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The Unalienable Right of Stupidity?

     The comedian Dennis Miller was asked about his view regarding the filmmaker Michael Moore’s right to make movies that bombastically drive opinions through questionable logic and facts.  Miller stated bluntly that although he found Moore despicable, he believed that the unique premise of America regarding free speech needed to be defended to the hilt, an inalienable right that ” allowed that stupid moron to be that utterly, completely wrong”.   I have decided for the most part to stay away from day to day stories on this blog for the simple reason that the immediate impulse to interpret rarely provides perspective.  A recent story however about unknown minister determined as a right of free speech to burn Korans has managed to ensnare the national media, the President of the United States, and the General in charge of combat forces in Afghanistan.  Now that’s the power of free speech; thus far no Korans burned, and yet the entire world is commenting on whether this man has the right to state his opinion through a ludicrous and reckless public display.

     What exactly is the right being defended here?  The First Amendment to the Consitution of the United States states the following:

          “Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”

     The privilege to act in ways that express your freedom of speech by voicing your discontent and outrage through the burning of Korans shall not be infringed by law or law officers, whether it be the chief legal officer of the the land, the President, or your local constabulary.  And clearly, your privilege as an Imam to build a mosque within blocks of ground zero is to upheld as a free man’s exercise of his religious expression.  The chief officer of the land, the President, who so vociferously rejects the logic of free expression of a crazy minister, is caught in the quandary of defending the free expression of a crazy imam who desires to build a triumphal temple at the site of the barbarous acts of fringe members of his religious vision.

     The problem comes down to the concept as to whether a right exists, versus whether it’s expression is moral or correct action.  In simple terms, do we have the right to be “that stupid moron” that Dennis Miller eviscerates?  Of course we do – and a developed, mature society has the equal right to complain, abhor, and most importantly, ignore moronic expression. The lunacy of defending indefensible acts does not protect the right of expression, but instead cheapens it by implying every stupid indefensible act needs to be supported righteously by a healthy society as a viable expression.  The right to express, does not make it viable expression.  The defense against stupidity and the prevention of moronic acts is a common sense recognition of right and wrong that demands society not needlessly support its own destruction through publicity.  If Nazis want to march through Skokie, Illinois no one should watch the parade. If an artist expresses his immaturity and perversion of placing a symbol of Christ in a glass of urine, he has the right, but society has the right to assure no public funds or facilities be utilized to publicize his moronic talentless expression.    If imams want to build mosques, they have the right to build but not the right to build unfettered to location.  If Koran burning makes the minister feel better, the total avoidance of any publicity or attention, the two outcomes he craves more than anything, merits the common sense approach.  We all have rights to expression, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to like a particular stupidity, expressed by a particular moron- we can use our common sense and express our opinion, that when you desire to express your right, we reserve the capacity to inform you societally that your right, is utterly, completely wrong.

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8:46 AM

     The sky was blue, as only fall days seem to be able to produce ,that special azure color of deep blue and cyan created by low humidity and cool temperatures.   A day , like a holiday, where everything moves slowly and breathing seems measured and special.  In an unusual weather pattern,  essentially the entire nation was treated to the same crystal clear palate sky that allowed one to see for miles and miles without the slightest hint or wisp of cloud, almost as if the morning was meant to unveil a special appreciation for beauty and organic quality of life itself.  Nothing out of the ordinary, yet in its special clarity, extraordinary.   Like a movie, too perfect, too visible, too quiet, too ephemeral.

     At 8:46 am  a searing sound like screeching bird caused people to look up and note a low flying object too big to be so low, too fast to be corrective, too aimed to be accidental, smash directly into the upper floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center with a deafening smack and an immediate fireball.  Just like that, the beautiful morning dissolved in a nightmare of progressive horror.  Was it a commuter plane? – too big. Was it an accident? – too unavoidable.

     At 9:03 am the mystery was solved – a second direct hit on the south tower of the World Trade Center – a second deafening impact, a second fireball.  This was no accident, no stunt , no movie.  This was real, this was terror, and this, changed us forever.

