Right to the Moon!

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, in apparent desperation, resorted to the JFK playbook when he said that by the end of his second putative term as President, the United States would have a permanent base on the Moon.  I laud the sentiment, even though Gingrich provided no details about how such a venture would be funded.  This is of particular importance here because a central element of the old House Speaker’s “Contract with America” was to cut government spending, not to expand it, a policy platform that has by now become so rote that it is always spoken, but rarely upheld, by politicians of the Republican brand.

Still, as a society, as a culture, as a nation and, most palpably, as a species, we need to do precisely what Gingrich proposed.  The late popular astronomer Carl Sagan argued that a return to the Moon would be an unwise expenditure of resources.  His opposition was based on his well-informed opinion that the Moon offered little of practical value.  Instead, Sagan argued, the benefits of space science could be derived from orbital stations which would also serve as platforms where space vessels could be built in zero gee and from which eventual robotic and manned missions to Mars, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and to the asteroid field could be launched.  These worlds, Dr. Sagan argued, contain more clues to the origins of our solar system and the nature of the universe, and more opportunities for discovery, of extraterrestrial life or other wonders, than does Earth’s closest companion.  But Dr. Sagan died before we learned that there are great quantities of water on the Moon, in the form of ice that can be formulated to fuel spacecraft.  A permanent base on the Moon might yet make sense, not for Gingrich’s stated nationalistic purposes (space travel should unite our species, not further divide us), but as a nearby low gee location for spaceship construction and as a logical place to begin what will forever be the necessary human undertaking of extraterrestrial colonization.

Looked at in this light, cost becomes irrelevant.  As a nation, the United States invested enormous human and financial capital in the 1960s to win the space race with the Soviet Union, to fight a futile war in Southeast Asia, and to transform the cultural landscape of America’s domestic front.  Do not decisive steps toward the assurance of the survival of our very species deserve such investment as well?  Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, thinks so.  In addition to the impact that a healthy focus on what he calls “the ultimate frontier” would have on the American imagination, Dr. Tyson adds that the human race is in desperate need of an infusion of wonder, of an audacious vision, of a grand mission forward into a glorious future that would stimulate invention by promoting great new strides in education, industry, engineering, the sciences and high technology.  To literally reach for the stars, especially during dubious times of economic uncertainty, political upheaval and ecological revolt, can reignite the spark of human imagination and motivate us to work together like no other endeavor.  The dream of being able to live and thrive on another world can move us to create the means to make that dream a reality.

The human race must pursue this dream.  As the sheer numbers of humans expand beyond this planet’s sustainability threshold, we will eventually have no choice but to spread to other worlds.  Perhaps a more crucial consideration is the fact that Earth will not remain forever habitable, that a cataclysmic event resulting in our extinction is possible even in the not-too-distant future.  Our species, uniquely so in the universe as far as we know, has risen to a point at which it can imagine leaving the planet of its birth, colonizing other worlds, and voyaging among the stars.  It would be a disappointment of cosmic proportions if that dream were to be left unrealized when it rests so tantalizingly close to our grasp.

To the Moon, then, and beyond!

Grand Misdirection

Starting on January 3, and now for the rest of the year, the news media will have us focus on this cycle of Republican Presidential primary elections.  It will tell us that this run-up to another general Presidential election is crucially important.  It will tell us that this is a decisive moment in our history.  It will tell us that if we citizens do not participate that we are somehow un-American, that we are neglecting our civic duties.  But, since first voting in 1982, I find that these elections have become more and more farcical and less and less relevant.  What really matters to Americans is not politics, but economics.  And American capitalism is all about the bottom line and little, if anything, else.

In a recent interview, former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm summarized the situation this way: “Corporate leadership does not feel a responsibility to the nation; they feel a responsibility to their stockholders.”  I said these exact same words to an Australian economist fifteen years ago and the man thought I was off my rocker.  He could not conceive of what I called “stateless” corporate entities with loyalties to transnational markets, boards of directors and stakeholders.  To my Australian friend, the political economy is similar to what I have written about Canada.  There is in his mind a keen sense of Australian common purpose, a feeling of responsibility for each other, that they are all in it together, so there is perhaps a more compassionate dynamic at play in Australian capitalism. 

