Rumors of Far Despairs

I have discovered, and am currently residing in, the tenth level of Hell. I am certainly not the original discoverer, being that I am at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport waiting to board my flight to Boston. We have already survived the lines at check-in and the TSA search points, and are now sitting in the boarding area listening to interminable repeats of various messages telling us what we must not do, and the consequences of doing so if we dare do it. This must be Hell, since only there would the guardians contemplate the verbal equivalent of the constant rock music the military used to flush Noriega during our infamous invasion of Panama.

I used to anticipate traveling. Airports were never the most fun part of the travel experience, but everyone approached the melee with good humor and high expectations arising from anticipation of their arrival at a desired destination. In their current incarnation, no one is in good humor in an airport anymore, primarily because the rules are endless and relentlessly negative, the personnel managing them – and you – are barely polite, and the specter of passage through the various checkpoints is daunting and stress inducing.

This unhappiness is a direct result of 9-11 and is more of a distraction than a true cost of that tragedy. The airport experience serves as a reminder, however, that 9-11 has cost the American people a great deal in the way of lost civil liberties, lost moral compass, and loss of prestige and trust among the peoples of the world. Anyone who thinks these things have not occurred has either slept through the past 7 years or never appreciated the value of what we used to enjoy during the time in which we enjoyed it. To receive, as I did, an email out of the blue from a Belgian friend with whom I have conducted transactions asking me what the American people could possibly think they are doing and asking for an explanation brings home just how much trust we have lost in such a short time.

America once had great reserves of trust built up in Europe and elsewhere in the world. It is a given that trust is earned and never conferred. Like all valuable commodities, it takes a very long time to create a positive trust balance, and, by comparison, it takes moments to squander the asset. We earned our trust through our performance in two world wars on the backs of the American citizen soldier and on major goodwill initiatives such as the Marshall Plan. We invested life, treasure and sweat equity to build a strong positive trust account balance, only to piss it away it in the aftermath of 9-11 due to the Bush Doctrine and the arrogant misuses of our power by Dick Cheney and his cohorts.

We didn’t have to give up our civil liberties by allowing the government to invade our privacy without benefit of warrants or other customary assurances of our personal liberties; we didn’t have to lose our collective morality by deciding, without benefit of hearing or representation, who our enemies were and incarcerating them indefinitely in inhumane conditions; we didn’t have to lose the trust of millions of non-Americans by suggesting that we were the only super-power and they had to simply accept it while we did as we wanted, “justifying” our actions as we went along through cynical morality plays no one really believed.

After 9-11, we could have done what Americans have always done in a crisis: get mad, get our collective will together, give those who have harmed us a good thrashing, and then go on about our lives as usual notwithstanding the worst they could do to us. Instead, our present administration told us to learn to fear and to be governed by our fears. The first evidence of this intention came in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 as George wandered aimlessly in Air Force One and Dick hunkered down in his bunker. The rest of us were left to try and overcome our grief and confusion by ourselves.

In my humble opinion, what we should have done after 9-11 – following a suitable interval of, say 90 days, to allow us to collect our dead and properly mourn their passing – would have been to have a National Finger Raising Day, whereby the collective body of the union would have been told to go outside at a communal hour and raise their middle fingers in the general direction of Osama bin Laden’s last known address for a 60 second period denominated by church bells. In other words, we should have told those at the top of the Al Qaeda pyramid that Americans weren’t afraid of two or three old men full of hate and hiding in their caves in the wilds of Afghanistan, and, if they thought we were, they were sadly mistaken. We should have advised them that they could expect a visit soon, and that “now” would be a good time to make themselves scarce (seemingly, they didn’t need that last piece of advice, but we should have told them that anyway.)

This would have been a quintessentially American response – unique and pointed, if you will pardon the pun. This would have been in the spirit of the citizen soldier and of the admonition that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Instead, we hunkered down and went into hiding and even developed color coding for perceived threat levels. I used to think a rainbow of colors was a good thing.

I am not arguing that there is no threat and that we shouldn’t look to the security of our ports and our skies; but let’s do it as Americans – proudly, honestly, and with our values intact. Sneaking around in order to violate our own and international law is not our way. Our court systems, if they had been properly used by the administration, would have easily processed the bad guys by now, and we would not have to be ashamed of ourselves for incarcerating so many without the benefit of trial or proper representation.

In short, we blew it. At least most of us did; those in United Flight 93 got it right. George, Dick, Rummy and the gang didn’t – they just used the tragedy as cover to further their own nefarious ends. They caused us to let those two or three old men succeed in their goal of making America change its ways. Those old men couldn’t stand the sight of liberty at work and play in disregard of their narrow view of the world, so they decided to punish and scare us. We let them succeed by changing our ways and abandoning our pride and morality – we hunkered down within our fear and color coded the level of its intensity for them to see.

I am still for giving them the finger. It is what they deserved then and still deserve today – that and the justice that still awaits them if we can ever manage to focus on their capture as we should have those many years ago.

