MUSE MACHINE

Obama-Bashing Disclaimer: I voted for Obama in the March Texas primary for reasons discussed here. I might vote for him in the fall. I find his candidacy fascinating not just because of his abilities, some of which are discussed here,  but also because of his symbolic importance in our country’s ongoing struggle to right “the never-ending wrong” of slavery. But I’m not drinking the Obama Koolaid, and I reserve the right to criticize while making up my mind.

 Obama’s alleged flip-flops on numerous issues have drawn fire from all quarters.   His hard-left fans are particularly incensed that he’s apparently changed positions on the FISA/telecoms question, which non-polwonks with actual lives can read about here. Looks like his original position was that the telecoms should be subject to private lawsuits for their post-9/11 cooperation with the government. Then, tacking to the middle after winning the Dem nom, he’s saying that they should have immunity from the suits. (Does he deserve damnation for changing positions? Consult My Two-Part Flip-Flop Test .)

Of course, these flip-flops are causing conniption fits in those who want to believe he’s the Messiah of New Politics we thought he was a few months ago, and the contortions they’re going through in order to stick with him produced a black-humor moment this morning on NPR’s Diane Rehm show when an ACLU lawyer expressed her dislike of his FISA flips, but then added: “You know, if he wins the election, this is one I think he’ll be coming back to reconsider.”

In other words, she grants that he’s abandoned his original position on telecom immunity, but believes that if he wins the White House, he’ll flip-flop again and go back to the original stance!

There’s an inspiring bumper sticker or T-shirt: “DON’T WORRY! HE’LL FLIP AGAIN!”

Someone said that when the pupil is ready, the teacher appears. That seemed to be the case when I reviewed Ted Widmer’s Ark of the Liberties: America and the World for the Dallas Morning News.

For quite some time I’ve been chewing over the question of America’s duality, our divided nature, and how the broad term “America” has become an umbrella covering radically disparate ideas both at home and abroad. There are so many conflicting notions making up America that Bill Clinton could say “There is nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by what’s right about America.”

What Widmer does is supply a historical context for understanding that two-sided reality, and for clearing our minds both of chauvinistic cant and blame-America-for-everything distortion. Extending Clinton’s statement (btw, Widmer wrote speeches for Clinton), Widmer would look at a historical disaster like slavery and say, rightly, that American slavery was a massive betrayal of all our fine words about equality and democracy and human dignity.  But he would then say, in fairness,   that the long struggle of abolition, Lincoln’s career, and the Civil War itself demonstrate the best of America and show that we have within us, always, the seeds of renewal.

I think two groups of people might be disappointed and offended by Widmer’s book:

1. Those who believe that America is, always will be and loves being  a vast militaristic, plutocratic cancer on the planet. This camp rejects Widmer’s “two Americas” idea, believing there is really only one America, and it is the source of almost every bad thing on the planet. It would be the source of every  bad thing on the planet, but you cannot make money at certain bad things, so we don’t mess with those.  These folks rightly denounce America for slavery,  but they dismiss the long struggle for redemption from the evils of slavery–a redemption that may be coming to pass in the Obama candidacy.

2. Those who embrace American “exceptionalism” to the point that they believe we’re exceptional in everything, that somehow we, of all nations of the earth, operate without regard to self-interest, never violate our stated principles, and are not complicit in any kind of historical wrongdoing. For these people, imperial adventures like those against the native Americans and the U.S.-Mexico War never happened. The first group sees only the sickness. The second group sees only the cure.

The review is here if you’d like to read it.

OK, link and ye shall be linked. A cool site called Reuse This Bag picked up my recent post on breaking the plastic bag habit, so I’m returning the favor here. The site has lots of good resources including this list of 25 Reasons to Go Reusable. Some of these statistics are really shockers. For instance, did you know that the United States uses 12 million barrels of oil a year just to make plastic bags? 

 So we’re paying ever more money, often to hostile regimes who loathe us,  for a vanishing, polluting substance–and using it to make millions of plastic bags that we then throw “away.” I think we’re smarter than that.

Today’s Dallas Morning News carries an editorial warning of recent threats to free speech–not from Mugabe- or Putin-style Third World strongmen, but from wrong-headed guardians of political correctness in other Western “democracies”–Canada, France, the Netherlands and more. 

