A Blog of My Own

Maybe it will take longer than 70 or 80 years for Holocaust-induced paranoia to fully disappear from the minds of American Jews; I know that one recent episode of a TV show, and one current movie, have reawakened it in me.

Both works were created by Jewish writers. The TV show stuck a thumb in the eye of the Christian majority, while the movie exposed to the world as unattractive a picture of a Jewish community as I have ever seen. (I have to say, however, that I have not seen any Nazi propaganda films.)

Both the TV show and the movie are daring. Daring in two senses. First, in the sense of brave. Second, in the more literal sense that they actually dare the Christian majority to hate us, and to do something about it.

On a recent episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry’s urine backsplashes from the toilet in the home of a fundamentalist Christian onto a painting of Jesus hanging on the wall, so that a droplet appears to the homeowner to be a tear falling miraculously from Jesus’s eye. The Catholic League last week complained, and I can see why. If Christian characters in a sitcom defiled a Jewish symbol in a way remotely like this, there’d be an uproar like you wouldn’t believe. Of course, the fact that Christians are a huge majority in the population and Jews a tiny minority alters the calculus of the whole thing, and makes the offense somehow more “permissible” (perhaps), but still. Can we actually get away with this stuff?

In A Serious Man, set in the Jewish community of a Minneapolis suburb in 1967, Joel and Ethan Coen display for us a gallery of grotesques. Nearly every character is ugly on some level — most of them physically. They are made-up and photographed so as to magnify the distortions in their features. The external ugliness seems meant to manifest a soul-sickness inside. Everyone is a victim or a predator. Leaders of the community are revealed as pious hypocrites. People behave unconscionably toward one another, or with unpardonable self-absorption. One poor shnook has a medical condition which involves something unspeakable draining out of his neck into a tube at all times, in a manner suggestive of some sort of space-alien fluid. Although there is a worst-nightmare quality to all of it rather than a sense of realism, it is impossible completely to dismiss as fantasy, since it has an uncomfortable truth, as nightmares do. (Otherwise they couldn’t scare us.)

We know that what’s on offer in this movie is not all there is to the real-life Jewish community. The real-life Jewish community contains a rich vein of inner and outer beauty, true (not hypocritical) morality, concern for fellow man (Jew and non-Jew alike), and gratitude for God’s blessings. OK, but all of that acknowledged — would this movie make any sense at all if it had been, instead, about life among the Swedes? I worry that the answer is no.

I felt nervous watching the film. I wished that some sort of Proof of Judaism card had been required for admission, so that we wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of others. I derived comfort from the fact that the movie isn’t a big hit, and not a lot of people may see it. But fat chance of that, now that the movie is being talked about as a serious contender for a Best Picture Oscar.

Of course, the catch 22 with my fear about how these characters are depicted (there’s always a catch 22 with us, isn’t there? — not for nothing was Catch 22 written by Joseph Heller, a Jew) is that the distortions in these characters’ personalities are a product of their fear of the society outside their (invisible) ghetto-suburban walls. The grotesqueries of the community in the film — the things that make the grotesqueries feel so Jewish, and fuel my paranoia about what the film will do to the Jewish reputation — those malformations themselves are stigmata of the characters’ completely-earned, historically-justified anxiety. Give this people a chance not to be persecuted for a century or two, and they might even become normal. I get it; and audiences who think a bit about the film may get it.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t look good.

And that may be the point for Larry David and the Coen Brothers. In being daring enough (in both senses of the word) to show something that doesn’t look good, they may, perversely, be searching for security. In their freedom, a freedom unlike any that Jews have known since Jews began, their (perhaps unconscious) agenda may be to say: “OK, Majority, we’re testing. Testing your tolerance, testing the limits of our freedom to provoke you and still survive. We’re going to give you every excuse to hate us, and if you still don’t — if we can show you this, and you still don’t round us all up and put us into cattle cars — well, then, I guess we Jews really are finally and truly safe.”

From their mouths to God’s ear.