Certainly, because my Australian banker friend works in East Asia, he is aware of how capitalism in THOSE cultures is suffused with a great deal of national loyalty from top to bottom.  Few Koreans buy non-Korean products.  The chaebol (massive corporate conglomerates) are 100% loyal to their nation and to the people and to the workers.  The same can be said about Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, China, and probably India, Indonesia and Malaysia.  (Singapore and Thailand are different in this regard.)  And the result is that, unlike the United States, these countries protect their industries.  In return, industries are loyal and don’t ship their jobs overseas.  Often, businesses are so fiercely protective of their local workers that they supplant the State when it comes to commonweal.  These are cultural dimensions of capitalism as it is practiced in that part of the world.  Meanwhile, in the United States, outsourcing, binge spending and being broke become fodder for sit-coms instead of serious matters worthy of critical thought.  Maybe my Australian economist friend has learned in the years since, as he has become more familiar with American capitalism, that what I said fifteen years ago was not so crazy after all.

And this leads to my point that politics, in the end, is really rather a sideshow in America.  How has my life changed under an Obama Administration rather than a Bush one?  To be honest, it’s a lot worse.  But I am just one person.  Still, this illustrates my point that it is not so much our elected leadership making the decisions that impact our lives most profoundly.  Those decisions are made in corporate boardrooms, by government procurement task forces, by groups of deans sitting on steering committees for efficiency and streamlining, and even by foreign institutions and governments.  This is another harsh truth about the American political economy – democracy is not even a part of it.  The media highlights the sideshow, telling us that it is the center ring at the circus.  While the perpetual Presidential campaign holds our attention, real public policy is made virtually anonymously.  This renders democratic processes and institutions in America increasingly irrelevant.  What is happening to America’s vaunted Constitution?  I thought we had the right “peacably to assemble.”  But protests against this state of affairs, one in which unimaginably wealthy entities and individuals are afforded one set of lax rules while everyday working people are subjected to a much more restrictive rulebook, have been quashed.  People remain bitter, and they will vote, but it won’t make a lick of difference.  The voting booth is but a pacifier.

I experienced the most freedom and the most prosperity of my life while living and working outside the United States.  I know my perspective is colored by this fact.  But I think the reality of the current state of affairs is well worth thinking about here, in these United States of America, where assumptions about superior freedom and prosperity are so deeply entrenched that few of us ever question them.  Let us no longer allow ourselves to be swindled by such misdirection.  Let us indeed pay attention to that man behind the curtain.

Christmas, We Hardly Knew Ye

Surely, I am not the only one who feels, more than a fortnight out from one of the world’s most celebrated holidays, that it has already come and gone.

Admittedly, this observation is grounded in the life of a person who relies on TV as his window on the world.  Sure, most of the bevy of sickeningly repetitious commercials are still for Christmas-related items, but not all of them, not like before Thanksgiving.  The networks, both broadcast and cable, are already telling us what to look for on the idiot box after the Super Bowl in February.  February?  We just turned the calendar to December, we just set out our seasonal decorations, we are just putting up our trees and wreaths, just filling our homes with the aroma of apple cinnamon.  The Christmas cards are just beginning to arrive.  Gingerbread cookies, egg nog and fruit baskets still await us.  And the magical, holy, silent night itself remains distant.  Yet, somehow, it feels like the celebration has come and gone.

As with most everything else, this is because of money.  There were more commercials about Christmas between Halloween and Thanksgiving, instructing obedient consumers to come on down to the stores on Thanksgiving night or in the still-dark early morning hours of what some twisted mind coined “Black Friday.”  We were beseeched to shop locally on Small Business Saturday.  Cyber Monday was promoted for the more online inclined.  On Thanksgiving Day, Christmas references reached their peak, and newscasters as well as advertisers squirmed in anticipation of imminent shopping sprees, as if the next morning heralded Christmas Day itself.  I am no Christian, but I still think the holiday deserves better than to be relegated to a Madison Avenue mass consumption gimmick.  It’s a special time of year, even for secularists, but it has become tarnished by excess, reduced to a time when exorbitant sales figures are expected to surpass those of the previous year.  This cheapens the holiday, transforming it into a spike in the inexorable march of the business cycle.

