Sharpening Pencils

This post should be especially interesting to Republicans because I am going to reflect on some school day memories.  School.  That big brick building in the neighborhood that once upon a time was a place where kids went to learn stuff.  I’m not sure Republicans are familiar with the place — or the concept — either then or now.  I do recall seeing some people who are today known Republicans scurrying about my school, however, including Tim Pawlenty.  So, yes, he was there, he attended one, although it is difficult to make the argument that he retained much from the experience.  It is a shame that we should care, but we should.

Anyway, I don’t care, not now.  All I want to do is write about pencils.  That’s all I want to do.

Do kids still use pencils, by the way?  I recall how important pencils were back in the day.  It wasn’t until we got into the higher grades — you know, fourth or fifth grade — that kids dared dream of Bic pens so pencils pretty much carried the day.  Pencils and erasers.  I always had an assortment of both.  Every self-respecting kid did.  But I am wired funny and I really liked my pencils, I mean really liked my pencils.  Pencils!  In truth it has been worse than that.  I have always been a paper and pencil geek, a hoarder of office and school supplies.  The school storeroom was a place of sanctity for me.  A marvelous cache of treasures.  That and pencils.

So I liked my pencils.  Let’s move on.

Back in the day we collected them and showed them, like some people show cars or dogs.  Most pencils were yellow with black lead, but occasionally different colors appeared.  The barrel or “shell” of the pencil — the wooden part- — might be colored white or black, which was my favorite.  Red painted shells  had red lead and blue ones had blue.  (Yes, blue…isn’t that amazing?)  And we had enough varieties of graphite hardness (the “lead” I’ve been talking about) to require special instructions for tests.  ”Make sure you have two #2 pencils ready for your exam tomorrow.”

Old pencils purloined from relatives even older than mom and dad were super special.  I had one that had a metal cap designed to protect the pencil’s point, a short stubby thing meant to fit in a shirt pocket with a small notepad.   It was stamped with “Wood Brothers” on the cap, my grandfather’s business.  (I wonder what I did with that. I must still have it here somewhere.)  And once I brought in a carpenter’s pencil that I found in my dad’s pocket (he always had extras) and was disappointed to find out that no one thought it special and it didn’t fit into the sharpener.

It is that sharpener that I want to talk about though.  You see, a pencil was something like a token of freedom in our school.  Unlike requesting permission to use the bathroom (called a “lavatory” in my polite schooldays), you could get up any time to sharpen your pencil.  In fact two sounds stand out more than others when I think back to school, they are banging old heating radiators and grinding pencil sharpeners.

I am buying a box tomorrow.

A lot of kids intentionally broke the point on their pencils to earn an excuse to walk up to the wall-mounted sharpener.  I learned that it wasn’t necessary to break the point, even a sharp pencil could grind in the sharpener.  And like a yawn spreading from person to person, when one classmate got up to sharpen a pencil — or two or three pencils if he were flush — others would certainly follow.  One could not miss the pattern.  In fact, quite quickly we would all catch on.  Knowing that the teacher didn’t like groups congregating at the pencil sharpener (two or more constituted a group) we would keep watch for a vacant path to the pencil sharpener to claim.  Often two or three of us would rise from our seats simultaneously, leaving the perceived laggards to concede to the quick.

This always set Miss Gee’s eye’s rolling, which was half the fun and part of the challenge because every so often we would push things too far — mayhem threatened — and Miss Gee would announce:  ”All right, everyone up and to the sharpener!”  Or something like that.  And we would dejectedly and obediently line up — all 12 of us — and each silently take our turn at the pencil sharpener and then solemnly walk back to our desks knowing that for that hour at least, the freedom bestowed by the pencil had been forfeited.  Life was so unfair.  Only real tragedy — two broken leads — could justify a timid approach to the pencil sharpener now!  A kid would have a better chance asking permission for the lavatory.

