All Hail the No Party system

                My wife, a Chinese born American, asked me why we have to have a two party system to run America. I’m an Independent, but I still said it makes America function well. I realized after saying this that I’d assumed there weren’t many people like me, who don’t feel comfortable spending until the cows come home or invading any country we choose.

                I was only in the wilderness for another hour when I looked in the WSJ at the Pew Foundation statistics on the makeup of the electorate.  Republicans are 29 percent, while 35 percent call themselves Democrats. But the shocker for me was the 38 percent of the people who identified themselves as independent.

                My mind started to imagine a different world. You could have former Republicans who believed in evolution. You could have former Democrats who realized the teachers unions were destroying America’s future. An individual could be for budget cuts and for abortion.

                I’m still a little lost on this issue and need to understand why we have a House of Representatives controlled by 29 percent of the electorate. I guess it was because a lot more people think evolution is a communist plot, than thought the country should be run by the trial lawyers.

The outside of a horse, the inside of a man

When I lived in Germany my daughter and I rode western saddles on warm blood horses across the fields of farms outside Frankfurt. Kathy, a civilian employee of the Army Corps of Engineers, owned the horses. Her favorite expression was “there is nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.”

30 years after a back operation, I can no longer ride and my heart is strong. That means my plan to leave the earth in a long gallop on top of a quarter horse is but a dream. I’m probably going to live forever.

In Flintridge, California I owned a thoroughbred/warmblood  (Warmblut) that had been beaten by a prior owner.  I stayed on her when she did 360s so I could prove to my long-dead father that I could do it. Since he used to be a ringmaster at horse shows, I figured he was watching.

But if the saying is true about horses, it is even truer for dogs. The other day my daughter was having a bad day, but she said her puppy always gave her attention and picked up her spirits. You may never get the loyalty from a human being that comes close to that you feel from a dog. (I’ not anthropomorphising   a dog, just trying to describe how it feels from a human perspective)

So in animals we find a relationship that needs to be cultivated and can make our lives better.  When things get tough there is nothing like having a dog at your feel or jumping on a quarter horse to lessen the worries about problems that otherwise might be hard to bear.

The Heart of a Navy Seal

When I was working at UPI in Boston, one of my colleagues was named Frederick (Ted) Marks. We used to work out together and then have a steak and salad. He had been the goalie on the 1960 U. S. Hockey team that played the Russians.

On his wall there was a cartridge belt and a rifle. Ted had a big scar on his chest. He said he killed the guy who had shot him and carried his belt and rifle with him as he lay on the stretcher. He was a man you knew could handle any situation, a man with presence.
Then UPI sent him to cover the war in Southeast Asia. I was told he was killed  as the US went into either Laos or Cambodia.

I have questions about America’s right to police every country, but I know our country needs people like Ted Marks. Navy Seals are the men who finally killed Bin Laden, a heinous criminal who killed many Americans.

Every now and then I punch his name into Google, in case what I learned was wrong. His name never comes up in any search, and we are the lesser for it.

Chinese Bachelors and the Housing Bubble

Today, the New York Times wrote that Chinese bachelors can’t get a second date if they don’t own property. In a country where mei Mianzi (losing face) must be avoided, this is a crisis

Now let’s think about the many people who have predicted an end to the Chinese property bubble. Does this mean ambitious men want to spend their days  and nights alone.  I doubt it. They have to buy something, even if it means getting a second job.

In an earlier blog, I said;

One female PhD who lives in China told me what she was interested in from a man. Here they are in rank order:

1.       He has to have a good, secure job.

2.       He should have a house

3.       He should own a car

I asked her about love? She said that it would probably come in time, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. (Remember we aren’t talking about Chinese women who grew up in America, this is about people who grew up in Mainland China.)

All those people who predict this collapse clearly don’t understand Chinese women.

I know Chinese immigrants who bought houses in the U.S when they were at ridiculously high prices. In every case it was the woman driving the purchase.

In America, women can disregard a guy’s present situation if he looks like someone with a future.  In an ambitious country like China, where they have a superior K-12 system in places like Shanghai, it’s like rolling the dice. (BTW, in China the nerd with the granny glasses can get the pretty girl. They don’t necessarily care whether he was captain of the football team.)

So does an ambitious bachelor want to spend his life alone? What’s your guess? And what do you think about China’s housing bubble?

Hey White Girl: You don't own my country

It seems that there are still white people in America who think this country belongs to them.  Let me get the cards on the table right away.  My ancestors were on the Mayflower, fought in the Revolution, and then fought for the north in the Civil War.  I was born white, but I don’t believe that makes me any better than any other American.

A white girl at UCLA went on you tube to make fun of Asian American families and the fact that they give their offspring so much support.  The close family unit that is represented by many Asian families is something that is positive in a country where many parents have no influence on their children.

When I used to teach university students about different cultures and how they communicate, my students from Africa and Latino students quickly understood that the values of Asian families were something to be admired.  Another group looked on Asian values as ridiculous because everybody should be out for themselves.

No matter how you look at it our country no longer belongs to people of any color or of any religion.  We are a nation of immigrants made stronger by the new blood which arrives on our shores every year.

As Christians we grew up singing “Jesus loves the little children.”  The song makes the point that it doesn’t matter what color a child is, Jesus loves them all.  Buddhism is a religion that arose out of Hinduism because Hindus believed people are borne into castes. Buddhism doesn’t discriminate among its followers and doesn’t assume any racial group is more entitled to Buddha's blessing.

If this girl doesn’t get it, then she can keep on excusing her lower grades by blaming Asians. The Asians will just go on becoming doctors, scientists and artists.

 Hey, white girl, you don’t own my country.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg3tIERI-D4

Wall Street Laughs And The Little People Lose

Goldman Sachs board member: “Our numbers are bad, you’d better unload.”

Hedge Fund Manager: “How come?”

Goldman Sachs board member: “I’ve got 73 more people to call. I don’t have time for an explanation.”

Goldman Sachs board member “I’ve got some info.”

New Hedge Fund Manager:  “Did you hear that documentary producer say at the Oscars that none of us had been put in jail?”

Goldman Sachs board member: “This guy is a jerk. He doesn’t understand we run America. We’re gonna throw a couple of Indians to the SEC, and Americans will think we cleaned house”

UCLA Basketball and Our Decreasing Standard of Living

John Wooden was a great coach who turned UCLA into a basketball dynasty. However, every coach who followed him was never given enough credit at UCLA.
There were two coaches named Larry who were treated as if their assistant coaches were Curly and Moe.

According to UCLA boosters there was no one acceptable to fill Wooden’s shoes. Now, even though they have a great athletic director who goes the extra mile, attendance in Pauley Pavilion has been dropping every year for the last three seasons.  This in a venue where disposition of four on the floor seats was once written into divorce agreements. 

The memories of Wooden’s tenure will soon no longer cripple a basketball program, because even UCLA boosters have to move on.

Soon our nation will have to smarten up and forget about the old days, because our standard of living will probably fall for the next seven years and people must face the concept of deleveraging. Everyone is still ignoring the fact that we thought there was twice as much money in our economy than there really was. When a bank loans out forty dollars for every dollar it keeps in reserve, asset prices go to ridiculous levels and a country’s assumptions get distorted.