Where is the meaning?  The well-loved Christmas specials have already aired.  Some guy sang about mistletoe and Saint Nick, holly and yuletide, Oriental kings and what came upon a midnight clear a couple of nights ago.  Hold your horses!  It’s not here yet.  By the time it does get here, we’ll have been so saturated with Christmas marketing for so long that we won’t really enjoy Christmas Eve or Christmas Day; we’ll just be glad to be getting it all over and done with.

The reason that the arrival of Christmas is rushed is so that more people will have more time to buy more stuff.  And they are whipped into frenzies over it.  Every year, we hear about shoppers hurting or killing at least one of their own, accidentally or purposefully, amid mad dashes to acquire, to possess, to consume.  It’s shameful, really, downright shameful, sad and disheartening, anathema to what Christmas is ideally all about: peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.  Isn’t our civilization better than this?

It is, but we see it only in pockets of isolation.  Families holding fast to old-time traditions.  The faithful attending midnight mass on Christmas Eve.  Sparkling eyes at ceremonial lightings of municipal Christmas trees.  An annual recitation, by an honorable elder, of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  Recalcitrant old codgers refusing to watch Rudolph, the Grinch or Charlie Brown until Christmas Eve, dusting off their VCRs to play old videotapes of those precious Christmas yarns.  Me, I like to sit in the quiet of the night, listen to the silence, watch the flame of a candle dance, inhale the pure scent of pine and nip a little nog before listening to the fine jazz sounds of the Vince Guaraldi Trio performing their renderings of Christmas favorites old and new.

If there is a lesson in all this, it is that the Christmas rush behooves us more than ever to slow down and appreciate some of the fine things about life — good music, treasured tales, once-a-year flavors and gaudy decorations that please the eye if only for a couple of weeks.  Let the sheeplike shoppers scuffle, shove, shout and race their ways through this wonderful season without stopping to savor it.  It’s their loss.

A wise man once told me to stop tightening up my gut for tomorrow’s travails today.  “Life,” he reminded me, “is to be enjoyed.”  I think we’d all be a lot happier and healthier if we took this simple advice, especially at Christmastime.

Prison for Paterno

Foreword added January 23, 2012:

Since the man is dead, there is no point in arguing for prison for him for being an accessory to rape after the fact.  Despite all the acclaim that is being heaped upon his legacy, much of it having to do with how much good he did for the young men on his football teams, the fact still remains that he didn’t do much good for little boys who trusted one of his own assistant coaches, of whose crimes Paterno was aware.  None of us is perfect, granted, and forgiveness is divine.  But let’s keep the truth in mind before we go about lionizing this man.

To say that I am deeply disturbed by the heinous acts of sexual molestation perpetrated on little boys by a football coach at Penn State University is an understatement.  I feel much more than disturbed.  I am repulsed.  I am sickened.  I am angry.  And I feel adrift.  Where did my country go?

The statement made by head coach Joe Paterno just after he was fired makes me see red. This football icon, a man who is virtually single-handedly responsible for the financial wealth of his community, and therefore the most powerful man in that same community, abided a pedophile in his midst.  But, upon being fired, he talked first about his own troubles, about how he would have to get used to not being a football coach.  Oh, poor Joe!  Only as an afterthought did he tell the news media and the gathered crowd to “pray a little” for the victims.  Pray a little?  Joe Paterno was in a position, for more than a decade, to do a hell of a lot more than just pray for the victims.  He was in a position to do something about it, to help the victims, to prevent more victimization.  But he chose, instead, to place the interests of his football program ahead of the interests of young boys who were being sexually exploited.

