Too Stupid For the Job?

It is becoming difficult to watch the continuing dysfunction in Washington DC. Each new day brings with it some fresh manifestation of either incompetence, ignorance or tomfoolery, or in some cases, like the President’s press conference yesterday, all three. At some point you have to start asking some hard questions, like…what the hell is wrong with our government?

This is a non-partisan question. Readers of this space know my Libertarian leanings and the low opinion I have of the Democratic Party. But, I have displayed an equal distaste for the Republican alternative. The place we find ourselves in as a nation has many fathers, so what follows is not an indictment of merely the current President and his party, but rather the entire governing class. Trust me when I say, Democrats and Republicans in Washington have much more in common with each other than either of them have with us.

As an observer of politics for the past 40 years of my life, I have seen my share of incompetence, so in a sense, the presence of bumbling idiots in government isn’t exactly a news flash. But the level of such bumbling has risen exponentially over the past 10 years or so, sort of like the much hyped, global warming caused rising of the sea levels. Only this increase is actually measurable. Any fair-minded observer who has been paying attention can’t help but wonder if anyone in politics knows what they’re doing. From Colin Powell’s UN speech offering “proof” of weapons of mass destruction, all the way to President Obama’s “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” fiasco, one is left with the creeping suspicion that the people at the highest levels of our government just aren’t that sharp. I have a theory.

In the 35 years after our Civil War, or the period from roughly 1870 through 1910, Americans turned against government. After all, it was the hot-blooded rhetoric of politics that had helped plunge the country into war in the first place. After the loss of nearly 600,000 Americans, the country was in no mood for it anymore. It was time to heal and time to make some money. Accordingly, the best and brightest began to go into business. Soon the industrial revolution gave rise to a new breed of man, the captain of industry.  Men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt rose to the top of the heep. At the same time, Americans were left with a long list of third stringers as Presidents. This was the era that gave us such notable chief executives as Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, and Grover Cleveland. These weren’t exactly intellectual heavyweights and consequently are largely forgotten by history. Since the juice of the country had flowed away from Washington, these men were known largely for doing nothing, and for a country that had barely survived a bloody civil war, “doing nothing” sounded pretty good.

What about today? Where are the best and brightest? Not in Washington DC. Any list of influential, transformative thinkers and doers begins with names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. At the top of anyone’s list of high achieving Americans would be names like Howard Schultz, Warren Buffett and Oprah Winfrey, not rubes like John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Silicon Valley is populated by hordes of extremely bright and highly motivated men and women making giant technological strides, while their contemporaries in Washington are writing unworkable, 3000 page laws that nobody reads or understands.

The big difference between the lightweights of the late 19^th century and our lightweights is the fact that guys like Chester Arthur and James Garfield KNEW that they were lightweights. Our political leaders today from both Parties all think they are geniuses, and it is this hubris that is driving the country over a cliff. From perhaps the most unaccomplished, inexperienced, thinnest credentialed President in history all the way down to a plucky Alaskan governor thought smart and worthy enough to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency by a major American political party, the overwhelming conclusion that must be drawn is that our representatives just aren’t smart enough for the job.

Now, if only they knew that.

What does a 142 million dollar painting look like?

I love art. Beautiful paintings, sculptures, great books, and fine music add immeasurably to life. Sometimes, just being in the presence of something artistic makes the world seem less dangerous somehow. Art has the power to transform us, to reorient our perspective. So, I love art. Yet, sometimes, I don’t get art.

 Yesterday a painting by Francis Bacon sold at auction for $142,000,000. No, this was not a sketch found in an attic belonging to the great English philosopher. This was a three part painting by a dead Irish artist known primarily for being openly and proudly gay at a time when most gay people were neither. The painting was in three frames and depicted a man sitting in what looks like some sort of wired cubicle at various angles. The man’s features are blurred and abstract. It turns out that the subject of the painting was Lucian Freud, a famous and influential painter in his own right, with whom Mr. Bacon had an ongoing relationship. These details are irrelevant. What boggles my mind is the price tag that this particular painting brought. One hundred and forty two million dollars is a lot of money. You could buy 300 Lamborghinis with that kind of money. You could sponsor 350,000 starving South American kids for a year with that kind of money. But some anonymous person thought to spend 142 million on this instead:

 

