-up, since it was the lobbying of environmentalists that had pushed the oil companies off the land into the ocean. Others have pushed the point that oil spills are extremely rare and that the failure to continue drilling for oil wherever it is found would be, as one spokesperson put it, “to wave the white flag of surrender to countries in the Middle East that hate freedom.” Still others have said the calamity in the Gulf of Mexico is a wake-up call to Americans, a warning that we must find less environmentally damaging sources of energy; some have even offered the questionable suggestion that nuclear power is a source of energy that should enthusiastically be pursued.

As all these suggestions and counter-suggestions were being aired on radio, television and the Internet, a report was released by the Convention of Biological Diversity that not a single one of the twenty-one recommendations made eight years ago as part of a strategy for reducing the loss of biodiversity by 2010 has been met. This report prompted the producers of Science Friday on NPR to begin their May 14 program with this observation

As we sit here on this pleasant Friday afternoon — I hope you are having a pleasant afternoon — something is happening out there. Plants and animals are disappearing at an alarming rate, or some of them very close to disappearing.

Researchers say that about one-third of the world's species are now threatened with extinction. Nearly half of all bird and amphibian populations are declining, wildlife habitats are being overrun, and the march of invasive species is increasing on all continents in all kinds of ecosystems.

The rapid and massive loss of biodiversity cannot be attributed to a single simple cause, but the scientific consensus is that human activity is a root cause. The human population nearly quadrupled in the twentieth century, growing from approximately 1,600 million in 1900 to approximately 6,000 million in 2000. That alone has been sufficient to push many species out of habitats they had occupied for thousands of years into less hospitable environments. But the population growth has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the amount of energy that the human race uses to make itself more comfortable. As a result of increased population using more energy per capita, the International Energy Agency reports, global consumption of energy rose from around 1000 million tons of oil equivalent in 1900 to around 10,000 million tons in 2000. (See Janet L. Sawin's PowerPoint presentation entitled Making Better Energy Choices.) In other words, as the human population quadrupled, human beings collectively consumed ten times as much energy. The side effects of that energy consumption have been disastrous to the other species that share this planet with the human race and to the human race itself.

It is regrettable that it takes disasters to make people think of changing their habits; it is even more regrettable that often even the worst disasters are insufficient to make people think of changing their habits. Economist Paul Krugman has written that the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico could be just what it takes to reverse America's backsliding in environmental policies. One can only hope he is right. On the other hand, the fierce opposition to sanity on the part of those who stand to make profits from collective insanity should never be underestimated. Also not to be underestimated is the willingness of human beings to be comfortable and to be spared the pains and fatigue of hard labor. Few of the people who spend their days surfing the web in air-conditioned or heated buildings would voluntarily give that up to make a livelihood hunting and gathering food and warming themselves on a cold winter evening by huddling with others around a fire made of burning buffalo dung. In short, given a choice between unsustainable comfort in an impoverished ecosystem and sustainable hardship in an ecologically healthy system of rich biological diversity, not many would hesitate to opt the former. After all, there are fewer mosquitoes hovering around one's laptop in Starbucks than around one's unwashed body in a mountain forest.

The Chinese Daoist satirist Zhuangzi asked more than two thousand years ago why people kept building bridges over rivers and spoiling the serenity of the waterways with rowboats. Why can't people be content to stay where they are? Why do they build machines to save them from having to work with their own bodies? When we build machines, he observed, our hearts and minds become mechanical, and when our hearts and minds become more like machines, we lose our ability to enjoy the beauties of nature and of loving relationships with one another.

As I sit in my living room staring stupidly at a television set showing numbing pictures of plumes of crude petroleum rising into the ocean like columns of smoke blackening the blue summer sky, my old friend Zhuangzi makes more and more sense. Why, I wonder, am I not listening?

Taxing my patience

I have never understood people who do not like to pay income taxes and estate taxes. It makes little sense to live in a society that provides roads, bridges, control towers for airplanes, a postal service, police and fire services, a national park system and a number of agencies designed to protect the public from insentient entities that have no conscience (such as commercial corporations), without being willing to pay for them. The only time I feel unhappy about paying taxes is when a disproportionate amount of it is spent on things I do not find necessary or useful. The 2009 tax year was one in which I found myself unhappy at how most of my tax dollars were being spent. The following table offers a summary. (The source is The Friends Committee on National Legislation website.

Percentage	Category	Explanation
33%	Military	24% of the 2009 budget is for the Pentagon's budget of $767,463,000,000, 6% is paying interest on past deficits, and 3% goes to veterans affairs.
27%	Economic stimulation	26% of the 2009 budget went toward bailouts of corporations that were deemed “too big to fail,”and 1% went to such things as job training and various social programs aimed at keeping the economy vibrant or helping those who were suffering because the economy was not vibrant.
17%	Health care	This covers the budgets for Medicaid, medical research sponsored by the NIH, centers for disease control, public health programs, and Indian health programs. This budget does not include the budget for Medicare, which is not funded through tax moneys but rather through trust funds.
11%	Responding to poverty	Budget for providing food, housing, utilties, and educational programs to people who need public assistance.
9%	General government expenses	7% of the 2009 budget goes to paying the interest on previous deficit spending in civilian programs, and the rest goes to funding the Congress, the judiciary system, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and the Treasury.
2%	Science	Scientific and environmental research, environmental protection, NASA, the national park and national forest system, oceanic research, atmospheric research, and most departments within the Department of the Interior.
1%	Diplomacy	The budget of the Stae Department, support of the United Nations, the cost of maintaining embassies and consolates, support for the Agency for International Development, and all non-military foreign aid.

Several aspects of this budgetary information captures my attention.

• If one adds the interest paid on past borrowing for military expenditures and the interest paid on past borrowing for civilian expenditures, it turns out that 13% of the tax money that is collected from Americans is paying for past debts. Given that the federal budget for 2009 was $3,184,888,000,000, this means that some $4,140,355,440,000 went to servicing past debts.
• The percentage of the 2009 budget for the Pentagon was lower (33%) than in 2008 (43%), but the actual amount ($1,039,531,000,000) was higher than in 2008. The president's recently proposed budget call for a significant increase in military spending, which should bring the percentage back up to 39%. The reason the pecentage amount of the total budget spent on military was lower in 2009 was that an extraordinary appropriation was made for bailing out financial institutions that were “too big to fail.”
• The combined cost of maintaining the three branches of government is relatively modest. What is expensive is the decisions that America's elected and appointed officials make. While I would be perfectly happy if 5% of my tax dollars went to the military, I am not at all in favor of the 28% that is spent to invade and occupy foreign countries, maintain military bases in more than 130 countries, and maintain and guard an obsolete nuclear arsenal and an arsenal of illegal chemical and biological weapons. So 28 cents of every tax dollar collected from me is going to military expenses I do not approve, and another 26 cents in 2009 helped pay for a bailout of financial instituions that were being rewarded for unprecedented degrees of greed and stupidity, while the victims of the policies of those institutions received almost nothing. That is a total of 54 cents of every dollar I paid in taxes going toward enterprises I consider foolishly wasteful. I would be happier if 54% of my tax dollars paid for reducing domestic poverty, funding education and science, supporting the UN and giving non-military aid to foreign countries and paying for a single-payer government-run health-care system that provided basic medical insurance to everyone in the United States, including visitors from foreign countries.

