Avdat

Suicide bombing the economy

It's almost worthless blogging about the debt ceiling crisis. No sooner does someone propose a plan than it's shot down. Your brilliant thoughts on Plan X are already obsolete.

I will say this: until last week it seemed inevitable that the Republicans would cave. After all, the President's a Democrat; he has a veto pen, and he's demanded new revenues. But this week it seems inevitable that Democrats will cave.

What changed? Until last week I assumed that the Republicans were only using the threat of a default as a bargaining chip. But now it looks like a lot of them in the House really do want a default.

This is madness.

And yet, as somebody somewhere on the internet said, If you're negotiating with somebody and you say, "If you do that you will destroy the world," and they say, "So what?" Guess who's in the stronger bargaining position?

I heard a GOP Congressman from South Carolina on the radio saying that default was no big deal because the government would continue to collect a whole lot of revenue. No. Not by a long shot.

Megan McArdle, no socialist, has composed a list of all the stuff that we can't pay for next month if we prioritize Social Security, combat pay, and Medicare--as the Tea Party would have us. It's like, everything. No salaries for federal prison guards or border patrol agents, no bullets for the troops, no disaster assistance and no FDIC insurance for your bank account. For starters.

I expect a certain amount of venality and corruption from Congressmen, but I don't expect them to be dumb as a bag of hammers. What can you do with such willed ignorance combined with a suicide bomber's negotiating mentality?

You probably cave.

I think that the best that Democrats and the progressive movement can hope for now is that the Republicans, flush with victory, will nominate an extremist like Bachmann, Perry or Palin. Obama can beat any of those three, but he'll have to abandon his post-partisan persona and run a brass knuckles campaign that makes the election all about the challenger, rather than the incumbent. That's the way Harry Reid beat Sharon Angle last year.

He can't let it be a referendum on his record because the economy will certainly be in the toilet next year--precisely because of whatever cuts he agrees to in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Boehner's plan (and Reid's is much the same) try to address our long term debt by cutting programs in the short term. All that will do is deliver the coup de grâce to this jobless, anemic recovery. Do people realize that cutting government spending means laying off government workers and ending programs that help needy people? Is that what we need right now?

Are Carolina fans crazier than the Tea Party?

Yes! Indulging in my highly discriminating taste for schadenfreude, I visited the Inside Carolina site last night once news of Butch Davis' firing broke. Here's a sample of what people think in the alternative universe known as Tar Heel Nation:

• A smart AD somewhere is smiling ear-to-ear realizing that BD is now available. I wont be surprised one bit to see BD coaching in a BCS bowl in the next 2 years.

• I am truly embarrassed that a once great university will not stand by it's players and now it's coaches.

• It's now time to see how the team stays together this year and if UNC could go get Urban or if one of the Asst. Coaches steps up as an interim guy.

• Both completely bend over for the NCAA to the point where they come to campus and find every single piece of dirt that goes on practically everywhere. Should have manned up and gave them the middle finger like Auburn and said "prove it, FU, K thx bai!"

Urban Meyer? BaaHaaHaaHaaHaa!

Yup. Tar Heel fans are mad... as a hatter. Not only are they fuming about the timing of this firing, which couldn't be worse, they're apoplectic that Butch was fired at all. In their Up-Is-Down world, Butch Davis is a coaching genius and a stand up guy.

Butch Davis? The guy who ran the University of Miami's sleazeball program? The guy whose assistant coach who was moonlighting as an agent runner? The guy whose baby sitter was writing term papers for football players and fixing their parking tickets? (And I'm talking hundreds of tickets on multiple cars!) The guy who presided over a program charged with nine major NCAA violations?

That Butch Davis.

But when you journey down the rabbit hole into a Tar Heel fan's brain, you'll discover that there's a rational explanation for all this. See, Butch knew nothing.

We can call this the Sargent Schultz defense. Or if you prefer another metaphor, think of Butch Davis as the child king of football, an idiot savant of Xs and Os betrayed by his nefarious regents (the aforementioned coaching assistant and baby sitter).

Carolina fans---it's time to come to Jesus.

Look, either he knew or he didn't. If he knew; he should have been fired. And if he didn't know, he should have known, and he should be fired for dereliction of duty. This is obvious to everyone who lives in the real world.

Now at one level this is a lot of fun for me, but at another level it's not. I was born and raised in North Carolina, and I have an abiding interest in that state's higher education.

