Does Anything Ever Change In Politics?

I can’t believe people’s fickleness. At the end of the Bush era everybody got hoarse clamoring for CHANGE, chanting YES, WE CAN, and now, only 8 months later, people let themselves be hoodwinked by a bunch of self-serving party hacks in the Congress of the United States, who instead of representing their constituents, side up with their real masters - the guys of Corporate America – in blocking that very change the majority of the people had demanded. One can only hope that at the very end wisdom will prevail, and people will finally come to realize that public options, like public schools, public transportation, public parks, public television, public safety, and yes, public health (like Medicare and Medicaid) don’t constitute socialism. Rather, they are what a modern democratic government is supposed to provide its citizens. Other countries, like the U.K., Canada, France, Argentina, and most others provide them, and nobody believes they are socialist countries.

Book Review: The Forger, by Cioma Schonhaus

A story of survival in wartime Berlin


Schonhaus’ description of the horrible conditions that prevailed in wartime Berlin is quite good. In The Forger he provided this reader a sense of the place that was convincing. One can see that the author knows Berlin. However, it is a story that has been written many times over. The "Last Jews In Berlin," by Leonard Gross, comes to mind. Being presented in the first person increases the story’s poignancy. Schonhaus' characterization of himself is quite credible, and it must be assumed that the original German version must read well. Unfortunately, the English translation is not as good as it could be. Finally, Cioma's crossing the Suisse border was rendered as being much too easy. The reader gets the impression that the author was in a hurry to complete the story.

Capitalism and the need for a Revolution in Spirit

An article by Benjamin Barber titled A Revolution in Spirit, published in the weekly The Nation, caught my attention not only for being well written but because it touches an issue dear to my heart, one that impacted my life in my younger years. In his article, Barber talks about the need for a revolution in the spirit in its relationship to culture, democracy, and ultimately to life. This, in my post-World War II years, was what some called Humanitarism, a doctrine that puts the spirit—with its ideals of peace, equality, and good will toward all—first. It is something I’d like to call now social capitalism.

Much has been written about the spirit of America, the wonderful force that became a beacon of hope and a cause for envy in much of the world. A spirit that, to a large extent, evolved from the rugged individualism that characterized the beginnings of the American experience. A spirit that produced our brand of capitalism, a force that not only propelled our country to become the richest nation on earth, but also, in tandem with our democratic ideals, helped the less fortunate in the world to alleviate in some extent their pervasive poverty.

But as the collapse of our present economic system demonstrates, not all is well with capitalism. Having won the Cold War, that not so symbolic struggle between Capitalism and Communism, we emerged as the sole undisputed super power. With our victory came the arrogance of the victor. The American spirit became the American hubris, and with it we began to lose many of the values that had made us great.

And now, in comes Obama. Not only is he a novelty for being our first African American president. That by itself is a milestone in the American experience. But he is exceptional in that he brings to the White House a unique intellect that with few exceptions was absent in many of its prior occupants.

One can only hope that President Obama’s call for change will help us break our cold and ruthless attitude toward what is right and wrong in our society. We definitely need a revolution in spirit, a reawakening of the spirit that once made us great.

We Americans are afraid of socialism. Maybe understandably so. But reining in capitalism in its rudest, often inhuman forms, doesn’t constitute socialism. It simply means that the government is responsibly carrying out the regulatory and oversight functions it is entrusted to execute.

The issue at hand these days is not the death of capitalism. I’d like to say that the real issue is to strengthen and purify capitalism, and thus prevent it from destroying our Western civilization as we know it.

Capitalism without morality cannot endure.

The Danger of Information Overload

The Internet, coupled with the gradually loosening-up of traditional restraints imposed on us over centuries by a ruthless hierarchical social system, is now confronting us with a new subtle but visible danger. Witness the 2008 presidential electoral process in the United States. For the first time our great nation is about to break a once thought unbreakable barrier erected by ossified traditions and a ruthless and corrupted socio-political system. This year’s election by one of our two major political parties of a presidential candidate —an African American or a woman—is proof that we, the people, have finally matured and truly deserve to think of ourselves as “We The People…” in the Land of the Free”.

This liberating process, however, is being undermined by a misguided understanding of the meaning of freedom. And the Internet, that universal forum for free thought, where everyone can publish anything unhampered by editorial corroboration, is unwittingly corrupting the very freedom it was meant to promote.

From the beginning of this year’s electoral campaign, our e-mail boxes are being overwhelmed by forwarded attachments—sent to us by friends and others—of uncorroborated writings by individuals often unknown to us extolling or decrying this or that virtue or vice of the candidates.

The sheer volume of these attachments, plus the wealth of what is freely published and accessed in what former vice president Al Gore called the Information Super Highway, is overwhelming and cluttering our understanding now.

The fact that at the same time we are being bombarded by a 24/7 news coverage that in its ceaseless need to appear up-to-date and newsworthy often resorts to a news coverage overload, dangerously flirting with irresponsible reporting, represents a clear and present danger to our democracy.

Indeed, the information overload to which we are continuously exposed can easily be turned into disinformation, a development we cannot allow to happen.

