Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

I worked briefly for an eccentric state senator who was renowned for his support of the arts. Interestingly, I worked for him just as Michigan’s new governor, rotund Republican John Engler, was changing school funding procedures, throwing the mentally ill out on the street, eliminating public assistance programs – leading poor people and their advocates to sleep in tents on the Capitol lawn in protest – and proposing significant cuts in general fund spending on environmental protection, arts and cultural affairs, and other “extravagances.” My new boss was unhappy and cantankerous and my tenure on his staff was short. I blame the experience on art.

This was when I first heard the expression, “penny wise and pound foolish” – my boss used it on the floor of the State Senate while railing against the governor's budget. Although I considered myself a cultured fellow who appreciated the finer things in life as well as bowling, beer and babes, I struggled internally with the question of whether we should be spending millions of taxpayer dollars to enable artists to sculpt, paint and perform while people were sleeping in tents and being told by state officials that they needed to “learn to be survivors.” Was civilization really falling, I wondered, just because museums were shortening their hours and galleries were canceling shows?

I didn’t realize until later that fiscal responsibility wasn’t at the heart of the conflict. What was happening, I learned, was that a conservative politician was enacting policies that suited his ideology and personal preferences and disingenuously doing so in the name of budget balancing. He wasn’t representing the people who foolishly elected him; he was trying to make the state reflect Utopia as only he and his ilk defined it.

This is what’s happening here now, too, and in Madison and Columbus and Indianapolis and Augusta and DC and Topeka and elsewhere where conservatives are calling the shots. Rather than representing their constituents and truly trying to get more bang for the public buck, Republican politicians are presenting their Utopia-building and government-shrinking and union-busting as the right thing to do economically even as nonpartisan economists are crying, “Foul!”

The United States spent an estimated $25 billion on foreign aid in 2008. What do the feds spend on arts and culture here at home? The 2011 budget for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is $168 million. (President Obama has proposed cutting this number by $22 million for 2012.) This investment brings:

• 5.7 million full-time equivalent jobs
• $104.2 billion in household income
• $7.9 billion in local government tax revenues
• $9.1 billion in state government tax revenues
• $12.6 billion in federal income tax revenues

Notice that our largest source of direct national funding generates a tax return of 75 times the initial investment? Spending on the arts sure pays off, huh? Yet I heard on Michigan Public Radio this morning that my state now ranks 48th in the nation in arts spending. (I wonder why conservatives want to do away with public radio.) Enjoy your Utopia, Republicans.



Sources: Artsusa.org, Michigan Public Radio, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Melissa Etheridge - Come To My Window (1994)

A Missive to Misogynists in Washington

Anita and I were driving our eleven-year-old daughter to swim practice last night when we turned on the radio in time to hear the Weeper of the House saying something about how a ban on taxpayer funding of abortions is the will of the people, dagnabbit, and ought to be the will of the land. Then the announcer mentioned something about the Hyde Amendment (the legislative provision prohibiting federal funds from being used to pay for abortions) and how Republicans are committed to making it the Ultimate Written-in-Stone Rule of All Time. And then some other pandering politician – undoubtedly white, conservative and poorly-endowed – started expressing outrage that so many sweet, innocent little unborn babies are brutally assassinated in this country but I quickly switched off the radio for fear of throwing up and crashing the van into a tree.

Thanks to Google, I learned why Boehner was polluting the radio waves last night. In a 251 to 175 vote, 16 anti-choice Democrats joined House Republicans in passing H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. Among other things, this proposal:

• excludes statutory rape cases from being eligible for Medicaid coverage.

• bans using tax credits or deductions to pay for abortions or insurance and turns IRS agents into “abortion cops.” If audited, a woman would have to prove that her abortion “fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.”

• prohibits abortions in the District of Columbia.

I sure hope the U.S. Senate and the POTUS do the right thing and kill this offensive waste of time and resources.

