James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

Same here re Obama - at this point there are three areas where I have serious heartburn with his actions to date: that deeply flawed bailout bill, his cosigning on giving the telecomms retroactive immunity for violating the law and our Constitutional rights by spying on our emails and phone calls, and his history of advocating severe restrictions on the Second Amendment rights of even responsible gun owners who are scrupulous about safety and obeying the laws.

As for the Republicans, I've seen some speculation by columnists and others who consider themselves moderate Republicans and fear that the far-right fundamentalists who've had a death grip on their party's steering wheel for over a decade now will keep that control and will push the Republican part even farther to the right. (A blog post in which I wrote on this at more length: http://www.teambio.org/2008/11/11/the... ) Given the changing demographics and views of the American electorate - there is a direct correlation among age, religiosity, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry, which means that their base is eroding daily, dying off faster than it acquires new adherents (of course there are many exceptions, both progressive older people and extremist young ones - that equates to that party becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The alternative would be for the moderate wing - fiscally conservative and socially somewhat progressive, in other words the opposite of the current leadership - to somehow wrestle control out of the hands of the far right and move the Republican party back toward the center, which would make it possible for them to attract more voters and make the Democrats work to keep their majority in the Congress.

If that doesn't happen, we might see another party move up to fill the vacuum created by the need for a mainstream opposition party to the Democrats. One that's growing fast is the Modern Whig party.

It is never unpatriotic to think independently, ask questions, and if the emperor appears to be naked to say so loudly.

The idea that good citizenship equals lockstep obedience is a recipe for totalitarianism, not for a free society... the people who try to stifle dissent or questions are the unpatriotic ones.

The people in our government always need to remember that they work for us.

As for religion, it never seems to occur to the people who want to establish official or favored faiths that their own version of belief may one day the minority whose freedom of worship might be at risk if that precedent is set for any denomination. Instead of being grateful that they're allowed to worship as they choose, they take it as an imposition on them if anyone else is allowed to exercise the same freedom in a different way. It's a simple question of the Golden Rule.

Re Obama's election, one of the most encouraging anecdotes I've heard - I forget the sources - was a blog entry by a woman who described how she was moved to tears of joy - when she tried to convey to her grade-school age child what had just happened, the child was confused - she told her mom she didn't understand what the big deal is, because what difference does it make what race he is?

If only we were at that level as a society!

The Founders did their best to separate religion from law-making, because they'd seen enough of the perpetual bloodshed and oppression that government support of various faiths had caused in Europe - before the Revolutionary war some of the colonies that became states did have official religious denominations and laws that gave those churches preferential treatment. That caused a lot of injustice, hard feelings, and at times bloodshed, and they knew it had to go when they created a national Constitution.

I, too, have a hard time seeing how a person to whom his/her religion is the central aspect of life could possibly set that aside in making policy as an elected official. Dr. King never ran for office, and that's good - the first loyalty of an officeholder should be to the Constitution, not to any church or deity. If that's not the case, taking the oath of office is an act similar to perjury.

I am resigned to the belief that we will never be without religious conflicts. Myself, I see spirituality as a wonderful thing, but not religion; all religions are man-made systems aimed at finding a systematic, cookbook-like way to achieve spirituality. They attract adherents by offering the sense of security that if they follow their rules, they'll get protected and rewarded. If anything, they shield people from having to examine their own values, question them, and come to their own conclusions about what is right and wrong. I think of a sequence in the film Jesus Camp, in which a fundamentalist minister was explicitly telling his congregation that they didn't have to think or make decisions, just do what the Bible said. I can't think of a clearer example of that "leave the driving to us" factor. That minister achieved a certain degree of fame after the film Jesus Camp came out, but not for his part in the film - his name is Ted Haggard.

Sometimes people succeed in finding contact with the spiritual in religions, but the institutions themselves seem to follow the same laws of organizational behavior as any other human groups like corporations or governments - they become self-serving and put maintaining and increasing their power ahead of their original aim.

English has several times as many words as most languages, partly because it has adopted words from so many sources. As an analogy, one writer - I don't remember when or where - compared it to a grand piano, with a greater range and more adjustments to timbre than other instruments, but correspondingly complex to master.

As I spend a lot of time with my grandsons, who are in kindergarten and second grade and are always needing to learn the words for things, and in the case of the second grader how to spell those words, I'm seeing again how arbitrary English spelling, grammar, and the cases of words can be (although at least it doesn't assign genders to most inanimate objects.)

For me it's always jarring to see misspellings and grammatical mistakes in writing, especially in books or mass media. That's where I see change; I'm seeing misspellings and punctuation mistakes in places I never used to see them - especially mistakes with apostrophes, as when people say "it's" when they mean "its" and vice versa.