The UNC system, of which Chapel Hill is the flagship institution, is one of the best public university systems in the country. It has been distressing and something of a mystery to me why it's distinguished leaders, and indeed some of the state's most distinguished citizens (I'm thinking of Bowles and Friday) would line up behind a shifty character like Davis. This scandal makes the institution and the entire state look bad, and while all the Wal Mart fans care about is fielding a winner, for alums, faculty and staff, this must be extremely embarrassing.

What's also something of a mystery is the timing, which is admittedly awful. Either something new and rotten came to light, or more likely, a changeover in the Board of Trustees brought in some badly needed outside perspective. Let's hope the new board continues to muck out the stall.

Too hot to play baseball

I had an epiphany while running past The Diamond on an oppressively hot Sunday afternoon: there's more to football's rise and baseball's fall than the fact that football is a better sport on TV. Baseball is a summer sport, but football is a fall sport, and that makes all the difference.

If you live in Chicago or Cleveland or Boston and suffer through five hard months of winter, there's nothing like cutting out of work on a weekday in July to watch the boys of summer. The warm sun on your face. Acres of green grass, freshly mown in a checkerboard square pattern. And this month's heat wave notwithstanding, the sun is rarely too strong or the temperature uncomfortably hot in these storied baseball parks. What's a hot day in Chicago anyway? 84?

But in the Sun Belt, no one luxuriates in freshly mown grass in July. That's a recipe for heat stroke. No. You play your 9 or 18 holes in the early morning, and then you hunker down in the comfort of your air conditioned home, blinds drawn. If you must be out at mid-day, you're at the pool or at the beach.

In the South, football season means it's safe to go outdoors again. Honestly, we're as house-bound here in the summer as Laura Ingalls Wilder was in The Long Winter. So I think it's no coincidence that as the nation's population has shifted south the nation's interest in football has also grown.

The wrinkle in my theory is that I, a native southerner, was out running a 10K at 3:00 PM in July. And on The Boulevard at that! The crunch, crunch of broken glass under my running shoes. The smell of stale beer and urine in the faint breeze. But I'm training for a marathon. I'm nuts. The exception that proves the rule.

By the way, you know what the speakers at The Diamond were playing yesterday? Running out, it was Baby It's Cold Outside, and running back it was White Christmas. Yup, exactly five months of shopping days until Christmas! Better beat the crowds now!

On second thought, wait until we're in the middle of the NFL playoffs, and it's not 140 degrees in your car.

CPE in the 6th century

On Facebook Brother Bill called me out for missing the presbytery meeting today. But the Lord's work detained me! I was reading Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks.

There's a lot of blood and guts in The History of the Franks, and more than a few head-scratchers too. Today I read about a hapless young man admitted as a novice to a monastery renowned for its severe discipline. One day the monks left the novice in charge of the wheat harvest drying in the sun. Suddenly a thunderstorm blew up. What was our poor novice to do? His brothers were too far away to summon. So he did all that he could do. He prayed.

And a miracle happened! The rain fell in torrents everywhere except precisely over the precious stalks of wheat.

The monks with the abbot came running, and they saw the dry wheat and the novice prostrate in prayer. What did the abbot do? He smacked around the novice for being a show-off and threw him in solitary confinement for a week.

Damned if you do; damned if you don't.

If Christians believed in reincarnation I could totally see this abbot coming back to be a CPE supervisor. Because it never mattered which verbatim you turned in for review, did it? They could turn any material they had on you into a turd sculpture of your ministerial incompetence and heart of darkness.

If it was a visit that went badly and you wanted advice, they never gave you advice; they gave you a lot of observations about how your dysfunctional family and your own cluelessness rendered your ministerial dexterity right up there with a bull in a china shop. Or if you turned in a beautiful verbatim, they contemptuously and openly doubted your honesty or sneered at you for your desperate need to impress your supervisors and outshine your peers. By the end of the internship, even you had to admit that a Christian coming to you for pastoral care was like taking a sick pet to a taxidermist instead of a vet.

But we're the better for it, aren't we? It was like boot camp, but now we wounded healer Christian ministers are the Marine Corps of Christianity, aren't we?

Gregory of Tours certainly thought that the novice monk's experience was good for him. Gregory reports that the man is now so hard core that during Lent he only drinks a cup of barley water every third day. BTW, Gregory refuses to identify the monk lest he see his own name in print and get puffed up with pride--for he does have a problem with pride, doesn't he?

Shorter History of the Franks (for the non-insane, non-aspiring PhDs reading this): Gregory loves miracles, so long as the miracle worker is dead. Somebody like, say, Martin of Tours, whose bones are interred in Gregory's church. Dead miracle workers are no threat to a living bishop's authority!