The roundup of freedom-squelchings includes the regrettable Brigitte Bardot incident I discussed here recently, plus other tales of those punished for criticizing Muslims, gays, and Scientologists.    Key quote from the editorial:

The First Amendment means that in our liberal democracy, we have to tolerate speech many of us find obnoxious or offensive. But it affirms that enduring hateful or distasteful oratory is far less dangerous than giving taboos on controversial speech the force of law.

That’s something to ponder the next time Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Sean Hannity, Bill Maher or Ann Coulter says something that just drives you up the wall.

 Before hitting the pool, loading up the grill or exercising the sacred right to go shopping, everyone should spend five Fourth of July minutes contemplating this key difference between the U. S. and much of the rest of the world. The full editorial is here. For some of my own thoughts, you can listen to a KERA/NPR commentary on the value and danger of free speech. That’s here .

I spent a number of years closely tracking the acrid debate over gun control in America, so I’m more than a little puzzled by these lines in a NY Times editorial criticizing the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against Washington, D. C.’s handgun ban:

After seven decades of holding that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is tied to raising a militia, the court reversed itself and ruled that it confers on individuals the right to keep guns in their homes for personal use. The decision will no doubt add significantly to the number of Americans killed by gun violence.

Seven decades of what?  Reversed itself how?

A visitor from Mars  reading these words  would think that for the past seventy years, the country had observed strict laws against personal ownership of guns, that guns were quite a rarity in America, and that now, hearing of this Supreme Court ruling, Americans were clustered in the town square saying, “You mean. . . I can have a gun? Me? Just a li’l ol’ individual who’s not a member of a militia? Gosh, how do I get one?” 

Our Martian visitor would think that the morning paper is not filled with stories of drunk boyfriends and angry gangbangers blasting away in the night. Elderly people don’t commit suicide with handguns or shotguns, thank God, because all guns are stored down at the militia headquarters.  Curious toddlers never find loaded guns in their parents’ bedrooms and accidentally shoot their siblings  because, after all, the Court has long held that “the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is tied to raising a militia,” and it would just be wrong to own a gun for personal use. And of course there are no gun shops or gun displays in sporting goods stores, WalMarts and the like, because only those militia members need to be armed.

I don’t quite get the reaction of the Times editorial board and other critics to this ruling, which seems to me to leave the gun landscape pretty much unchanged. Status quo ante: Millions of people own guns. Most states and cities make little effort to limit ownership. A few federal laws are on the books (the Brady Law, assault weapons ban). Status quo post-ruling: Millions of people own guns. The ruling says that states and cities can continue to craft laws against certain types of people possessing guns, against bringing weapons into certain places, and against certain kinds of weapons.

So I just don’t see the momentous change the Times seems to fear. For better and/or worse, we were a heavily armed country before the ruling. We’ll be a heavily armed country after the ruling.  Depending on your politics this may be glorious or lamentable, but it’s not the dawning of some brave new world.

I recently reported feeling like The Lone Eco-Guy when I take my reusable cloth bags into the grocery store, an effort to avoid hauling home dozens of plastic bags which must then be thrown “away,” wherever that is. So I feel a bit relieved to learn that the Plague of Bags problem has a name: “White Pollution.”

 I learned the term thanks to a cool service called WordSpy, which sends me a couple of cutting-edge new words each week.  If you’d like to get their e-mails,  sign up here.   Quick, painless, no spam, no sales pitches.

 While we’re on the subject of vocabulary, I continue to enjoy A-Word-A-Day, which deals with older and more obscure vocabulary-stuffers. Today’s Word-A-Day reminded me that I’ve been feeling a bit “atrabilious” lately. Maybe you have too. Sign up here if you like.

Just had to share this pic (see header)  I took on a weekend run down to Austin and related Hill Country sites. Down there, the barbecue joints are as thick as the oddly dated but still charming  ”Keep Austin Weird” stickers. I’ll keep it up as the header pic for a while. Still looking for “Real People Eat Eggplant.”

Here’s another installment of The Change Chronicles from That Blogger Who’s Always Talking About Change. 