Although I am probably slightly to the left of some members of the Tea Party movement, I agree with their claim that government spending is out of control and that neither political party is serving the interests of the majority of Americans. A nuclear arsenal is not in anyone's interest, nor are all the bombers and fighter jets and helicopters parked in American airbases around the world, nor are stimulus packages paid to American auto manufacturers that have consistently built oversized fuel-inefficient vehicles and to financial institutions that grant mortgages to people who cannot afford them and lend money to poor people at usurious rates of interest. But unlike those who like the Tea Party, I do not think the answer is to reduce the size of government. It is not less government that Americans need, but good government. That has been in very short supply for as long as I have been alive. But it is never too late to try to achieve it.

Anyone for a nice cup of tea?

The impetus for the Tea Party movement is excessive government spending and taxation. Our mission is to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize our fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with our three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets. From the Tea Party Patriots
Mission Statement and Core Values

Who would argue with curbing excessive spending, whether in the household, or in the state legislature, or in the Congress of the United States? And who isn't in favor of curbing excessive taxation? Being against excessive spending and taxation is like being against unreasonable force. The devil, as they say, is in the details, or in the definition of such key words as “excessive” and “unreasonable.” As for the three core values, they also sound like something pretty much everyone would be in favor of, depending, of course, on how those values are spelled out. So let's look into this matter a little further.

Fiscal Responsibility by government honors and respects the freedom of the individual to spend the money that is the fruit of their own labor. A constitutionally limited government, designed to protect the blessings of liberty, must be fiscally responsible or it must subject it's citizenry to high levels of taxation that unjustly restrict the liberty our Constitution was designed to protect. Such runaway deficit spending as we now see in Washington D.C. compels us to take action as the increasing national debt is a grave threat to our national sovereignty and the personal and economic liberty of future generations.

Having the freedom to spend the money that one has earned is a fine ideal to strive for. It is very difficult to exercise that freedom unless a good banking system is in place, preferably a banking system regulated in ways that ensure fiscal fairness. Probably the best way to achieve that is to have a government that both devises those regulations and implements them. Paying for such a government will require raising funds somehow. Taxation seems a good way to raise those funds. So the real question is how those taxes are to be raised. If the Tea Party Movement favors individuals keeping as much of the money they earn through the fruit of their labor, then the main tax burden should be borne by those who earn money through investments. This means that corporations and capitalist investors should be taxed, and so should those who inherit money from their relatives. So the Tea Party Movement appears to be in favor of what conservatives inaccurately call the death tax and what everyone else correctly calls estate taxes. So a system in which capitalists are taxed rather heavily, while laborers are not taxed very much at all, sounds very good to my ears.

Taxing major corporations would go some distance to reducing the amount of money that funds lobbyists; as Tea Party fans love to point out, government of the people by the wealthy and for the corporations is not exactly what is meant by the phrase “government of the people, by the people and for the people”—a phrase coined by Abraham Lincoln (who was not a founding father, and who advocated federal laws abolishing slavery in all states, even in those states that wanted to retain slavery, and whose words should therefore be quoted with care by Tea Party Movers).

On the matter of wasteful government spending, I have been advocating for a very long time for a reduced military. The United States maintains military bases in 130 foreign countries. (See Konrad Roeder's blog.) About 42% of every federal tax dollar is spent on the bloated and unnecessary military, which arguably does far more to make enemies and provoke them into hostility than to keep them at bay. The United States spends 37% of all the money spent on military in the world. (So says Wisegeek.com) That, by my lights, is excessive. If the world wants so much military running around, let other countries pay for it. It is time from the United States to cut its military budget to about 10% of what it now is. That would lead to a dramatic reduction in taxes and government spending and would leave just enough military to deploy to clean up after natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and all the other things God inflicts upon us when we forget that in God we trust. So far, I am liking the kind of tea these folks are brewing. What more do they have to say for themselves?

We, the members of The Tea Party Patriots, are inspired by our founding documents and regard the Constitution of the United States to be the supreme law of the land. We believe that it is possible to know the original intent of the government our founders set forth, and stand in support of that intent. Like the founders, we support states' rights for those powers not expressly stated in the Constitution. As the government is of the people, by the people and for the people, in all other matters we support the personal liberty of the individual, within the rule of law.

Who could possibly argue that the Constitution of the United States is the law of the land? It is somewhat questionable, of course, whether what the original founders believed is what should guide us. After all, most of the original founders believed that only male property-owners should be entitled to vote. Quite a few of them also believed it was morally acceptable to own slaves. The abolition of slavery, and suffrage for women (such as Sarah Palin) and former slaves, were achieved by amendments to the Constitution and were not thoughts of the original authors. So if the doctrine of original intent means the Constitution cannot be amended, then we might have to do away with all the amendments including the Bill of Rights. Eliminating the Bill of Rights, of course, would wipe out most of the freedoms that the Tea Party Movement folks would like to preserve, so some method of allowing some deviations from the original intent of the male property-owners who wrote the Constitution may have to be found. Perhaps something like having a Senate and House of Representatives empowered with making new laws, even laws that deviate from the beliefs and practices of the original authors of the Constitution, could be put into place. Wait a minute. Those mechanisms are within the Constitution already, so I guess we can conclude that the original intent of the authors of the Constitution was to create a nation in which people were free, even encouraged, to move on in ways that do not reflect all the original intent of the founding fathers. So it looks as though what the Tea Party Movement favors is something like the status quo, that is, a government that changes its own laws and guidelines as a result of learning from the collective experiences of the citizens of the country.

