Columnist.
Marriage in New York State, by act of its legislature, and in spite of everything you've always heard, is for everybody, and every combination of everybodies. Except, you know what -- it's not. And, what's more, won't ever be. For all the legislature's grandeur and power, and the fervent encouragement of The New York Times, no aggregation of human beings enjoys the power to redefine marriage.
The Unconscious Prejudice Industry -- the boo-hoo-we're-all-guilty-stop-us-before-we-discriminate-again lobby -- took it deservedly on the chin Monday from the U.S. Supreme Court. Genial enough was the court's unanimous decision not to allow advancement of a sexual discrimination suit against Wal-Mart, inasmuch as the plaintiffs were using the wrong part of the right law. Better still was the conservative bloc's rejection of a claim to the effect that Wal-Mart managers might have been allowing stereotypes to influence their personnel decisions, thus engaging in "gender bias" against 200 actual claimants who wished judicial permission to speak for a million and a half female employees.
We didn't used to have long seasons of debate by earnest people wanting to show us why they should be president. But then we didn't have Twitter, estimated debt in the trillions of dollars or -- to the degree we have it now -- angst over the survival of our liberties. This means we should get used to a lot of debates. And further, that these puppet shows with cute questions ("Leno or Letterman?") and choreographed camaraderie bear some direct relationship to liberty's prospects in the new century.
"Industry Puts Heat on Schools to Teach Skills Employers Need," says The Wall Street Journal headline. Well, duh -- a phrase painfully familiar in the modern American classroom. Skills matter, knowledge matters, rational understanding is consequential to national survival because ...? Duh. It's gotten hard to explain. Fearful of waiting too long for government to lead the struggle, and it is one, for education excellence, American business is taking a hand.
The problem with getting old, the fellow told me once, is that you remember when everything was cheap. There's an offsetting advantage, though: You remember how long politics has been mendacious. Thus, watching a Republican operative on YouTube pushing a sweet old crone off the cliff in her wheelchair (that's how much Republicans hate Medicare!!) wasn't much different really from watching Barry Goldwater, back in '64, incinerate a little blond girl picking daisies (that's how much Republicans love war!!).
The point about Israel that keeps getting lost in the Gentile underbrush is that Israel isn't just a Jewish homeland. Well, it's that certainly. Such was the point of its creation in 1948, which wasn't about efficiency of things like that. Under mandate from the League of Nations, the British had been doing a characteristically admirable British job of looking after a foreign territory -- building roads, administering justice, and such like. The Jews had a different vision for Palestine, as it was then known. They saw the vision enacted at last, and in paraphrase of the Creation narrative it was good.
There's never any accounting for a Newt Gingrich idea, or even for Newt himself, who never steps out of the spotlight, never leaves a thought unexpressed, and seems to crave the microphone and TV camera the way a 3-year-old craves peanut butter. The Republican Medicare plan is "right-wing social engineering"? Aw, come on, Newt. Does the aroma of presidential politics come to us on the breezes from "Meet the Press," from which vantage point Newt addressed us Sunday? Maybe he hopes to pick up Democratic votes through his new "moderation," or whatever it is.
The good old American inclination to wave a magic wand and say to an urgent problem, "Begone!" is on display in the fast-emerging movement for a national K-12 curriculum. Ah, you didn't know there was such a movement, far less that it was emerging. Here's the lowdown. Various analysts representing mostly the education establishment are pressing for a so-called "common curriculum" -- one that would supposedly engage the minds of all American students, aligning their performance with the latest thinking as to what's needed.
The main thing is, we got him. Emphasis on all three words. They count equally, each one. We, the people of the United States, personified in action by some of the best and bravest fighting men since the Spartans, got -- eliminated, sent to hell -- him who threw our times out of kilter through murder and personal vanity of unmeasurable dimensions. We got him. "The bloody dog is dead," as Richmond sums up the downfall of Richard III: words equally applicable to the overthrow of Osama bin Laden. The world has witnessed an act of restoration and of cleansing.
I haven't investigated, but I'm sure of it. A pollster in ancient Babylonia was sampling the citizenry on a proposal to raise money by taxing the vineyards and flesh pots of the obscenely rich. I don't know a word of ancient Babylonian, but can we doubt the response went something like, "You bet! Go for it! Get those miserable shekel-grubbing sons of camels!"? In other words, there never was a human instinct that didn't continue to play out, century after century, millennium after millennium. Class resentment included: which explains polls purporting to demonstrate that a majority of Americans want to fight the federal deficit by raising taxes on those earning $250,000 a year.