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I spent the last several days working on documenting a sizable loan transaction on behalf of a long time client. My instructions from the client were to get it closed “while we still have banks to close a deal with.” This comment seemed funny to me when I first heard it, but given the events of the past few weeks and the failure of Congress to act on a bailout package yesterday, I have to wonder if it has some actual merit.

The most amazing thing of all is Congress’ inability, depending on your point of view, to (a) do one single thing right, or (b) do anything at all. Both are versions of the same thing – an absolute inability to come to grips with anything useful. They only seem to achieve something when earmarks are involved for their own district. The rest of the time they are simply content with engaging in backbiting, character assassination, rampant party politics, and seeing who can achieve the biggest headline of the day by making comments about one another that would be deemed slanderous in any context other than the legislative process.

This statement is not anti-Republican or anti-Democrat; it is anti-Congress, itself, as presently constituted and operated. It wouldn’t matter if we still had Whigs and Tories – the system that we so revere is fatally broken due to the politicization of the legislative process that began in the 1990’s under Newt Gingrich and his gang. While the days when Senator Arthur Vandenberg acted as the loyal opposition in working with President Harry Truman on the Marshall Plan are long gone, one wonders if they shouldn’t be recalled with more than fondness of memory. Truman and Vandenberg couldn’t have been more different politically, and both men were fierce fighters for what they believed. Despite all this, they found ways to work together on important financial legislation necessary to restructure the world economy following the end of World War II. The debate they had was conducted with mutual respect and in relatively calm terms, without all the partisanship and poor English used by today’s Congress.

If you don’t think the current inability of Congress to act rationally is really a problem, take a good look at your forthcoming monthly 401(k) statement. The adverse affect of the Congressional morass upon each of us the past few years has been considerable, but it has been the sort of morass that most of us on what is currently being dubbed “Main Street” have been unable to comprehend. Voting to serve the ends of a President determined to end various of our civil liberties is truly harmful to the general public, but we are able to wrap it up in politics and the American flag and not understand the venality of the President’s and Congress’ actions. However, you won’t having any trouble understanding its adverse effect this month if you have a 401(k) or a bank account at Washington Mutual. The adverse effect will be palpable, and, as I write this, I can only wonder how much of an effect it has had. Opening that envelope will be a real thrill that only a prior drink of scotch will likely mitigate.

The point of all this is that I think we should consider recalling Congress as a whole and starting over from scratch. This is not such a radical idea as it might seem. The current lot of representatives and senators (note the lower case – they don’t deserve the respect of upper case) has become imprinted with a way of doing business that is self destructive and dangerous for the state of the Union. The concept of imprinting was pioneered by Konrad Lorenz when he became convinced that Graylag goslings would attach themselves to the first thing they saw moving after being hatched from their shell. Consequently, he walked around a nest of goslings wearing rubber boots as they hatched, and the geese faithfully followed him (or, rather, his rubber boots) as if he (or the boots) were their parent. This same concept applies when you first take a new job and someone says to you during your first day on that job: “Listen. Around here if you want something done, this is how you go about doing it” and then proceeds to give you the social mores of the organization in question in order to “aid” your integration.

The mores of Congress are sick and debilitating. No business would allow the carping and demonizing that prevail in our respective Congressional delegations. You can argue that this is politics as usual, but I think not. Politics as usual was Arthur Vandenberg and Harry Truman. Politics as usual is not Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton. It is time that for the rest of us to say “enough” and toss the rascals out.

The only problem with my plan is that there is no easy mechanism to recall the entire Congress – and I rather suspect that our publicly mean-spirited congressmen aren’t going to go willingly on their own. Further, since the filing deadlines for the November elections have long since passed, we cannot start a third party and go after them that way.

So, my suggestion is for concerned citizens all over the country to make themselves available as write-in candidates for Congress. No, I don’t expect any of the write-in candidates to win in a system that vastly favors entrenched politicians, but if the vote totals for these good folks were to be significant enough for the media to publicly contemplate its import in their usual moronic manner, we might just send a message that enough is enough and it is time to call it quits. In that way we might see some improvement in the next Congress, and sow the seeds for a badly needed third party that can break through the deadlock that currently disables Congress.

Simply put, it is time to throw the bastards out. They had their fun and look what it got the rest of us – envelopes that can only be opened after a stiff, preparatory belt.

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I watched the first of this year’s presidential “debates” last evening. Of course, like so many others, I came away wondering who had “won” while thinking that Obama certainly held his own on the subject matter that is supposed to be McCain’s ace in the hole. The polls this morning suggest an Obama edge, particularly among uncommitted voters – the only place where “winning” or “losing” truly matters to the candidates.

However, the overall losers in the “debate” are the rest of us. As long as the candidates fail to answer the questions put to them and behave like over-stimulated adolescents in their mutual give and take, the voters don’t really learn much about anything other than their respective testosterone levels and relative degrees of pugnaciousness. For those of us who are actually interested in a specific answer to a specific question, there is little meat upon which to feed.