Somewhat more promising is the principle that the federal government should not interfere in state laws. It would be a relief to see states able to pass laws allowing same-sex marriage without fear of having those laws overturned by the federal government, which has no constitutional power at all concerning marriage laws. It would also be a relief to see states given free reign in determining whether their own citizens can produce, sell and use alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, LSD, heroin, cocaine and other medical and recreational products. There is no point in having federal agencies controlling drugs and alcohol and firearms. Perhaps even states should not have jurisdiction over such things. Those are clearly local matters, best left to counties, municipalities and neighborhood associations.

A free market is the economic consequence of personal liberty. The founders believed that personal and economic freedom were indivisible, as do we. Our current government's interference distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty. Therefore, we support a return to the free market principles on which this nation was founded and oppose government intervention into the operations of private business.

From what I have been able to read, the founders had quite a diversity of opinion on the extent to which markets should be free. So if we are going to adhere to the principle of original intent of the founders, we should be prepared to continue having healthy debate on how much markets should be free. So once again, it looks as though the Tea Party Movement advocates something very much like the status quo.

This issue of learning the intent of the founding fathers bears just a little more investigation. It would be difficult to understand what their intentions were if we did not read what they read. I am very much in favor of this aspect of the Tea Party Movement. We should encourage reading Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, John Locke, David Hume and many of the other great thinkers whose writings shaped the thinking of Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Hamilton. Reading those classical authors and all the figures of the European enlightenment (Bacon, Voltaire, Rousseau) would do us all good (not to mention keeping philosophy departments in business)—arguably reading the classics would be almost as edifying as listening to speeches by Sarah Palin. And like the founding fathers, we would want to enourage a healthy skepticism about religion. Perhaps having every American read Thomas Jefferson's version of the Bible would be a good first step toward understanding more about the original intent of the framers of the Constitution.

All things considered, if the Tea Party is for dramatic reduction in wasteful and unnecessary military spending by closing foreign bases; and if they are for heavily taxing corporations and investors and those who inherit money rather by earning their money through honest labor; and if they are for ensuring the individuals are free from predatory lending practices that lead to massive credit card debt and mortgage foreclosures; and if they favor liberating people from onerous medical expenses by implementing a single-payer universal health-insurance plan; and if they favor a return to classical education and an education based on a thorough familiarity with the authors of the European enlightenment, an education tht enables people to write and read very long sentences such as those found in David Hume and other authors whose ideas shaped the original intent of the founding fathers—then I am all for the Tea Party Movement.

As the Canadians say “It's tea time. Put on the kettle!”

The Empire Strikes Fat

Every time I spend a couple of weeks outside the United States I am stunned on returning by how many seriously overweight people there are in the country. We fat people are everywhere to be seen. At a time when the country's politicians are pondering health care reform and looking for ways of cutting back on constantly rising costs, it is painfully obvious that one starting point would be do to put more effort into educating the public about all the diseases associated with obesity. Education is a place to begin, but clearly more than education is required. This is an area in which Americans need a government that interferes in their personal lives and limits their misspent, squandered and abused freedom.

As obvious as the oversized people in the United States are the oversized servings put before them in restaurants. In Europe or Asia, a fairly common size for a serving of a soft drink is 200mL (about 7 fl. oz.) On the campus where I teach I frequently see students walking around with 16 ounce or even 32 ounce containers filled with sugary soft drinks. It is not uncommon for restaurants in the United States to offer as many free refills of a large container of Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola or Dr Pepper as a customer can drink. A European or Asian can expect to pay approximately the same for a standard serving of Coca-Cola as an American pays for a serving several times as big. The same thing can be said about coffee and about solid foods. Europeans and Asians pay about the same for a standard serving as Americans pay for a much larger standard serving.

According to the McDonald's website, a McDonald's Happy meal consisting of a cheeseburger, small french fries and 8 ounces of 1% chocolate milk adds up to 700 calories. According to the Nutrient Facts website, chocolate milk has 157 calories, so if you are on a diet, you might want to replace 240 mL of chocolate milk with 240 mL of Coca-Cola, which has only 97 calories according to a page on the Coca-Cola website. On the other hand, going for a double cheeseburger, a large serving of French fries and a 16-ounce Coke will bring the caloric intake up to around 1134—about the same as five slices of vegetarian pizza or 100 spears (38 cups) of broccoli or 10 large apples.

It is not only the people and the servings of food on their tables that are oversized, but also their vehicles. The majority of automobiles on European and Asian roads are fuel-efficient compacts and sub-compacts. In some countries, the number of automobiles on the road is considerably smaller than the number of bicycles, motorbikes and scooters, not to mention pedestrians who get from one place to another with no vehicle at all.

Americans eat and drink too much for their own good, they drive too much and they walk too little. Is there any way to coax them into eating and drinking less and walking more? One fairly obvious answer is to follow European and Asian examples. Make prices much higher. Imposing heavy taxes on sugary and fatty foods would discourage their consumption. Levying at least a 200% tax on a McDonald's Happy Meal ™ while leaving fruits, vegetables and whole grains untaxed would go a long way to helping people make better food choices.

As for exercise, Americans are not at all likely to volunteer to drive their unnecessarily big cars less as long as fuel prices are as ridiculously low as they are in the United States. The price of gasoline in most European countries is about triple the price in the United States, while Canadians pay about $1 per gallon more than Americans. Mexicans pay about the same as Americans, despite the fact that the minimum wage in Mexico about 55% of the minimum wage in the United States. According to Nation Master website, a starting salary for a school teacher in Mexico is around $10,465 per year, in contrast to $25,707 in the United States. A starting salary for a school teacher in the Netherlands is $25,896. What this means is that a Mexican school teacher has to work 2.5 times as much as an American to earn enough money to buy one gallon of gasoline, while a Dutch school teacher has to work three times as much to earn the cost of a gallon of gasoline.

If fuel prices in America were comparable to those in Europe, Canada and Mexico, there is no doubt that Americans would walk more and be more healthy (while, as a bonus, contributing much less to greenhouse gases that cause climate change). The best way to achieve those prices is to levy substantially higher taxes. The effect would be to make Americans less prone to expensive obesity-related illnesses, which would bring down health costs. It is time for Americans to consider the advantages of being a physically and morally healthy nation instead of a degenerate empire of lazy and sick fat cats. The extra revenue raised by those taxes could then be used to fund a government-run single-payer health-care system providing universal coverage. It would make living in the United States a little more like living in a civilized country.