One significant piece of irony: when JFK ran, many people were worried about whether he would be so loyal to his religion that he would try to turn Catholic dogma into U.S. government policy, and he had to go out of his way to promise that he would not let his official decisions be driven by his faith. The last few times around, we saw the opposite, a number of candidates competing to see who could most enthusiastically push a religious agenda if elected.

Liberty Cabbage then, Freedom Fries more recently... I wonder whether people in other places have done similar things with the names of American food items?

Will's experience with the in-flight movie reminds me of watching TV when I was stationed in Japan; at one point we were watching Sands of Iwo Jima, with all the dialogue between John Wayne and the rest of the cast dubbed into Japanese. Surreal.

I'm sorry to hear about your getting treated that way, George. Kind of sounds like the way some idiots went around during WW1 kicking dachshunds because they were German dogs. Funny, there's no record of anyone doing the same with German Shepherds.

I think the central element in any situation that could be called slavery, or that resembles it, is that someone is objectifying someone else and treating them without empathy, as a thing, rather than as an equal human being - as Buber put it, treating someone as an 'it' rather than a 'thou'.

For me, that is also one of the most fundamental definitions of evil. It is at the heart of xenophobia and bigotry, of any crime that victimizes others, of child abuse, of forced prostitution, of dealing addictive drugs, and of economic exploitation of every other kind, as well as of slavery.

Marco,
It may not be a realistic possibility for a person of color to become PM in Britain at the moment, but that can and probably will change with time. Until recently, there was no serious chance of it in the U.S. either.
I hope that Obama's election, as well as the campaign of Hillary Clinton, help move the U.S. and the rest of the world closer to a situation where we really just look at a person's qualifications and character without regard to ethnicity or gender. Until we do, we're not only perpetuating injustice, we're wasting talent we need.

As Elizabeth said, the belief and hope of most people at the time was that it really had been 'the war to end all war.' People and governments had gone into WW1 naive and enthusiastic - they expected it to be over in 6 weeks (each side expected to win, of course) and they didn't remotely grasp the scale or grisliness of the casualties that were possible. They had a picture of something glamorous and picturesque, and instead they experienced industrialized slaughter and maiming on a scale no one could imagine beforehand (except perhaps Americans who recalled something similar from the closing stages of the Civil War here.)

The main thing that wrecked the peace was that the French and British heads of state decided to use the peace as a vehicle to punish, humiliate, and plunder Germany, put all the blame for the war on Germany (in truth, they all shared responsibility for it), and leave Germany permanently too weak to defend itself. That, in turn, bred the bitterness in Germany that enabled Hitler to come to power.

I like your poem, Marco - it's good that it looks at the reality of the way warfare destroys so many lives and the permanence of that. If more of us realized that when we were young, it might be very difficult to get enough people into uniform to ever have an army in the first place.

There was a documentary on the History Channel recently about one of the best of the war poets from World War I, Siegfried Sassoon - you'd probably find it very interesting if you get the chance to watch it. Sassoon was a young British man, a sheltered member of the aristocratic upper class, who went into the war in France as a junior officer with all those naive illusions so many had. In a short time, though, his brother (to whom he was exceptionally close, even for siblings) was killed at Gallipoli, then one of his closest friends was killed there in France, and he saw a lot of other people in his unit killed - his attitude and poetry changed completely, and he became very anti-war, although he also fought with rare skill and courage, getting the nickname 'Mad Jack' from his fellow soldiers, and was highly decorated.

Robert Graves was another war poet from World War I, and he and Sassoon were close friends.

This is a link to a piece I wrote - it's a prose essay, not poety, but I hope it fits in this string: it's on my MySpace blog - scroll down to the essay titled "The Nature of the Job": http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fus...

George, I agree about it being a difference in semantics. Perhaps it would be just as accurate to say, rather than calling it slavery, that a number of powerful elements in our society find it useful to use the judicial and prison system to sustain a permanent underclass.

As things stand, this strips about a quarter of the black male population, and a lesser but sizeable share of the male Hispanic population as well, of the U.S. of their votes; blocks their, and their families', access to a number of government services such as low-income housing; makes it very difficult for them to get decent jobs; and provides an easy scapegoat for reactionary politicians to use to divide the middle class and working class and pit them against each other, and for racist politicians to demonize.

The Republican party has pretty much claimed the race-baiting tactic for itself for some forty years now, ever since president Lyndon Johnson signed the great civil rights legislation of the mid-60s and the white politicians of the South moved to the Republican party en masse. Since then it's been used by Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. This last time around, they used it in two ways: they tried to drum up as much hysteria about Hispanic immigration as they could, and they used Obama's out-of-the-ordinary ancestry and life story to try to paint him as not being a 'real' American.