Now, don’t misunderstand me here. My beef isn’t with the price itself. The proper price for anything is simply what someone is willing to pay, so in this case, since someone was willing to fork it over, this painting was, in fact, worth 142 million. My problem is with the painting itself. This is the part of art that I don’t get. I mean, look at it, just stare at the thing for a few minutes. My eyes see a blurry, disjointed sketch set against a backdrop of nothing. The subject’s face looks like paint that got smeared by a raindrop. But there are a thousand art critics who will extol its brilliance from the rooftops. It’s a bit like the concert I attended this past weekend. The music was divinely performed and beautiful beyond description, except for the headline piece, a brooding discordant thing which featured intentionally sharp, grating chords tied together in a somber funeral dirge pace. My son rolled his eyes at me when I shared this opinion, embarrassed by my Philistine sensitivities. Guilty as charged, I suppose. Life is already full enough of discord and disharmony, why rip it out of music too?

I’m told that Mr. Bacon’s painting fetched the highest price for a painting in history. That’s great news for the art business, but I’m not sure what it says about art. But, what do I know?  

My Words Come Back to Haunt Me

This past weekend I attended a wedding shower for a young couple. After dinner we were to split up into groups of men and women to dispense advice to the bride and groom. When it was my turn, the gist of my comments were about how important it is to listen to your wife. This morning, with clear algorithmic malice, my Facebook feed offered the following piece of evidence highlighting my hypocrisy....

Why Men Don’t Listen to Their Wives—November 12, 2013

Last Friday, I informed my wife that I would be getting the leaves up in the yard. Henrico County picks up leaves in my neighborhood only twice this fall, and one of those days would be the following Monday. Since we would be in New Jersey for the weekend, it had to be done on Friday. Our conversation went something like this:

Pam: Wait, you’re going to bag up the leaves on the day before you have to drive 5 hours to New Jersey??

Me: ..er, well…yeah.

Pam: With that shoulder? The last thing you need is to screw up your shoulder or throw out your back right before making that kind of drive!

Pam and I have had variations on this conversation at least a hundred times over the nearly thirty years of our marriage. I make a simple declaration of my intentions to do A or B. Pam replies with a couple of paragraph-long warnings about all of the horrible things that might happen because I plan on doing A or B. I proceed to do A or B anyway. Many times, she is proven right by events. But it doesn’t matter, because although I listen to my wife, I often choose not to hear her. Why is this? I have a theory.

All of my life, I have been accused of doing the sorts of things that women seem to think are dangerous. When I was a kid, I was the tree climber, the bull chaser (a story for another time), and the kid who would throw rocks at hornet’s nests in the tops of trees. So, the first influential woman in my life, my mother, would be the one yelling things like, “Douglas, you better put your old shoes on before you walk through that trash fire,” or “Don’t shoot that BB gun in the house,” and “If you fall off that roof and break your leg, don’t come running to me!”  Then, as I became a teenager, it would be various girlfriends who would say, “Doug, are you sure that recruiting the football team to lift Mr. Jefferson’s MG on top of the breezeway roof is such a good idea?” Now, as a grown man, it’s mostly Pam looking incredulously at me as I’m walking out of the door to play golf. “You’re going to play golf today, the hottest day of the year, seriously? 100 degrees in the shade today and you decide to play golf?”

What all of them are essentially saying is, “Be careful. You might hurt yourself.” And, that is why I don’t listen. The possibility that I might hurt myself is half the fun of the thing. This is what women don’t understand. Asking a man to be careful might seem like prudent advice, but to a man it sounds like, “don’t have any fun.” If men throughout history listened to this type of womanly advice, we would all still be living in mud huts, eating berries and roots.

The fact that Pam has, more often than not, been prescient in her warnings isn’t the issue. The reliability of our wives’ instincts are not the point. The reason men don’t listen is because, we don’t want to be reminded about the calendar. We don’t want to be reminded that we aren’t twenty-two anymore. We are fully aware that back then a badly turned ankle meant Bayer aspirin and a bag of ice, while today it means x-rays, crutches, pain-killers and three weeks of rehab. We know all of that.

But to acknowledge it would mean admitting that we aren’t real men anymore. We would rather take the risk, or better yet, deny there even is any risk. Doing so helps us to hang on to our sense of worth, our dignity, and the last vestiges of our self respect.

So, we look at our wives as they warn us about the latest harebrained scheme we have cooked up, and we nod in agreement. All the while, we hear nothing, just like the parents in Peanuts television specials, “Wa, wawa, wawa, wa.” We would rather be daring than careful. Besides, if a leisure activity does not carry with it at least the possibility of putting ones eye out, is it really worth doing in the first place?

My New Favorite Politician

 

 

 

This is Ron Ford.