America's drug lords

About fifteen years ago, when I was still living in Canada, I took a railway trip from Seattle to Denver. The person in the seat next to me was a Japanese American. Somehow as we talked through the night, he happened to mentioned that a neighbor of his had recently gone into bankruptcy as a result of medical expenses. The man in the family had had a heart attack, which led to a short stay in hospital. By the time he was released and had had all the interventions his physicians recommended, his hospital bill was considerably higher than all the money he had put into his retirement plan. After losing all his savings, he sold his house, and even then did not have enough to pay all his medical expenses. As I listened to this story, the thought crossed my mind that I was having a conversation with a lunatic who entertained himself by making up unbelievable stories. Surely, I thought, no country could be so primitive and backwards that it would not provide for the medical needs of all its citizens. Since moving to the United States, I have learned that such stories are not uncommon, and that the United States is indeed a country so primitive and backwards that it does not provide for the medical needs of all its citizens.

Recently I had a first-hand experience that demonstrated to me just how dysfunctional the health-care system in the United States is. I was prescribed a medication called Lovenox (enoxaparin sodium), an anti-coagulant that helps the body deal with blood clots. When I went to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription, the pharmacist told me it cost $171. My first thought was that for some reason my insurance plan did not cover this medication. The reality, however, was that my prescription drug insurance plan does cover the cost of this medication. The dosage I was prescribed costs $1300, all but $171 of which was covered by my health insurance. A search on the Internet showed me that the same dosage in a Canadian pharmacy costs $292.

For years I have known about the difference between the costs of prescription drugs in the United States and in Canada. It is not unusual for name-brand prescription drugs to retail for a fraction of the retail price in the United States. (In the case of Lovenox, the Canadian price is 22% of the price in the United States.) What accounts for such a discrepancy? The answer is simple: government regulation. Canadian regulations allow for pharmaceutical manufacturers to make a reasonable profit; they do not allow pharmaceuticals to be sold at a price several times the cost of production. As a consequence, name-brand pharmaceuticals typically cost only slightly more than their generic counterparts.

Pharmaceutical companies in the United States have taken advantage of (and helped promote) the widespread paranoia in American culture about “big government.” By pinning the emotive label “government interference” on all attempts to protect consumers from the kinds of inflated prices that merge in a “free market economy” dominated by a few giant corporations that have squeezed small players out of the game, those with a vested interest in maximizing their profits have managed to convince much of the American public that it is in the interest of all Americans to have unregulated markets. The results of the blind prejudice for free-market capitalism—a prejudice that has prevailed since at least the end of the First World War—have been escalating medical costs, housing bubbles, and massive personal credit-card debt exacerbated by exorbitant interest rates. In the war on the public being waged by unregulated capitalists, the capitalists have won one campaign after another, and all but a tiny percentage of the public has suffered constant defeat and humiliation.

A friend of mine from Vietnam told me once than in his village there was a proverb that went something like this: “By ridding the village of bandits, we make room for the pirates.” He reported that where he grew up there was a sense of fatalism that no matter what one does to try to eliminate rogues, charlatans and crooks, the dishonest are always a step ahead and ready to bend every law to their own advantage. Ordinary people, and especially honest people, were thought not to stand a chance against those who were determined to take advantage of them. Perhaps that comes close to being a universal story of the world. What people often fail to recognize is that the sense of fatalism constantly works to the advantage of those who are out to take care of only their own interests, no matter what the consequences for everone else. Failing to be outraged by outrageous circumstances only serves to perpetuate them.

In my enounter with outrageously high pharmaceutical prices, I more or less got off the hook. I had an insurance plan that absorbed the costs. People without such insurance plans face either a life of untreated medical conditions that shorten their lives or make their lives less comfortable, or a life of financial hardship. And those of us who are fortunate enough to have insurance plans that pay the unnecessarily high medical costs face having to pay higher and higher premiums. Insurance companies are no less interested in making high profits than pharmaceutical companies. And they are no better regulated.

If America were a democracy with an informed electorate, people might be better protected from the drug lords and insurance moguls. Unfortunately, America has not been a representative democracy for quite some time. No candidate who is not backed by big finances has a chance to be elected. This means that almost everyone who is elected is at least as indebted to those who have financially backed their campaigns as they are to the citizens who voted for them. Hardly anyone has an interest in looking after the welfare of ordinary people. There is no money to be made in caring for people and maintaining a compassioante society. Being shameful and dishonorable in our society carries with it no penalty more severe than having to endure the scorn of an occasional blogger.

The war of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Oslo - US President Barack Obama has scratched items from the agenda surrounding his upcoming date to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo, the Nobel Committee in the Norwegian capital Oslo reported Friday. A previously planned press conference before the ceremony on December 10 is to be cancelled, while a short press conference after Obama's meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg is also likely to be cut.

The US president's various domestic and international political commitments were given as the justification for the cancellations. (US World News)

It would be false to say that I am disappointed in how the first year of the Obama presidency has gone. Disappointment is a feeling that comes about when one was expecting something that did not come to pass. Unfortunately, the Obama presidency has turned out so far to be pretty much as I thought it would turn out. During the Democratic primaries, he seemed to have the least well-thought-out plans for health care reform. He consistently said he would take troops out of Iraq and put them into Afghanistan. His rhetoric on the importance of “finishing the job” in Afghanistan worried me throughout his campaign. His apparent commitment to the notion that “finishing the job” of hunting down Osama bin Ladin seemed naive, superficial, ill considered and ignorant of history. Of all the candidates in the Democratic primaries in the early stages of the campaign, I thought I could probably live with almost any of them, but there were two who worried me and who would, I hoped, be quickly eliminated from the race. Those two were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. When they were the only two left standing, I backed Hillary, reluctantly at first and then more enthusiastically as I got to know her (and her opponent) better. When Obama was chosen as the Democratic candidate, I began to think seriously about voting for Ralph Nader. If I had not panicked at the possibility of having Sarah Palin as a vice president, I might well have voted for Nader—or written in the name of Dennis Kucinich. I am neither surprised nor disappointed in Obama. I am, however, sick at heart.

Obama's feeble leadership in the the area of health care reform has led to limp bills that, if passed, will result in few positive changes. When House Minority Leader John Boehner speaks of the government takeover of the health care industry, I can only groan and say “If only the government could take the well-being of the American people out of the hands of rapaciously greedy and under-regulated insurance companies and for-profit health-care providers, we might have a chance to design a system in which caring for all people mattered more than caring for a few wealthy shareholders.” As it is, however, gutless leadership has led to a gutted set of measures that will still leave far too many people unable to afford even basically adequate health care, and will still leave insurance companies under-regulated, and will still leave American medical care overpriced and of the lowest quality among all industrialized nations.