Joe Paterno could have stopped his assistant, Jerry Sandusky, from committing any more sex crimes.  All he had to do was refuse to be associated with a child molester, a pedophile who had spent a lifetime maintaining a so-called charity for underprivileged kids so that he could prey upon them.  He could have turned Sandusky in as soon as he learned that Sandusky had sodomized at least one little boy in Penn State’s football locker room.  He could have had campus police jail Sandusky.  He could have had a local prosecutor take Sandusky to trial, convict him, and throw him in prison, leaving him for the biggest and strongest inmates to do with as they pleased.  True justice!  Perhaps only Joe Paterno, with his godlike status in central Pennsylvania, was in a position to put an end to Sandusky’s sex crimes against children before the lives of who knows how many more were damaged.  But, instead, Paterno took the easy way out.  He followed the law, yes, by reporting the incident up his chain of command to his ostensible supervisor, the university’s athletic director, and then he confiscated Sandusky’s locker room keys.  But Sandusky continued to serve Paterno as an assistant coach.  Didn’t the very thought of a child rapist on his sideline make Paterno sick?  Did he and the athletic director and whoever else decided to take Sandusky’s keys really think that was sufficient punishment?  Men do not rise to power and responsibility by being ignoramuses.  There was surely a cover-up, a desire by Paterno and others to prevent a scandal from sullying their vaunted football program.  Such lack of ethical perspective, such aiding and abetting of a child molester, should land Paterno, along with all the other authorities who covered for Sandusky, in prison themselves.

But such harsh punishment is not enough.

President Obama called for national “soul-searching” over this outrage.  It’s about time.  Ours is becoming a culture where the buck stops nowhere.  It is becoming increasingly difficult to get responsible authorities to take responsible action.  And when action is taken, no one is held accountable.  Everyone covers their asses and passes the buck.  Bureaucracies in institutions both public and private are designed this way.  We are told, “That’s not my department.”  Or “That’s above my pay grade.”  “My supervisor is unavailable.”  “Visit our website to lodge a complaint.”

As a reporter, I once had to get a court order to find out who at the Michigan Department of Transportation was responsible for the procurement of property.  It was a minor matter compared to child molestation, but someone had screwed up, perhaps even committed a crime, and that person was being protected.  This is now the status quo of American culture.

As I noted, this does not feel like my country.  I was raised by people who admired President Harry Truman’s motto: “The buck stops here.”  In order for imperfect people to form a more perfect union, individual accountability and transparency are necessary for the establishment of the public trust.  But in today’s “pass the buck” culture, there is little for the public to trust.

This must change.  In the meantime, I hope more than a little prayer is done for the victims of Penn State University’s moral ineptitude.

When Titans Fall

How appropriate is it that the final out of the New York Yankees’ 2011 season was a strikeout by its “star” third-baseman, the 250 million dollar man, Alex Rodriguez?  This is the man who earns 43,000 dollars every time he comes up to bat, whether he knocks in four runs or grounds into a double play.  This man exemplifies the Yankees, the spoiled rotten team that should be dominant but is instead, well, rotten.

But this little piece is not about “A-Rod.”  This is about baseball and my beloved Detroit Tigers.  The Tigers are the little guys from a city suffering crushing economic conditions who knocked the Yankees, perennial playoff contenders, the team from the city of Wall Street, out of the post-season.  Hooray!  It felt fitting that the underdog Tigers from hard-luck Detroit was the team that eliminated the Yankees.  Some in Motown worried that losing home-field advantage and having to go back to Yankee Stadium for a decisive Game Five in the American League Divisional Series would prove too difficult.  But one fellow Tiger fan welcomed the challenge because it gave the Tigers the opportunity to go onto Yankee home turf and say, “Eat it!”

There is a photo of the moment just after the final strike blew past Rodriguez’s bat.  It shows the multi-millionaire looking glum, his head bowed, about to drop his lumber and walk away for the season.  It also shows an Alex of a different stripe.  Alex Avila, the beat-up young catcher who worked as hard as any player this season for a relatively modest middle six-figure salary, smiles broadly, rising from behind the plate to run out to the mound, jump on closer José Valverde, and start the celebration.  The photo is a memorable study in contrasts.