Another indication that we have been ignoring the problem came yesterday from Robert J. Shiller whose book “Irrational Exuberance” warned us of the stock market crash to come, and told us house values would drop 30 percent, which they already have.

Shiller said Tuesday that there was a substantial risk of the housing market falling another 15, 20 or 25 percent.

Stock prices have climbed back to the level they were in 2008 and everyone seems to assume companies can keep laying off people to raise revenue without Americans returning to work.

Young Americans will find it tough to choose between Air Jordan’s and a new cell phone. They already are graduating from college with hopes of a job at McDonalds. Our standard of living is going to go down because we play with cheap money we already owe to countries that understood beans didn’t grow to the sky.

We are buying our own Treasury bonds on days when West Texas Crude sells for $100 a barrel and where most people were already using Brent as the standard. (Damn it, why couldn’t I find a Kroner fund?)

But the reckoning will come.

Bernanke uses the mistakes of the depression as the guide to how we must not respond to economic growth.

He has forgotten that the French built the ridiculous Maginot Line because they assumed that the Second World War would be fought like the first one. To that I say two words: “Belgium and Blitzkrieg”

And if I have to choose who to believe, Shiller will always beat out Geithner.  Let’s get ready and deal with the fact we’re not going to be as rich as we were. If you’re having trouble with this, buy yourself a Norman Rockwell calendar and drink the last of the Remy Martin.

It's not just the child who suffers

A friend of mine just emailed me from Beijing with details on his baby who was born a couple of hours ago.  Another friend of mine, also Chinese, has a son three weeks old.  Both of these guys have always been responsible so their lives aren’t going to change.

But mine did when my daughter arrived 22 years ago.  All of a sudden, I was really responsible for the life of another human being.  It changed the way I looked at everything.  I would drive around Los Angeles with her to get her to go to sleep. I had everything safety proofed.   She became the one person who I would always love unconditionally.  She made me a better person.

I taught at a university where many students were brought up by single mothers.  One 21 year old woman broke into tears one day in my office, saying “He left before I was born; what’s wrong with me.”

It wasn’t just her life that had been adversely affected; the man who could have been a stronger person evaded his responsibility and never grew up.

Of course, some people, grow up fine, and act responsibly throughout their lives.  But for those who consistently run from responsibility, taking on the rearing of a child can help him learn to face up to his own shortcomings.  But for so many that first step is too hard to take and a child suffers.

Two human beings have their lives diminished, with one always wondering “what is wrong with me?” 

What ADHD really feels like

There are a lot of people who think ADHD is made up. Some of us personally know better. Tommy Babcock is someone who has it and he describes what it feels like to him: 

All the new information I’d taken in since I arrived left me nervous about navigating the rocks and shoals of Ginny’s marriage and dealing with Jimmy’s plans. The train and the ship left me with a need to move about, so the next day I jumped into Ginny’s MG and drove to Ambleside.  This area of Cumberland was cold and bleak in the winter, but Lake Windermere had an attraction in any season. As I drove roads leading towards the coast, I thought about dinner last night and tried to clear my head of the Port, while absorbing Jimmy’s offer. It was an offer that hit me like bathtub gin in a Chicago speakeasy.  I knew it might be the right thing to do. It also might, for a while, turn off that ceaseless inner motor. There often was a runaway railroad train inside that threatened to tear me apart if I couldn’t keep moving. Sometimes all the pushups or miles I’d run couldn’t stop it and I wouldn’t know what to do next. Explorers are oftentimes described as heroes, but I believed men went in search of new lands because they couldn’t handle staying where they were. The men who remained in St. Louis were probably more comfortable in their own skins than Lewis, Clark, and the others who’d followed the Missouri to its source or crossed the Sierras in November. Meriwether Lewis was so haunted by those demons he stabbed himself to death. 

If Washington Was Filled with Daffy,Bugs and Goofy

The best way to look at Washington, D. C. is to view it as if it was an animated feature.  If we could use our favorite comic characters, it would be much easier to explain to people what’s going on in Washington.

There are the obvious choices.  Bugs Bunny would be perfect for Joe Biden because Biden never says anything more important than “that’s all folks.” John Boehner would be played by Goofy, except goofy would break into tears when you said anything about the flag, his career, or big business.

The president and his wife would, of course, be played by Mickey and Minnie mouse, the most stable of all our comic characters.

Then you have the man who just won’t go away, Dick Cheney.  He would be played by Yosemite Sam, except that he would have a big 666 tattooed in his armpit.  You’d see him trying to run down the street pursued by Colin Powell, who is still angry that Cheney’s people lied to him and made him look foolish in front of the United Nations.

Nancy Pelosi would be played by Cruella De Ville, except that Democrats would see Snow White on their screens.

The entire animated feature would focus around two different street barricades, one defended by Republicans and one defended by Democrats.  The entire movie would look like it was filmed from the vantage point of the Goodyear blimp, so we could watch every part of the street by street fighting.

That’s all folks.

What Happens to America When We Lose Our Financial Strength

Because I’ve been writing about our seemingly losing race with China in my blogs, I thought I’d write one on how other countries have handled their dethronement. Americans think we are different, but if the Democrats don’t cut spending and the Republicans won’t undo Bush tax cuts, there is no hope our debt won’t grow like a lion cub.    I study Chinese history, but I guess I understand British History the best, so I’ll try to talk about what happened there.

The 20^th Century was our century, but for the British it was tough. First they go into a stupid, unnecessary war in 1914 that leaves them in debt and diminished in power.  So many men had died in Flanders’s Field and at the Somme, that it was a country of churchyards and statues to the dead.  But the British, a hardy people, went on hoping that things hadn’t changed.

It was WWII that drove the nail in the coffin. Because Chamberlain and Baldwin didn’t stop Hitler when he took the Rhineland and then Austria and Czechoslovakia, the war left the country bankrupt. I once had some British tourists over and they marveled at the amount of food we served. England has a lot of great people, but their country has been weakened.

Since we won’t bite the bullet, American wages will fall in comparison to other nations. Clothes and food won’t be as cheap. The Wal-Mart-China partnership will raise prices, so American will be facing the choices other country’s citizens already make. Can I afford to have a cell phone and still put gas in my car for a trip? Can I pay for my daughter’s college and afford health insurance? People addicted to shopping will search 99 cent stores instead of Macys.

I love America and believe in the strength of its people. I don’t have the same feelings about our congressmen and women and about our Senators. Everyone is either owned by corporate America or the teachers’ union. They don’t care about our country, just about their wallets. When we can no longer afford to light the Washington Monument at night, they will be well invested in foreign stocks.

We won’t have the international responsibilities we have now. There will be less oil to waste and we too can have little cottages overrun by roses.

I

America's Debt Grows: Bernanke says"Great"

We seem to be the only country that keeps inflating our money supply when other nation's are paying down their debt.  This bothered me a lot, because Asian countries say that money from QE2(our attempt to inflate the economy by having the Fed buy treasuries) is causing inflation in their countries.