     19 committed men, supported by a death cult of abject murderers, had trained and practiced for years to direct their hate, to funnel their religious perversion, , to perform with precision the ultimate suicidal martyrdom of hijacking and flying passenger jet planes into special targets with the single solitary purpose, the decapitation of  western civilization.   In their hatred was to be consumed that morning the lives of 246 innocent crew and passengers of 4 planes, 125 innocent workers at the Pentagon, 2,606 innocent inhabitants and rescue workers of the World Trade Center, and over 6000 injuries.   Deaths proceeded with special heroism found in so many who awoke that day average citizens with no sense of their impending fate or special purpose.  The firemen and police heading to certain death to attempt to rescue people in collapsing buildings, the doomed leaps of people from the top floors to the streets below rather than accept the death of asphyxiation and fire, and the travelers of flight 93 who purposefully wrestled their plane into the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania rather than allow their hijackers to martyr themselves on the citadels of liberty and freedom, the US Capitol or the White House.  The beautiful morning shattered in a maelstrom of hate, destruction, and death.

     Nine years later, the day has become a hazy shell of memory with the visual still acute, but the raw emotions harder to feel.  We almost avert our eyes from the memory, so as not to deflect our advancing and progressive distortion of the sequelae.  The funereal mood and a sense of the end of times.  The security clampdown. The whole country bound together in righteous anger and purpose – “united we stand”.  The destruction of the Afghan Taliban Tyranny.  The escape of the chief designer and murderer Bin Laden.  The death of Daniel  Pearl.  The expansion of the War on Terror aims into Iraq. The overwhelming blitz on the Iraqi dictatorship and its fall.  The missing weapons of mass destruction.  The capture of Saddam. The deaths of Uday and Qusay.  The capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  The attempt to democratize the Iraqi nation.  The support of the troops, but not their war aims.  Abu Ghraib.  Waterboarding. The loss of of over 4000 more Americans in the conflict. The internecine struggles in Iraq. The pride of successful elections. The horrors of IED’s. The vicious fight for upper hand in Iraq. The bombing of the Grand Mosque. The Mahdi army. The Anbar awakening.  The Surge and its success. The return of the Taliban.  The tapes of Bin Laden.  The return of the American isolationist impulse. 

     The circle of history thus complete with lessons only partially learned, missions partially completed, and murderers partially vindicated in their theories of the tired lack of resolve of the western society. 

     At 846am, on a clear day, innocence is blotted from the morning sun, and the tides of fate are loosed on an unknowing and conflicted people.


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A “Wave” Election – Tsunami or Pond Ripple?

     There is a growing consensus that the state and congressional elections of November 2nd, 2010 are heading toward a climatic outcome that may profoundly shift the political direction of the United States.  These are referred to in the journalistic vernacular as “wave” elections, where not only vulnerable politicians lose their elected office, but politicians in so called “safe seats” are swept away in a rising tide of voter anger.  Multiple examples of wave elections are present in electoral history.  A classic example is the election of 1994, when the Republican party took over 50 seats to sweep into power and take the house majority for the first time in over 40 years.   In review of classic wave elections, it is often forgotten what the forces that catapulted winning party into such a dominant position in the voter’s mind, and the reasons are often mis-represented.  In 1994, the journalistic mantra is that the public accepted the positive role of the “Contract With America” as the primary reasoning behind the forceful public decision.  Careful polling, however, indicated that in 1994, the general voter’s acknowledgement of the existence of a  “Contract with America” was in the minds of less than 20% of those who polled for the republican candidates that year.  The true reason for most “wave” elections is a fairly simple one -revulsion for the tactics of the party in power – rather than any positive impressions of the party out of power. If there is such a wave election this year, the reason will be little different. 

     The public’s perception of a ruling party’s arrogance about the role of public opinion is  usual catalyst of electoral collapse of the party in power.  For some time the disconnect between the public’s perception of change they thought they voted for in 2008 – fiscal sanity, government transparency, and government accountability – has become more and more ingrained.  Current congressional job approval is only 23% with 72% disapproval and generic polling for whether the country is on the right track (31.8%) versus wrong track (61.2%)  represents a crushing 29.4% negative interpretation of the current Democrat Party policy direction.  There is no voter gasoline stronger than the sense by the voting public that leaders are acting in “anti-democratic” fashion, ignoring time and time again the priorities identified by the voter.   Promised fiscal sanity, the voter is presented with the ballooning deficits and scatter-shot stimulus spending that seems to have no identifiable productive logic or constructive goal.  Promised government transparency, the recognition of dramatic back room deals to special interests and clumsy bills with thousands of pages of hidden agendas voted through without the barest public or legislative vetting is seen time and time again.  Promised government accountability, the current congress has been unable to come together sufficiently to present or vote on a proposed budget, despite overwhelming party majorities. 