In the long run, they're fighting a battle they'll inevitably lose - the demographic and actuarial tides are against them. Before long white people will be a minority in the U.S., as is already the case in my state (NM) and others; surveys show that there's a strong correlation between age and the likelihood of an American voter voting on a racist or sexist basis (or, for that matter, being hostile to equal rights for gay and lesbian people.

So the maintenance of this semi-slave class/underclass will not continue to be part of the political landscape here, I hope. But we'll see. People with power seldom gladly share it, and people who've lived most of their lives as bigots seldom spontaneously give that up either.

I'd love to go to this inauguration, but doubt we'll be able to - we're already planning a trip to California to visit family there in December.

George,
You're correct that the money made using inmate labor doesn't offset the cost of their incarceration. However, especially in the case of the private prisons, the state pays the prison a set rate per inmate, and the prison corporation gets to keep the money it makes both selling products to the inmates at inflated prices and selling the products the inmates make. So it works out in a way like those cost-plus contracts the feds give their favored military contractors.

As for their being incarcerated for the purpose of being exploited, again, you're technically correct that the reason a person goes to prison is, on the face of it, for the crime he or she is convicted of having committed.

However, both the lobbyists working for the private prison corporations and the correctional officers' unions do all they can to influence legislatures in the direction of longer sentences and loss of access to social services, education, and economic resources when they're paroled. That makes it much harder for them to make an honest living and to avoid ending up re-offending. For the COs, it's job security, and for the management, it's the organizational equivalent, i.e. stability of the existing system in which they're making a killing and an assured ongoing supply of inmates.

In an extra twist, we had a situation here in New Mexico where one of the private prison companies lobbied the governor and legislature heavily to build another new prison and let them run it, and then hired a construction company that happened to belong to the governor to build it. That was the governor before the current one. Our current governor appointed an employee of that same corporation as his secretary of corrections - a former warden who'd gotten in major trouble over inmates being beaten up by COs - after the corporation made a hefty donation to his campaign for governor. While in office, that secretary is doing everything he can to steer money to his former employer; and I'd bet a nickel he'll go back to work for them when this governor leaves office, at a higher salary.

Also, while people are in prison, although the system is called "correctional", it doesn't offer anywhere near a decent minimum in terms of the educational or mental health services they need to improve their odds of success at a legitimate lifestyle. Finally, part of what struck me, as a psychotherapist, is that in order for any of us to succeed in adult life, we have to have and exercise initiative, independent decision-making, and self-confidence, and in the name of making people more pliable and easier to manage, the treatment of inmates systematically attacks and undermines all those qualities.

It was an incredible night - I told our seven-year-old grandson to pay close attention, as it become clear early on that we were seeing an event that will be remembered as one of the most important in American history and in the young 21st century.
I agree with Marian's point that it was wonderful to see most people looking at Obama as a politician first instead of being stuck on race. That is a milestone.
Also, as others noted, in his concession speech McCain had the finest and most principled moment of his whole campaign. I kept thinking, as I was watching, "Why weren't you like this during the campaign?" I'm glad Obama won, but if McCain had behaved as positively, respectfully, and articulately over the last several months as he did on Tuesday night, he'd have done a lot better in the election.

Two other major milestones stand out to me: first, although before every election for decades now, people have told pollsters they hate attack ads and negative campaigning, until 2008 those tactics still worked. This year, for the first time, voters apparently not only felt that revulsion at the nastiness, but they used their votes to say so. It finally backfired.

Second, a strictly personal one - Obama is the first presidential candidate I've seen that is younger than me. I've got about three years on him, or he has three years on me, and I have a lot of respect for what he has accomplished in his life so far. The media kept pointing out that if elected McCain would have been older than any previous first-term president, but to me the this-guy-is-younger-than-I-am-and-he's-headed-for-the-White-House! factor caught my attention more.

I beg to differ, again, on these points:

1. Susanna, the prisons I described are regular U.S. prisons, not special cases that are worse than average. Those are typical prison conditions in this country. There are many privately owned prisons, but the majority are still operated by the federal or state governments, while the jails may be operated by either private contractors or city/county governments. (the difference: if a person is sentenced to a year or more of incarceration, he or she goes to prison. Jail is where people are held pending trial if they don't make bail, and if they are convicted and sentenced to 364 days or less, they serve that time in a jail rather than a prison. If anything, jail conditions are worse - more overcrowded, more violent.

2. To answer your question about people being diagnosed with their mental illnesses before prison or having their lawyers plead diminished capacity or not guilty by reason of insanity - no, in most cases that does not happen. Public defenders are tremendously overloaded and may only meet with the people they're supposed to represent once before they go to trial; these lawyers lack training in identifying mental illness and often don't realize it. Even if they do, many places including my home state will return a verdict of "Guilty But Mentally Ill" - that means the person still does the time, but gets referred to a therapist when he/she arrives in prison. Unless the symptoms are so serious the person is an obvious danger to self or others, or is unable to function, the counseling they get typically consists of one or two introductory sessions, then brief contacts monthly if at all after that. I was in a luckier situation, working in the psych hospital - the clients were more severely disturbed, and I had a ridiculously large caseload - at one point when we were short on staff it exceeded thirty, where at that level of treatment ten should be the max - but I was still able to see more of them and give them more attention than could the MH staff in other parts of those facilities.