In some ways this blog has become an ongoing series of laboratory experiments in change  with varying levels of success. What I’m learning is that change is possible, but it’s almost always hard, which is why most good intentions about  change–the most infamous being those New Year’s resolutions–come to nothing.

That’s because of something we all know about but seldom focus on with full power: Habit. The first few times we do anything, we’re aware of what we’re doing. It takes an effort. But at some point after a certain number of repetitions, we go on autopilot. The habit is set. Anything you’ve done hundreds of times can then be done with very little forethought or awareness. It’s what happens when we set out to drive somewhere and find ourselves heading for  a habitual destination we didn’t even want to reach that day.

Here’s my most recent experiment in change: dumping the plastic bag habit. Several months ago I read two or three appalling articles about the billions of plastic bags we use each year, the energy it takes to produce them, and the awful effects they have on animal life and the landscape. These things are literally everywhere–everyone has heard about the vast Sargasso Seas of bags that float on the oceans, and plastic bags have been seen littering glaciers, for God’s sake. (A slide show on the effects of the bags is here  if you’re curious.)

I then began to notice how many plastic bags come into our house each week–anywhere from 10 to 40 a week on average. That’s a lot of bags over a year, especially when you add in the bags that now encase the daily newspaper. For years we just threw them “away” (and where is “away”?). Now a few grocery stores will take bags for recycling, so that’s a partial solution, but I also want to cut down on the number of bags I use in the first place.

So I bought a couple of those $1 reusable bags at Tom Thumb. But here’s where it gets interesting. As so often happens, coming up with a “solution” to the problem is only part of the answer. Then we must implement the solution and stay with the new behavior.

The first few times I drove to the store with my reusable bags in the car, I just forgot to take them in. Why? Because I’m not in the habit of taking reusable bags to the store. I’ve gone to a store at least 5,000 times in my life (conservative estimate), and I don’t TAKE bags to the store, I GET bags when I’m there.

So the GET-BAG auto-robot  habit has to be broken, and the TAKE-BAG habit established. I now keep the reusable bags in the front seat so I can see them when I get out of the car–and I’ve still overlooked them a few times.

By the way, if you like to think of yourself as a pretty independent type, perhaps a bit of a rebel, see how you feel when you walk into the store carrying these reusable  bags. In the 15 or so trips on which I’ve managed to remember to take the bags in, I’ve noticed NOBODY else using them. Zero. And a few people do stare when you hand your bag to the person doing the bagging.  Guess I’m the tip of the spear on this one.

 I  definitely  feel better when I manage to loosen the chains of habit and take the bags to the store. Change is always tough and it always requires small steps at the outset. Without those small steps, however, we’re just plodding in the ruts we’ve made, impotently complaining and enduring the growing gap between what we are and what we want to be.

Photosource:http://www.blogto.com/upload/2008/04

Re my recent post outlining The Flip-Flop Test, persistent Iraq-watcher George Packer has a smart piece in the current New Yorker advising Obama to start modulating his position on the Iraq pullout–recognizing, as he should, the limited but real successes of the surge– but to do so in a way that inoculates him against both the Flip-Flop Flak Attackers and McCain’s charge that he is hopelessly naive in foreign policy. Key line:

The politics of the issue is tricky, because acknowledging changed ideas in response to changed facts is considered a failing by the political class.

That’s it exactly. Read the whole piece here if you like.

My daughter just finished her first summer job.

 Did she wait tables? Nope. Mop floors? Nope. Sack groceries at Piggly-Wiggly? Forget it. No, she spent four weeks singing and dancing in two or three shows a day –in other words, stuff she loves to do–in a play enjoyed by hundreds of kids from local day-care centers and church groups. And she collected a nice paycheck in exchange for having all that fun. Not bad for a 13-year old’s first glimpse of the working world. But it’s all downhill from here, snarled her jealous father, remembering all the groceries he sacked.

Seriously, I did have some grease-stained summer jobs as a kid, including one at a movie theater where we were ordered to save all the unsold popcorn, reheat it, and sell it along  with the fresh stuff the next day. (Let the buyer beware.)  And there was the time I got canned because of a bizarre allergic reaction (not my own) to Jade East cologne.  Long story.   But I also had a couple of great summer jobs. Here  is a KERA/NPR commentary about the best one.