Of all the failures of the Obama administration, there is none that matches the sheer folly of his Afghanistan policy. A couple of months ago at Leiden University I saw a poster advertising a talk by a Dutch political scientist, the title of which was "Afghanistan: De oorlog van Obama." (Afghanistan: Obama's war). That title captures a number of perceptions. The war in Afghanistan is not a war of the people of Afghanistan, nor a war of the people of the United States. Nor is it a war of necessity. Nor is it a war that is possible to win, if only because it is not at all clear what winning even means. It is a war that can only produce losers. Many Afghans will lose their lives; many more will lose their homes and their means of livelihood and their dignity and their self-respect. A few Americans will also die; many more will bear for the rest of their lives the psychological scars of seeing what no human being should ever have to see; even more Americans will continue to lose confidence in the ability of their own government to make rational decisions. America as a nation will continue to lose the respect of its allies. The American economy will continue to lose stability as war debts mount to levels far beyond the ability of any nation to pay. The only gain for America will be a gain in enemies, a dramatic increase in the number of people who are determined to bring American influence to an end and to establish their own autonomy. There is no one else whose war this is; it is indeed Obama's war in much the same way Vietnam became Johnson's war and Iraq the war of George Bush père and George Bush fils. It is another in the long series of wars into which America has been led by presidents obsessed by the demons of bad reasoning and a poor grasp of history.

When President Obama goes to Oslo on December 10 to receive his Nobel Peace Prize, one can only hope that he will hear a small, still voice coming from deep within his heart saying “Man, thou dost not deserve this honor.” Whether he will then be man enough to listen to that voice, admit his errors, turn down the prize and insist it be given to someone more deserving—that remains to be seen.

The world as seen from Europe

One of the most interesting (to me) aspects of being in Europe for the past two months has been seeing all the ways in which Europe is connected to the entire world. I have noticed before while traveling in Europe that the news and commentary on the European version of CNN has stories from all around the world. Even the weather reports tell what the weather is and is expected to be in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Americas and the antipodes. In contrast, I almost never hear anything about the weather in Chihuahua, the state in the United States of Mexico that borders the state in which I live in the United States of America. As for news coverage, I almost never see anything on American television except what is going on in Washington, DC and in the lives of a few carefully monitored celebrities.

What is even more striking to me is the advertisements. During the half hour I watched television news coverage on CNN on a Dutch television station this evening, I heard advertisements in both English and Dutch about business opportunities in Nairobi, Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Ankara and Riyadh. It was interesting to hear a man with an American accent talking about all the advantages of doing buisness in Singapore, listing among the tremendous business advantages the health care system that keeps employees healthy with little cost to the company. (Will they ever let this guy back into Kansas I keep asking myself.) On other ventures into watching Dutch television I have seen advertisements for banks and investment firms in Nigeria, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Interestingly absent have been advertisements for business opportunities in the Americas.

The quality of television programming in the Netherlands is not especially encouraging, but when is television ever uplifting? Because the Dutch-speaking population in the Netherlands and Flemish Belgium is relatively small, Dutch television stations show quite a bit of programming from Germany, France, Spain, England, Canada and Australia, sometimes with Dutch subtitles and often without. I have seen very little programming from the United States, except for a bowling tournament and some footage of a NASCAR race (along with scenes from auto races in Abu Dhabi, India and China).

If television programming and advertising in this part of Europe is any indication, the world's economic future belongs to Africa, the Middle East and Asia. One could be forgiven for thinking that Europe and North America are about to go the way of all the great empires of the past. No doubt people will still want to go visit the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls, and occasionally set up a factory in West Virginia or Alabama to take advantage of the cheap labor. Perhaps a few lucky Americans will be hired to work as maids, cooks and nannies for billionaires in Mumbai or Damascus. I wonder which artifacts of American and European culture will end up in museums for Asians and Africans to admire with slightly condescending smiles on their faces.

In another month I return to Albuquerque. It will be fun to turn on the television news and get caught up on all the reports of domestic violence, rape and murdered drug dealers, not to mention the ongoing efforts of the Albuquerque police force to break up cock-fighting rings and close down methamphetamine labs. It will be fascinating to hear all the arguments against governments playing a role in providing health care and adequate school systems, and to see politicians looking straight into the camera and saying America already has the best health-care system and education in the world.

A comment I have heard from many Europeans is “I've been to America several times. I love it there. I love the open spaces in the West.” I nod in agreement. I also love the West. No matter where I have lived, the Southwestern United States has always been where my heart is. It's my home. And then the conversation continues: “I like the spirit of the American people. So open! So friendly!” Again, I nod. As I nod, a fidgety feeling begins to come over me. I know what is coming next: “But why does America always seem to have such backwards political leadership?” I smile and shrug. By this time I feel as though I should perhaps be bronzed and placed outside as some European taxi driver's garden gnome to keep unfriendly spirits away from the tulips.

Peregrinations

Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together into a civil body politic,…

A few years ago, I attended what was billed as an interfaith event. The first speaker was a minister from a “big box” evangelical Christian church that could boast of having several thousand members of the congregation. The minister quoted the Mayflower Compact, the first few lines of which are cited above. His point in citing that document, written in 1620 and therefore one hundred sixty-seven years before the American Constitution, was to show that America was founded as a Christian country. It was clear from what he went on to say that he believed America should still be a Christian nation and was in peril of losing touch with its Christian roots.

It may be worthwhile to examine some of the assumptions in the minister's claim. The first assumption is that America was founded when John Alden stepped off the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock. It was not founded by any of the people who had already been living on the continent for millennia, nor was it founded by the Dutch or French or Spanish colonists who were competing with the English to establish European colonies on American soil. Apparently, it was not founded when the American war of independence was concluded, or when the first president took office, or when the constitution was ratified and became the law of the new republic. It did not continue to be founded by the waves of immigrants who migrated in the centuries after the immigrants on the Mayflower. No, it was founded by those passengers on The Mayflower who drew up a pact stating that they had come for the advancement of the Christian faith.

A second assumption is that the intentions of the putative founders of the nation must still be carried out nearly four hundred years later. So even though hardly anyone in America still gets around by sailing ship, and most people no longer wear buckled shoes and knee-length breeches and tall hats that look like inverted flower pots, and few people write sentences as long as the single sentence of the Mayflower Compact—in short, even though the world has changed in technology, scientifiic understanding, literary style and in its perspectives on history—the intention to advance the Christian faith as it was grasped by the Pilgrims is one thing that cannot change. America may now be populated by Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, atheists and people who have no interest at all in any religion, but whatever its population, the assumption goes, it is still a Christian nation.