That’s ok.  If we were quietly wearing down pencils in Miss Gee’s class we were likely learning the cursive capital Q or something like that, and now I wish I had paid more attention to my worksheet than the sharpener anyway.  (My cursive is horrible.)  Lessons matter, I understand that, even lessons learned indirectly about discipline and manners enforced by a Miss Gee.

I can’t remember for certain, but I think I learned a lot back then.

Anyway, I have my very own pencil sharpener now.  It is much like the one we had in school and the special one I got as a gift one Christmas.  I still get a lot of joy from sharpening a pencil, but now nearly all of it is comes from the memories it keeps fresh.

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Gun Debate Logic: Discerning When Opinions Trump Facts

Generic multi-axis political spectrum chart will give you a headache.

In the gun control debate, one will frequently hear opponents of gun control say that there are so many guns and ammo clips and things out there right now that any attempt to control them is futile.  It is essentially an “It’s too late” argument, which is a rather pathetic argument, in my opinion.

More significantly, it doesn’t address the problem as a problem.  In fact it essentially concedes that guns are a problem worthy of regulation, but, darn, we’re too late.  There’s nothing to be done but even the playing field:  More guns!

Now I understand that gun rights supporters fill the political spectrum from left to right.  Even a left-leaning nut such as myself has a shot gun and a rifle.  But the loudest critics of gun control legislation and those most frequently making the “It’s too late” argument, come from the conservative side of the political spectrum.

Let’s look at there “too late” argument.

These are the same people, by virtue of their conservative political credentials, most likely to argue in our current budget policy debates that we must cut debt now and not increase deficit spending.  The argument here is we cannot go further into the hole.

Thinking people would agree, in principle, with the argument that we should not make a problem worse by piling on what is causing the problem in the first place.  So why is one argument valid and the other not?

Well, it has a lot to do with rational engagement with facts.

Never mind that country’s like Australia which did in fact begin to limit access to assault rifles, for example, did see a decline in crimes with those weapons.  That is Australia, gun control critics will argue, and we are not the same.  (But we might become the next economic Greece, however, even though we are not Greece.)

Former Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. Please attribute to Gage Skidmore if used elsewhere. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And never mind that most economist argue in favor of temporarily continuing deficit spending to stimulate economic growth so we can ride economic gains to get control of government debt.  Adding even a dollar to federal debt represents insane irresponsibility.

These contradictions represent selective preferences of opinions over facts.

Facts matter very little in the examples of I am using here.  Compare the two arguments logically the contradiction with facts becomes apparent.

There are not two sides to an argument if one side is arguing from reason and facts and the other is arguing from emotion and opinion.

This is obvious enough — to thinking people, anyway — but I suppose you first must have the ability to discern fact from opinion and logically apply reason to both.

We had a governor here in Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, who liked to say “you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”  Charming, Tim fancies himself a smart folksy kind of a guy, but entirely off the mark for Tim because, if we believe he understood what he was saying, he didn’t know a fact from an opinion.  Or he was a manipulative little hypocrite.  Take your pick.

Political discourse is a lot about disagreement, of course, but it isn’t exclusively about disagreement.  Politics is about synthesizing compromise and progress.  In fact…where is Hegel when you need him?

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)

Hegel might not be the most politically decisive and understood figure in history, but I think good politics is inherently Hegelian.

The process of dialectics is about thesis and anti-thesis, both of which can be legitimately fact-based, but where politics wallow today, however, is something entirely different.

We are getting to a point where our two-party political system is diametrically opposed and ineffective and the solution to that has been a rise in propositions and constitutional amendments being put to a popular vote.  In a nation where our constitution protects the rights of a minority, it is troubling that law making increasingly evades the legislative process and goes to a majority-wins system of either or.  That sort of system threatens the rights and interests of minorities.

We need leadership responsible enough to take facts seriously and argue intelligently.  Ignorance of facts is bad enough, but shutting oneself from wise argument and debate only makes things worse.  If we are unable to reflect on the arguments we make, perhaps we can come back to a more dialectical political process.