In yesterday’s post about our imperfect choices on energy policy, I noted in passing that I don’t see John McCain’s recent change of mind on off-shore drilling as a serious “flip-flop,” in mediaspeak.

The issue here is not McCain, who, if recent polls are predictive, may be headed for a defeat of Mondalian, if not Goldwaterian dimensions.  Every campaign season produces plenty of heated rhetoric and flying charges of flip-flopping on every conceivable issue. Opposition research teams dig back into their rival’s distant past to find every time he or she ever changed his mind about anything. “Today, Senator Marglebargle talks a fine game about women’s rights. But in 1971, as an Ohio state representative, he spoke out against the Equal Rights Amendment.”

Which prompts the question: What’s a flip-flop, anyway? What’s the difference between a dishonest, craven flip-flop and an actual new view of a problem?

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m deeply interested in how and why people change or don’t change, so naturally the Flip-Flop question intrigues me. On the one hand, we always praise people who learn and grow and educate themselves and reach out to new perspectives and try to get everyone to the table and hear all the voices in the debate.  On the other hand, if a pol announces a change of mind on anything, the Flip-Flop-Flak-Attackers pounce on him and rip his flesh.

Of course, the most hopeless people on this matter, as always, are the purblind partisans of Left or Right, those who only want to win at whatever cost. These are the people, whatever their party, that I just can’t stand to listen to anymore. Life’s too short. That’s why I just grimace and click away when Chris Matthews or Chris Wallace tries to get, say, Terry McAuliffe, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, to admit that she might have made a mistake, or to grant that McCain or some other Repub might have just the smallest flicker of a good idea. Not gonna happen.

Here’s a beginning stab at a distinction, a Two-Part Flip-Flop Test:

1. Has significant new information emerged on the issue? Has some game-changing development taken place? Is it possible that Candidate X was not aware of certain key facts five years ago, but knows about them now? Has  the passage of time  exposed unintended consequences of a position that were not apparent in the past?  Perhaps a pol enthusiastically supported NAFTA in the 90s, but now comes to believe that the trade agreement has had negative consequences for her district, state, or the country as a whole. Is she supposed to remain wedded to her original vote forever, denying all new evidence of bad consquences? If she now comes out against NAFTA, is that a Flip-Flop or a response to new conditions?

2. Is the change in position being made in a moment of political crisis? Is there an obvious looming reward for dumping the old position, or a looming punishment if the change is not made? Do you hear the voice of Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady saying, “Well, isn’t that convenient?”

I think that test is a good start on the Flip-Flop question. To that, we might add a note of human sympathy, which I know will brand me as a sappy wimp and dupe: Elected officials take “positions” on hundreds of issues, some of which are of  minor importance in any big scheme of things, some of which they took after a seven-minute briefing by an aide twenty years ago. If reporters dredged up  tape and transcripts of  all your happy hour chats from 20 years ago, how many “flip-flops” and deviations would be revealed?

Should we drill offshore? Drill in Alaska? Drill in Crawford, Texas? Never ever drill anywhere ever again? Build a few nuclear power plants? Fuel all vehicles with a sawgrass-Taco Bell grease formula?

The current back-and-forth on energy policy between some Dems and some Repubs reminds me of what I call the Galloway Rule,  after a local sports radio yakker.

Discussing a contest between two second-rate teams, Galloway would allow that Team A was far from stellar but would nonetheless stomp Team B, which not only had  mentally deficient coaches  but five starters sidelined by injuries. “Old Ugly will beat Old Nothing every time,” he would declare.

The Galloway Rule also applies to political questions. It would be peachy to have the Perfect Solution With Absolutely No Downsides whenever we have to make a choice. But the PSAND almost never exists, a fact frequently and conveniently overlooked by partisans of all stripes.  All too often we’re left with a choice of flawed choices, a field of Old Uglies each with its own hairy warts and double chins. We must choose the Least Ugly of the lot.

This is definitely the case with energy policy.

No need to recite all the many Old Ugly Factors in our current addiction to oil–environmental, geopolitical, economic, etc. So what about the alternatives?