For some folks, there is no greater joy in life than seeing the Yankees lose.  This amuses me and makes me smile, but I think there are greater joys than that, among them watching the Tigers win.  The Detroit Tigers manager, a man his players call “Skip,” the crusty and inimitable Jim Leyland, was a picture of class at his press conference after the Tigers were beaten by the Texas Rangers in the next playoff round.  He said that he thought too many people criticized the Yankees for losing instead of congratulating the Tigers for winning and that he wasn’t going to do that.  His hat was off to the Rangers, who had proven to be the better team.  This, too, is a joy: the glory of integrity.

Why doesn’t the Yankee-obsessed New York (and, by extension, national) media demonstrate such integrity?  Why did Alex Rodriguez, even in losing, garner more media attention than the upstart Detroit Tigers?  It all has to do with money.  New York, New York is awash in it; the Rustbelt doesn’t have enough of it.  A friend in Toronto despairs of his team ever reaching the post-season because his Blue Jays are in the same division as the Yankees.  There is no salary cap in baseball, so the well-heeled Yankee organization can afford to scour the country, the continent, the world, and acquire the best players, often tempting them away from places like Detroit and Toronto with eye-popping offers that cannot realistically be refused.  So, given New York’s financial advantage over the rest of the baseball world, many people celebrate when the Yankees fail.

I understand this perspective, but I celebrate more when the Detroit Tigers achieve the unexpected.  I celebrate more when this unassuming little Midwestern team performs miracles, like winning 20 of 26 games in September, at one time winning twelve straight games as they swept four crucial series in a row.  I celebrate more when the Tigers are the first team in the majors to clinch their division.  I celebrate more when good hitters on other teams express trepidation about facing Tiger pitching.  I celebrate more when the Tigers advance in the playoffs.

But I must admit that when such celebration comes at the expense of the New York Yankees, it does taste sweeter.

The Iron Envelope

I hate the fucking religious people.

They take it as a given that supernatural phenomena and notions of the divine, such as God and heaven and afterlife, are factual, even though there is not one shred of empirical evidence to support the existence of such phenomena and notions.  These are things that must be taken on faith, but the fucking religious people espouse them as truths.  Faith, by definition, involves a leap into the unknown, but rarely is the unknown acknowledged as unknown.  They say they know, which contradicts the very faith they hold so dear.

Meanwhile, these people who reflexively affirm the existence and truth of wholly irrational notions, such as an all-knowing and all-powerful God, a holy redeemer sent by that god through virgin birth to save us all from original sin (whatever the hell that means), the performance of miracles like changing water into wine, healing cripples and raising the dead, then transcending death himself before ascending into the clouds and thence into heaven, are simultaneously dubious about scientific precepts and historical fact.  The laws of science are, by definition, immutable, having been tested, retested, then tested lots more, and subjected to the ultimate test of time.  This is the scientific method, to establish truth with certainty through demonstrable and repeatable experimentation that serves as empirical evidence.  But the fucking religious people defer instead to holy books that say the Earth is only this many thousands of years old, not four billion years old, and so they insist, in the face of all hard and fast evidence, that man and dinosaurs coexisted, for example, or that evolution is a fantasy.  Evolution by natural selection can be and has been scientifically tested, documented, demonstrated as true and repeated over and over again but the fucking religious people continue to insist that it is untrue.  No empirical evidence exists to support the notion of an almighty creator of the universe, but the fucking religious people accept that notion without question, so much so that they want it taught to students in our halls of knowledge.  At the same time, they demand from science proof for that which science affirms to be true, even though they will never accept such proof because their faith precludes it.  “Faith moves mountains,” they say.  Bullshit!  Tectonic plates are what move mountains.