     The democrat party in power has been assuming all along a relative ripple on the pond voter reaction that will allow them to permanently secure their policy agendas.  The current response to the public angst about the direction the country is headed?  You guessed it; a proposal for another 50 billion in stimulus.  Being a successful politician has in recent decades been about controlling the power of money to win elections – more money, more electoral wins.  This election season something different seems to be afoot – politicians who capably use their five senses – touching the pulse of the public, hearing the public concern about the country’s future, acknowledging the rotten smell of an  establishment suckled on money, seeing the future for what it is and acting on it, may yet ride a tsunami wave on the  fifth sense this year – the satisfying taste of overwhelming victory.

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Armstrong vs Aldrin

     The first and second men to land and walk on the moon in 1969 performed their mission with a level of symbiotic teamwork that rivalled the great explorer teams of history, such as Lewis and Clark, Fremont and Carson,  and Rutan and Yeager.  Time and distance however have brought them to a significant point of division as to where America’s space program is best served in going forward.   The last space shuttle flight is scheduled for next year, and President Obama’s announced framework for America in space enlists no NASA  directed manned flights for the next decade after. 

     It is hard to envision the leader in manned space exploration earthbound, but after 50 years of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the Space Shuttle, there is no immediate road map for America maintaining a space presence. This has lead essentially every former astronaut and flight director from America’s space exploration glory years to express their disappointment and concern with America’s direction -except one telling exception -Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon and Armstrong’s teammate on the the July 20th, 1969 Sea of Tranquillity moon landing.  The two astronauts have now staked out dramatically different positions on the future of America in space and have gone public with their disagreement.

     In truth, the American space program has been in a vision funk for nearly four decades since the last moon landing of Apollo 17 in December, 1972.  The American public’s appetite for spending for projects of manned space exploration decidedly waned after the initial moon successes and a relatively rudderless policy  space flight has resulted.  The space shuttle’s 1970s technology and its overblown premise of “cheap and safe” reusable spacecraft were exposed in the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters. The nation’s leaders have struggled since 1990 in defining a vision of directed and goal oriented logical programs that the public would see as worthwhile and appropriate for investment.  The first President Bush envisioned a Mars landing as a goal by 2020, the second President Bush staged the process in a more coherent strategy of improved rocket design, return to the moon with moon basing, followed by the Mars mission, reflected in the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration.  This required the development of two new craft, a manned vehicle the Orion, and a new heavy payload rocket, the Constellation,  for gravity escaping deep space lift not capable with the Shuttle rocketry.  As typical of complicated engineering concepts, these projects have developed behind schedule and over budget.

     President Obama made the public announcement of a dramatic re-thinking of the space vision process on April 15th, 2010, with the elimination of the Constellation project and the re-directed development of the Orion as a “rescue” vehicle only for the International Space Station. For the next ten years American astronauts would “rent” seats on Russian Soyuz craft when  travelling to the space station, and America’s engineering energy would be redirected to sub-orbit travel through private space programs such as SpaceX and other unnamed and yet undeveloped concepts. Long term, America would re-enter the manned deep space process with potential asteroid missions or a Mars project by 2030.  This multi-directed and non-specific future is what has lead to the schism between Aldrin, a proponent of President Obama’s vision and Armstrong, a decided supporter of the previous 2004 plan.

     Who is correctly articulating the future of America in space?  Why do two heroes of exploration have such vastly different views of what America’s role should be in space?  My opinion tends to lean toward the Armstrong view.  As previously articulated in this blog, America has lost its way in the capacity to develop and complete big ideas.  President Obama has again extended the timeline and blurred the focus of the timeline and goals such that the cynics among us feel it is simply another dodge in the process of standing behind, or letting go, of America’s leadership in manned space exploration.  The Russians and Chinese have no such conflict; though of more limited means, they have much sharper and better articulated strategies.  As Armstrong suggests, the larger damage of the new vision is the loss of the years of accumulated know-how and experience of the engineering community that once disbanded, will prove very difficult to reconstruct at some future, undescribed later date. 