So what can be learned from the debates if nothing specific is to be had? More can be learned from watching the candidates’ respective reactions to comments or questions than by listening to their rhetoric.

McCain appears to have no doubts about himself or his importance, and he seems annoyed by Obama’s presence – almost as if Obama had not the right to stand so near to greatness. He has little or no grace of presence and, in his answers, wanders much further from the specified subject matter than Obama. He seems always out to make a point, whether or not the point has anything at all to do with the question asked. His is an aspect that reflects the arrogance of assured ego and power. I do not find it appealing, and I find it more than a little reminiscent of Dick Cheney. Personally, I am not as much worried about 4 more years of George Bush than I am terrified of four more years of Dick Cheney. If Obama had any sense, he would compare McCain to Cheney rather than Bush – Bush is nothing more than Charlie McCarthy to Cheney’s Edgar Bergen.

Obama seems self assured and somewhat aloof, bringing an almost professorial aspect to his responses. He tends to answer the questions asked more than McCain, but does so in his own way which is more than 20% off true. For example, when asked which programs he would not be able to undertake given the price of the financial bailout (in other words, what were his priorities in the face of a pending budget deficit of significant proportions), he chose to speak about the things he wouldn’t cut. This is a partial answer – i.e., these are my matters of highest priority that I won’t cut – but it didn’t answer the question except insofar as you could then conclude that everything else is subject to being cut or delayed. If he had only said that last piece, he could say he answered the question. Of course, McCain didn’t answer the question either, leaving the moderator, Jim Lehrer, perplexed and somewhat annoyed since he asked the question in every possible way he could phrase it.

All in all, my biggest disappointment was that Obama failed to go in for the kill at times when he could have done so. Someone needs to learn the skill and art of Lloyd Bentson telling Dan Quayle: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Neither Obama nor McCain has yet achieved Lloyd Bentson’s status as a debater, much less JFK’s style and grace.

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John McCain literally has stormed into Washington to enter the great debate over the financial bailout. Most commentators seem focused upon whether he is helping or hindering the debate and whether or not he is there solely to aid his campaign for President.

What is more interesting to me is what these actions say about John McCain’s character – i.e., who is John McCain and what can we learn from the events of this week about how he might govern if he becomes President.

It has long been said that John McCain is a hero. I have no reason to doubt that statement based on what I have read and what I see happening in Washington. He is certainly unafraid of combat and even seems to have a sense of joy about an impending battle. I suspect he has a strong self vision that assumes that extraordinary personal effort and a strong will can and should make a difference, and that if he exerts himself in the throes of the conflict, only good things can ensue. He has leapt into the fray as if seeking to slay the dragon – the very sort of behavior one expects of a hero.

However, is this the sort of behavior one wishes in a President? Teddy Roosevelt was of a similar mindset, and for Teddy it worked well in its time. Teddy was always dashing off to solve something or other, and he did so with a genuine zest for life and for a battle over a good cause. We celebrate him for it even unto this day. When, however, after serving as President he ran again on a third party ticket, the electorate had had enough and he fared poorly. I think that a President in Teddy’s mold is only able to be effective when conditions are exactly right for a certified, club-carrying hero – at times when there is real or perceived physical danger and we need a leader who is not only unafraid to face battle, but relishes the prospect.

Other times demand that a leader of this kind step aside – those times when we need to engage in reflective thought about our goals and our future because our everyday behavior seems to have become disconnected from our basic values. Those times when a new consensus needs to develop so that we can move forward, many-voiced but united. This is such a time.

Leadership by heroic acts in times like these is antithetical to the achievement of a consensus. In times of reflection, the appropriate leader is someone who sets the rules for the debate, encourages the debate, encourages creativity, thoughtfulness and diversity of opinion, and who has the ability to synthesize a course of action from the myriad voices offering suggestions for the general betterment. He or she needs to encourage the debate, but know how to bring it to a successful conclusion so that we find common ground and move forward with confidence.

He who carries a club will not flourish in this environment and will stand in the way of the process. There are no quick, heroic solutions in these times.

In short, John McCain is simply not the man for this time. He may have been the man for some other time. He would certainly have been a better choice for the nation in 2000 and he would likely have succeeded after 9/11 in bringing us together where George Bush has not only failed us miserably in this regard, but also picked our civil liberties pocket in the process. It is hard to imagine John McCain on that Presidential plane flying erratically across our country in the minutes and hours after 9/11. He would have been in Washington or New York, and he would have been readying us for the war we should have fought, not the one we have fought.

But this is not 9/11. That was a sad time, but we need to let it go and face the reality of a society which is no longer sure of its goals and purposes. What we need now is to re-orient ourselves as to our moral vision and the very fabric of our financial and political systems. A man with a spear or a club is not the man for the helm at this time. We need a healer who can push us to, and lead us through, a constructive debate on these matters. It is not a time for cudgels.

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