In a dialectical process two sides don’t fight until one prevails, they come together to something different and better.  It seems to me that on almost any issue you choose today — including gun rights and our economic policy — there is room for ideas to come together for something different and something better to arise.

But then we need to logically engage facts — and opinions — don’t we?

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Romney Can Turn the Economy Around?

Mitt Romney (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the eve of the Republican National Committee convention in Tampa, Florida, the message Republicans hope to send is clear.  Romney, they will claim, is the right guy to fix our nation’s economic woes.  But for all the reasons they make this argument are exactly and correctly the real reasons why he is, in fact, absolutely not the right person for the job.

Very simply, Romney is a businessman through and through.  He appears incapable of seeing the wold beyond the scope of business models.  This is bad news for a man who wants to be president of the United States for the very simple reason that a country is not a business.

At a very common sense level this should be obvious.  Businesses are about generating profits.  The goods and services they sell are not in essence the final goal of a business.  They merely are part of the profit-generating system.

Government has different goals.  Profit is not the goal.  Instead the goods and services it provides are the goal.   Moreover, governments operate in a closed system.  Compare this with a business which operates entirely differently.  A business, for example, can move or even shut down. In fact, Mitt Romney‘s career as a businessman is one that takes advantage of the open opportunities that a business enjoys.  He routinely moved or closed businesses for economic gain.  You cannot move a country.  And you cannot fire its citizens.

At an economic level, Romney, like most conservatives today, is terribly unprepared to manage the United States economy.  First of all business finance is not the same as macroeconomic policy.  There are questions of balance of trade, monetary policy, and deficits that conservatives seem inherently unable to grasp.  Government plays a very different role in our economy than a business does.  In fact you can look at what applying businesses best practices to government policy has done to our economy so far.

The era of austerity is failing our economy.  Deregulation and lower taxes has failed to stimulate economic growth.  And the profit motive has sent more and more of America’s wealth up the economic ladder, and not down to the benefit of most Americans as promised.  Why, one has to ask, would you ask for even more of these failing policies and not less?

Of course at the root of all of this is a basic difference in how conservatives and progressives see government.  Conservatives are not afraid to gut social safety nets, schools, environmental regulation all the rest that does not involve wars, guns, and prisons because they believe in a so-called merit system.  If you live a good life, you should be able to send your kid to school, pay your medical bills and so on.  Of course economists see this differently.  A good job for you comes at the cost of a job for someone else, for example.  Not everyone can have a million dollar income or a million dollar will have no value.

There is a whole argument about public goods that should be made, but we’re way beyond that now.  However it is indeed important to understand how investing in the common good serves us all, rich and poor alike.  A healthier,  better-educated population is a safer and more productive society.  Challenge these so-called individualists to move to Somalia and start up a business and achieve their American standard of living.

Even in today’s paper, my friend Tim Pawlenty was again mentioned as an attractive Republican politician because of his success from humble roots.  But it is hard to see how the policies guys like Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney promote would let the son of a delivery truck driver attain the sort of success and opportunity Tim has enjoyed.  Can a delivery truck driver own a nice home and support a family today?  Seems less and less likely.

…if you are really concerned about your children’s future.

Very simply these guys don’t get it and, as much as I hate to say it, it isn’t entirely their fault.  They don’t believe in government, don’t understand how it works, and are ignorant of economics.  Why should we expect them to propose sound and appropriate public policy?

The real fault lies with the voters who nominate and elect these politicians.  A poorly-informed and unsophisticated electorate is the real risk to democracy.  And it certainly looks like we are in the thick of it now.

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Why Students Fail

Today the Minneapolis StarTribune started a three-part series entitled “Tutors Profit as Kids Fail.”  I’m not sure they need three parts.  A big part of the problem is exposed in the first three paragraphs.