     As with so many other of President Obama’s articulated visions, you are just going to have to accept a world where America is just another country on the world map,  and vision lies in the ethereal world of dreams, not the right stuff of realization and getting it done.

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The Road To Serfdom

     In an  Internet bookstore with millions of available titles, Amazon.com lists its category best sellers and overall best sellers monthly, an interesting pulse on the  interest areas of the reading public.  The number 1 best seller for all books on Amazon in June of 2010 was  The Road To Serfdom by F.A. Hayek. – WHO?? – It is reasonable to consider with some amazement that an economic treatise written by an obscure Austrian intellectual 66 years ago could captivate such a large segment of the population as to lead all books in all categories.  A book that dominated the usual summer classics, such as the vampire inspired The Passage or the son’s memoir of his father S**t My Father Says , would be assumed by all to have some violent or sexy angle to bring in all these literary stragglers.  Perhaps this is a book about a Serf mafioso who rules over a dangerous road through which a hero must travel to attain a powerful ring…clever premise, but no,  that’s far from the book’s central theme. 

      It turns out that the gripping premise of F.A. Hayek’s book that so absorbed the American public’s attention this summer is a call to intellectual arms to avoid the collectivist mistakes of socialized states and to defend the power of man’s individualism.  How could such ideas written by a relative unknown born in 1899 resonate so strongly this summer? The answer is obvious to those like me who have read Hayek’s treatise.  Its is Hayek’s description of the collectivist impulses of governments promoting good acts that ultimately strangulates the capacity of individuals to achieve success by “developing their own individual gifts and bents”.  Hayek saw the collectivist responses of governments to the world wide depression born of classic liberal utopian desires to level the playing field and eliminate the inequities presented by the capitalist model.  In the process of seeking societal ideals of social justice, grater, equality and security, the social utopian structures common plans that deferentially and without prejudice would “handle our common problems as rationally as possible”.  For these modern planners, “it is not sufficient to design the most rational permanent framework within which various activities would be conducted by individual persons according to their individual plans.  What our planners demand is a central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan, laying down how resources of society should be ‘consciously directed’ to serve particular ends in a definite way.”  Hayek saw the classic argument regarding a totalitarian socialism that neither cared nor understood how the utopian goals were achieved and were merely certain that they be achieved, no matter what the cost, and the democratic socialist who struggled with dictatorial tenets of such utopians, argued only regarding the means, not the ends.  Both fundamentally believed that government must ” centrally direct economic activity if we want to make the distribution of income conform to current ideas of social justice.”  Hayek quoted Benito Mussolini as objectifying the need for central planning to reduce the inequities of individual competition in a modern world – ” We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.”  benito mussolini (1929).

     Hayek was speaking to an audience dealing with the aggressive impulses of the totalitarian socialists Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, but asking them to recognize the tendencies in their own threatened democratic world to the less martial but every bit as threatening collectivist strains of their own society.  For Hayek , ”the welfare and happiness of millions cannot be measured on a scale of less and more.”  What becomes inherently clear in the democratic effects on building a collectivist society, is not that the equality of society transcends to an absolute good, but rather, that the benefits of society receive a more equal distribution.  The definition of good or bad can not be left to society to determine benefit, for obviously everyone’s opinion as to good differs, and millions of people’s definition of good differs absolutely.  Inevitably, the direction of relative good can not be left to people to decide as in the end, the decisions in attempting to satisfy everyone will satisfy no one.   The lasting consequence, Hayak suggests, is the inevitable “cry for an economic dictator as a characteristic stage in the movement toward central planning.”   The death of freedom of choice must be the outcome that permits the central planner to achieve his end, because every effort to direct tendencies brings the unforeseen consequence of the individual’s adaptation to the rules, to secure the individual’s best possible outcome against the difference of the definition of good acknowledged by the many individual variations, and the single definition of the central planners.