Thoughts about American Literature

Looking through the shelves of our big bookstores and reading our major newspapers’ Book Sections, one cannot help but notice that the strength of American literature largely derives from our writers’ keen opposition to or enthusiastic support of our country’s political and economical life. Many of America’s best known authors appear to be either active protesters or ardent supporters of whatever political wind happens to be blowing. What has happened here? Many a fiction writer complains that this pragmatic outlook causes non-fiction books to rank higher on publishers’ lists than fictional literature. Is it possible that the cause of this can be found in the way our society developed over the years? More often than not the American novelist creates his or her work in isolation, in a large city or small town, in a towering skyscraper or on a pastoral farm. Our writers live in a country devoid of a café culture that enables social gatherings and cultural exchanges like those found in Paris, Madrid, or Buenos Aires, where writers meet other writers and share a spiritual home.

As of late, American literature is handicapped by publishers, often controlled by foreigners, who only pursue financial success, who publish their books guided solely by the aim of promoting them to become bestsellers. The writer’s artistic output, therefore, is subject to commercialization—it is only a product that “has to be sold,” and that’s all. Unfortunately this trend is detrimental to the reader, and oftentimes fatal to the writer. In our new globalized order, it can be said that this persistent diminishing of our writers’ artistic endeavors vis-a-vis the publisher’s practical considerations and financial successes may be limiting the penetration that our American literature should be enjoying in the world.

How likely is it that we will soon reach a new stage where literary merits are based on originality or boldness of style rather than the pragmatism of the idea or the commercial or political value of the covered subject?

Unfortunately, American literature, like most other forms of our artistic output, is falling victim to the subtle but inexorable descend into mediocrity provoked by a relentless market-oriented economy.

The Ultimate Emancipation

We Americans, as a nation, stand before our history’s ultimate test as roughly half of our population is to decide who will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in this year’s election. We have an opportunity, for the first time ever, to overcome old taboos and traditions and break the ultimate glass ceiling that stands in our way to become a truly United States of America, united not just within geographic boundaries but also by race and by gender.

We like to think hyperbolically of ourselves as the “greatest nation in the world.” And true enough, we have done some extraordinary things not only for ourselves but also for the world in general. At the very beginnings of our history as a nation, we have inspired the French Revolution, a rebellion against tyranny that set the world on a new track towards freedom and democracy. We have fought our very own to preserve the Union that would make us great. We have emancipated our African-American population who some of our forebears mistreated horrendously. We championed the worldwide Suffragette movement that emancipated women long suppressed by giving them an equal right to vote. We overcame our own racial prejudices by enacting legislation that granted equal rights for all people under the law and little by little made us a kinder and gentler nation.

We did all this and more. But one thing we haven’t done yet in our society. We haven’t raised the cultural barriers that prevented a black man or a woman from becoming president of the United States. Until recently it would have been unthinkable for either to aspire to become president of the mightiest country in the world. Whites would have rejected the idea of an African-American running for president, and most men would have rejected the idea of a woman becoming president and commander-in-chief of our armed forces. It would have been considered ludicrous. We kept telling ourselves that “the country wasn’t ready for it.”

Now, finally, our nation is facing a decisive test. We are about to see the ultimate emancipation in our country’s history. History would correct itself by putting Barack Obama in the Oval Office. Why Obama and not Hillary Clinton? It’s not because Hillary isn’t qualified. It’s because White America owes a greater debt to our black compatriots than to our women.

Sorry, Hillary. Next time it’ll be your turn.

Sequel to We the People

The other day I read in the paper’s Opinion Page a letter referring to the accountability or “unaccountability” (italics mine) of our government. In it the writer asked, “When are we, the people, going to make our government accountable?” The question not only begs to be answered, it invites a closer scrutiny.
The writer puts her question quite rightly. She didn’t ask “When will the government be accountable?” Instead, she ask, “When will we, the people, make our government accountable. The emphasis is on “we the people.” It clearly shows that the burden is entirely on us. The truth is that we, as a people, are complainers. We are passive users and many times vocal abusers of a system that was given us by our inspired forefathers who saw in us, the people, a nation and not an economy, which regrettably is what lately we are being programmed to be. But in all fairness, even today there are innumerable examples of the government being accountable. Unfortunately the accountability appears to favor mainly the privileged among us, namely, those special interests groups who through their lobbies make their voices heard. We, the “mainstream” people, have few lobbies other than our representatives in Congress, who unfortunately, like Judas in another time, often succumb to the temptation of a few pieces of silver, and a handful of advocacy groups whose non-profit status many times ignores overly generous salaries and other pecuniary benefits for their executives. So how can “we the people” make our government accountable? Not by imitating the powerful corporate or political lobbies with their bribes and corruption, but by a more direct action at the grassroots level. By boycotting politicians whose track records are shady, instead of falling again and again for their empty promises and constant personality “reinventions;” by boycotting products and services whose prices are visibly not based on honest costs and returns but on “what the market can bear,” that fabulous market economy formula that legitimizes, indeed decriminalizes in some cases, the once reprehensible, if not illegal, price gouging; by doing “en masse” what that letter writer did – flood our newspapers’ opinion pages with our observations and yes, legitimate complaints; by shouting from our allegoric rooftops: “We wont take this anymore. We want our country back!”