“Jeremia Jackson is supposed to be working on his online tutoring lesson, but the 8-year-old can’t keep his eyes off ‘Burnout Paradise,” a high-speed car racing game blaring on the family’s big-screen TV in St. Paul.

“‘Go back and jump off the ramp,’ he tells his sister, Tangeline, as she controls a red Lamborghini.

“His grandmother tries to keep his mind on his studies.  ’Pay attention to what the lady is saying,’ she urges.”

Anyone see the problem here?  Come on, Grandma!  Turn off the damn TV!

If Jeremiah has trouble remaining focused at home, it is a safe bet he has the same problem at school.  Perhaps if we had better prepared students the tutors wouldn’t be needed at all.  In fact it is hard to tell if the tutors contribute to better outcomes anyway.  Why?  Well…why will a kid without a propensity to study and learn in school be any better off in a home environment?

The Supplemental Education Services, a program packaged with the poorly-conceived No Child Left Behind program, exists to help close the large educational achievement gap in the United States.

Politics is a problem.  After decades of improved academic achievement, the United States is now on a failing trend.  As an example, Tim Pawlenty, a one-time presidential candidate and former Minnesota governor, blames unions and teachers for our failures.  Well, I went to the same schools Tim attended, had the same teachers and took the same courses.  We turned out all right, even if one of us is of more sound mind and reason.  (Sorry, Tim.)

Publicly-funded schools gave our nation the educated citizens it needed to thrive and take advantage of its economic advantages.  Conservatives whine and whimper about the plight of so-called “job creators” in this country.  It seems sensible to me that one of the best things we can do for employers is provide them with educated workers.  But once again, conservatives fail to grasp the importance of public investment.  I don’t think it is unreasonable, therefore, to look at politics, not teachers and unions which at one time built the world’s leading education system, for today’s education malaise.

Guys like Pawlenty argue that we need to make schools more competitive and accountable, like business.  (Business, right after that holy capitalist, Jesus Christ, is a conservative politician’s favorite touchstone.)  So here you go.  We have a tutoring program, sucking millions of dollars from school district budgets to fund the private tutoring industry, and look at the results.

At the very best this sort of service should be redundant, reinforcing what happens in a proper school classroom, but instead it looks like a failing surrogate for what isn’t happening in the classroom.

Let’s not forget that public schools in high-income communities do quite well.  Graduation rates are at record highs in these areas and students learn their lessons well.

The simple truth is an ugly one.  In poorer communities schools are underfunded and face further funding declines.  Unequal public school funding as a result of income and racial segregation delivers failing results.  It is an achievement gap that exists as a symptom of an increasingly unequal society.  This has nothing to do, as people like Pawlenty see it, with “out of control” teachers and unions.  Nor is this problem that will be solved by outsourcing public education to private tutors.

Poor Jeremiah isn’t prepared with the sort of discipline and maturity that a child needs to learn.  That is problem one.  But I think we need to look at why we have growing achievement gaps in the first place.  I would argue that the reason falls firmly on the shoulder of misguided politicians.  We increasingly live in a culture that judges opportunity as a sort of god-given entitlement.  Some of us are better than others.  Supporting the poorest isn’t the responsibility of the richest.

That’s exactly what god-fearing capitalists and conservatives think, right?  Well, follow the votes, look at the policies they support.  Claiming concern for the future of our children is one thing, but doing something about it is another.  Ignoring and destroying the community values that once supported education in this country causes achievement gaps.  That’s why students fail.

Thanksgiving Eve

The Family Car.

My friends tell me this is the biggest party night of the year, but then I’d expect that from them.  For my part, I feel as flat a Republican toupee and don’t see anything coming along to kick me out of the slump.

Picking on Michele Bachmann isn’t much fun anymore.  Don’t really want to do that.  And we don’t have little Tim Pawlenty to kick around anymore.  Frankly, they all kind kick themselves around rather nicely without much help.  And that’s just boring.