The first passenger of The Mayflower to set foot on Plymouth Rock was John Alden. He was not among the 40% of the adults on the ship who had gone to America to seek religious freedom. He was not a Pilgrim, if we understand a pilgrim to be one of those who left England for Amsterdam and then Leiden and who took part in a movement of Protestants led by pastor John Robinson seeking separation from the Church of England and who eventually left from Delfshaven, Holland in two ships called The Speedwell and the Mayflower (only one of which made it to the shores of America). John Alden was a ship's carpenter who was hired onto The Mayflower as a cooper, and like many of the 60% of the people on The Mayflower who were not Pilgrims, his primary motivation was probably to find adventure and fortune and not to advance the Christian faith. In his later years, in fact, John Alden was known for his strong dislike of Quakers and Baptists. He did sign the Mayflower Compact, but to what extent he wholeheartedly endorsed all that it is said is impossible to know.

While the advancement of Christianity may have been an undertaking of those who drafted and signed the Mayflower Compact, the signers of the document also sought a

better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony…

The evangelical minister who cited the Mayflower Compact at the interfatih meeting did not even mention the colonist's determination to frame just and equal laws conducive to the general good of the colony. That might have required admitting that honoring the spirit of the intentions of the Mayflower community could best be done by establishing universal health insurance under a government-managed single-payer insurance system. The particular minister in question revealed political leanings in the rest of what he said that would make his endorsement of such health-care policies unlikely.

I find myself thinking about the Pilgrims these days, because I am living in Leiden and walking the very streets they walked and going into some of the buildings they probably entered. I have stood on the very spot where they embarked from Leiden for Delfshaven and then on to America. William Bradford was one of my ancestors, as was John Alden. I have been aware of that connection for most of my life. I even chose Alden as a middle name for my son, but it never occurred to me that I should try to think as my (and my children's) ancestors thought. I still have no urge to take those who formed my DNA as a model on which to base my own beliefs and prejudices and actions.

That notwithstanding, I find myself intrigued with all the ways that these human things change through the years. How does the descendant of a Quaker-hating ship's carpenter become a Quaker? How does the descendant of at least one person who came to America to advance Christianity end up devoting his life to advancing Buddhism in America? How does the descendant of people who chose to leave Leiden end up being invited to help disseminate knowledge of Buddhism in Leiden?

The answer to those questions is simple. I am selective. I take bits and pieces from the past and put them together in a way that I find palatable. In that respect, I am very much like the evangelical Christian minister who carefully picks out a few phrases from the Mayflower Compact and disregards the rest.

Whence the mediocrity?

Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus opened in London in 1979 and was eventually turned into a motion picture that was amusing, but not nearly as provocative and disturbing as the play. Ostensibly about the possibly mysterious death of Mozart, what made the play as powerful as it was was the exploration of the theme of mediocrity. In the play, the Venetian composer Antonio Salieri (1750‑1825) is portrayed as a man tormented by the fact that he has piously dedicated his career to composing music to glorify God and has always been morally upright and of good conduct, and yet he was never able to compose anything as magnificent as the childish and irreverent clown Mozart. Surely, exclaims Salieri, God is mocking me!

The theme of divine justice (theodicy) is as old as the notion of a supreme god who makes moral demands on his or her creatures. The pious and righteous often suffer defeat and humiliation, while the scoundrels often enjoy all the pleasures and comforts that their ill-gotten gain can buy. If God expects righteousness of his creatures, how just can it be that God's well-behaved creatures must endure hardships while the ill-behaved skate relatively effortlessly through life? How can a just god reward a buffoon with arguably the greatest musical genius in the history of Europe and visit nothing but musical mediocrity on a God-fearing servant? That is the question posed in Shaffer's play. (Leave aside the fact that the real Salieri was anything but mediocre as a composer and conductor. It is the character of Shaffer's play, not the real musician, who concerns us here.)

I am happy enough to let better philosophers than I struggle with the issue of theodicy and the relationship between piety and mediocrity. The theme that is intiguing me now is to do with another aspect of mediocrity, namely, how it comes about that a nation can become so addicted to substandard goods and services that it despises all those who try to raise the standards to a higher level.

The question comes to my mind after spending several days in Paris. Like most people who have spent time in Paris, I could not help spending quite a bit of time wondering how even apparently humble and seemingly unpromising restaurants manage to serve such well-prepared meals. It is obvious that they must do so, or else quickly go out of business, because the French will not settle for substandard food. That is not so surprising. What issurprising is that Americans do, for the most part, settle for inferior cooking. They settle for huge servings of mediocre fare, food with little nutritional value despite its overload of calories, food that lacks subtle tastes, food that is heaped upon over-sized plates with no regard to appearance, food that fosters obesity and all the illnesses that go with it. Why?

During our stay in Paris, my wife and I went to museums, took long walks and read. Every evening we watched a little bit of television. We happened to see CNN and were struck again, as we have been before while traveling in Europe, at how much better CNN is in Europe than in the United States. It actually carries news in Europe. It carries stories about Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas (north, south and central). It is possible to learn what is going on in the world by watching CNN in Europe. Why do Americans settle for such substandard news broadcasting, and news commentary representing such a narrow range of opinions and perspectives?

On returning to the Netherlands, where I'll be spending some time, I got caught up on news stories that I had not paid much attention to in France. I read the New York Times on line and was taken aback by how much the American public seems to have turned against Barack Obama's proposed health-care reforms. All across the country there seem to be masses of people protesting against a series of proposals that would go at least some of the way toward beginning to lift the United States out of the mediocrity that they have settled for in health care. It would be difficult to design a worse system than the one that now exists. It delivers substandard health-care at outrageous prices to those who can afford it and leaves the rest of the population to remain sick and injured and eventually to die. No one benefits from the system but a handful of overpaid physicians and directors of for-profit insurance companies. It is worse than mediocre. And yet more than a handful of Americans, the very ones who stand to benefit from an improved system, are loudly insisting that government not tamper with the status quo. To settle for mediocrity is bad enough. To insist on it is nothing short of tragic.

The demand for substandard health care is, of course, intimately related to the substandard access to information that Americans settle for. America has become a nation of political zombies who will follow only the loudest demagogues and most ill-mannered purveyors of vituperation and character assassination. Americans will settle for bad food that makes them sick, substandard health care that fails to heal them, repugnant forms of entertainment that lets them remain savages, and politicians who drive them into deprivation for the simple reason that they do not know any better. They do not know any better because they have no easy access to good news reporting and analysis; to become informed in America takes a lot of work, and the culture of making an effort died with my grandfathers' generation.