I dropped by to see Ben Bernanke the other day to talk to him about why he still wanted to buy treasuries when the world is facing runaway inflation.

“As you know, I’m an expert on the depression,” he said.

 “I heard that,” I said.  “But we are the only country that isn’t trying to bring down its deficit.  Other nation’s people don’t like it either, but it seems necessary that we do it too.”

“Have you read the material I’ve written on the depression?” Bernanke said.

“Some of it,” I said.

“Then I don’t understand why you’re asking me these questions,” he said.

“I don’t understand why we’re a debtor nation and aren’t doing anything about it?” I said.

“If I don’t keep buying Treasuries to inflate the money supply, the stock market might go down and we also might have a double dip,” he said.

“It sounds to me as if you don’t think the American people can put up with some pain now in order to avoid enormous pain later,” I said.

“Aren’t you an American?” he said.  “The bankers want to have larger paychecks.  Those on Wall Street want the market to keep going up.  People whose houses are underwater don’t want to pay back what they owe on their mortgages,” he said.  “The bankers and the people on Wall Street control this country and I’m not going to make them angry.”

“But one day, when we aren’t the world’s reserve currency, we’ll have to pay back all the people and countries we took money from.”

“Take a closer look at what I  wrote about the depression and you’ll understand,” he said, standing up and walking out of the room.

I realized as I walked around Washington that I'd read all about it, but this time I was in a depression of my own.  If only a country could take a Prozac.

The Great Gatsby and the Rich Today

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Those words end the best novel written in 20^th Century America, a novel that forever haunts you with all its implications.  The novel left obscure how Jay Gatz got to be Gatsby and where his money comes from. However, it introduces us to an emerging America and points out how the old, rich world of Tom and Daisy doesn't really value a symbol of the nouveau riche like Gatsby.

Things have changed a little in America. Upstarts get startup money and having an old family doesn’t mean anything. (When I was a child of a widow in America, living on social security checks, I would have traded being a Mayflower descendent for cash any day of the week) Now money and fame are all that matter.

We also no longer seem angry that laws passed under Clinton and little Bush (In China he’s called Xiao Bush) mean the people who live in the rich suburbs are going to be able to pass on all of their money to their offspring, while most Americans will die with nothing to pass on to their lower middle class children.

Now we know where these bankers and Wall Street Caesars come from. But they still go to the same rich place where Tom and Daisy lived.  When they help bring down the country they keep the money they arranged to be in their pay packets and option plans. The Republicans and New York’s senators still do their bidding. On Sutton Place, or in Beverly Hills, they use their money as a powerful tool to get what they want.

Our politicians (if this is possible) have become more corrupt and beholden to these rich people. I’m a capitalist American, whose ancestors fought in the Civil War and the Revolution, but I always expected my country to be a fair one and it no longer is. When the Supreme Court killed Mc Cain-Feingold I knew things were heading in the wrong way. (By the way I an Independent Voter, not tied to either party)

Under old inheritance laws the government took enough money so that others could, through pluck and luck, rise up the ladder through hard work and replace them. It’s not impossible now, but it’s harder every day.

Social mobility made this country great. For 28 years I taught at a University in the inner city, while living in a rich suburb in Los Angeles County. One day a society matron came up to me and said; “Rich, you talk to Black people…” Yes I did and do and suddenly I felt I was a link between two worlds. I also talk to electricians and plumbers when my toilet isn't clogged and my lights are on.. Are we being borne ceaselessly into the past? Did all the gains in social mobility from the 60s to the 90s mean nothing?

What will happen to the children of the 9.4 percent of our countrymen who are unemployed?

My mailman when I was a kid was in the first wave of Marines at Iwo Jima. He was a hero to me no matter what others might think about his social status.

I have faith in my country and in my countrymen. At some point  laws governing inheritance will seem so misguided  and be perceived as so unfair, that the people will demand a reinstatement of what I’ve always called “American values.” These values promote social mobility, reward hard, honest work, and allow our country to become a better place, generation after generation.

Bank of America Screwing Americans to Improve Profits

I have been waiting for a middle of the road president since Bill Clinton ended his second term.  No matter how much the Republicans hated him, in the second half of his term Clinton was a moderate who reached the independents among the electorate.  I believe George Herbert Walker Bush was also a moderate president.

Barack Obama has become a very pragmatic President. He seems to be no longer beholden to the left wing of his party.  His pro business attitude has endeared him to voters that had stopped approving of him.  Some thought he wasn’t doing enough to solve our unemployment problem. They also didn’t like the left wing of his party running the show.

That is all very well and good, because moderates should be running our country and I approve of his decision to be the President of all of us.  However, we still have to be careful that big business doesn’t continue to control the country.  I believe Obama will watch that inequity in power on behalf all of us. The left wing will, of course, dislike him for not being Big Bill Haywood.  It will be like watching Tony Blair and old labor at the beginning of his years as prime minister.

Joe Nocera in the New York Times today wrote an article about what had happened at Bank of America when the Times published the story about a retiree who was being foreclosed on by the bank. Bank of America had foolishly taken over Countrywide with its millions of bad sub-prime loans. It made mistakes it wants to rectify by getting every pound of flesh from the American people.  A strong judge, Duane Hart, immediately looked at the case and earned the bank’s ire. Bank of America is losing a lot of money because their former chairman bought more than one subprime lender after the financial crisis was apparent.  They want to get their positive quarterly financial reports in the black by sticking it to this woman, who is retired, and a good citizen  They want to steamroll over others in her category.

The judge didn’t let that happen and now the woman will be able to pay her mortgage out of her retirement checks just the way BofA promised her before they sought foreclosure.  The judge made sure that a cynical financial operation, which made many stupid decisions, was not going to reverse its terrible quarterly reports on the backs of retirees.

There are flippers and outright crooks that need to have their mortgages foreclosed on, but Bank of America doesn’t seem to know the difference between decent, honorable people who were taken advantage by sleazy subprime lenders and those who tried to game the system. I believe they don’t want to try.

 (A lot of Americans made bad decisions by themselves and they will have to live with the consequences).

It probably was only a symbolic victory for anyone except the retired woman. Bank of America will probably forget this experience and keep covering its mistakes on the backs of good, but poor, Americans.
At one point in history, Frank Capra would have made a movie about this, but Americans have short memories, and, except for the 9.4 percent that are unemployed, will forget their country was brought down by Wall Street and the banks. The CEO’s are beginning to give themselves large bonuses again, because they think we’ve forgotten what they did to our country. Have we?

By the way, shouldn’t a company called Bank of America be trying to help Americans, as well as try to make a lot of money off them?

Cross-hairs and the Crazies

In Chinese the word sha in the first tone means kill.  Sha in the third tone means idiot. I’d like to use those words in connection with political rhetoric and the actions of disturbed human beings.

A man who seems as crazy as a loon shot a Congresswoman.  Before this happened Sarah Palin had put crosshairs on the Congresswoman's district in a map.  Sarah Palin uses this phrase “don’t retreat, reload” in her missives to the American people. The tea party members love her rhetoric, but most people don’t classify them as crazy.