Maybe I am suffering a Walker Percyean malaise.  (How would you credit a quality characteristic to Walker Percy?  Or whatever I mean…)  But it isn’t quite the classic malaise, in the Walker Percy sense, I don’t think.  In fact I think I got it…I identified the feeling…I feel like a kid left in the car while mom goes shopping for a new dress.  Just sitting playing spaceship in an old Ford Torino station wagon and that’s starting to get dull…that sort of feeling.

Yes, by the way, mom’s did that to kids, especially their own kids.

Leaving kids in the car was just fine back in the day and we didn’t end up on the 6:00 news weeping for forgiveness.  Cars were like big play pens, especially so when parked.  Despite our pleading, mom frequently left us in the car…even in the summer!  If we asked nicely mom would leave the keys, too, so we could play with the radio and windshield wipers.  We even turned a car on once or twice until we did that to a car with a manual transmission.

But fear not, this was a time when car windows rolled down and the world was safe.  We even made friends with other kids left behind by their mothers in other cars from time to time.

Golly, being left behind in a car doesn’t really sound all that bad right now, does it?

Instead I’ll suck it up and go out on “the biggest party night of the year” and do my best to be charming on over-priced beer.  I’m sure sometime around midnight I will find my stride and not want to come home, but shoot…that’s six hours from now.

The only sane thing to do is take a nap and dream about being left behind in a car.  With the keys.

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Tim Pawlenty Still the Poster Child

Even as Michele Bachmann shows how deeply the GOP has fallen, Tim Pawlenty remains the party’s poster child.  Petulant, erratic, and lost, he also has a knack for hypocrisy, perhaps the key GOP personality trait.

Pawlenty, predictably enough, attacked Barak Obama’s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.  He complained that the president should listen to his generals because they are the military experts who know the facts in Afghanistan.  Politics, Tim says, should not steer military strategy.

He seems to be suggesting that we should defer to the experts, does he not?   Well, that’s a unique view from a guy who lets his opinions trump the facts in matters of economics, environment, energy, health care, tax policy…you name it.  Tim is known for saying people are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.  Great advice, wise old sage wannabe, but advice most ignored by Pawlenty and his party.

So I am waiting for a fact-based argument that supports a GOP policy position…any policy.  Perhaps a position on Afghanistan is an opportunity for a GOP position to be supported by facts.  (Hint, hint.)  I don’t care what it is.  Someone prove there is even a glimmer of intellect and reason over there on the right and we’ll post it here on A Little Tour.

And keep an eye on Pawlenty before he has no choice but a move to Fox.  To paraphrase Nixon, a Republican from the GOPs better years, we won’t have Timmy to kick around much longer.

Tim Pawlenty is a Knob

South St. Paul Union Stockyards

I don’t know why I do it…but I went back and watched Tim’s melodramatic and misleading video presenting his presidential exploratory committee.  Facts don’t get in the way of Tim’s ambitions.

He makes an issue of the meat packing plants closing in South St. Paul in the 1970s and 1980s.  He says he therefore knows what hardship is all about.  (Then, as I point out in an earlier post, he insults his home town.)  But does he really?

There isn’t much depth to conservative thought or what passes for reasoning on the right.

The conditions that caused the meat packing plants in South St. Paul to close were very different from the economic collapse causing businesses to close in recent years.  Drawing any parallel is a mistake.  What caused the meat packing businesses that Tim thinks he knew was consolidation taking advantage of profitable economies of scale.

Conservatives don’t understand macroeconomics.

Where once there were hundreds of meat packing plants across the country, there are now today only a couple dozen.  Good thing?  Bad thing?  That’s another debate.

If anything, the pro-business (so-called) and anti-regulation platform of Republican politics had more to do with closing the meat packing plants in South St. Paul than any bad economic policy position.  So here again is an example of something that conservative politics would support being turned into something that has a bad side that conservatives can exploit.