Ron Ford is the mayor of Toronto.

He's in trouble because a video has surfaced showing him smoking crack.

Hard to believe, eh?

Glad That's Over With

Thank God that’s over with. Ever since the rollout of ObamaCare, we have been inundated with story after story, (including mine) of Americans being kicked off of their health plans by the new law, this despite the President’s ironclad campaign assurances about how if we liked our health plans, we would be able to keep them.

The White House has struggled mightily to spin their way out of what seemed to some  a bald-faced lie. First, they denied people were actually losing their coverage. Then they claimed that the people who were losing coverage would find better and even cheaper coverage on the exchanges. When that explanation turned out to be false, they blamed the insurance companies. When that charge was debunked by none other than the Washington Post’s fact checker, it was time for the President himself to offer an explanation. In a speech three days ago, he told a crowd of 200 true believers that what we all heard him say more than 30 times over the past 4 years wasn’t what he said at all. The word IF was added to the sentence in question, as in “IF your insurance company made no changes to your plan after March of 2010, you could keep it.” The trouble with that explanation was that nobody can find any tape of the President ever uttering this new formulation. Even for our famously in-the-tank news media, this was a bridge too far. So, the wise men surrounding the President got together and decided to have the President do what he should have done months ago.

There was the President sitting across from NBC reporter Chuck Todd, a portrait of George Washington hanging forlornly over a fireplace behind them. When asked about the nearly 5 million Americans who will be losing coverage because of Obamacare, President Obama said, “I’m sorry.”

“I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.”

Well, ok then. We can all move on. There’s nothing else to see here. The President is sorry that the empty assurances he employed so brilliantly to get his law passed in the first place didn’t turn out to be…well, true. But isn’t that what really matters, that he’s sorry? I mean, hey, we all make mistakes.

I watched the entire interview. The only thing that was missing was Oprah, and tears. The President could have greatly helped his cause if he could have managed to tear up a bit, to demonstrate the depth of his contrition. But Chuck Todd is no Oprah Winfrey. No tears. In fact, the President looked like someone who would rather have been having a root canal without Novocain, than to be forced to apologize to a lousy 5 million Americans too stupid to know what a great deal they were getting with Obamacare. Seriously?! 5 million people lose their health insurance? 5 million out of 250 million?? How in hell are you supposed to make an omelet without breaking a few eggs?

But, there he was, having a difficult time maintaining eye contact with Chuck, galled beyond human understanding to have been put in such a humiliating position, but there he was saying those magic words, “I’m sorry.”

Glad that’s over with.

Kids No More

This coming weekend, Pam, Kaitlin and I will make the drive to Princeton, New Jersey. The famous Westminster Choir will be in concert on Sunday. Kaitlin will get to see Princeton for the first time, and we all will get to hear this phenomenal choir for the first time. There will be a morning of sight-seeing and good food. It will be the first time that all four of us will have been together since July. Then, two weeks later we will be together again for Thanksgiving. Sensational!

Last night I was reading A Moveable Feast while listening to Ella Fitzgerald on Pandora, but could concentrate on neither. All I could think about was how it seems like just a few months ago when the four of us were crammed into a booth at Friendly’s enjoying sundaes after a day of Little League baseball at Tuckahoe. Pam would be consoling Kaitlin over some tough last inning loss, while I was trying to get Patrick to stop kicking his sister underneath the table. It was my daughter who was the intense, brutal competitor, while my son’s favorite part of the game was wearing the cool catcher gear.

In Princeton, we will sit around a much more sophisticated table. The conversation will be of things literary and musical. Pam and I will glance at each other in the midst of it with astounded wonder at what we have managed to present to the world. They, after all, will one day be our replacements. In more ways than I can begin to articulate, they will be a vast improvement, not because we were such great parents, but because of something both fascinating and ethereal, the constant visitation of God’s grace in their lives. Often it took the form of talents, endowed upon them at birth, flowered into maturity by skilled and loving teachers. When I consider the impact that people like Larry and Diane Collawn, Sherri Matthews, Mark and Joanne Terlep, and Jeremy Welborn had on the two of them, it is impossible to calculate. When I think of the incredible people in the extended family to which they are connected by blood, I realize that some of their success is indeed hereditary. No two kids on Earth have been endowed with such a loving and supportive tribe of uncles, aunts and cousins. Surely such love and acceptance helped sculpt their self-image as human beings of value and worth. Whatever it was and however it happened, Pam and I are two lucky parents.

Yes, can’t wait for the weekend. I’ll let you know if Patrick kicks his sister under the table for old time’s sake.