We live in a country today in which 24 hour news channels fill all this time with anything they can find.  Fox news is right wing. Keith Olberman screams from the left. We’ve come a long way from Walter Cronkite’s 30 minutes a night.

 More and more on our television we see absurd people are given coverage.  There was  a lot spoken about a pastor who wanted to burn the Koran, even though he had only about 10 members in his congregation. Sarah Palin, like Iago, only communicates through Facebook and Twitter, unless you count her puff reality show where she takes Kate and eight on a disastrous trip through Alaska. Just like Iago, she makes outrageous comments to her followers and doesn’t have news conferences.

If she says something that sounds like sha in the first tone, someone who is sha in the third tone will get ideas.  Since father Coughlin on the radio in the 30s, we haven’t had such a popular figure that dispenses vitriol.  (Okay, Okay, Rush Limbaugh is another) Oliver Wendell Holmes once said “you can’t cry fire in a crowded theater.” In the same way you can’t put crosshairs on a human being and expect there to be no consequences.

Some days America is scary.  For some of my former students just getting from the project to the bus was a rite of passage.  The possession of guns runs rampant in our inner cities.  There are gun nuts everywhere. Even though polls show a majority of the American people want gun control, our legislators are so frightened of being targeted (appropriate word) by the NRA that it will be impossible to ever have gun control legislation.

Knowing that there are a large number of guns out there in America, people who aspire to national leadership need to watch what they say and do. This is not the America I grew up in.  This is a country full of powder kegs waiting to be set off by someone who says the most outrageous things. As a country we are Othello, with Iago in Alaska.

Why Mainland Chinese distrust (hate?) the Japanese

I once taught English in Germany. Many of my students felt guilty about what their grandparents had done in the Second World War. Some of the grandfathers who were devout Christians carried the guilt every day of their lives. One good man, who’d done impressive things in his life despite having a metal plate in his head from the Russian Front ,was in agony in his 70’s because he wondered how he and other Christians could have done what they did in the 1930s and 1940s,.

On the other hand, students from Japan have told me the Rape of Nanjing is a myth, there were no comfort women, and China started the Mukden Incident. (Comfort women were Korean and Chinese girls who were enslaved by the Japanese so their men could have sex) Most of these students were fine human beings but the facts weren’t in their K-12 textbooks. It took until 2006 for a Japanese newspaper to break the news that Japanese, not the Chinese, had been behind the Mukden Incident (the Chinese call the debacle  September 18^th).

Why did this happen?  The Republican Party, which was against the war before it happened, had the slogan “Who lost China?” MacArthur, who administered Japan, was convinced the Communists were the enemy and he forgot about how vicious the Japanese had been during the war. We needed allies to fight the commies. In Korea we encouraged the rich Yang ban, who had been collaborators with the Japanese, to take over the government, because with all their loot they certainly wouldn’t turn communist.

We were right to fear the communists, but for 30 years being ant-communist was the only consideration in our attitudes toward other governments.

At UCLA, and in many places around America, people of Japanese and Chinese ancestry, who had nothing to do with this history, are best friends. In fact, you’ll mostly see Koreans, Chinese and Japanese walking together and doing things that don’t involve whites. Because of their shared attitudes towards education they have strong bonds of friendship   In this area America has been a true melting pot.

In Japan recently the Prime Minister went to the Yasukuni Shrine where the  seven most evil Japanese war criminals have their ashes. Can you imagine Germans visiting a temple to Hitler placed over his bunker?

American citizens whose ancestors once lived in Japan believe what they’ve been taught about World War Two from their textbooks and have no interest in preserving the face of their ancestors. But they were brought up knowing the truth and, anyway, it was a long time ago.

For the Chinese, whose ancestors had been raped, disemboweled and beheaded, it is not an old memory. Every year the Prime Minister returned to the Koa Kannon temple was a slap in their faces. I’ve talked about how important face (Mianzi) is to a country that was treated badly by the white man and the Japanese for a century.  It's a very important consideration. If the Japanese want to stay in denial, there will always be a gulf between them and Mainland Chinese.  It’s too bad they don’t understand how 25-year-old Chinese feel about them, while we’ve been buddies with Germans for at least 30 years. Denial is not the cornerstone of friendship, and for a country that is growing old, with no real army, it could prove to be disastrous.

Exciting News on the Economic Front

 Lloyd Blankfein, who is famous for saying he was “doing God’s work” in running Goldman Sachs, decided to take it further and announced today he is leaving Goldman to run a series of loan tranches for the Vatican Bank.

Also today, Charles Prince, who has admitted he didn’t know what was going on when he ran Citicorp, finally had subprime tranches explained to him. He has decided to give away all the money he walked away with from Citicorp toward the establishment of the “Too Big to Fail” chair at Middle Tennessee University.

In other news, both Bank of America and J. P. Morgan Chase have cut mortgage payments in half for anyone who can “fog up a mirror.”

Barney Frank has come out for shutting down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying “every boondoggle has to come to an end sometime.”

Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers again announced it wasn’t his fault the bank fell like a haystack in the wind and the government caused it.

Unfortunately  Fuld ruined a great dream. I awoke to a world filled with crooks who still haven't been prosecuted for destroying our financial system.

The Power of an Example

There is a success story in Barack Obama’s life that only tangentially involves the Presidency.

To describe this, I must tell the reader that I taught for 28 years at a university that was 1/3 African American and 1/3 Latino. In my life at the University, I had long discussions with students whose fathers had abandoned them. Since my father died when I was seven and we lived for years on social security payments there were some connections that came easily.  However it took awhile for them to believe I was supportive and non-judgmental because I was from another race. Eventually students passed on their positive assessments of me to new students.

The stories were almost uniformly sad. One woman used a lot of Kleenex when she said; “What’s wrong with me, he left before I was even born.” Many had never had a male figure in their lives. What that had done to their psyches had different effects on different students. Many intelligent students sabotaged themselves because they thought they were not worthy of success.  One expressed outright hatred of the absent biological father whom he said he would kill if he ever met him.

I also had students who had surmounted this and were my best students. They all had a will and an ability to transcend what cards they’d been originally dealt.

Barack Obama is really the poster child for all of my best students. He stands as a beacon for those who want to be something despite the obstacles that stand before them.

Obama’s father deserted him when he was very young; he had a stepfather who his mother divorced, which saw him returning to Hawaii without that male figure. But he had a grandmother and grandfather who showed him love and gave him support.

His drive and determination, along with what must be a very solid, physical brain structure, helped him achieve and he moved from success to success. Although I became Assistant to the President of Occidental College after he left for Columbia, everything I have ever heard  from those who taught him was laudatory.

His success or failure in the Presidency as evaluated by historians will not affect his importance as a symbol for young African-Americans.

By the way I have another blog called My Student, My Hero that discusses one of my former student’s successes.

Cuomo moves up while Wall Street rejoices

Soon, Andrew Cuomo will be Governor of New York, which means he will no longer be Attorney General. This could be a very bad thing for those of us in America who want the people who caused the financial crisis to stand up and face the music.

