Imagine the Quaker
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archives | newquaker.comFriday, December 17, 2004
One of my favorite Bob Newhart gags has him as a psychotherapist with a sure-fire technique for fixing his patients' psychological problems: No matter what problem they bring to him, his prescription is "Just stop it!" You have a drinking problem? "Just stop it!" he says. Anxious about things? "Just stop it!" And so on. Well, at least it's funny when he delivers it. But this isn't about Bob Newhart. It also isn't really about the Bush administration's toolbox. (That's the toolbox in which they have only one tool and they use that one tool to fix everything.) You think the "war on terrorism" is getting fixed? Just wait till they get around to fixing Social Security.
Back in 1994 our pundits figured that the Social Security system would go belly-up in 2029. The Congressional Budget Office now has it failing in 2052. Despite a slew of interesting suggestions to keep the system functioning properly, the Bush administration, with its recognized lack of imagination, wants to get rid of it altogether through a process of privatization. Like this president's plan for confronting universal terror, there is only one way to ensure the solvency of Social Security. So we fix Social Security like we fix terrorism. "There's only one way to deal with terror," says President Bush: "We must confront the enemy and stay on the offensive until these killers are defeated." Like terror, we must confront Social Security and stay on the offensive until it is defeated, er, privatized. Forget that the Social Security tax currently stops at incomes of $87,900, pushing the burden to everyone with incomes below that; forget that the shortfalls could very well be paid for by the remission of his supply-side tax cuts specifically favoring those who make over $500,000; forget that this president wants to borrow $1.5 trillion dollars just to make the privatization plan work.
My take on it is that this is a consistent application of the Bush administration's single-minded effort to benefit the large publicly-held corporation. That's who benefits from stock-and-bond trades, and, well, along with the firms that will handle the trades and the accounts and the accounting, and we know that they can all be trusted with our money.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 4:35 PM
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Sometime in 1996, around the time of my separation and divorce, I gave up on radio, TV, and all forms of media news. I did that for about a year and a half. I suppose I could have done something else, like maybe not speaking for a year, walking around with chalk and a small chalkboard to use for communication, but the divorce made me want to scream a lot—the scary, primal kind, which comes from deep inside—so that wouldn't have worked out. When I did pick up the news again, I discovered that not much had changed. The names were different, the time was different, the places were different, I was more broke ... but our politicians still spoke falsely, crime still frightened the country, somewhere there was always a disaster or two, and there were still wars or rumors of wars.
I figure that it would just be a repeat of it all if I swear off the news again, but yesterday seeing George W. Bush put the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the necks of Gen Tommy Franks, Paul Bremer, and George Tenet, in what is really our version of the knighting ceremony, made me want to go back into hiding. This US president has no shame. He could very well have been knighting the Three Stooges. But in another year there will be something equally stupid to rant about, and so it goes. Life in a fallen world is a world in which we keep pretending that life is better, that we are making progress, forgetting that this is a world in which progress is sometimes merely actually getting up in the morning. How much better is that today than yesterday?
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 4:44 PM
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Correcting the Duke. I got a comment today from someone in the UK regarding one of last year's blogs about David Duke and correcting my reference to the institution from which he received his honorary doctorate. Alas, one of my sources was The Village Voice, but, hey, I can't use that as an excuse. Rent (the commenter) says that Duke was given his doctorate by "a private organization with established anti-semitic credentials, the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (primarily a correspondence course outfit). Don't call him Dr without irony."
After some other due-diligence research, I fixed the entry, added a reference to the Inter-Regional Academy of Personnel Management in the Ukraine, and at the same time took the opportunity to soften my reference to Christy Martin (well, after all, she did write me a personal letter objecting to my bold statement regarding her connection to Duke's incarceration).
Such things don't change history, but only clean the lens through which we look at it.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 10:30 PM
Monday, December 13, 2004
Well, it's been close to two weeks now with Pepe, my daughter L's new chihuahua puppy. Here's a picture. His ears haven't perked up yet, but when they do, I'm sure his first words will be "Yokiro Taco Bell!"
Again I'm captured by the thought that animals occupy a special place for us on earth, and that the difference between us and them has nothing whatsoever to do with any special metaphysical qualities—but that we are humans and they are animals. It is because of our humanity that we have a special relationship to God and our Lord Jesus. It is because of our humanity that we ought to see something human-like in animals. I think this is not anthropomorphizing, but rather a steward's compassion for that which he has been charged to oversee.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 10:50 PM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