Voting "NO"

I made a mistake yesterday. After spending nearly fifteen minutes in the voting booth trying to decide between impossibly flawed candidates, I made the mistake of declaring on Facebook that I couldn’t bring myself to vote for any of them. Instead, I had only voted against the Meals Tax. This morning I read the results and it is clear that for the 1,659^th time in my life…I should have kept my mouth shut. Among other things I was accused of inexcusable apathy. I was reminded of all those who had fought and died to preserve my right to vote. I was told that since I had not made a choice in the voting booth, I had lost my right to complain. I was accused of aiding the Democratic candidates by not voting. Even my credentials as a Christian were challenged since I didn’t vote against the Democrats since they are the only party in America completely bereft of morals, principles, and values.

Politics is an enterprise that doesn’t respond well to reason, so mounting a defense against these charges is in many ways a pointless exercise, sort of like attempting to answer the question, “does this dress make me look fat?”  But, I do love a challenge, and pointless exercises are for me, the spice of life, so here goes.

1.     INEXCUSABLE APATHY. If I were truly apathetic, I wouldn’t have gone to the polling station in the first place. I did, in fact, vote. If apathy is the lack of passion or excitement, I can make a reasoned argument that this is a good thing when it comes to politics. In our nation’s history, it has been the true believers in the power of politics who have done the most damage to life and liberty. Woodrow Wilson’s deranged progressives at the turn of the century provide a textbook example of what happens when a group of people get fired up over the possibilities of political power. I would think an intense skepticism about politics would be a much wiser approach, given the history of partisanship.

2.     People have died for my right to vote. No, they haven’t. The brave men and women of the United States military who have fallen in battle did not do so to preserve my right to vote. They did so to preserve my freedom, which includes the freedom to not vote. If you want mandatory voting as a requirement of citizenship, move to Cuba. Besides, any thinking person who knows anything at all about this country does not want every citizen voting. Do you really want the 40% of Americans who can’t name the Vice-President, and think the Supreme Court was the name of Diana Ross’ second album…voting?

3.     By not voting, I lose my right to complain. Bullshit. I am a tax-paying, fully functioning citizen of the United States of America. The fact that I couldn’t in good conscience pull the lever for the candidates that our cash-addled political parties vomited up onto the ballot this year takes my right to complain away in much the same way as refusing to eat poisoned food takes away my right to starve to death. Again, people who say this are describing Cuba, not a free Republic.

4.     By not voting, I helped the Democrats get elected. I, er..uh, what??

5.     Even if I didn’t like the Republican candidates, I should have voted against the Democrat since they are immoral. Several people made this point, bringing up the Democratic Party’s support for abortion and gay marriage as evidence of their immorality. First of all, I agree that abortion is immoral, and I believe that homosexuality is a sin. But to make the leap to, “democrats have no morals” is ludicrous and insulting. One can be mistaken without being immoral. Are these two issues the only two things that require morals, principles and values? I can make a reasoned and intellectual argument against the entire welfare state apparatus on the grounds that it is injurious to the very people it claims to help. But I can concede and even admire the moral underpinnings of my Democratic friends who support it, since it is their moral, principled, value system of caring for the poor that undergirds it. You might even say that they believe that it is their Democratic party that is trying to follow the commands of our savior to care for the “least of these.” I believe them to be merely mistaken, not immoral. The assumption that underlies the view among many Christians that  Republican Party support equates to genuine Christianity is an insidious slander. Besides, “blessed are the peace makers” isn’t exactly a description of the Republican Party these days. What about that moral? Or how about Capital punishment? Surely reasonable people can disagree, right? Seeing as how roughly 50% of “born again believers” end up in divorce court, does that mean that they have no morals, since divorce is clearly contrary to scripture. You can’t cherry-pick moral values, and any assertion that any secular political party has a monopoly on values, principles and morals is lazy and disingenuous. Still, many of my Christian friends will say that regardless of where a candidate stands on a thousand other issues, a Christian cannot vote for him if he is pro-choice. Ok. So, does that mean that if a Pro-Life candidate came along who was for Obamacare, raising taxes, and an expanding welfare state, that Christians lose their right to complain about losing their health plan and their higher taxes?

Politics has often been called the ‘art of the possible.” Well, morally pure, totally principled political parties don’t exist. You make the choice the best you can between very flawed men and women. And every now and then, when presented candidates for whom the bar has been lowered beyond comprehension, you do the moral, principled thing…and vote “NO.”