Back in February, I read an editorial in the New York Times entitled, “The War on Women.” The essay, which talked about the GOP’s attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, eliminate support for Title X (the federal program that provides birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and HIV and STD testing to poor women) and forbid awarding federal funds to any group that even talks about abortions, among other evil ideas, closed this way:

These are treacherous times for women’s reproductive rights and access to essential health care. House Republicans mistakenly believe they have a mandate to drastically scale back both even as abortion warfare is accelerating in the states. To stop them, President Obama’s firm leadership will be crucial. So will the rising voices of alarmed Americans.

I’m one of those alarmed Americans to whom the Times refers. I don’t understand this whole ‘restrict all abortions in any way possible’ philosophy. Sure, abortion should be a last resort and not a form of contraception. Most thinking people agree on this. But most people support keeping abortion legal in the first trimester, too. (An October 2007 Harris poll asked if people favor or oppose Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision making abortion at up to three months of pregnancy legal, and found that 56 percent of respondents favored the decision.) Why do Republicans want to force women and girls to experience more shame, distress and depression than they already must feel?

I get that the issue is controversial. So are taxes and eminent domain and desegregation and the Internal Revenue Service and war and Kenny Rogers’ plastic surgery. What I don’t get is why white, conservative, male politicians have to be such dicks and try in every way possible to prevent women from having control over their own bodies. Why the War on Women, Weeper?

It’s been almost four decades since the highest court in the land (all guys, by the way) made its ruling. Abortion is legal. Yes, some people are against it for religious reasons – but some people’s religious views dictate that they avoid eating meat on Fridays and fly airplanes into skyscrapers too and you don’t see conservatives fawning and pandering and passing resolutions about that. You lost this one, fellas. Move the hell on. How about starting on that job creation thing now?

And stop making me feel ashamed to be a man, willya? I’ve got a wife and four daughters, for Pete’s sake.



Sources: Between the Lines, New York Times, Thinkprogress.org

Twista feat. Kanye West - Overnight Celebrity

On Writing

Sometimes the words and thoughts and ideas spew forth and I’m challenged to get them all down in my rapid hunt-and-peck typing style without losing some. At other times I sit in front of the computer for an irritatingly long time, stroking the spacebar expectantly, but nothing comes up or out.

It helps when something big happens like the Number One Boogeyman in the World is captured and executed or a band of loser politicians bends the President of the United States over a budget barrel as a government shutdown looms.

It also helps, I’ve found, to read other writers. Good ones, especially. Writers like Matt Taibbi, my current favorite, and Christopher Hitchens (god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) and Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, Reefer Madness) always get my own juices flowing.

I’ve already plugged Taibbi’s Smells like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire. Do yourself a favor and read his other stuff too. The results of the guy’s investigative journalism are guaranteed to piss you off, and he writes in a colorful, easily-understandable style. Taibbi’s a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine whose most recent book, Griftopia, is about the economic meltdown. (I haven’t read it yet.) He’s written “Why isn’t Wall Street in Jail?” and “The Real Housewives of Wall Street” for the magazine; recent blog posts include “Best Way to Raise Campaign Money? Investigate Banks.” and “Tax Cuts for the Rich on the Backs of the Middle Class; or, Paul Ryan Has Balls.”

Speaking of Christopher Hitchens, this guy would make a great subject for a book himself if it hasn’t happened already. A Marxist and atheist, the controversial writer is a fan of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and George Orwell and a critical foe, at least on paper, of the Clintons, Kissinger, St. Ronnie of Reagan and even Mother Teresa. Although by no means a liberal, Hitchens – who’s written for Vanity Fair, The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications – supported Nader in 2000 and opposes the War on Drugs. He’s had to cancel recent appearances due to esophageal cancer but I doubt he'd want us to pray for him.

There was a time, briefly, when I entertained the idea of writing poetry but when I shared a few pages with an honest friend who was a poet, I learned I should probably leave this genre to the professionals. Reading the words of Charles Bukowski and Langston Hughes and Wisława Szymborska and Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Seamus Heaney is a whole lot more fulfilling than trying to write like them.