New offshore drilling? I’m visiting Santa Barbara, California this summer. It’s the site of the huge 1969 oil spill that helped to launch  the American environmental movement and led to the current ban on any new offshore drilling in the U.S.  A huge oil spill is  Old Ugly with a vengeance. Nobody wants another drop spilled in any of the earth’s oceans. And there is no doubt that any new offshore drilling will carry the risk, however remote, of a spill.

Nuclear? As John McCain notes below, many countries aren’t as superstitious as we are about using nuclear power.  Yes,  nuclear plants  can malfunction  with serious consequences, but mankind’s history with nuclear power shows those accidents are rare indeed. Three Mile Island has become a rallying cry for the No-Nuke faction, but not a single person was killed in that mishap.

Wind? Solar? Let’s build ‘em. Let’s invest. The sun and wind can be a part of the solution–but not the whole answer anytime soon.

Mass Transit?  Put it in the mix. My home town, Dallas, a capital of Car Culture, has proved over the past decade that even a sprawling metroplace will make use of  light rail. All along the DART rail line from Plano to South Dallas, we’ve seen mass transit prove popular enough to spark all kinds of development both residential and retail. People want to be near the rail line. But again, this is a partial solution: 90 percent of greater Dallas lives too far away from rail to make it a feasible transit solution, a situation replicated in most of the big Sun Belt cities.

Conservation? A big yes, and here’s the beauty part: We don’t need to wait for Explicit Instructions from Washington on this score. Set that thermostat on 78 degrees. Drive less. Drive slower. Plan errands better. Car pool. Walk or bike a bit. I started being more aware of my driving habits when gas crossed $2.50 a gallon.

You get the picture. Every energy answer has an Old Ugly factor. Some alternatives carry environmental  dangers. Others are hugely expensive. Others nibble at the edges of the problem but don’t bring a total solution. Others will take slow, agonizing work over decades. Others require personal sacrifice.

As you may have gathered, I’m for trying  everything. Our energy demands present  a monstrous challenge, a war with a thousand-mile front, and we’ve got to try all kinds of combinations to tame the beast.  But  you know what? Every combination we come up with will have its downsides. No combo will be perfect. All will be Old Ugly in one way or another.

But Old Ugly will beat Old Nothing every time. I think that should be the  rule for all the voices in the energy debate: You can’t advocate Old Nothing. You can’t just sit there and shoot down every proposal that gets proposed, pointing out their flaws and pretending that the status quo isn’t riddled with flaws of its own. Even if you think we should get all petroleum out of our lives pronto, it’s not going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years.  This country is  going to use vast amounts of energy for a long, long time, and we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, because in this case there is no perfect solution.  It’s not enough to denounce market speculators or greedy oil barons, or to  wish we could live like the Plains Indians or the old Navajo, our moccassins treading lightly on Mother Earth. Blame and nostalgia do not form an energy policy.

That’s why I don’t see McCain’s newfound acceptance of offshore drilling as being some kind of scandalous flip-flop. If it is, I’ve flip-flopped too. (Entry to come on flipflops vs. growth and evolution.)  Back when we could get distant others to do the  dirty work of oil extraction at a reasonable price, I saw no reason to drill anywhere near our shores. I also like having other people come around and pick up my garbage, but if they wanted $500 bucks a bag, I’d truck it to the dump myself.

 I spent a happy week on Florida’s pristine, white-powder beaches last summer, and it was paradise. And yes,  I know it takes a decade to find and extract any new oil, and yes,  I know we can’t “drill our way out” of this problem. But some kind of new drilling may well be one part of the big combo of answers we’re going to need, so just repeating the party line –”Drilling offshore now won’t affect our gas prices at all”–is just mindless and unhelpful. Of course it won’t help now. Duh.  But now has a way of leading to then, and then it might help.

Anyway, with all options on the table, here’s Mccain on nuclear power:

 In the speech, Mr. McCain also intends to renew his call for new nuclear reactors in the United States, where none have been built for more than three decades. “One nation today has plans to build almost 50 new reactors by 2020,’’ Mr. McCain is to say. “Another country plans to build 26 major nuclear stations. A third nation plans to build enough nuclear plants to meet one quarter of all the electricity needs of its people — a population of more than a billion people. Those three countries are China, Russia, and India. And if they have the vision to set and carry out great goals in energy policy, then why don’t we?’’