As long as Cuomo’s been Attorney General he’s pursued the shady people on Wall Street and their accountants. Today we learned Cuomo is close to filing civil fraud charges against Ernst and Young for staying silent while Lehman Brothers cooked its books and lied in its reports to stockholders and the American people.

The Justice Department has done virtually nothing and the SEC needs to have more enforcement agents that I can’t see it receiving from a Republican House.

Let's listen to how it might sound in the future:  “His campaign contributions can’t be ignored as we decide whether to prosecute. Let’s watch things awhile, after all he deserves to get some slack because of his loyalty to our party.”

“You know this operation looks a lot like what Madoff did, but what if we’re wrong and we upset him. Let’s hold off until we’re sure we can absolutely get a conviction.  We don’t want to be embarrassed by a big time loss in court.”

“I really want to pursue this but I don’t have enough enforcement people to get the data we need to prove this conclusively.”

So let’s remind ourselves who is not in jail:  Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide, whose fines were paid by Bank of America; and Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers.  There are a lot of people who brought this country to its knees who are walking around with a lot of money they earned by lying for years.

Without someone ambitious such as Cuomo, who was brought up by a former Governor lauded for his ethics, many of the miscreants are going to walk. And it will be the same as it was on Wall Street before he became Attorney General  in a world where greed tops ethics every time.

Start Christmas On Labor Day to get the country moving again

Labor Day, 2016, American Pie, Rhode Island

Rev. Roger Williams today decried using Labor Day as the beginning of the Christmas season. As the chairman of the “Put Christ Back in Christmas" movement, he has been adamant that Christmas no longer be used as an economic stimulus.

“I believe this all started in 2012 when retailers put up Christmas decorations two weeks before Thanksgiving Day," he said. “Bernanke couldn’t get the economy moving quickly enough even after using Fed employees to give out $20 dollar bills on street corners. He then suggested the so called ‘magic of Christmas’ could fix America's problems.” Democrats wanted rich people to only take ten dollars a day, but the Republicans said that “truth, justice and the American Way” demanded everyone get the same cash.

In 2013 the Christmas shopping season began in October when Christmas music began appearing on the radio, after Bernanke’s plan to flood the country with newly printed Benjamins failed to drop unemployment to six percent.

The next year was marked by the collision of a Walmart and Amazon drone attempting to deliver Christmas packages to the same home in early October.

Rev. Williams has a big sign on his church that says, “Wo ting Ye Su de” which translates in Chinese as “I listen to Jesus,” in the hopes that the Chinese company that owns the mortgage on his church will understand his position. He is awaiting foreclosure on the building.

From the Ming Dai to Today

A recent story in the Wall Street Jounal focused on China's potential directive that western companies must share their proprietary technology in electric car manufacturing if they want to sell cars in China. This is no surprise to those of us who read a book called To Change China: Western Advisors in China by Jonathan Spence. He described how the Jesuits in the Ming, then Qing Dynastys shared their advanced knowledge of astronomy with the Emperor, then stood there waiting, hoping they could proselytize in China. (Back then predictions on where celestial objects would be was important to the Emperor's face). The Emperor then looked at the priest and said, "Why are you standing there?" The priest asked what was in it for the Jesuits. The Emperor said,"Thanks a lot."

This drama played out through Chinese history and culminated with the ouster of the Russian advisors when they were no longer essential to the communist revolution and the rebuilding of China. (In fact, the book Odd Man Out draws a picture of how Stalin manipulated the Chinese Communist party and put them in a position where they had to fight in Korea. It wasn't always a good things to have Russians around)


So, a few years ago, when I watched this American bank buy a Chinese bank and build ATMS all over China I was amused. Beijing didn't allow them to take deposits from Chinese. Of course, the bank could have foreigners use the ATMs. American bankers never seem to know what's going on, only how big their paychecks will be.


More and more companies that used to be described as American moved their operations to China because the CEOs wanted bigger bonuses and the less they paid employees the more they got in their pay envelope. They didn't care whether a lot of Americans wouldn't have a job, they just wanted more money.


So the idea that technology would be taken over is a logical expectation given Chinese history. If companies don't want to sell cars in China, they can go home. Since most Americans couldn't find China on a map, it is to be expected that these corporate barons wouldn't know anything about Zhongguo li shi. America is an insular land where the only other languages besides English are spoken by the children of immigrants.


So this step was inevitable. A couple of  months ago, Boeing sales made our trade deficit less horrible than usual. Wait until the Chinese produce a plane. 

Riding the Purple Wind

When I was young, Syracuse, New York had no Chinese food and you had to drive across the bridge to Canada to get tang cu xia (sweet and sour shrimp). Asia, especially China, called to me because I wanted to walk among Zhongguoren (Chinese) and look at the world from a different perspective.

It was when I was living in New York City that I read "The Razor's Edge" by Somerset Maughm, a novel in which a rich American, disillusioned by World War One, gives up his life in Chicago to go to India and study in an ashram. He ends up driving a cab in New York as he provides spiritual sustenance to old friends. It was clearly about transcendence of the world's pain in a journey to enlightenment. I would read it on the subway and one day teenage boys were whipping each other in my subway car while I went on absorbing the plot.

 As life progressed I wanted also to know about 5,000 years of Chinese history.  I figured that there was so much I hadn't been exposed to that could enlighten me. I knew little about the world, because I was looking at it through the eyes of an Upstate New York white guy.

As I grew older, everything Asian attracted me. I wanted to hang wind chimes that came from there, learn to speak Chinese, and develop an Asian mind that looked at the world from a different perspective from the Western mind that made my decisions. I studied Kong Fu Zi (Confucius) and tried xin fo (practice Buddhism).

Now most of my friends where I live are Chinese and we talk about things it would be hard to talk about with most Americans. One of them said to me writing English is just a bunch of letters put together while Chinese characters are an art form. I can say “Wo you Zhongwen ji chu,” (I know basic Chinese) but I know the limitations of my knowledge of the Chinese language.

One might say this is just the attraction of a different way of life, and I’m sure that’s part of it. But before I die I want to have an Eastern mind set as well as a Western one. How do people persevere in the midst of the Cultural Revolution or the Korean War, and still keep striving? Why did a shame society like Japan condone the Rape of Nanjing? Soon the yuan, and to a lesser extent, the won, will be world currencies and Asia will be the place that matters. I have walked the steps to Sun Zhong Shan’s mausoleum, walked a short portion of the Great Wall, and seen the Laughing Buddha in all sorts of temples. I’ve been in places where fo jia is called Chan and Zen. I’ve walked in the Forbidden City. I feel the change in my outlook. I once worried my upbringing would hold me back. In bad times, or even in good times, I pray and thank Ye Su (Jesus) and have decided what is right or wrong based on training in Sunday school, but I’ve figured I can keep those beliefs and attitudes and add other insights. After all, I've discovered the journey never ends, and as it was for the main character in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by Joyce, the epiphanies still keep coming.

Prince Charles, Austerity, and America's Ostriches

The picture on the front page of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal shows England’s Prince in Perpetuity, Charles, and his unlikely replacement for Princess Di, being attacked by students who don’t want to pay more money for college. The students can’t escape to America to study because it’s more expensive here, even after England’s rise in tuition.