In this case, Tim is trying to build his credentials with an irrelevant issue — which is typical – and if it is relevant it is so in a way where he is on the wrong side of the issue, not the right.   Not the right stuff, indeed.

Save your country.   Don’t vote Republican.

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Tiny Tim’s First Little Step

Tim Pawlenty

Anyone with any grasp of facts and figures really should hold on tight before watching Tim Pawlenty‘s video announcing his formation of a presidential exploratory committee. 

If Tim is sincere, he simply does not get it. 

But no one so directly involved with politics can be sincere about such things and thus so naive…or can they be?

Tim’s generation of conservatives are hypocritical and ungrateful to the core.  Conservatives today propose cuts to services that benefit aging Americans, for example, the harder working, forward-thinking Americans who built a robust economy and enacted policies that gave people like Pawlenty a good education and a lift up in this country.  Can you respect that sort of political ethic?

Look at Pawlenty’s little YouTube jeremiad.  It turns facts upside down and asks us to disregard the truth about where our country is today and how it got there. 

He laces his alter-reality with images of the ruin that conservative principles have brought to this country.   Never mind that Tim is a conservative Republican, one who advocates the very policies and values that have dismantled the social and economic security of our country.   He points out the damage, blames it on other people, and asks for the chance to do it all over again.

Only the desperate-to-be-deceived still think conservatives and Wall Street are blameless in the debacle that nearly ruined our national economy two short years ago.   Only blind conservative ideologues think a country with a dying middle class offers more for our security and freedom. 

Selfishness — a misguided turn against noble selflessness and public service – is at the root of conservativism, and sadly that turn is taking a sharper and deeper cynical tone.  There simply is a pig-headed ignorance about facts that conservatives embrace too easily, and among the biggest pig heads of them all is Tim Pawlenty.

Speaking of pigs…Tim mentions the demise of the meat packing industry in South St. Paul, his former home town and a city that he disses by telling the world that the city has lost its spirit and soul.  Good PR there, Tim.  But maybe Tim isn’t so clear about where he comes from anyway. 

Unless Tim is trying to reclaim his blue collar roots, he’s Tim From Eagan.  Eagan is a more prosperous and — I suppose we can presume — still a city with spirit and soul. 

Tim tells us that he has travelled to nearly every state in the union, too.  (He neglects to tell us that he did much of this travelling while elected as Minnesota‘s governor, but no bother…it is all over now.)  So who’s to say what place Tim recalls when he remembers his youth today?  One of the dying businesses shown in his video as he’s talking about his former hometown has a palm tree growing in the background.

I grew up in South St. Paul, sadly a little too close to Tim and his era.  I don’t know what spirit and soul our city lost.  The meat packing plants started closing in the 70s as the industry decentralized and moved out of our cities and into rural America.  (The plants that remained closed while Pawlenty was governor, by the way.  Where was his cool and hip-sounding JOBZ when we needed it?) 

People struggled, no doubt, but they hung on and we had a pretty good life in South St. Paul.  Great schools, great neighborhoods, and plenty of opportunity.  The decades of our youth were not all that  bad.  Unlike Tim, I choose to respect that, and like many others who have left South St. Paul, I don’t only go back only if it is politically prudent to do so.

In so many ways Tim Pawlenty shows what is wrong with conservatives today.  He has no respect for his roots, whether working class or middle class; he doesn’t understand how the power of community and progressive government helped him.  He is ignorant of civic values.  He lacks creativity…

In short, Tim Pawlenty is the perfect Republican.

Tim’s video is loaded with the same tired partisan rhetoric.  Anti-government this, pro-Reagan that…blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…there is nothing there.  No new ideas, no fresh solutions.  But then why would we expect anything more than rhetorical soundbites?  Tim is running for a Republican nomination, after all, and he is doing so for today’s hyper-conservative Republican Party.

Take a startling example.  Tim makes the claim that anti-government principles will create jobs and opportunity.  He says “In the last eight years, that’s just what I did here in Minnesota.” 

