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Whose freedom march?

 Bash the Messenger, Human rights, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 072007
 

It’s a sad state of affairs when the issue of freedom in other countries is seen as a Bush idiosyncracy. Back in the days when Liberals were liberal, it was a cause that almost everyone in the United States favored. But here is a headline and lead paragraph from an article in Monday’s WSJ:

Pakistan Crackdown Slows Bush’s Freedom March

President Bush’s vaunted “freedom agenda,” using U.S. aid, influence and example to advance political liberty around the globe, suffered one of its worst setbacks this weekend when Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan.

I suppose it’s hard for the average newspaper journalist to ever stop thinking about George Bush. And there are those who are going to think of every event in terms of whether it hurts or helps their partisan faction. But isn’t this crackdown also a blow to the freedom of the people of Pakistan? Shouldn’t that issue be just as important as whether it helps or hurts Bush?

And if it’s too hard to focus on the lives of people in other countries, there is also the fact that every loss of freedom elsewhere is a threat to our own freedoms in the United States, too.

It’s not all about Bush.

Exploiting children for partisan politics

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 252007
 

There has been a lot of talk about the socio-economic status of Graeme Frost’s family and eligibility for SCHIP programs. I don’t know much about that. It’s not that I am uninterested. I have had my own experience with people trying to make me and my family, with our middle-class income, dependent on government welfare programs. But I’m more interested in his case of the issue of whether it’s right to take kids, put words in their mouths, and put them up on stage for partisan political purposes.

We seem to have an instinctive sense that it isn’t right when celebrity stage parents do it. The following is from a book review in the Wall Street Journal: The Perils of Being a Child Prodigy : Why Ervin Nyiregyházi never lived up to his potential.

In fact, “Musical Wonder Child,” part one of “Lost Genius,” might easily have been subtitled, “How Not to Raise a Prodigy.” The child of an amateur pianist and a tenor in the chorus of the Royal Hungarian Opera, Nyiregyházi was paraded around Europe performing for the social elite. Although his parents arranged quality musical training for their son, his mother banished his chess set for fear it would lure him away from music. She urged him to play Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” in less than 60 seconds and insisted he perform in short pants to heighten his marketing appeal. (He finally rebelled at the age of 17.)

We could come up with other examples like that, too. But somehow, whenever there is talk of cutting government spending, people think it’s OK to parade their kids like was done with Graeme Frost, and even put words in their mouths. Back in the mid-1990s when the new Republican Congress was battling the Clintons, some parents at the local VA was were also parading their kid in front of journalists for the sake of continued government spending. That’s when my campaign against this kind of child exploitation began.

I had already got somewhat sensitive to this issue some years earlier when my two oldest children were young, probably a little younger than Graeme Frost. I took them to a debate between Jackie MacGregor, Republican candidate for Congress against the incumbent, extreme leftist Howard Wolpe. MacGregor was a bit of an extremist herself, as am I. But she said some things I couldn’t support, and finally I just sat on my hands during her final applause lines. My kids were clapping wildly, though, along with the rest of her partisans in the crowd. I was glad I had brought them to the event, but it made me think how dangerous it is to use children this way. They knew which side their parents supported, but they weren’t old enough to think these things through themselves.

Graeme Frost is in 7th grade, so he is old enough to start thinking. The Kennedy-vs-Nixon campaign was in full swing when I was that age. Our teacher in our two-room school in rural Nebraska was at one point quizzing the kids about their political affiliation vs that of their parents. There was one 8th grade girl who supported the Democrats while her parents were Republican. The rest supported whichever candidate their parents supported. The teacher used that as evidence that only one of us was thinking for ourselves, while the rest of us were not doing so yet. That infuriated me, and I’m still angry over it 48 years later. Just because I agreed with my parents didn’t mean I wasn’t doing my own thinking. So I became a rebellious teenager — rebelling against those who said teenagers of the 1960s needed to rebel against their parents. (Well, to some extent I did, as my parents can still testify. But it in many ways I refused to do so, still angry over the implications of what our teacher had said in 7th grade.) I imagine Graeme Frost is doing some of his own thinking, too, and might be similarly resentful over what I’ve been writing here. But at that age kids shouldn’t be used as props for their parents to hide behind.

Special people

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 232007
 

In the 1750s Benjamin Franklin was in England, in part to petition for redress of grievances — The Pennsylvania Governor considered himself too special to have to pay taxes, even though he was the richest man in the colony. Eventually we had a Revolution — one that had an impact around the world.

Now the egalitarianism that began in that era is coming undone.

From the WSJ

A law President Bush signed last month drew a lot of attention for trying to make college more affordable for many. Less trumpeted were provisions that support the altruists among us.