     The treatise of a long ago theorist has become the running commentary of today’s events and has once again made the obscure economist Hayek a best selling author and a prophet to millions of Americans concerned with the direction of current governmental actions.  The need to eliminate individual variation in decision making and responsibility to achieve a common good – government takeover of mortgage loans, college education loans, credit card and financial lending,  the government take over of health care decisions and insurance, the government takeover of major industries such as the automobile industry, the government regulatory processes to “effect” climate change, social justice, immigration, propagation of non-elected “czars” rather than legislators to effect change – all point to the road map to servitude Hayak pointed out so presciently many years ago. 

     The reason The Road To Serfdom is a best seller again, is because we, as a free society under attack are farther down that road than ever before, and a larger and larger proportion of the populus is recognizing it.

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What Just Happened?

     The most important component in the determination of the trends of an historical event is the element of time. It is also the most difficult to tolerate, as often the results of significant investments in blood and treasure seem without reward, without conclusive outcome, in a time span that allows satisfactory predictability for the people who have made the investment. The study of history cautions all to not make snap judgements about cause and effect, as it is often decades before the true denouement is known. Despite the recognized complexity of the bends of history, our people and leaders continue to be ignorant of the rationale of proceeding with action with historical grounding, and having the patience to recognize the context of any outcome.

     President Obama delivered a speech the other night declaring the end of the United States combat participation in the historical event known as the Iraq War.  He made many historical mis-interpretations, as he has been apt to do.  He declared an end to the conflict he stated started with the incursion of US forces into Iraq in March of 2003, but the historical projection is obviously a much larger palette with the initial invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces in August, 1990, followed by the forcible expulsion of the Iraqi army from Kuwait  by US and allied forces, the subsequent ceasefire, the maintenance of an aggressive no fly zone for the next 12 years, 17 UN declarations ignored by Iraq as a means to achieve permanent resolution of the armed conflict and the eventual expulsion of the dictator in 2003.  That 12 year process was followed by a bloody occupation that extended until the successful “surge” of 2007, that finally achieved a relative stasis allowing for the removal of combat forces and the moment for President Obama’s declaration.  The separation of events has no historical significance and therefore no ability to predict the longer term consequences.  

     Examples for this are weaved throughout history:

     Great Britain suffered a horrific defeat at the hands of the American  revolutionaries in the War of Rebellion of 1775-1783.  It resulted in the loss of the American colonies and access to the majority of the massive American continent and its natural resources.  The result would seem obvious; yet, by freeing the British Empire of its North American heartache, it allowed more directed focus on its eternal enemy France and with the battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815,  development of the the British Commonwealth, making Great Britain the richest and most powerful  nation on earth for over a hundred years.

     The crushing defeats by Germany and Japan in 1945 seemed to signal the apocalypse for those countries.  Ironically it freed them of the national tendencies of subservience that allowed them within 20 years to restore their position in the world to mighty economic powers that persist to this day .

     The United States accepted the premise of the “domino” theory in defending against the loss of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to the perceived Comintern communist threat represented by North Vietnam.  Historical perspective implies that this interpretation was a transient western slant on a thousand year old conflict resulting in the inevitable consequence of  a single Vietnamese nation, a nation that now holds the United States as its largest trading partner and holds joint military exercises with the US against its “eternal ” enemy, China.

     As painful as it is, we are going to have to show patience to understand the effects of the interactions of the last 20 years in Iraq to determine what the positive or negative consequences will be.  In historical perspectives, “What Just Happened?” is a journey, not a race of understanding, and our future interventions by our country and leaders will be better served by recognizing that eternal truth.

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The Match Is Lit, and The World Changes Forever