I’m always moved by something I read in The Sun magazine, an independent, ad-free monthly with top-notch, provocative writing. The magazine’s editor, Sy Safransky, is on my list of "Top Ten People with whom I’d like to Dine and Drink." (Notice how I didn’t end that with a preposition? Yeah, I’m that good.) One of my best memories is of being with Anita in our kitchen, drinking Port wine and reading out loud to her from the latest issue which had just arrived. The magazine’s “Readers Write” feature is one of our favorites.

My kids gave me a subscription to Harper’s magazine for my birthday; it’s good that few people are around in my neighborhood at noon because I can’t help skipping and jumping when I check my mailbox and Harper’s is waiting. Check out the article in last month’s issue entitled, “Democracy 101: Mark Twain’s Farewell Address” by Lewis H. Lapham, the magazine’s former editor who’s credited with creating the fun and interesting "Harper’s Index." Now that’s some good writing.

I used to make a nice income through my writing, but being a grantwriter for a major environmental organization or a state employee are different than being a blogger/freelance writer. Anita presented me with a copy of the 90th anniversary edition of Writer’s Market a few weeks ago. The book contains “over 3,000 updated listings to help me sell what I write including literary agents, book publishers, magazines, newspapers, production companies, theatres, greeting card companies and more.” I think she wants me to start getting paid again.

Frédéric Chopin - Marche Funèbre - Funeral March

No, really. Mission Accomplished.

Last night Barack Obama wrapped up the 2012 presidential contest.

Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 that resulted in the deaths of 3,497 human beings, died at the hands of the American military at a fortress-like compound – not a remote mountain cave – in Abbottabad, Pakistan, near Islamabad. The operation was authorized by the POTUS himself.

That’s right. While a puffed-up Donald Trump was crowing about how proud he was to have held the nation’s attention hostage for so long on an issue that had already been decided in the minds of thinking people and meant absolutely nothing in the whole scheme of things, Barack Obama was planning the end of the mission begun by his disingenuous, dim-witted predecessor back on March 18, 2003 when the United States began bombing Baghdad.

I remember when Dubya did his One Tough Cowboy impersonation for the nation, growling back on September 18, 2001, one week to the day after the Towers fell, that he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” Then, just six months later, he responded to a reporter’s question by telling the world that he was "truly not that concerned" with catching bin Laden. “I don’t know where he is, nor do I…I just don’t spend that much time on him,” the drooling idiot had said.

I also remember May 1, 2003, when he stood before cameras in his Fighter Pilot Halloween costume on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, under a huge “Mission Accomplished” banner, and declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. And then guerilla warfare in Iraq increased. (The vast majority of civilian and military casualties occurred after Bush’s arrogant pronouncement.)

Well, Barack Obama never stopped being concerned about finding bin Laden and bringing him to justice. And our 44th president was able to focus on the actual country in which bin Laden was hiding, not just any ol’ sovereign, oil-rich nation ruled by a despot who used to be our ally until he invaded Kuwait in 1990 and ticked off Dubya’s daddy.

In announcing that we had taken down the Number One Boogeyman, President Obama said, “On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together. We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country. On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.”

My initial reaction was similar to many on Facebook: pride and jubilance and the patriotic feeling that “Our president is a badass and Chuck Norris better make sure Obama isn’t in his closet.” But the more I watched people on TV waving oversized American flags and whooping it up as though we just beat the Soviets at Lake Placid, the less jingoistic I felt. As the crowds grew into the hundreds in the park across from the White House, at Ground Zero and elsewhere, I realized that a man was dead. That’s all. Yes, he was evil and ugly and had caused pain and sorrow and unending grief for thousands of families. But he was one warped man. I doubt there is a shortage of haters willing and able to step into ObL’s role.

While mostly Americans were killed in the 9/11 attacks, 327 foreign nationals from the following countries also lost their lives: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Cote d'Ivoire, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ecuador, France, Germany, Ghana, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela.

I wondered if people were cheering and dancing and waving these flags somewhere too.

My Facebook friend Terry West responded to the news by posting the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”