It was about seven weeks ago that health care legislation officially passed into “I don’t understand it anymore.” I know some of the proposals, and I know what makes sense to me, but I no longer know what’s in the law making its way through Congress. It’s all too complicated. So the news that something passed yesterday in Max Baucus’ Senate committee leaves me feeling neither elated nor distressed.

The health system we have now is screwed up. Whatever the Congress does is either going to make it less screwed up, more screwed up, or exactly the same screwed up. I have no idea. And if I – a guy who follows these things, and generally stays engaged with policy and politics – have no idea, I’m pretty sure very few other people do.

As I say, though, this doesn’t distress me, or make me anxious. What I’m feeling isn’t boredom, either. Thanks to the impossible-to-follow “debate,” I’ve now attained a state of complete detachment, almost a meditative state, waiting to let Congress do what it will, and to find out later if it made things better or ruined our lives beyond all recognition. It’s actually kind of peaceful.

My knowledge of the new health care law is now on a higher plane, unconcerned with facts about what the new law will do, governed by the certainty that whatever else the law is or will be, it is perfect, because it is part of the universe.

The right wing puts in our heads all kinds of horror stories demonstrating that public health care in the countries that have it (Canada, the UK, etc.) is a prescription for disaster — people not receiving desperately-needed operations for years, having to wait interminably for doctor appointments when they have terminal diseases, and on and on.

Meanwhile, the left wing (as with The Huffington Post’s banner story yesterday) counters with horror stories demonstrating that private insurance companies, in the system we have now, deny people essential, life-saving procedures because of evil corporate greed or bureaucratic incompetence.

To educate yourself on the issue, you examine both sides, and all you come away with is the horror of both. And that way lies despair. You conclude that continuation of the status quo sucks and is completely unacceptable, and that every possible change from the status quo sucks and is completely unacceptable.

Maybe both sides should be talking about why their health care solution is good, instead.

In the meantime, here’s what makes sense to me. It’s the health care plan I thought Obama proposed when he was campaigning.

No public health care.

Instead, everybody gets private health care insurance. You change the laws so that the insurance companies are required to give you coverage, regardless of preexisting conditions, and are prohibited from taking your coverage away if you lose your job. You also require everybody to get insurance — thereby putting healthy young people (who don’t think they need insurance and now don’t have it) into the system, which will keep the system solvent. For people below the poverty line, the government subsidizes (or completely pays for) their insurance premiums. Middle-income people get a tax credit to help defray the burden.

What’s wrong with that?

Here’s my concern with a “public health care option.” I think it will quickly cease to be an option and become the only choice, as more and more employers use the existence of public health care as a justification for eliminating health coverage as an employee fringe benefit.

Once, health care was seen by employers as a valuable perk they could use to lure a top-flight workforce. Now health care is just an expensive albatross around employers’ necks, one they will rid themselves of as soon as they defensibly can. The existence of public health care will give them the cover they need to do that. So Obama’s avowal that under his public health care option “you can keep the private insurance you have now, if you choose to do that” is a misconception, I’m afraid. You can’t keep private health insurance if your employer takes it away using the rationale that you have a plan B.

Meanwhile, evidence seems to say that as flawed as our present system is, it works, for the people who have private health care insurance. 80% of them say they’re satisfied. And while our health care system is expensive, it also works. Mortality rates for common cancers are much lower here than in countries with public health care.

So just do my plan. There, I’m glad that’s solved.

I didn’t realize until just now that Senator Al Franken is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This means that he will be among the questioners this week of Supreme Court judicial nominee Sonia Sotomayor. (CNN and PBS will be airing complete coverage, along with MSNBC and Fox; I imagine C-Span will, also.) This means that Senator Al Franken will have his first chance to crack America up! I sincerely hope he doesn’t let the opportunity pass him by. We need his wit. It’s why I gave his senatorial election campaign money in the three figures, twice. And I want my money’s worth.

Don’t hide your funny under a bushel, Al.

When Congress and the White House were “crafting” the stimulus package, Senators Ron Wyden and Olympia Snowe (he a Democrat, she a Republican) put in a provision to discourage bailed-out companies like AIG from paying their executives big bonuses — namely, a 35% federal excise tax on said bonuses.