The law, signed by President Bush last month, appropriates $20 billion to cut interest rates on certain federal student loans and increase grant aid for low-income students over the next five years. But the College Cost Reduction and Access Act also creates an important incentive for all students to enter fields of public service by offering to forgive what could amount to tens of thousands of dollars of school debt per student.

The legislation broadly defines public service to include a wide range of occupations, such as public health, public education, working for a nonprofit organization and serving in law enforcement or as a public-interest lawyer.

In other words, the members of the governing class are too special to have to pay the full costs. They get special government subsidies that the rest of us don’t get.

This is bad on so many levels. It sets up a situation of government vs the people. It shelters a whole class of people who tend to favor higher taxes from knowledge of the impact that the cost of government has ordinary people. It demeans entrepreneurship in the private sector, the sector that supports the increasing costs of government.

We’re seeing this same sort of thing happening in England, now, too.

From Paul Greenberg

There’ll always be an England, so they say. But you might doubt it after reading about the latest controversy in Parliament. To quote David Stringer’s AP dispatch from London: “British lawmakers have been granted the power to move to the head of the line at restaurants, rest rooms and elevators inside the Houses of Parliament, angering those assistants, researchers, janitors and other workers who must stand and wait.”

Audible unbrowsable

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 192007
 

I’ve told the Audible.com people that I’d like to sign up, but first they have to fix their wretched web site.   I’ve pretty much run out of books for my MP3 player from our public library’s Netlibrary subscription, other than Pimsleur language recordings.

But it’s too painful.   If I go to their web site and elect to Browse for history books, I get a web page that says “Audible has 1587 history titles with more being added all the time.”   And it displays eight of them, and offers to let me listen to samples.  But there is nary a link by which to browse to look at more than those eight.   To do that, I have to use their complicated search page.  But I don’t want to search.  I want to browse — one handed, with my mouse, not my keyboard.   Most library card catalogs have decent browse functions to provide serendipity almost as good as you can get browsing the stacks.  But audible.com doesn’t get it.   False advertising, I’d say, telling me to “Browse and Discover”, and then provide no means to browse.

Slow entrance, fast exit

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 192007
 

slowcemeteryentrance-6346

A slow entrance is fine. I’m in no hurry. But there will be a fast exit, according to St. Paul. (It’s in 1 Corinthians 15. It’s a good thing I looked it up, because I had thought that passage from Handel’s Messiah came from Thessalonians.)

Monday before last, I was riding to the probable site of Isaac McCoy’s Baptist Indian Mission a few miles from here (just outside of Bridgeton, Indiana in Parke County). I was riding into a southwest wind, which is a good way for me to be reminded that I’m getting older, which may be why I read the sign as I did. I rode a ways past it, then rode back to get a photo.

This stuff is catching

 First Amendment, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 082007
 

David Everitt shows that no one political faction has a monopoly on the urge to stifle the opposition. He addresses the question: Is there an echo of the old McCarthy era blacklists? The sad thing is that we have so many examples like this, and so few of the “I disagree with what you say, but defend your right to say it” type.

With the kind of demagoguery found in both periods comes an eagerness to stifle the opposition, sometimes successful, sometimes not, but always managing to inject intolerance into the public square. During the 1950s, the most damage done to political adversaries, and civil liberties in general, was perpetrated by right-wing zealots when they took advantage of the furor over the Korean War and installed a media purge. Leftists couldn’t match the right’s efforts – but not for lack of trying. During World War II, they had supported the Roosevelt administration’s sedition trials and the suppression of publications considered pro-Axis. Later, as the Cold War began, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship demanded that an anti-Soviet film, The Iron Curtain, be banned, and the Voice of Freedom Committee attacked anti-Communist radio commentators by organizing protest campaigns against their sponsors, employing techniques that presaged the methods used later by Red hunters to instigate the blacklist. A similar tendency would even be embraced by avowed free-speech champion John Henry Faulk. Just three years after striking a blow for tolerance and fair play in his historic 1962 libel trial, he adopted the tactical thinking of his old enemies by urging the John Lindsay mayoral campaign to publicize the past political affiliations of rival candidate William F. Buckley in order to “shut him up.”

In our own times, the readiness to silence the opposition continues to crop up. While the right tried to derail the careers of Danny Glover and the Dixie Chicks, the left attempted to do the same for radio psychologist Laura Schlesinger and, just recently, proposed a bill to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine in an effort to undermine the influence of conservative talk radio. On the broader political scene, this habit has been accompanied by extremist rhetoric and paranoid conspiracy-mongering, also reminiscent of the blacklist period. Some on the left have characterized Dick Cheney as a Nazi, just as Secretary of State Dean Acheson was once branded the “Red Dean.” Many have recently fulminated over a Zionist, neo-conservative cabal that secretly controls the Bush administration, just as right-wingers once denounced an insidious group of Ivy League pinkos manipulating foreign policy in the early Cold War (while leftists simultaneously insisted that Truman was the puppet of Wall Street warmongers).