Well, ok, Tim…run on that.  Run on your last 8 years.  I’m looking around and paying attention.  There do not seem to be a lot of jobs and opportunity rising from the wreckage you left behind.  In fact, you did more to suck the spirit and soul out of our state than you did to build working solutions.  I’m sorry, but I don’t see much here to brag about. 

Bragging about ruining government shouldn’t be the foundation of a presidential campaign anyway, should it?

Governments invest public interest and efforts into public goods.  It is that simple.  Rich and poor alike benefit from a well-functioning society and the advantages that strong public goods provide.  There is no time — and little point, I’m afraid — in lecturing about the merits and purpose of public goods, but when a beneficial service or facility (e.g., clean air and working highways) cannot be turned profitable, the private sector has no interest in providing those services and facilities.  We choose, therefore, to provide those valuable assets to us all as a whole through our collective public investment.  Conservatives don’t get it.  They don’t want to get it.  They want someone else to pay for everything.  They want only what’s theirs. 

As much as Tim tries to portray himself as a straight shooter, he’s much like most hypocritical conservatives.  He has had it both ways.

Oh, by the way.  That reminds me…I watched Tim’s video on the StarTribune website.  Some fun irony here.  Homophobe Tim’s video follows an advertisement for the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus Spring concert!  Perhaps a little justice exists out there…but not enough.

In the end, we have to stop electing these myopic little people to office.  We need Can Do people, people who respect all Americans and the government that serves them.  In the last 30 years we have gone too far in the wrong direction and electing people like Tim Pawlenty will not change that course.

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Mainstreaming Weakness and Blame (Draft)

Image via Wikipedia

I should take a break from fantasy and stop pretending I might escape to pre-World War II Yorkshire and become a successful veterinarian. 

We do, however, have a group of politicians — too many from my once-strong and prosperous Minnesota — who want to take us back to something that looks like 1930s, or maybe 1920s, America.  And that is no fantasy.

The speeches Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann gave at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) were frustratingly predictable and empty.  The same right-wing whining about how hard life is because government is so dastardly big and evil…over and over and over again.

Is anyone else growing tired of this incessant whining?  The GOP hasn’t given us new ideas in years, but conservatives are not about new ideas.  Conservavite political success today rises and falls on the ability to complain and create chaos, not ideas.  So don’t expect the petulant whining to end. 

Consider business, for example; often regarded as a core constituency of the GOP, the right laments how poorly things are for business under Obama even as profits rise, bonuses flow with reckless abandon, and fortunes grow.  Oh!  Right…that’s corporate American business (mostly) and not the “little guy” that the GOP pretends to represent.  It is true that the local mechanic is not a Wall Street robber baron, but don’t let that little fact trouble you.  Reality has no place in the GOP.

Nevertheless, there has been good news for the GOPs true constituency – e.g., big business — and still all they can do is whimper, whine, and in some cases literally cry.  You see the best interests of most Americans does not steer the course for the GOP because the best interests of most Americans has not place in today’s conservative ideology.  However if the GOP could only count on the votes from the 1-2% of people who do indeed benefit most from their policies…well, they wouldn’t win many elections, would they?

This is where Tea-Paw and Bachmann come in.  They stand merely as ideological pawns in this political deception.  They are not the best and the brightest.  They simply get noticed and that is all that matters.  If they can keep the tiresome repetition of half-truths and flat out lies alive, so be it.  Let them speak.  But when was the last time you heard anything resembling an original idea come from these people?  Anti-government tax-cutting rhetoric is not original and the policy has served us poorly.  But that’s all they have. 

The right is practicing Goebbels’ Big Lie approach to leadership.  If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big one — like WMDs in Iraq, for example — make the lie big and tell it often.  Keep repeating it.  Eventually some of the lie will be discovered and forgotten, but the rest will be remembered and believed.   There is nothing noble about this, certainly nothing patriotic.