     On September 1, 1939, the inevitable and the inconceivable met on the fields of Poland at dawn, and the world shuddered.  On the premise of a trumped up staged border incident the armed forces of Germany hurled their might into the antiquated defenses of the Republic of Poland, bringing to birth the cataclysm of World War II.  The predictability of the attack was foreordained by the ceaseless pattern of intimidation and provocation by the dictator Hitler throughout the 1930’s against the tired Great War weary nations of Europe occurring in a straight line from re-militarization, the restoration of the Ruhr, the Anschluss into Austria, the destruction of the Czech nation and absorption of the Sudetenland in a process that brought the word “appeasement” into the diplomatic vernacular.  Appeasement was conceptualized as the mature alternative to war in which  identified grievances were rationalized and negotiated rather than fought over by governments.  The underlying flaw of appeasement and the fatal illogic of appeasers was that only one side admitted flaws and only one sides grievances were appeased, in a process that allowed time for the strength of the dictator to grow to position him to  achieve his ultimate aim.   His aim was true on September 1 – the world was introduced to the concept of “Blitzkrieg” , the rapid and mechanized coordination of land and air forces that rapidly overwhelmed brave Polish forces that relied on outdated structures of fixed defenses and cavalry charges. By September 17th, the Polish forces had retreated to defensible redoubts in Southeast Poland only to find that their erstwhile allies, the Soviet Union, had secretly entered into a pact with Hitler to carve up Poland, and massively attacked from the east, crushing the the Poles in a vice and rapidly rolling up the nation out of existence as an independent nation for the next 50 years.

     By October 5th, the general struggle for the polish nation was over and the feasting on the remains by the totalitarian states was commenced.  The world saw appeasement for what it was, a delusional tea room exercise and girded itself for the six year death struggle that had commenced.  It has been assumed by most that the lesson of dealing with belligerent dictators was forever codified by the resultant investment of 60 million deaths  in the cataclysm of the second world war conflict, but we continue to argue today under similar scenarios as to whether early aggressive action or extended commitments to “understand” the grievances of the beligerents  offers a more rational course.  Our current President echoes previous leaders who felt that the key to inoculating against future violence is to “understand”  and “apologize” for the perceived affronts of democracies against aggrieved intolerants, and find avenues to address their concerns that assuage them.  The fascinating lesson of history remains that the agenda of all intolerants is not their own temporary disadvantaged state, but rather their overwhelming need to determine in final terms who is right, who is stronger, who will triumph.  Unfortunately democracies continue the pattern of airing their weakness in public and forcing the test of the tyrants onto a timetable best suited for the tyrant.  So far, the enlightened side has managed to ultimately win, at great cost.  Are you willing to bet this outcome is inevitable, regardless of the adversary?

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Salzburg Celebrates Mozart

     Every July and August since 1918, with the single interruption of 1944, a music festival has been held in the Austrian city of Salzburg celebrating its home town hero , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  This year’s festival occurs in the 254th anniversary of Mozart’s birth and presents the master in many venues in addition to other composers.  I am writing about this fine event in hopes that I will someday take the plunge and attend the festival , a lifelong dream.  Certainly Mozart’s music is universally available and paying the absurd price for the events at this most famous of music festivals is likely not the most efficient way of absorbing the beauty of Mozart’s music.  So be it – you have your musical event fantasy, and I have mine.

      Salzburg, Austria sits in some of the most picturesque landscape on earth and was a fitting inspiration for the soaring beauty of Mozart’s greatest gift to the musical world, the Andante, or slow movement.   The Andante is a tempo of walking, contemplative slowness taking in the beauty and spirit of one’s surroundings without the abject loneliness and desperate sadness of the slower Adagio.  Mozart was a very spiritual person who believed in an afterlife that guaranteed an alleviation of life’s sufferings and a joyful affirmation of the eternal nature of the soul.  His moments of internalizing and personalizing the musical score invite the listener to contemplate a higher plane of awareness, where the sounds achieve purity and beauty that few composers other than perhaps Beethoven ever achieved, approaching harmonic celestial perfection.  If this was not heaven, it was Mozart’s earthbound version of it.

     If someday I find myself in Salzburg walking down  the Getreidegasse and look up to see No. 9, the birthplace of the old master Mozart, I expect to think first of the supreme Andantes and their connection with the man who brought such beauty to life.  Would not the world be a little better place if at times of such instability and trial as we live in today, events were blissfully soundtracked with the sound of the world as it ought to be…,.

Andante, Mozart Piano Concerto No 23

Andante, Mozart Clarinet concerto

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Does Anyone Read The Bills Anymore?