Religion is abstract, inconsistent, destructive and downright laughable.  And the emotions surrounding religion serve to divide humanity.  On the other hand, science is concrete, and its assertions are accepted only after enduring the rigors of relentless experimentation and time.  It is inherently innocuous.  It is logical and believable and sensible.  And since science seeks the truthful understanding of nature, of time, space, the universe, it can only serve to unite humanity in knowledge that doesn’t vary by culture or tradition.  But the fucking religious people refuse to accept logic, believability and sense, or even the vast stores of empirical evidence upon which the laws of science rest.  The fucking religious people prefer emotionalism, divisiveness and ignorance.

We are smarter than this, we big-brained mammals.  It is high time we leave our most primitive explanations for the universe behind us.  But I think the fucking religious people are scared to do that.  They are scared to stop having faith in all their ridiculous notions about supernatural phenomena.  They are scared that they won’t be able to sleep at night.  They are scared to face the most abstract concept of all: the void.

I take it back.  I don’t hate the fucking religious people.  I pity them.

Settle Down

What does it mean to settle down?  People have been telling me to settle down for 25 years.  I used to think I knew what they meant.  But I look at myself today, pushing fifty, never married, no kids, no pets, no job, no money, no financial security whatsoever, but also with no responsibilities to anyone but myself and my own survival, life’s ultimate imperative.  Then I look about me at a population of babbies having more babbies, living in apparent domestic bliss, matrimony optional.  And I wonder yet again what it means when people say, “Mark, isn’t it time you settled down?”

When I was a teen and a young adult, chock full of piss and vinegar, people told me to settle down.  But they meant “calm down,” “hold your horses,” “take it easy.”  Maybe I was frothing at the mouth, spoiling for a fight, or wearing my lust on my sleeve, as young men with active hormones do.  In such cases it was wise to settle down.  It would save me a lot of trouble, help me avoid alimony or child support, maybe even keep me out of jail.  Settle down.  Good move.

But those days are long gone, thankfully.  I do not care what others think of me, I am no longer stridently ambitious, fixated on lofty goals, and sexual desires no longer guide me.  And it feels really good to be free of those things – better than a nice long slow screw.  Unlike the temporary gratifications of youth and its fleeting moments of ecstasy and euphoria caused by a haze of chemicals released in the brain, life this way is calm and lucid.  Enjoyment is uncomplicated and long-lasting.  While it is sometimes visited by inconvenience and irritation, part of the unavoidable clamor of life in these noisome and populous times, such intrusions are usually easy to endure.  Here’s an example: I just wrote a check in the amount of half my life savings to the power company.  (This isn’t as dire as it sounds, for my life savings do not even reach into the hundreds of dollars.)  The bill had clamored at me, and paying it involved some irritation and an unpleasant sensation similar to pain, but it only lasted a few minutes.  I dropped it in the mail and it was gone.  I looked out at the swaying trees just beginning to blush, felt a gust of cool, crisp wind, smelled the distinct aroma of autumn in the air, bit into a plump apple, savored the taste and the texture, and heard the barks of the geese rising from the river.

Is this not what it means to be settled down?  I can’t imagine being more settled than this.

In my mind’s eye, I see what passes as “settled down” for the hordes.  Their houses, apartments or trailers are strewn with stuff.  Screaming children run amok, infants wail, television screens blare.  Mums and dads diligently work away their days to assure that there is food among the clutter and to pay their bills.  Stressed, they yell at one another over trifles.  They make up through rare nights out, paying the babysitter with cash, paying for the meal with a nearly maxed-out credit card.  Dad wastes his lunch break arguing with the insurance company for denying coverage for a precautionary medical test.  He gets home, slams the door, yells at the kids, then apologizes to his mother-in-law who’s been with the children all day.  Mummy works late tonight but, for one of the kids, only Mummy will do.  She arrives home after midnight, bedraggled, and does her best to soothe the anxious child.  When she plops into bed she tells Dad not to dare.

Such people tell me that I’m missing out, that no other joy matches children, that there is nothing to compare to domestic tranquility.  “So, Mark,” they ask, “when are you going to settle down?”

I don’t tell them that I am quite glad to be missing out.