“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.”
--Shakespeare (Love's Labor’s Lost)

Plenty of words this month, you betcha! The U.S. election seems a dim memory. Very dim. Ohio? There weren’t any problems with the voting, I guess. If there were, the mainstream press would have brought them to our attention. Wouldn’t they?

In any case, there are far more pressing and distressing problems to contend with. Our president is still speaking, regularly (a problem in and of itself) and lest we miss a single word, it would seem to be to our benefit to pay attention.

There seems to be some sort of financial problem. It appears to be a case of the macrocosm resembling the microcosm; we as a nation appear to be spending more than we are taking in. Most American families do the selfsame thing on a weekly basis. We max our credit cards one month and then live on cottage cheese and applesauce the next to pay the bills. If this indulgence spins out of control, personal bankruptcy becomes an option, and has in fact become so commonplace that it has all but lost its stigma. Lawyers and trustees are the order of the day, and credit card debt counseling has become a growth industry.

Folks in the throes of financial debt seem to grasp almost immediately that the way out of the situation is to arrange affairs so that one’s income exceeds one’s expenses. That leaves two choices: reduce spending or increase income. Or better still, doing both. Even a mediocre playboy with an MBA from Harvard should understand that.

I cannot imagine that a person in such a downward spiral would walk into his boss’ office and demand that he be granted a cut in salary, said cut to be permanent and irrevocable. One would have to be pretty much a fool to take such an action. If we were to hear of an acquaintance of ours doing the above, we’d question his sanity, or look for some method to his apparent madness.

And yet, the madness described is the net and all but pre-ordained result of our leader’s tax cuts. These tax cuts benefited no one save the wealthy, and were yet another pathetic attempt to prove an ideology correct despite repeated experience to the contrary. This sort of thinking is almost a textbook definition of insanity. It is in fact a fairly accurate definition of stupidity.

Unless tied to a of requirement that the beneficiary of the tax cuts use some part of the windfall to invest in some sort of job creation, the only person who benefits is the guy’s Porsche dealer. This is the difference between a tax cut, and a tax incentive. Bill Clinton knew the difference and gave us eight years of record prosperity. Neocons belittle this fact, blaming it on the “dot com bubble.” If that be true, Gimmee another eight years of bubble.

Our president can’t be stupid, can he? I mean, after all we elected the guy. He survived four years of mistakes, declining economic conditions, bungled military operations, blatant lies, and general social stagnation bordering on regression.

He must have something in mind. Let’s see… If we are required to fund an open-ended military adventure in the Middle East, cut our revenue even further by making the idiotic tax cuts permanent, and fund transparently stupid defense projects such as the Missile Defense Shield (recently tested, and an abysmal failure; yet it is still being deployed), then it is inevitable that we will have less to spend on social programs.

How ‘bout that? Couldn’t have worked out better!

What a beautiful example of the triumph of conservative economics! They all told FDR that the New Deal with its Social Security wouldn’t work. They told LBJ that the Great Society with all its frivolities such as Medicare (a single payer system that has been one of the true successes of Liberalism) was un-American and a fool’s errand. These steely-eyed ideologues believe only in the free market. To them, it is not an economic theory, something to be used, controlled, and regulated, but an elemental force, a fundamental law of nature, like death.

If you visit Ireland and drive through the countryside, you will occasionally happen upon grassy mounds that run along the sides of the road. These are not natural terrain features, but mass graves. They contain the remains of the victims of “famine fever,” men, women, and children who fell ill with cholera, dysentery, scurvy, typhus. Masses of these victims of the potato famine of the mid nineteenth century were buried without ceremony or coffins, a mere few inches below the soil. In the space of ten years over 750,000 Irish died.

Despite the pleas of Irish politicians, the British absentee landlords of the large estates (under British law, Irish Catholics were prohibited from purchasing land or entering the professions) continued to export livestock and grain to England, instead of making these available to the starving tenant farmers who produced them. England believed, as a stated matter of policy, that the free market would end the famine. No kidding. I cannot remember the fool’s name (he was an English politician), but I recall his quote every time a conservative opens his mouth. “The winds of free trade must not be interfered with.”

Now we are being told that we have a problem, and the solution once more is to let the free market handle things. Last year, a study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of sciences, estimated that the lack of health insurance coverage causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. If they are correct, then in the last ten years, as many of our fellow citizens have died as did Irish during the potato famine.

Americans are suffering and dying because our leaders cannot bring themselves to open their mouths and their hearts and actually do something about the problem. The increasingly marginal Hillary Clinton tells us that the best she can do for us is to support a paperwork reduction act. Our already maximally marginal president flies around the country touting tort reform as the answer. Both are out of their minds, and out of touch with reality. We need government to step up and do what needs to be done to save the lives of those who pay to provide all our legislators with the best health plans our tax money can furnish. We don’t need tax credits, paperwork reduction acts, medical savings accounts, or any other of the half-assed cowardly proposals on the table. We need every American covered by a national health insurance plan. Everyone. One hundred percent. We need it now, not in ten years. If that means scrapping the useless missile defense shield, so be it. If that means raising my taxes, then so be it. I can live with one less movie rental a week, one less dinner in a restaurant a month. Do it.

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We are all capable of believing things that we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
--George Orwell in 1946 essay "In Front of Your Nose."

The Iraqi elections are over, and regardless how one feels about the war one has to feel a sense of admiration at the courage of those who risked their lives to vote. I mean, the sooner they have a stable government, the sooner U.S. troops will leave. That photo of the Iraqi women proudly holding up their ink-stained fingers will stay with me forever. They now have a governing council of sorts and hopefully will soon have a constitution and a president. How long the new republic will stand is anyone’s guess. The insurgents have proven themselves nothing if not militarily astute. I fear that they will simply let the elections proceed, let the winners wear their suits, pass their laws, and then murder them one by one. I sincerely hope that will not be the case, but I fear it will be.

Militarily, the war continues to chew up our soldiers and marines and spit them out. Our Secretary of Defense has recently disclosed that he offered (twice) to resign, but Bush chose to retain him. He kept a dolt in office who, when confronted by front-line soldiers about the lack of adequate armor, offered that “one goes to war with the army one has, not the army one wants.” He then got into his fully armored Humvee and flew back to the real world. Well, to Washington anyway. I guess the soldiers he left behind were comforted by his remarks, realizing that a tank, even though fully armored, can still be
destroyed, so you might as well go into battle in the nude. Makes logical sense…

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I hope some of the above makes logical sense as well. It does to me. There has been some discussion about the tone taken by some columnists and letter writers. I have no real problem with people who are honest and express their opinions in a forthright manner, and are able to dialog without resorting to ad hominem remarks. I do have a problem with being told that by writing in a particular style a person is somehow at odds with a “Torah directed life.” I see a frightening trend in the current political climate, and reserve the right to be just as angry, sarcastic, and opinionated as I feel is necessary to prevent the destruction of my country by what I consider the equivalent of Fascists and Nazis. If I am wrong on facts, by all means point the error out to me, I would submit that many of the Jews marched to the gas chambers strived to live Torah directed lives, and in the end, it did them precious little good in the face of stupidity and a passive and ill-informed population. Only my opinion.

Once again, thanks to my Megillah friends for your indulgence, and (as I duck for cover) I welcome any and all comments and criticism.