     We are living in an era of government dedicated to the proposition that, the larger a bill of enacting laws that is put forth, the greater the chance that the bill will deal with the complicated contingencies of modern life. These megaliths are often given clear and impactful titles – The Patriot Act, The American Recovery and ReInvestment Act, the Health Care and Education Affordability and Reconciliation Act, and the Financial Regulatory Reform Act  to name a few of our recent beauties. The descriptive character of these titles belie the incredible vagaries and unknowable effects of thousands and thousands of pages of byzantine edicts and regulations. The one thread that runs through all these monuments to modern legislation is that almost no one who has voted for them has spent any time reading any of them.

Interestingly our leaders are proud of this fact:
          Frank Lautenberg, Senator New Jersey – Feb. 13 2009 – ” No one will have time to read the final version of the Stimulus Act before it comes up for a vote in the Senate.”
          Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House -March 9, 2010 “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it”
          Bill Thomas, Rep. California – June 10, 2010 – Asks Warren Buffet at Financial Review Meeting if he thought the Congress had gotten most of the Financial Regulatory Reform Act “mostly right”. Buffet confessed he had not read the 1500 page bill, and Thomas assured him that was okay, because” no one has read the text of the financial regulatory reform bill, including some of the co-sponsors”.

    What has happened to the consideration that congress used to put into laws, the committee review, the careful syntax, the brevity for impact. Well….its just gone.  President Obama ran on the principle of assuring the public that each act of legislation would see at least five days on the Internet prior to any vote , to provide the “light of Day” to each action.  That promise didn’t last inauguration, and hasn’t seen the light of day since.  The process of passage now is comprised of allowing lobbyists and policy wonks their best shot at crafting policy statements as laws, and then allow subsequent acts to “fix” the mistakes. The American public? Simply too naive and reactionary to be allowed to know what’s in the bill ahead of time, as fore-knowledge would simply kill any passage momentum.  At a time in our history when technology offers the opportunity to each citizen if so inclined to have access to  information that will intensely affect his or her life, the access is denied.  More frighteningly, when the information is available upon passage, the reader is buried under a blizzard of ridiculous hedges, sidebars, and subsets that make the impact simply unknowable.

     The most important piece of legislation passed by an American Congress is the Bill Of Rights, passed by the congress in 1789, and ratified by the states in 1791. 

     The Rights of Man, so complex, so important, so revolutionary, so effective………………fits on one page.

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A Chilean Drama Elevates Us All

     On August 5th, 2010, a temblor caused the collapse of deep exit tunnels in the San Jose copper and gold mine in some two hundred miles north of Santiago, Chile.  This has been a year of intolerable national disasters for Chile, including both an 8.8 magnitude earthquake and a devastating tsunami.  The news from the August 5th mining disaster seemed destined to fit the solemn and depressing narrative as it was reported that 33 miners were lost behind the cave-in and presumed dead, as water and air was felt likely only available for 48 hours. As days stretched to several weeks the efforts to drill relief holes were felt to likely be perfunctory – then a miracle.  On August 22, seventeen days after the cave in, a sentinel probe drill was noted to vibrate and upon being withdrawn from a point some 2200 feet under the ground, was found to have a note attached – Estamos bien in el refugio los 33 – we are safe in the shelter the 33. 

     We are once again confronted with the amazing tendency for the human race rise to heights of true heroism.  Thirty three common men faced with fearsome odds and rapidly diminishing resources, managed to stay alive and sane in the pitch darkness of a hole 2,257 feet underground lit only by their head lamps and stretch water and food resources for 17 days until a rescue relief 4 inch drill hole that they had no certainty would reach them provided them with contact to the outside world.  They were not specially trained cavers, submarine officers, or survivalists.  In the notes that followed to the surface, it was clear that these men were driven only by their bonds to each other, and their hope to someday see their families again. 

     The challenge that lies ahead of them remains daunting.  Even provided the most modern machinery, it is assumed a relief channel sufficient to lift out grown men will take up to 60 or more days to drill.  The ever present risks of further mine collapse, disease, claustrophobic dementia, depression, and physical collapse remain dangerous adversaries to the men, who, if they survive will likely have sustained themselves longer than any previous group has in such conditions.

     Chile is a country that has survived its own civil crises of the 1970’s to become a leading light in both economic and civil progress in the Americas.  It is putting on display the inate strength of its national character in this year of  challenge, and thirty three men are showing us all the way to face difficult moments, work together for a common good, and hopefully, ultimately, triumph.

     It just may elevate us all.