The combination of various forms of mediocrity that have become standard in the United States have a kind of synergy that creates a vicious cycle, a downward spiral, a kind of cultural black hole from which no light can escape.

Can the trends be reversed? Events of the past six or seven decades are not promising. All the same, history is full of surprises. The universe is complex beyond our wildest imaginations, so it never unfolds as one would expect. Suffice it to say that if dramatic cultural improvements are visited upon Americans, despite all their efforts to resist them, it will have been a fluke, a series of accidents that will no doubt look to some like divine grace, to others like blind luck. Is there a difference?

Who deserves to suffer?

An American woman reacting to the release on compassionate grounds of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for playing a role in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988, said “He already got his compassionate release when he was sentenced to life imprisonment instead of getting the death penalty.”

The implication of the woman's comment—I should perhaps add that she made a point of saying that she was speaking as a Christian—was that being allowed to remain alive was as much compassion as the man deserved. The fact that he is believed to be dying of prostate cancer was not worth taking into consideration. Apparently also irrelevant to this woman is the fact that al-Megrahi was tried and convicted of murder in the United Kingdom, where capital punishment for the crime of murder was formally abolished in 1969 and abolished for all crimes in 1998. There was no possibility of al-Megrahi's being sentenced to die for any crime in the UK, so his being “allowed” to remain alive was not a question of compassionately releasing him from a punishment that under law he deserved. Rather, it was a question of applying the law of the land.

Megyn Kelly co-host of America's Newsroom on Fox News, may have been unaware of the law of the land in the United Kingdom when she said words to the effect that while the Scottish courts seem to favor compassion, Americans are more interested in the rule of law. In fact, the Scottish court demonstrated that it was quite interested in the rule of law, for the custom in Scotland has been to release terminally ill prisoners so that they can spend their last days with their families. It turns out that in the United Kingdom, the rule of law is not incompatible with compassion. The law itself has provision for the judicious exercise of compassion.

American law, of course, is not entirely devoid of compassion. In contrast to all other industrialized nations, however, there is more a culture of punishment than of rehabilitation. Not only is the duration of imprisonment in the United States longer than in Canada or Europe, but it has increased. It rose by 83% in the 1990s. That trend may be reversed as a result of fiscal difficulties in many states. Already there has been a serious cutback in California in allocations for programs to educate prisoners and teach them trades. These programs, which could reduce the likelihood of recidivism (now more than 70%), are proving too expensive to maintain in the short run. The long-term costs of cutting those programs, along with the pressure to release prisoners from severely overcrowded prisons without their having the benefit of being in facilities that could rehabilitate them, could be very high indeed.

Why are sentences in the United States so long? Why is the prevailing philosophy to throw people in prison and throw the key away? A web site dedicated to the so-called Three Strikes Law explains that the 1994 California law that mandates giving a minimum prison term of 25 years to a person convicted of a third felonious offense grew out of a conviction that some people are simply not responsive to being imprisoned. While it might seem strange to increase the time in prison of people do not benefit from imprisonment, the principal rationale for doing so was that society is made safer by keeping dangerous people in a place where they cannot commit more crimes. Experience has shown that such people often do continue to commit more crimes; it's just that their victims are other prisoners rather than people on the outside. The reasoning seems to be that people already in prison may somehow deserve to be victims of crime more than other people.

That people allow themselves to ask the question of who “deserves” to be a victim of violence or unpleasant treatment is alarming. Once the question is even asked, people can be drawn into thinking that it somehow makes sense to allow other sentient beings to suffer. Animals can be allowed to suffer, some might argue, because they are allegedly not intelligent, and besides they are useful for food and clothing. Poor people can be allowed to suffer, some might argue, because they do not work hard enough to get out of poverty. Jews and gypsies and homosexuals can be allowed to suffer, many Europeans did argue not so long ago, because they make no useful contributions to society. Immigrants can be allowed to suffer, many now argue, because they have not taken the right steps to become citizens, and even if they have, they may not understand our culture.

I do not understand our culture, especially that aspect of our culture that tolerates the suffering of prisoners, illegal immigrants, newly arrived legal immigrants, people living in countries against which we wage declared and undeclared wars. This aspect of American culture–human culture–is repugnant to me.

There is an alternative to the culture of punishment and allowing the suffering of those who allegedly deserve it. For the past several days I have been recalling a speech in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice that my ninth-grade English teacher made the class memorize some fifty years ago. That teacher died about forty years ago, but I hope there are many of her former students who still remember at least the opening lines of the lines we were made to memorize. We need those words.

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show like God's
When mercy seasons justice.

In closing I express my heartfelt condolences to all those who lost loved ones on Pan Am flight 103. I also wish the best for the man convicted of their murder. May all the tormented souls connected with that tragic incident find peace of mind before they go the way of all flesh.

Why do Americans fear government?

Last night I saw a news segment about one of the town-hall meetings around the United States in which citizens are voicing their concerns about health-care reform. One woman, her voice trembling with emotion, asked “Can you name one thing—one thing—that government has become involved in that has not grown wildly out of control and hopelessly inefficient?” I gather that her rhetorical question was meant to be an argument against government being involved in the health-care industry.

Within a couple of seconds of hearing the question, I was thinking of all the government agencies that have done excellent jobs of overseeing and performing tasks that private enterprise would have done much less efficiently and that have not grown wildly out of control. The first few that came to mind were government agencies that I know about because members of my family have worked for them: The United States Geological Survey, the National Park Service, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services. Then I thought of government agencies that have provided funds to scholarly, scientific and artistic endeavors that would not likely be funded by private enterprise: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation.

Within less than a minute I was able to think of about a dozen or so more national government agencies that routinely do excellent jobs without growing wildly out of control. And of course when I began to think of governmental agencies at the state, county and municipal level the number of exemplary government agencies began to fill me with a deep sense of gratitude for all the things that governments provide the citizens of the United States. So where, I began to wonder, does this fear of so-called “big government” come from?

When I begin to think of government ventures that really have grown wildly out of control and have swollen budgets for inefficiently doing services that we hardly need done at all, I also notice that it is these government enterprises that we hear about most often and that we encounter more often than we would like. The most wasteful big-government operation of all, of course, is the military, which gobbles up 43% of all monies gained through taxes. When people look back on American military ventures that have taken place since the end of the second world war, the only thing they can see are counterproductive operations that have wasted lives, destroyed property and depleted the treasury. If the military is the most visible arm of the American government, no wonder Americans are so distrustful of government.