Sometime in the middle of the night before the Senate vote, that provision got removed. Nobody seems to know how or why. Or whodunnit.

Is it going to turn out that the person who directed the removal of the provision was someone in the Obama Administration?

Please make that not be so.

Because that would realllly suck.

Bear with me through some predicates here.

Predicate #1: The stock market is not going to turn around, not ever, until there is some good economic news from somewhere. It’s not going to happen through some magical shift in psychology, some confidence that comes out of nowhere. We need a month in which reported home sales are up versus the same month the year before, or in which retail sales have an uptick, or in which the amount of lending in the financial system is seen to increase. Then and only then will the market bottom out and begin its comeback.

Predicate #2: If the stimulus package and the bailouts work, as we all hope they will, it will be some months from now (at the shortest) before their positive effects in the economy are seen.

Predicate #3: We have become a nation of stock investors (through our pension funds and 401K plans), and when stocks go down, it’s therefore not just a few million Americans who retrench their spending — practically every middle-class American does so. And that drives the economy further into the ground. A cratering Dow means that GM isn’t going to sell any cars. A cratering Dow will prevent the stimulus package from working, even if it otherwise would have.

My solution: Suspend trading on all American stock markets now. And suspend it indefinitely. Freeze stock prices where they are. If it takes six months for the stimulus plan and/or the bailouts to begin to show a positive result in lending, home sales, employment, or retail, wait the six months. If it takes a year, wait the year. However long it takes. When we begin to see some good news in the economy, such that investors might feel confidence that a rebound is beginning to happen, then and only then unfreeze the stock exchanges and let trading begin again.

Otherwise, all that will happen is a further declining stock market, which will make it impossible for good news ever to happen. The downward cycle needs to be short circuited. It’s all well and good (and true) to say that the Dow won’t go up until somebody buys a car, but nobody’s going to buy a car while the Dow is still going down, so nothing will stop the Dow from going all the way to zero. (As for today’s report that new car sales were off in February by 41% compared to a year ago, the only thing that surprises me is that it means that some people are actually still buying new cars. Who are these people, and are they insane?)

During this freeze, what do we do about those folks who must sell their stocks in order to have money to live? We allow them to sell 1% of their shares a month if they must, for 85% of the frozen market value, and the buyer will be the government. The government (we the taxpayers) will then own the shares, and as taxpayers we will all benefit on the day the market is unfrozen at 100% of its value, because we will have made a profit on those shares instantly.

That will cost the government some money in the short term, but will it cost any more than the bailout money we’re now flushing down the toilet?

I have no idea whether Obama’s budget is going to save our bacon or fry it. But I do know my gut reaction is to wish Congress would STFU and pass it. If it turns out to be our ruination, well, it was a nice country while it lasted.

I’m more inclined to want to find out, one way or the other, than to argue about it. I imagine Sully making his decision to land in the Hudson and his co-pilot screaming at him that he’s insane and fighting to wrest the controls away from him and his flight attendants refusing to go along with the evacuation plan because their idea was to land at Teterboro and the passengers in the exit rows yanking out the doors and bailing in midair because there’s no way you can land a plane in a river, and the result not being a happy one.

It looks like Paul Krugman is kind of where I am on this. At the conclusion of a week that saw an agreement on a stimulus package and the Treasury Secretary laying out his fixes for a failed banking system, he writes:

It’s early days yet, but we’re falling behind the curve.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures…

Complete column here.

Well guess what and golly gee. When I wrote on January 2, regarding the stated intention of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and senior U.S. Senator from Illinois Dick Durbin to find any nominee chosen by Gov. Rod Blagojevich “unacceptable,”

way to unnecessarily provoke a constitutional crisis and make yourselves look like asses when you lose, Democratic Senate leadership,

I was right!

Question: If I, an ordinary U.S. citizen, knew that according to our Constitution, Roland Burris, being legally appointed by a sitting state governor, had an undeniable claim on this Senate seat, why did it take the Democratic leaders of the Senate ten days to know it?

Asses.