That incident put in perspective America’s approach versus the world. They’re mad in Greece and England because they have to suffer because of the fiscal crisis America Created. America doesn’t have riots because no one in government is telling us to tighten our belts and deal with deleveraging. We’re pouring money we don’t have into driving our economy with the Fed buying 600 billion worth of our own bonds. According to pundits that isn’t working and won’t.

It’s like Margaret Carlson said about body screening. She said all that’s been asked of the American people while fighting two wars is to submit to body screening and we don’t want to do that. The American people who are not unemployed are not being asked to do anything. The unemployed are bearing the entire burden. People who bought twice the house they ever could have afforded are sitting in those houses waiting for the house fairy to save them. While Ireland is moving to apply a 90 percent tax on bankers, ours are paying themselves big bonuses, which they did all through the crisis they caused.

I must admit that when things get tough for me, I put my I pod in the car and listen to Country Gospel, which reminds me of the churches in upstate New York I attended growing up. These are the hymns they have stopped singing in mainstream American churches. But I’m going back to a memory of when America was a pleasant place if you were white. The Tea Party wants to return us to that time and it’s a non starter. We have to suffer in today’s America and fix it. Americans have to face up to the fact they thought there was twice the amount of money in this country then there really was. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns had loaned out 30 dollars for every dollar they had and Americans believed that was real money.

Yesterday we found out the tax cuts won’t disappear and we’ll be spending more money than we have and increasing the deficit. I guess none of our politicians, who are used to payoffs from companies, want to be foolish enough to tell Americans that they have to suck it up and suffer as the Europeans are ready to do. What happened to the America that fought World War Two and launched a Space Program? The only program we’ll be launching is a modified debt repayment program.

Joe Wong told his son he had to learn both English and Chinese if he wanted to be President. He said his son would need English to govern the country and Chinese to deal with debt collectors.

America and the Future of Basic Science

In a recent post I ranted about how the AMA had pushed to restrict the number of M.D.’s produced in America. But what happens in the other fields of science? Here’s how the process works, for both social sciences and physical sciences.

A professor encourages a lot of people to go to graduate school in his field and when they can’t get a real job, he hires them at low wages as a postdoc. So not only don’t you have to teach undergraduates, (I guess they smell funny once you’ve got a paper in Nature), you’re building a cheap labor pool.

In my article (Education in America and China) I quote one of the college seniors I was teaching, who said, “Hey, tell me more about that verb thing.” As you can imagine not a lot of Americans like him choose to study science or even learn how to figure out a percentage. Anyway, for a long time, becoming a college professor has been like winning the lottery. (I wonder how many history professors have been hired in the last 20 years. If it’s more than three, please hold up your hand.)

In the sciences, they long ago discovered that Indians and Chinese understand math and science and are driven to be very good at what they do. So they’ve filled up our graduate programs. I think maybe there is one white guy in biostatistics.

In addition, labs run on postdocs. There are training grants from NSF and NIH for labs to hire Americans as postdoc researchers, but not many want to become one as postdocs are well known to be "overworked and underpaid".  So now a majority of postdocs in our universities are from foreign countries.  A long time ago, foreigners from places like China wanted to stay after getting their seasoning in some white person’s lab, but now places like Peking University, Tsinghua and Fudan are full of brilliant people doing fascinating things, so why stay in a place that doesn’t have Lanzhou pulled noodles?

We can’t make them stay by giving them a teaching job at a university because there aren’t enough for American citizens. As India and China surpass America in the number of people who can understand logarithms and do difficult math, the future for science in America looks pretty dim. American college students have figured out that, even if they know calculus, going into that science pipeline isn’t encouraging. With states trying to pull themselves out of debt, they won’t want to hire new professors. Who will fill up those labs NSF chipped in to build? What does this mean for basic research in America? Sen. Arlen Specter was the guy who cared about NIH funding and he lost his job. Maybe Sarah Palin supports basic science and the Tea Party will make it one of their causes?

Wonder Why It Costs So Much to Get Sick?

I have a friend from China who we are going to call Zhong Shan in this essay. He is compassionate, intelligent, and at 42 he’s going to sit for the medical boards in America.  Since he already has an M.D., PhD. From China, he’s going to do well on the exams and be a great doctor here. He will need to get a residency, but his great personality will help him.

In Pulaski, New York, they have a great doctor and he’s from Korea. He’s beloved in this totally white town near the Canadian border. He practices medicine in underserved areas, as will Zhong Shan.

It’s interesting how Medicine denies the basic law of supply and demand.  The more doctors, the more costs go up. Big cities have a lot of expensive doctors.

How can this happen? It’s very hard to get into medical schools and there are not enough of them, partly because the AMA has worked to restrict the number of doctors produced every year, driving up costs. States like California keep upping the cost of tuition, so people leave medical school with, perhaps, $200,000 in student loans. Can you afford to be a pediatrician or family doctor with that debt burden? I don’t think so.

The rule for a physician is that he has to have a procedure to make money, you have to be an orthopedist, heart surgeon, or as the most highly paid public employee in California is, a liver transplant specialist. To cut is to cure, as they say. It’s also a good way to pay off those loans. Dermatologists can concentrate on Botox or laser faces so folks can look young. That’s another good way to earn a buck. But being a family doctor or a pediatrician means you’ll take forever to pay off those loans. Even neurologists don’t make a lot, after four years undergraduate, four years medical school, 3 years residency and then specialty training.

To cut costs why doesn’t the government open more medical schools, make tuition low, so people can afford to take jobs where there aren’t enough doctors. People would respect you and you would be where you can form relationships with a society that’s appreciative you’re in South Dakota. Medicare is going broke and health care costs keep rising while the unemployed can’t afford to get sick. If the costs of student loans, plus an implied right to make a lot of money after toiling for twelve years  to be a specialist, were taken out of the equation, then maybe we wouldn’t be facing a health care Armageddon.

My friend, Pete, and the American Dream

I have a friend named Pete who’s had a dangerous life. He was of elementary school age when Eichmann wired the Budapest ghetto with explosives. Luckily for Pete and his fellow Jews, The Russians entered Budapest the day before it was to be blown to bits. They were spared, only to come under Russian rule, which on some days was less anti-semitic than that of the Germans.

But Pete and his wife, Marta, who had also been in that ghetto as a child, lived under the Soviet regime until 1956, when a friend stole an army truck and 16 men, women and children drove out of Hungary into freedom in Austria.

A Jewish charity brought them to America and he became an engineer for some of America’s biggest companies. When he retired he owned one of the small companies that make our country so productive.

I remembered back 20 years ago when I complained that the Japanese were beating us, and  buying up Pebble Beach and a lot of prime American real estate. Pete looked at me and told me you can never give up on America, the country that had given him freedom and prosperity. He was right of course, Japan's stock market is worth a third of what it was in 1989 and the land under the Emperor’s Palace is no longer worth as much as the land in California

The other day, feeling discouraged about our debt and the fact that it is China that is now eating our lunch, I was worrying about the United States. However, I thought of what Pete, the consummate American, would say to me. He would tell me never to give up on our country, and that this is just another bump in the road in the journey of a free nation toward its destiny.