Good question.

 Obama is also more receptive to a nuclear option than the typical Dem, or at least he has been. According to some of the nuke-watchers at this site, his support may have wavered as he sought the Democratic nomination. Each party has its third rails, of course. The GOP can’t alienate the Religious Right, and the Dems can’t ruffle the teachers’ unions or the hard-line, anti-nuke enviros. But, assuming Obama doesn’t get backed into a “Read My Lips, No New Nukes” capitulation between now and November, maybe he can switch back after he’s elected.

Gary Hart, whose absurd womanizing in the 1988 election cycle sent him into the wilderness for years, has emerged in the past decade as a voice of wisdom, as I noted here a few months ago. Today Hart pens a NY Times Op-Edifier dishing advice to Barack Obama. A quote:

Senator Obama has two choices. He can focus on winning the election to the exclusion of all else and, like Robert Redford in “The Candidate,” ask, “What do we do now?” after it is over. Or he can use his campaign as a platform for designing a new political cycle and achieve a mandate for starting it.

Of late, alas, it’s looked like Obama has decided to take the just-win-baby Redford Option, bemoaned here a few days ago. For more advice on what he should be doing, check Hart’s full piece here.

 The age of cheap energy, which made possible and sustained much of contemporary American life,  may be  gone forever.  With so many of us defining the good life as a never-ending parade of consumption and painless mobility,  some wrenching and unpleasant changes may lie ahead.

It’s interesting to see the spectrum of opinion developing, with some adamantly arguing that we can “drill our way out” of the problem and glide on down the highway forever, and others saying that the day of Energy Apocalypse draws near and cannot be avoided. Among that latter group, one of the most eloquent doomsayers is the author James Howard Kunstler, who has addressed (and, some believe, overhyped)  the problem both in nonfiction (The Long Emergency) and fiction (World Made by Hand). I’ll be reading some of Kunstler in the next few weeks and reporting on what I learn.

While some of the changes ahead may require doing new things, at least one response may involve not doing something that millions of us hate to do anyway: Drive to work. At some point on the trail from $4 gasoline to $5 and beyond, lots of people mired in the morning commute are going to look over at the driver stuck in the next lane and say, “Why in the hell are we doing this?” Already, some large employers are asking just why it’s necessary to have all their employees schlep off to the same beehive every morning. Click here for one smart response.

And if you’ve got to have that workplace cameraderie, rent several episodes of The Office.

 Maybe it lacks the drama of A-Rod’s 500th (see below),  but according to the tireless statisticians who labor in the WordPress tech netherworld, this is the 500th post I’ve done on this blog, which was born in March 2007. According to my own rough estimate, about  40, 345, 389 blogs were born and died during that stretch. So when any blog reaches the ripe old age of 500 posts, well, attention must be paid for at least 14 seconds.

I’ve tried to anticipate some of your questions about this milestone: What have I learned? How has the blogging experience changed me? What sustained me back in the early days when my readers could be numbered in mere dozens? What sustains me now, 500 posts later, when my readers can be numbered in mere dozens?

Okay, I’m being falsely modest. Again according to the WordPress number crunchers, I’ve found a pretty decent audience with some of my posts; a recent one about trying to quit eating meat, a longtime concern, drew more than 500 sets of eyeballs, assuming everyone who clicked in had both eyes open. And, without making a virtue of necessity, I really don’t worry much about not drawing a lot of comments, for two reasons:

1. I think reading and not commenting is pretty standard on the bloggintubenet.  I’ve read certain blogs for six or seven years now and have never tossed in a thought.

2. The vast majority of comments I’ve ever seen on blogs were angry, vitriolic, obscene, and misspelled. As I noted in my General Explanation of Why This Blog Exists, I’m not in the blood-sport game, I don’t do name-calling, and I don’t substitute profanity for thought. So I’m not the kind of target that’s going to draw a lot of hate-flak.

But for those of you who have dropped in now and then over the past 500 posts, thanks. I hope I’ve raised some good questions now and again. I know your time is valuable and I promise not to waste it.

And now it’s on to 1,000 !!!!!!