So while speeches by political leaders are bad enough, what really should raise a red flag and be the cause of concern is the fact that so many Americans rally behind the hollow rhetoric delivered in these speeches.  THAT is the real issue here.  There have always been fringe groups with stupid ideas.  Unfortunately the GOP and their noisy sidekicks are bringing some of these to the mainstream.

Related Articles

• GOP Presidential Hopefuls Line Up At CPAC (npr.org)

We Are Missing Something

Getting Closer! Ironically so.

American political discourse today melds the ideals of freedom with the interests of private business.  One seems to depend perfectly upon the other.  Anything beyond that is suspect, inefficient, and — good grief – totalitarianism.  Systematically, and in increasingly larger steps, contributions from public efforts get squeezed out of public discourse.  Even our soi disant progressive president gets in on the act. 

It isn’t surprising, perhaps, that younger — and dare I say more naive? — political leaders see the world this way because of their age.  We began ransacking government services in the 1980s after all. 

But people like Glen Beck, Rand Paul and Tim Pawlenty — especially Tim Pawlenty, and for many reasons — shouldn’t have naivete as an “excuse” for being uniformed and ignorant.  That generation of selfishly petulant conservatives should see things differently. 

I don’t think I am being overly romantic or revealing a hyperreal nostalgia if I say there was a time when civic pride meant…well, civic pride.  Today the lines between community pride and business interests are being deliberately blurred.  

Civic interests and business success, especially in local economies, do share  a common sense of pride in a community.  There is no doubt about that.  But when government defers and more closely resembles a chamber of commerce than a government of public interests, I think we have a problem with how we view and manage our government. 

What has happened to civic pride as pride in things the community does together and for each other?  Americans have always respected small business and have celebrated its success.  (The chamber of commerce almost always is part of the community’s celebrations, is it not?) 

Consider our public facilities and services, for example.  Schools, libraries, parks.  Civic projects once were pursued with a sense of style and commitment that we lack today.  Public space is private space controlled by commerce.  Conservativism is turning our public world into a corporate one.  Main Street has been replace by the Mall of America.  In my great state of Minnesota, you cannot find places to throw your trash at some state parks anymore.  Carry it out…it is too expensive to contract for garbage service. 

And what do we get for all of this anti-government shifting of our dollars from our public goods to an increasingly shrinking private few?  Well…look around.  Wealth hasn’t trickled down, it has trickled up.

We have closed public facilities and still get a bad economy.  A lose-lose scenario, I would say.  We have declines in education at a time when we need well-educated people more than ever before, especially if we want to compete in a smarter world.  That’s not very good either.   We live in a crumbling, civically disengaged society and that is not a good thing.

Perhaps most significantly, however, we have a dissatisfied public that is being manipulated by distorted rhetoric and even flat out lies.  How else do you make anti-middle class policies appealing to the middle class?

America was great when Americans respected their government.  Government might not have been perfect, might not have been uniformly fair and respected, and it might have been big and clumsy…but it was our government, a shared investment in our present and our future and it was directly responsible for generations of progress in social programs, civil rights, education, environment, workers’ rights, commerce and banking, and economic innovation and growth occurred with our government was bigger, stronger, and lead by people who respected government’s role in our collective best interests.

That respect for government and the civic pride that supports it from the ground up is what is missing.  Demonizing public service and public goods is no way to build a strong future for all.  This is where the GOP has proven itself wrong since the 1980s and still insists on the same failed ideology as they press on with an anti-government agenda. 

We are missing optimistic leadership that respects the positive role government provides for our future.  It is hard to see how our increasingly conservative slant will provide beneficial change in this regard.

Related Articles

• Actor calls on schools to help restore civility through civics studies (cnn.com)
• Mr. Obama, tear down this wall! (thehill.com)
• Jon Stewart To Tim Pawlenty: ‘Why Is The Right So Fearful Of Tyranny?’ (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)