Another branch of government that everyone who travels by air experiences is the Transportation Security Administration, which makes sure that no grandmother boards an airplane with more than three ounces of skin lotion and that no child has a bomb concealed in his shoe. At enormous expense and irritation to the traveling public, this highly visible organization asks us to believe it is their work that has prevented further hijackings and bombings of aircraft. When Americans see how many obviously pointless measures are taken by government agencies in the name of airport security, no wonder they are wary of more big government.

Is there any reason to believe that a government-regulated medical insurance program or a government-regulated pharmaceutical industry would be as inefficient and wasteful as the military or the Department of Homeland Security, or as invasive as the FBI? No. It has not proven to be so in other industrialized nations. Why assume that a national health service would be more like the US military than like the US Park Service or the Department of Housing and Urban Development?

Is there any reason to believe that a government-regulated medical insurance program or a government-regulated pharmaceutical industry would be as inefficient and wasteful as for-profit health insurance companies and for-profit health maintenance organizations (HMO)? Again, the answer is suggested by the experience of people living in countries that have government-managed health-care systems. They provide much better care at a fraction of the cost of what is available in the United States in our market-driven system.

The American fear of big government is not entirely irrational. There are very expensive government agencies that return very little of value to society; the military is the most obvious of these. But it is irrational to fear all government. There are also scores of governmental agencies that none of us would want to live without: the National Guard, various police forces, fire-fighting agencies, departments that build and maintain roads and highways and bridges and airports. Who would prefer having to travel on privately owned turnpikes and tollways instead of on the federally maintained system of interstate highways and all the state highways? Who would prefer to live in a society in which every merchant had his own definition of what a pound of weight or a yard of length or a minute of time is, as opposed to a society with a federally financed Bureau of Standards? Who would like to live in a country without a national postal service?

Who would like to live in a country that has a health system in which the people most in need of care cannot afford to pay for it, and in which insurance agencies have no incentive at all to provide coverage to anyone who might make claims that could reduce the dividends or shareholders or diminish the bonuses paid to already highly paid executives? I guess that question has an answer. Sarah Palin seems to be one such person. But why? And why are so many Americans so ready to be persuaded by her careless rhetoric than by a careful study of what would actually be of benefit to them?

Care to study the situation a little more carefully? One place to begin is at the CNN site on health care.

America's love affair with ignorance

There has been a lot of blogging recently about an editorial in Investors Business Daily. A summary of some of the best-known blogs can be found on the BBC website. In addition to what one finds there, a reflective piece occurs as part of a recent post on Bodhipaksa's blog site, Bodhi Tree Swaying

The BBC site notes that a theme in the debates among bloggers is whether the author of the Investors Business Daily was deliberately lying about the British national health care system or simply misinformed. As I have heard some of the questions coming from the audience at town-hall meetings on the proposed health care reforms in the United States, I have been astonished at the level of ignorance being manifested in the questions. As I have written before, it is astonishing to me to hear comments about “the” Canadian health care system. (As I pointed out in that blog posting, Canada does not have a health-care system; each province has one, and the details are different from one province to another.) I have heard almost everything from Americans but accuracy in descriptions of Canadian health care; even Americans who are relatively well-informed about the world in general seem to know very little about their neighbors to the north. In this post I plan to draw attention to a few features of the systems that I personally experienced while living in Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Québec, Canada and to say why I would love to see similar features in the United States.

• Universal coverage. There may be people living in Canada who are not covered by any health insurance, but it is not because they cannot afford insurance or because they have been rejected as a bad risk by an insurance company. There are various ways to make sure that low-income people are covered. One method is to subsidize people below a given level of income as reported in their annual income tax filings. Another is to pay for health care out of taxes, which automatically means that those who make (and spend) a lot of money pay more into the health care system, and those who earn or spend little pay less into the system.
• Excellent medical care. Twice when I was in hospital in Canada for surgical interventions that I never would have been able to afford in the United States, I met patients from the United States who had come to Canada for medical procedures more advanced than any they could find in the United States. They were not there only because the price was lower for procedures than the price would be in their own country; they were there because they could get in Canada medical attention that was not available at all in the United States. Canadian medical research is among the best in the world, and it becomes available to the public much more quickly than it would do in a profit-oriented systems.
• Cost-efficient medical care. Because most medical insurance is provided through government-run plans, billing is simple and can be carried out by far fewer clerks and bureaucrats than is the case in a system in which there are numerous insurance companies, each with its own forms and regulations. Medical procedures are routinely approved in Canada, unlike the case in the United States where insurance companies, motivated by the need to make profits to pass on to their shareholders, spend time and money finding reasons to deny claims. (In my own experience, I never had to appeal a single medical expense during my thirty-six years in Canada. Since moving back to the United States, I have had to appeal several decisions made by my insurance company.
• Employers do not pay for employee's health care. One of the greatest advantages of a single-payer system is that health care costs are borne by a combination of the person insured and the government, not by the insured person's employer. This means small businesses in Canada are not burdened by having to pay the same high costs as their American counterparts. When the North American Free Trade Agreement first came into effect, this became one of the first major issues of dispute. American small businesses complained that Canadian competitors had an unfair advantage, because they had no health-care premiums to provide for their employees. Strangely, rather than demanding a single-payer system in their own country, American companies insisted that it was only just for them to impose tariffs on Canadian goods and services.
• Canadian pharmaceutical providers are limited in the amount of profits they can make on a product. If you have an e-mail account, it is likely you (or your spam filter) receive several e-mails a week advertising pharmaceutical products at Canadian prices. Canadian prices are lower than American prices for exactly the same products, because the Canadian government places a cap on the amount of profit a pharmaceutical company can make on a given product. The profit margin is still reasonable, but it is not allowed to become exorbitant as American profit margins are allowed to get.

The Canadian health-care systems provided by the provinces I have lived in are far superior to anything I have experienced in the United States. (Having said that, I have heard enough about the Kaiser plan in California to think it would make an excellent model for health-care in the United States.) What has amazed me most about the debates in the United States is that from the very start the most sensible plan of all—a single-payer system—has been “off the table.” None of the various proposals being considered in the United States would make the US health-care system even close to either the British or the Canadian systems or anything that is available in Europe or Japan. Almost as astonishing to me has been the sheer ignorance that prevails in the United States about why health care is so substandard in the United States. In place of accurate information and careful argumentation, one finds in this debate very little but misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric. If Americans do not wake up and take an interest in matters that are to their own advantage, they will end up with the inferior kind of health care that willfully ignorant people probably deserve.