A day in our shoes

 Dissent, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 032007
 

I had seen a few references to Hillary Clinton’s laugh/cackle, but I regret to admit that I wasn’t paying enough attention to join in the Hillary-Bashing. It’s not like me to miss out on an opportunity.

But I see from Dick Morris’s Column that there was more to it than the laugh.

But every once in a while, there’s a rare moment of clarity. That happened last year when Wallace interviewed the former president. At the end of the interview, Bill lost it. Suddenly the veneer was off, exposing the enraged, snarling, lunging Bill accusing Wallace of “do[ing] his nice little right wing hit job” when he forced Clinton to address his inability to capture or kill bin Laden.

Not a pretty sight.

And Wallace did it again in his recent interview of Hillary. Asked about the extreme partisan politics espoused by her and her husband, the real Hillary challenged Wallace. “Well, Chris, if you’d walked even a day in our shoes over the last 15 years I’m sure you’d understand.”

Oh, yeah? And what is that supposed to mean? Lots of people on all sides of political issues have come in for heavy criticism and opposition. Is she saying criticism of the Clintons is what explains her extreme partisanship? If so, how come it’s only the Clintons who have that kind of reaction to it?

Well, at least she didn’t deny that she was an extreme partisan.

(I don’t think this comment was as revealing of the real Hillary as the one in 1993, “I can’t be responsible for every undercapitalized business.”)

Jury duty and second-hand television

 Uncategorized  2 Responses »
Sep 262007
 

I got called in for jury duty today, and was sent home after a morning in the jury assembly room.   Hopefully that will be the extent of my duty this time.

I didn’t exactly spend my time in that room, though.   I walked out when the television was turned on — presumably to pacify us while we waited.   I couldn’t walk far enough to get completely away from the idiot noise that came out of the box — they don’t want potential jurors mingling with people involved in the cases.  But at least I could stand out there and read a book without being made dumber for every minute that I would have spent in the same room with the idiots on the tube.

Why is it that we’re not allowed to bring cell phones and communications devices into the building, yet they’re allowed to assault us with television?   And they don’t allow smoking.  They try to protect us from second-hand smoke, but what’s the point when we have second-hand teevee idiocy around us?

The least they could do is provide a separate non-TV room where those of us who don’t want to listen to second-hand idiots could go?   Eventually, people will realize this tv crap is a greater threat to health than smoking, and all public places will be made teevee free.     (Don’t get me started about hospital waiting rooms.)

Bicycles, a cure for boredom on the road

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 232007
 

Joseph B. White at the Wall Street Journal says new car sales are down because cars are boring:

New-car sales are sagging in America and car makers are blaming the housing slump or the credit crunch. I suspect something else. I suspect boredom. Face it. A lot of the cars sold in America are just dull.

Whose heart leaps at the thought of firing up a Toyota Corolla? If you took away the logos, who could discern a significant difference among the interiors of any five $35,000 luxury cars? Black plastic, faux wood grain, even “metallic look” plastics — clichés all. Sport utility vehicles and crossovers? Ho hum.

Well, of course cars are boring. They’ve been boring since the 1970s. They’re commodity items now. And the safety and efficiency people have taken everything of interest out of the main roads. Bridges are just slab-sided affairs that keep you from seeing the scenery you’re crossing. Local safety people cut down the trees that used to provide arbors over country roads, and have cut and filled to provide good lines of sight, and incidentally to disconnect the roads from the world of which they once was a part. And, as White points out, there is the traffic.

White, being a journalist, blames the state of affairs on government. No, not because of governmental meddling. He thinks there hasn’t been enough government meddling. Ho, hum. Dog bites man; journalist wants more government. All the things he wants may make cars more efficient, but they will not make driving less boring.

If you want the open road to be exciting, get a bicycle. In my role as The Spokesrider I get more memories of scenery and road experiences in any day of riding than I do in years’ worth of driving.

Even now, I can review in my mind details of a week-long tour I did eleven years ago. I sometimes surprise myself with what I recall when I try to review the whole ride in my mind, from beginning to end. The closest I come to that in a car was a drive to Canada’s Arctic some years ago — but even there I can’t remember all the little details that I do of bike rides to podunk towns in the Midwest. Bicyling is a multi-sensory experience — with sight, smells, touch, sounds. Sometimes it’s even a tasty experience, as when riding late in the day and insects come out.

Cars, on the other hand, are designed to insulate you from sensation. Get a bicycle.

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