I've Seen the Enemy and It's My Television

The Economist quoted Keith Poole (UCSD) saying this congress will be the most divided since the civil war. Does that mean our congress reflects us? There are a lot of signs that  different sections of America, both philosophically and geographically, are not speaking to each other because they don’t share the same views.

I want to talk about 24 hour cable news as an enabler for this dissolution of good will in the body politic. There is not enough news to go around. It’s like watching the news at Christmas time in Tulsa. Sometimes there isn’t any.

So television created the Tea Party, so Fox News would have something  to fill their time slots and Rupert Murdoch could then get more money from advertisers. MSNBC tried to get viewers by putting people of the left on their broadcasts. CNN just decided to keep being a boring place that looks for endangered species in New Orleans.

Walter Lippmann always talked about the decline of civility, but there’s no way he could envision the world we live in today.  He lived in a time when there were only three national networks, each with one half hour of news a night. There were no news outlets to make stories out of whole cloth. Everything that happened then wasn’t all that important; if you wanted to find out about something weird you bought the National Enquirer.

But today's 24/7 news networks spend time on some preacher with three followers who wants to burn the Koran. We had this brouhaha recently where a conservative got a piece of videotape in which a woman was talking about her experience with racial tolerance. He twisted it around and got the woman fired. Think of what Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, an alcoholic bully who got professors fired in the ‘50s, could have done on Fox News. His day came too soon. With 24 hour cable news, he might have ended up President.  “I have the names of over 500 communists in the State Department. One communist in the state department is too many.” When asked to provide the names he always avoided the question, because these communists didn’t exist.

That’s the danger of this organism of 24 hour news. It can make something out of nothing to fill all that time. So more and more outrageous things that good newsmen and women once wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, are now put on the air, even it pits one part of America against the other. But it does sell ads.

Dancing with the Hurricane

As all of you know, the blog talks about serious issues, which is why I have to address the crisis involving “Dancing with the Stars.”

As a student of American political philosophy, I will try to put it in perspective. The story of Bristol Palin actually involves a down to earth, sweet, nice person who can’t dance but is headed for the finals of America’s second most popular show, “Dancing with the Stars” (I guess the number one show is “Survivor: Orange County”).

You can’t help liking her, but you are surprised frequently by her staying power on the show despite being the kind of dancer I was in high school. Her mother is in the news a lot (she provided support for a witch who tried to become a U.S. Senator).  Because of her daughter’s success, Republicans believe Sarah Palin will run for the Presidency in 2012, with Jim Carrey as her running mate.

Bristol always gets the lowest score from the judges, but since votes by the public count, she stays on. There are tea party people who vote many times, through multiple e-mail addresses, to keep her on the show. Because of this, our future is clear; this highly organized group is going to run the country, while the Democrats continue watching “Masterpiece Mystery.”

The midterm elections pale in importance next to this “Tempest in a Tea Party Pot.” We understand that if we had direct voting on TV, the next president would be Justin Bieber. Even Brandy couldn’t overcome Hurricane Bristol. While the rest of the world worries about currency imbalances Americans are staying focused on what is really important. And except for the Wisconsin man who shot his TV set in frustration after watching Palin dancing, we know what the important issues are.

Of course I await the final verdict. Since sociologists always write in a way that makes the words unclear to anyone who isn’t a sociologist, we will have to wait for their final judgment on this issue and hire a translator to explain it to us.

Is China Really at Fault?

I’ve written before on the relationship between America and China and the problems with one country setting up a mechanism that prevents their currency from appreciating. I’ve advocated tariffs, because that would be the only way to make the Middle Kingdom understand that one country can’t control its currency with a state run apparatus, when all their trade partners do not have such a mechanism.

Lately, China has been saying that our quantitative easing is doing the same thing. I disagree, but I do wonder when we, as a people, are going to admit we thought there was twice the money in the country than there was, because places like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers lent out over 30 dollars for every dollar they had in reserves. Our houses weren’t worth more, but we took this ephemeral equity out of our houses and bought boats and took trips that we couldn’t afford. We extended our debt by running our credit cards up to the limit and acquired new ones. Now a quarter of the houses in this nation are underwater. Doesn’t it look imprdent now that we thought the beans would grow to the sky?

Just as the people who use drugs in America create drug cartels in Mexico, we were at least partly at fault  as the slimeballs who ran America’s Banks. Now our houses are under water and we won’t admit that we made improper decisions to take on so much debt. It will take an immense amount of deleveraging and pain to get us back to where we should be. There was a guy I knew who would scream at me that deficits didn’t matter; why was I so stupid to worry about it? He probably won’t ever admit he was wrong, but his ideas were shared by many on Wall Street and we let them get us into the biggest mess in financial history.

But the Chinese always know what they are doing and they looked at this  country turning into a debtor nation and said: they’re doing it to themselves, so we can hold the value of the yuan down and take advantage of their mistakes. George Bush once justified his trip to the Beijing Olympics because he “was going to visit our money” (he does have a good sense of humor). Unless America can stand up and deal with the pain of deleveraging, the America I love will be on the way to the poorhouse, printing money while our ship goes down. China took  some advantage but we encouraged them to do it. Wouldn't Wall Street have done the same?

Here’s a you tube clip that puts it all into perspective.

America Demands To Know

1.       When they autopsy Dick Cheney, will they tell the American people where the 666 was hidden on his body?

2.       Was  Vice President Biden taken to the hospital to remove a Cole Haan from his mouth?

3.       Did Obama really go to India “because I love curry?”

4.       If Nancy Pelosi ever stops getting Botox, will she  begin to understand the American people?

5.       Has anyone counted the hours Sarah Palin watches Russia every day?

6.       If she stops, will the National Security Agency be able to pick up the slack?

7.       Does the Tea Party secretly drink Dragon Well tea and supplicate themselves before pictures of Hu Jin Tao?

New York with Palm Trees?

I drove down the coast the other day and ended up In Brentwood. I remembered what the clerk in the DMV told me when I first arrived in Los Angeles. She was from Upstate New York. She had me move close and said; “they’ll smile at you and act friendly, but don’t you trust them.” That was the best advice about West Los Angele I‘ve ever received.

I’d come from a job in journalism in New York City, and I would describe West L.A. as “New York with Palm Trees,” but that was doing New York a disservice.

Just because someone says “Let’s have lunch” means nothing. I learned to say “have your people call my people.” I, of course, had no people because I was a college professor, but this was West L.A. and you had to learn to blend in. I learned to never step into a crosswalk on San Vicente at seven a.m. because I’d just piss off the broker or banker who had to clean his bumper after he hit me going sixty.

Since I lived in a place that only elected Democrats, I learned what an important  word really meant. Having gone to the Maxwell School, I thought I knew what liberal was, but I was wrong. I was with a nice man who happened to be a pediatric specialist. He was going on about how the school system needed to be more integrated. I asked him why both of his children went to private school and he told me his kids were too sensitive. Since his daughter taught my daughter how to say f—k, I understood his plight. To be liberal is to help people poorer than you as long as you don’t have to touch them or go to school with them. But you could hire them as a nanny or housekeeper where they would work 70 hours a week, hoping the spoiled offspring wouldn’t make something up about them and get them fired and deported.