The editorial page of The New York Times naturally picked up on President Obama's assault on the GOP for assaulting the "social compact," a terrible thing to do, by the president's and the Times' reckoning. As Obama phrased it, the Republican goal of bringing the federal government's multi-trillion-dollar deficit into line with economic realities "is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America." The New York Times throws the states into this dark gumbo and seconds Obama's motion in a subheadline: "From Congress to statehouses, a sweeping attempt to dismantle the social compact."
So why (you ask, reasonably enough) does he bother? Doesn't President Obama know that the Republicans who wrung substantive budget cuts out of him last week aren't going to applaud this week when he calls for tax increases on "the rich" to help pay down the federal deficit? This ole dog, as we like to say in Texas, won't hunt: no way, no how. Only after about a tenth of a second of concentrated thought do we understand what's going on. Two things essentially: PR and Democratic economics. The public relations aspect to Obama's big speech on Wednesday has back-to-back elements.
One reason Democratic policies have made America such a worry-free land these last couple of years is the uniqueness of Democratic gifts and abilities. For instance, did you know Democratic spokesmen can see into the future? Well, they can. Days before House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a Republican, was to lay out his $4 trillion plan for controlling federal spending and reviving the economy, Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) knew what was in it. He had odor, flavor and contents down pat. Not a bite of it would we want to ingest. Trust him.
The New York Times marked Geraldine Ferraro's death with the observation that by gaining the Democrats' vice presidential nomination in 1984, she kicked aside ancient barriers to women's acquisition of national political power. Bah, humbug. What barriers? The Ferraro story clicks neatly in place as an installment in the approved narrative of women's rise from oppression to near ubiquity in human affairs: for all that she and Walter Mondale lost the '84 election overwhelmingly, and, further, that no woman since then has won the presidency or vice presidency.
When Ralph Nader wants to impeach a liberal African-American president for war crimes, you start to get the idea how odd these present times are. Odd and getting odder. Nor is it likely, in spite of the wall of comments concerning our Libyan intervention, that anyone can grasp the meaning. There seems one likelihood to suggest. It is that this won't be the last intervention. We live in that kind of world.
Our national weeping and wailing over education spending cuts, public employee unions, and such like cause minds of a certain vintage to stop still and wonder. When were the divorce proceedings between home and classroom filed anyway? And who filed them, and why? It can be argued that the current traumas of education proceed from that divorce: further testimony to the general understanding that it's the kids who get hurt worst in divorce. The divorce between home and public school classroom -- accomplished by the end of the '70s -- was a national calamity. To put it another way, once public education lost in great degree the robust support of the middle class, there was nowhere for things to go but downhill. And so they have slid for decades. Teachers parading around the Wisconsin capital like Jimmy Hoffa's truck drivers? It not only wouldn't have happened in ye olde days -- it didn't happen.
Crash! Thud! The president's grand scheme of remaking America in the image of the Daily Kos, MSNBC and the Democratic left is encountering, hmmm, let's say some slowdowns. These should make varied American breathe more easily as they contemplate the near future. Bad enough, from Barack Obama's standpoint, has been the refusal in recent months of at least two federal judges to affirm his right to compel universal purchase of health insurance.
The more it changes, the more it's the same, hmmm? In this present instance, meaning our country's seemingly fresh-scented wrangle over union power. The scent isn't fresh at all, nor is the wrangle. The arguments are old, the question at stake is old: namely, when is the public interest served by giving organized coercion its way? Lately, we haven't thought much about that question in America; which is why Wisconsin takes us by surprise -- the raging public employees, the adamant governor and the fugitive Democratic senators, hiding out to avoid a vote on stripping public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights. What's this? Teachers abandoning the students whose parents pay them?
"I am going to stand with the hard-working taxpayers of Wisconsin." -- Gov. Scott Walker That is a pretty good place to stand if it comes to that -- as it has in Wisconsin, obviously -- and so arises another obvious point: What about Scott Walker for president? Just asking. We have to see how the government-union tantrum up there plays out and to whose advantage -- that of the taxpayers or that of union members so attached to the public interest they'd rather mill around the state Capitol shouting slogans than perform the jobs for which they hired on. You know, teaching children to read and such like.
Something there is -- to paraphrase Robert Frost -- that doesn't love an oil company. That, in fact, wants to Shake Fat Cat Oilmen Till Their Teeth Rattle, then Make 'Em Pay for Polluting the Skies and the Oceans!! Then ... ah, well, that'll do for starters. Whatever that "something" may be, Barack Obama has at least a mild case of it: his new budget being case in point. Any federal budget, a political document as much as an economic one, is complex, but from it, you get simple hints as to what's on the minds of those who propose it. The Obama budget -- all $3.7 trillion of it -- signals chiefly a desire to achieve political traction by sidestepping cuts that would anger Democratic constituencies; it likewise signals a dismal understanding of how to create jobs and growth -- for instance, by making energy cheaper.