 

Our Daoist President

Lee doesn't understand why the national debt is consuming so much of our political leaders' time and energy. I think that a lot of it has to do with the President's leadership style. He's something of a political Daoist. He doesn't seize the bully pulpit and drum up support for a cause he thinks is just. He goes with the flow. Obama will always sail downstream; never paddle upstream, but he will try to steer the ship of state toward what he sees is the more pleasant shoreline.

So when he came into office with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, he steered toward health care reform, even though in his campaign it appeared as though climate change legislation was his bigger priority. The only people who care about global warming are kids who love polar bears and egg-headed liberals like me. But health care reform would be the capstone of the modern welfare state. It's something New Dealers and labor activists have dreamed of, and in their minds it was long overdue. So he did health care reform.

Then the GOP took back the House. They had plenty of energy for austerity. And the Democrats were exhausted. So Obama decided to capitalize on the GOP appetite for austerity. If there was to be austerity, then he would try to get as favorable an austerity package as he could get, one that wouldn't gut the welfare state, but would address its undeniable funding problems.

Turns out the Republicans were bluffing. And it looks like they may capitulate entirely--giving the President the authority to raise the debt ceiling without requiring a penny in spending cuts. The only condition is that they'll have to vote on it during next year's presidential race. Which is no real penalty. Nobody cares about the debt ceiling. What they care about is getting a Jay-Oh-Bee.

What I call political Daoism is what some have called "leading from behind," either derisively in the case of Charles Krauthammer, or as a compliment in the case of Andrew Sullivan. It's Obama's modus operandi. It drives liberals crazy. They're forever fearing that the President is going to sell them out and perpetually disappointed with his results.

On some counts they have a right to be disappointed. Decapitating Al Qaida doesn't vindicate a surge strategy in Afghanistan that's gotten a lot of people killed and has little to show for it. The Libya War is illegal, although only technically. The Congress's refusal to approve of the war or to defund it basically renders Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the Constitution a dead letter. If Congress won't declare war, somebody in government will.

But otherwise, this President is getting stuff done. Stimulus? Check. Health care reform? Check. Saving GM and Chrysler? Check. A new arms control treaty? Check. Raising fuel economy standards? Check. Stiff-arming Republican attempts to slash the budget in a jobless recovery? Check.

He's gotten more done in 2.5 years than Clinton did in 8. Props to the man.

Prayer requests

We take 'em at my church. It's the usual stuff: a speedy recovery from surgery, employment, traveling mercies, world peace.

But yesterday someone made a truly jaw-dropping prayer request. This person is being fired; her employer is outsourcing her job to India. It's a depressingly familiar story. But here's the kicker. Her last official duty is to train the very Indian workers who are inheriting her job. The company is flying them in from halfway around the world just for this.

It's not quite as bad as having to dig your own grave before the firing squad lines you up in front of it, but it's the same idea, No?

It gets better. The company has counseled her and her fellow grave diggers not to consume beef or pork in the break room lest they give offense to their Indian trainees. I'm sure everyone feels better that they're being canned by a company with an ironclad commitment to cultural diversity.

No, this is not a Dilbert cartoon. This is real. But it could be a Dilbert cartoon. Life imitates art.

At this point I'm tempted to jump off into politics and decry the excesses of capitalism, the weakness of the labor movement and/or the corrosive effects of free trade, but I'm not going there. Since I was made aware of this travesty in worship, I'm wondering, What would be an appropriate liturgical response to this situation?

I think situations like this remind us of the continuing relevance of some of those Bible passages the lectionary protects us from: the cursing psalms. Particularly relevant for this situation is the phenomenon of the evil-doer getting caught in his own trap, which the psalmist either prays would  happen, or gloats over once it does happen. "Lord God, may the manager who brought together his new staff with his soon-to-be former staff in this embarrassing, humiliating situation one day be put in a like situation."

In churches that use set, written prayers, there's the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, which the minister and congregation pray before Holy Communion. Maybe there needs to be a Great Prayer of Cursing in which the minister and congregation ask that justice, and not just any justice, but poetic justice, be served to evil-doers.

For we must not forget that companies, nations, trading partners and the like are ultimately made up of individuals and can do nothing apart from them. The awareness that there is such a thing as structural sin ought not obscure the fact that somebody--not a legal fiction like a corporation--came up with this idea, and somebody signed off on it. And if there's nothing we can do about it because the system protects them, then we who belong to another system called the Church can at least call these individuals to account before God.