Since the city council never met a developer they didn’t like, it’s almost impossible now to drive east after three p.m. It can take between 30-45 minutes to get to the 10 freeway from UCLA. It got so bad I considered moving back to Syracuse and its 300 overcast days. The people are real there, but you can’t survive without a heated garage. I  taught at Newhouse with a  nice guy who was allergic to sunlight.

I have to go now, because you can never know if they’re going to tow your car. By the way did I tell you LA only survives because now photo tickets cost $450?

Happy Deepavali

Today is Deepavali in Singapore. While it’s a Hindu and Sikh holiday celebrating the victory of good over evil, it also seems to represent tolerance for different races who live together successfully in that Island Nation.

I was thinking how great it would be if every country had such a holiday that made us all seem worthwhile to our fellow citizens of the globe.

When I was younger I believed that by now White and African Americans would be intermarrying and no one would even comment on it.  I believed in a world in which everyone would be valued equally.

As I think of the people of Singapore lighting lamps in this Festival of Lights, I think of so many places where race is pitted against race or religion is pitted against religion. These places should all have a Holiday in which the equality of all would be celebrated.

Zuckerberg is Us

Walter Bagehot, a British political philosopher in the 19th Century, said that you can tell a lot about a country by looking at who its people admire. Now if I talk about Mark Zuckerberg, you’re going to say what a loser, but that of course is not  an honest reaction. Among recent generations, who really wouldn’t have wanted to create Facebook? Remember when a lot of people from the Ivy’s wanted to become merchant bankers on Wall Street? They could make a lot of money really quickly and ethics wasn’t the most popular course in business school, so anything went.

This is not to throw rocks at any generations, because America has been moving in this direction for quite a while. People have learned to cut corners, shade the truth, and withhold evidence. The only things that impressed a lot of Americans were money and status. I remember when Monica Lewinsky was invited to lots of parties. She was famous for a gulp, but that didn’t matter. She was famous.

Notoriety and picking up a lot of cash were what a lot of people wanted and worked to obtain. Who do you think were the underlings that put together the sub-prime mortgage tranches? It was guys who before would have become professors of Math or Economics. They might have spent a couple of years in the Peace Corps if they came of age during the ‘60s.  But people think professors are people who want to be poor forever and striking it rich is what America’s all about. I wonder if today you would know how to find a lawyer you could really trust. I don't.

This has been evolving over the years; we’re just at one dark point in the journey. There’s a reason congressmen are slimy, they represent us. There’s a reason Bank CEOs are people who act like they crawled out from under a rock. Those are the guys in today’s America who won.

Once Mark Zuckerberg developed Facebook he got laid a lot. Mark Zuckerberg is us.

Mandate,Shmandate

P.J. O’Rourke was on Bloomberg TV today to push his book Don’t Vote; It Just Encourages the Bastards.

I had already decided to write this blog, but listening to him only increased my desire to let this feeling out. The Democrats won in 2006 and 2008, because George Bush was too dumb to realize that all of Cheney’s ideas were stupid and dangerous. The Republicans are going to blow out the Democrats in the midterm election because Obama let two egomaniacs, Larry Summers and Nancy Pelosi run away with his first two years. He had little experience, but I voted for him out of blind faith he would be better than Bush, but I realized my standards weren’t very high. I should have voted for someone in the primaries who’d actually understood what being a President really required. Today O’Rourke called Obama an “Ivy League smarty pants.”

Pelosi thought she had a mandate, so she called the shots on the health care bill. (The only reason I’m glad it passed is that three of my friends desperately needed the coverage.) The bill didn’t try to control costs. The Dartmouth group, whose research Democrats used to show it wouldn’t increase the budget deficit, say their research was misinterpreted.

Obama and Pelosi didn’t have a mandate to turn America into a liberal paradise, and  they pissed off the American electorate and made a lot of people very angry, because they should have spent all their effort on finding jobs for Americans, rebuilding infrastructure and saving our National Parks by thinking like FDR.

Now the Republicans are going to blow out the Democrats by running witches (I’m still not sure O’Donnell isn’t one) and people who want to eliminate social security. The Tee-Hee party is filled with people who have major personality disorders who want to emulate Herbert Hoover. They’ll think they have a mandate. They don’t, people just want jobs. The problem is that the Republicans are the party of the employers, they really don’t care about employees and they love bankers. They’re going to think they have a mandate. They don’t, and when they try to privatize social security, everyone will say we want the Democrats back.

The average American isn’t left wing or right wing. There are new people becoming independents and carrying picture of Michael Bloomberg in their wallets every day. In fact, the average American doesn’t buy into either party’s radical philosophies. And they think members of congress are one step below used car salesmen.

Fathers and Daughters

Very soon I’ll take my daughter out for her birthday. She’ll come up from where she goes to college and we’ll eat Prime Rib to celebrate. She calls about four times a week, so I don’t know why that old song by Sara Evans called “Suds in a bucket” upsets me so much. In the song a girl turns 18 and takes off with a guy in a white pickup and it’s clear she’s leaving for good.

I feel like I’ve got a lot of nerve being upset by that song. I ran away from home when I was 15 and dropped out of college once to figure out what was going on. It’s clear everybody has to spread their wings.

But when you’ve put her to bed for years, taken dance lessons with her in the Canary Islands and had her sit next to you at the bar in Germany while you had Schnitzel (it’s perfectly acceptable in Germany), it’s hard not to think about how I’d feel if she moved to Alaska.

I wrote once before about carrying her on my shoulder into a drugstore when she was a little more than one. She started stroking my hair and from then on she owned me.

But for the father who didn’t walk away before she’s born, or isn’t mad she’s not a boy to take to Dodger’s games, it can be a great experience to love someone for the first time without reservation. It doesn’t matter how great your life is with someone, a daughter has a key to your inner self. She can finish your sentences; remember when you acted like a fool and forgiven you when you took her cell phone away.

It could be the same thing with a son. My Sunday Chinese language exchange is with a great guy from Inner Mongolia and his Dad frequently calls him when one of us is explaining his native tongue to the other. I can tell from the conversation they’ve got a close relationship. I guess any father is lucky to get a least one other homo sapiens who they can watch grow and then create life him/herself.

Lesser Songs for Lesser Cities

Many American cities have songs about them: there’s "New York, New York”, two songs for Chicago, many about Tulsa and, of course two great ones about San Francisco. Every city should have a song, but they might sound like this one:

“Omaha, you’ve been hanging heavy on my mind. I’m leaving even if I have to crawl.” That’s a little ditty made famous by Waylon Jennings.

So we should have some songs about other cities. They can all be sung to the tune of Omaha:

Syracuse is overcast 300 days a year. I’m leaving to try and find the sun.

Concord, New Hampshire is the world’s most boring place. I gotta get out before the snowflakes fall.

How about a new song about Gary, Indiana? They already have one:

Gary, Indiana is a city that’s barely alive. It’s nothing since they lost the Jackson Five.