Obama is fond of saying, when pressed on policy matters during this interim period before his inauguration, “We have only one President at a time, and it is George Bush.” Quite right. It is equally true that Illinois only has one governor at a time, and that governor is Rod Blagojevich.

What ought to be happening now, is that we ought to be paying attention to the law, not to our sense of high moral dudgeon. The law is explicit on what happens when Illinois has a U.S. Senate vacancy. It’s called the Constitution, specifically the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and it says the governor makes the appointment. Here’s something it doesn’t say: “The governor makes the appointment as long as everyone has confidence in the governor’s honesty.” Here’s something else it doesn’t say: “The governor makes the appointment as long as everybody is pretty sure the governor is going to be the governor for a while.” It says the governor makes the appointment.

What part of that is ambiguous?

Just as there are laws that make explicit what is supposed to happen when we have a Senate vacancy, there are laws that lay out the process for the indictment and conviction of bribetakers, and for the impeachment of state officeholders who have betrayed the public trust. We do not have to make this thing up from scratch. We don’t have to wring our hands about what to do next. We don’t have to manufacture a constitutional crisis over this. All we have to do is follow the law.

What should happen:

1) Since, in my opinion, Blagojevich is a crook, he should be impeached and removed from office, and indicted and convicted in federal court, ASAP.

2) Since he has not yet been indicted or impeached, he should be fulfilling his obligations as governor and appointing a person to fill our empty Senate seat. This, to his credit, he has done. We are entitled to two U.S. senators just as every other state is.

In failing to impeach the governor by now, the Illinois legislature has, in effect, mandated that Blagojevich make the appointment. That is not what they intended, but that is what they have done. Given this, it’s a good thing Blagojevich did so — especially since neither his conviction nor his impeachment are foregone conclusions. Can anyone say with surety that he will not still be Governor of Illinois a year from now? No, they can’t. Are we supposed to go without a U.S. senator that long? No, we are not.

The pronouncements by the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate that they are not going to accept a Blagojevich choice are outrageous. The Constitution says Blagojevich gets to make the pick. If the Senate rejects Roland Burris, Illinois should take the matter to the Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of that rejection. (That won’t happen, because our state Attorney General happens to be an enemy of Blagojevich, but it should. In fact, if she fails to pursue this action on behalf of her constituents, the people of Illinois, Attorney General Lisa Madigan should be impeached.) In any case, if the state doesn’t take it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Roland Burris’ own attorney has already announced that he will. And he will win, because the law is straightforward. The Senate’s prerogatives in challenging the qualifications of incoming members are strictly limited to legal qualifications, such as, is the incoming senator a citizen of the state he represents, and is he at least 30 years old. Burris qualifies.

Way to unnecessarily provoke a constitutional crisis and make yourselves look like asses when you lose, Democratic Senate leadership.

Meanwhile, the press continues to try to hang this thing on Obama’s back, all the while expressing “concern” that it will cast a cloud over his presidency. There is no cause for concern, and no cloud – other than the one the press is creating! The jackals.

Everybody take a deep breath. U.S. Senate leaders, seat Roland Burris when he comes to Washington next week. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, pursue your criminal case against Rod Blagojevich. Illinois legislature, keep your impeachment inquiry on track and bring it to its conclusion expeditiously.

Christ, is that so complicated?

While we’re at it, here’s another thing that frosts my ass about the way the media is reporting this. They keep trotting out the Blago quote, “This thing is golden, I’m not giving it away for nothing,” as if that means something. Unless he was talking about a contribution to his own coffers (and he might have been, but this has not been proven), there is nothing at all untoward about that quote. Any politician would say it. Politics, famously, is the art of compromise, and compromise always means you give me something for what I give you. The quote, in itself, does not suggest anything different from the sort of logrolling we accept, relatively happily, as part of the American political process. The quid pro quo Blagojevich had in mind could have been, “I’m not giving this away — I’m going to hold out for a promise of $5 billion in federal capital improvement funds for my state.” I don’t think he did mean that, but there’s nothing in the quote that says he didn’t. So to keep repeating it as if it’s prima facie evidence of guilt (as I heard Rachel Maddow do the other night, but she’s not alone) is idiotic.