I'm partial to the "God has no hands but our hands" prayer, so I don't think that prayer replaces but rather compliments work for social justice. But we're talking about the Church after all, not a labor union or a political party or a lobbying firm, so let's begin with prayer.

Of course a Great Prayer of Cursing could be abused or trivialized, but what can't be in the hands of sinful human beings? And someone might object that it's not a nice prayer to pray and Christians ought to be nicer than that, but you know what? We don't live in a nice world. Maybe the world needs to be put on notice that Christians are war with it--with the weapons of the Spirit. Put differently, "I got a psalter and I'm not afraid to use it."

Let's make a deal

This could be very good news:

President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.

Rather than roughly $2 trillion in savings, the White House is now seeking a plan that would slash more than $4 trillion from annual budget deficits over the next decade, stabilize borrowing, and defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode as the cost of health care rises and the nation’s population ages.

That would represent a major legislative achievement, but it would also put Obama and GOP leaders at odds with major factions of their own parties. While Democrats would be asked to cut social-safety-net programs, Republicans would be asked to raise taxes, perhaps by letting tax breaks for the nation’s wealthiest households expire on schedule at the end of next year.

Silly me. I thought that this was what they were already working on. How can you address the nation's long term debt without addressing the federal budget's most expensive programs? But I am glad that they are finally getting down to brass tacks.

This is what I hoped would happen when the Republicans took control of the House. After the stimulus, health care reform, an ultimately failed bid to do cap and trade, a new arms control treaty, and a ton of other legislation, my sense was that Democrats were exhausted. Even though I'm not a Republican, I believed that if the government were to make any progress on the nation's problems, the energy would have to come from the other side of the aisle.

We don't have two political parties because half the country is good and the other half is evil. We have two parties because given the size of this country and human fallibility, no one political party is going to be able to adequately address all the legitimate needs the country faces.

My only concern, and it is a big concern, is that I can never tell whether the Republicans are against the size of the government or the size of the debt. They tend to conflate the two. And in fact, the extremists like Grover Norquist actually want the debt to balloon so that one day, America will face a situation like the Greeks have faced this summer, and we'll be forced to privatize Social Security and end Medicare. So they cut taxes and increase spending, like during the Bush years. There's nothing conservative about that.

But maybe there are legitimate conservatives in the GOP who, given the choice between a big government in the red and a big government in the black, would choose the latter. I'd be happy if President Obama negotiated a deal with those folks.

I'm not talking about a deal like signing onto the Ryan plan. The Ryan plan actually ends Medicare and replaces it with a voucher system called "Medicare."

What I'm talking about are cuts in the form that we've already seen in the health care reform legislation--"cuts" that reward doctors and hospitals for best practices, cuts in the form of changing Medicare from a fee for service system to a fee for outcome system.

Liberal reaction to this trial balloon has ranged from measured (Kevin Drum) to paranoid (Talking Points Memo.) I'm disappointed with this. In fact, I've been disappointed with the conventional wisdom in the liberal blogosphere about the debt negotiations. It ranges from dread of Republicans for threatening to default on the nation's debt if they don't get their way to contempt at Obama for getting rolled in these negotiations.

As if a fair amount of brinkmanship isn't part and parcel of politics. Liberals sound like they did in the Bush years, whining about how mean the Republicans are. Frankly, I can't blame the Republicans for playing this card. It really maximizes the power of House Republicans, outnumbered as they are by the Democrats in the Senate and at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

I only wish Democrats had played the same card first. In 2002, they could have held the debt ceiling hostage in exchange for the White House pulling the plug on any plans to invade Iraq. I would have supported that.

As to the President getting rolled, look at what he's shepherded through Congress so far. This is not a man who gets rolled. This is a man who gets stuff done.

The modern welfare state is a good thing, but it is always going to need tweaking to respond to demographic and fiscal changes. If Obama can ensure the long-term solvency of these programs with some tax increases and smart cuts, liberals should jump all over that.

Marvin's garden: July 6, 2011

This is what the garden looks like when it rains! Pretty good! There's green tomatoes hanging all over my tomato plants. Out of sight of the camera are some very healthy eggplant.That big long vine hugging the tomato cages is Ethan's Prizewinner pumpkin. He wants to grow a 100-pounder and enter it in a fair.

I'm also excited that the okra is up. Okra is a real drought buster. When the rest of your flowers are sad and wilting, the okra is covered with these beautiful, large, white blossoms with purple interiors that will feed you without fail until frost.

But praise God; we don't need drought-hardy plants so far this summer. It has stormed three out of four days! Today a downpour hit around noon, and after a short break it stormed for a couple of hours.

This is how I remember it being when I was a kid. Sure it was hot and humid, but three or four days a week, the sky would shatter, the rain would pour, and that made Southern Living bearable.

For the past decade summers have been hot and unforgivably dry. Living in North Carolina and Virgina has been more like living in Oklahoma--temperatures topping the century mark, and God shutting up the heavens with a pair of girormous Channellocks. Or maybe it's been us and our coal-fired power plants cooling our homes as fast as we're heating up the earth.

Not this summer. Check out this bed in the corner of our back yard:

The rhododendron aren't browning up at the tips. Why if I use my imagination, I can go into the back yard, stare at them, and trick myself into thinking I'm at Montreat--it's so cool and soggy out there. And look at this yard!

I may actually have to mow it twice in the same week! Last summer weeks went by without me mowing. Even the weeds died.

Speaking of the weather, there's a good occasion for me to extol the virtues of Joe Romm's Climate Progress blog. It's part muckraking about climate change denialists and their do-nothing accomplices in Congress, and part reporting on cool, new green energy technologies. I really appreciate the second emphasis. It gives me hope.

I love the ecology in which I was born, raised and have lived most of my adult life. I love the deep shade that massive oaks cast on neighborhoods in Atlanta and Charlotte. I love the salt marshes tucked between barrier islands and the mainland--a fragile, fecund eco-system whose spartina grass, gooey mud and fish nurseries depends on shelter from the pounding ocean waves. I love the moss-covered rocks that centuries of torrential rains have exposed in the ancient Appalachian Mountains. It makes me sad to think that my grandchildren may never enjoy these delights--that the Southeast at the turn of the next century may burn to a crisp every summer like north Texas, and north Texas turn into Arizona.

But they can yet enjoy these things--with some creativity, ingenuity and sacrifice on our part.

I'm not worried about Casey Anthony going free

But maybe you are. If so, my advice is, Take a deep breath and ask yourself, "Do I have anything personally at stake in this matter?" If not, maybe it's not worth getting hot under the collar about it.

We all have a stake in a criminal justice system that protects society from violent criminals. But there's no reason why that general concern should translate into any sustained interest in the Casey Anthony trial, except for the people who live in her community and know her family personally. Even then, some of those folks down there really oughta chill out. Don't you have anything better to do with your time than haunt the courthouse? If you care about kids, go volunteer somewhere!

As for the rest of us, there's absolutely nothing any of us can do about this verdict, so why get upset about it? "Keep calm and carry on," folks. Just because Nancy Grace has ridden this hobby horse for three years doesn't mean you have to ride it with her.

Little book review--The Mermaid Chair

The Mermaid Chair, by Sue Monk Kidd. Jessie, the protagonist, leaves her husband Hugh behind in Atlanta and grudgingly returns to the South Carolina barrier island on which she was raised to deal with her mother's mysterious act of self-mutilation. While she's there she falls in love with a monk at the Benedictine monastery and gets to the bottom of deep, dark family secrets.

This book is The Bridges of Madison County in a salt marsh, marinated in a little Low Country Roman Catholicism. The religious angle takes the star-crossed lovers trope to a whole new level. What I mean is that the book seems to argue that adultery really ought to be a sacrament. See, rolling around in the mud with a holy man is such a beautiful act of self-expression--it's art, really--and this manifestation of creativity is just the ticket to the self-differentiation that both marriage partners need. And Oh--the noble tragedy of knowing, really knowing how much harm your act of self-indulgence is going to inflict on the innocent. Why, it's practically a cross to bear!

And another thing: assisted suicide ought to be a sacrament too. If you're going to off yourself, there's no better place than a church!

There's nothing subtle about either the self-absorption on display in this book or the shopworn contrast between religion and spirituality, art and dogma. It took every bit of self-control I could muster to keep from throwing this book at the nearest wall, but hey, if it provokes feelings that strong, there must be something to it, right?

Or maybe not. At the end of the novel, Jessie recalls a day she spent hiking with Hugh early in her marriage. The day ended with them frolicking naked in a creek and making love. I thought to myself, "This woman's problem isn't that she lost herself in her marriage. Her problem is that she hasn't been getting it enough in the great outdoors."

If only ol' Hugh had known. If only he'd have driven her up to Kennesaw Mountain every month or so for a romp in the bushes. All this could have been avoided.