I disagree with the belief that most criminals belong in prison - many do not have adequate legal representation and, as noted, do have mental health problems that lead them into trouble but are not recognized until they're already convicted and in prison, if then. I had one inmate on my caseload whose public defender had not even bothered to have him brought to the courtroom for his trial - this defense attorney made a plea bargain without his client's consent or advance knowledge that landed him in prison for three years - and it turned out they had the wrong man! The person who had committed the crime was another man with the same name. Incredible, but I saw documentation confirming it - and my guy ended up doing the time anyway, with his only recourse being to sue the state after he was paroled. On top of that wrong, this guy had a fairly pronounced case of schizophrenia, which was in remission as long as he got his meds, but which had been untreated before prison. It was kind of surreal - when he was first brought into the prison mental hospital where I worked and the treatment team (psychotherapists, occupational therapists, psychiatrist, nurses, and security staff) brought him into a meeting to explain how the place worked, do initial paperwork with him, etc., it was hard to carry on the conversation with him because he kept standing up and starting to sing ballads to the team.

Our system is indeed badly broken. We have 2% of our entire national population in the correctional system, and people who do time and are released have, last figures I saw, almost an 85% chance of being rearrested or violating terms of their parole within three years. That drops to around 65% if they receive any educational or mental health services while in prison, and down to about 35% if they get intensive MH treatment, typically in a special addiction-treatment unit. In our population in general, a person born as a black male has about 1 chance in 5 that he will end up with a criminal record, while his white counterpart who as an adolescent and young man might engage in basically the same activities - mainly related to experimenting with alcohol and illicit drugs - is far less likely to ever be arrested, and less likely to be convicted and serve time even if he does get caught.

After years working in the prison system, I think only those who are predatory and dangerous should be locked up, and most inmates are not dangerous. If we legalized and regulated the drugs that are now illicit so that possession or use was no longer a crime, most of the people currently being sent to prison would never even be getting arrested. The federal government conducted a major study and found that every dollar spent on treatment for addictions saved the taxpayers seven dollars that would have been spent on policing and prisons. Another study, in turn, found that every dollar put into proven evidence-based youth substance abuse prevention programs saved five dollars of treatment funding. So although we will always have some people we need to incarcerate for everyone else's safety, we could be saving immense amounts and having people who are now going to prison remaining in society as regular taxpayers. Better from both a human rights and an economics perspective.

3. George, inmates are typically required to work at some job or another while in prison - if they refuse, they may be subject to disciplinary action that can among other things extend their sentences with new charges. The wages they are paid are just about slave level - if an inmate has a job, perhaps making office furniture the state or the private company running that prison will sell for prices similar to what you'd see for good quality furniture in a store, the inmate is probably making between 75 cents and one dollar per hour, and that's about the best pay scale available for them. Other jobs may pay less than 50 cents an hour, less than 1/10 the outside minimum wage, and remember, to stay healthy these people need to supplement the food and clothing they're issued, and the only vendors they're allowed to buy from gouge them with prices that are multiples of prices in outside stores. So it might take that inmate making oak bookshelves, say, that will be sold for hundreds of dollars, two and a half weeks of full-time work to earn enough to buy a pair of sweats, whereas I, his therapist, might make the same amount in a bit under two hours.
There is also, thanks to the presence of that percentage of hard-core predators and the gangs that the staff can't control or suppress, a lot of extortion and sexual assault and sexual slavery. If inmate A knows that he will be badly hurt or killed unless he submits to inmate B or to whomever barters with inmate B for the "privilege", then inmate A is a slave.

I'm thinking of the way the Republican party went from a little fringe group, watching the two major parties - at that time the Democrats and the Whigs - but with its main issue of abolishing slavery becoming a vital concern for the country, the Republicans reached the level within less than a decade where they were able to get their candidate, Lincoln, elected.
As you pondered, Thomas, a big factor will be what issue turns out to capture the voters' attention that fast. If I had to bet, I'd say either the environment or our foreign/military policy, with subsets being how the government treats service members, vets, and their families; and the role of private military companies like Blackwater.

Isabella, your sentiments about people in prison are understandable, but after having spent years working in a couple of different state prisons, I have to disagree.

Most of the people in our prison system are there for non-violent offenses, most often related to drug addiction; many of them have other mental health problems. Most of them did not "commit deliberate acts against society", they found themselves in trouble because they had drug problems and ran afoul of inane drug laws, or because they broke the law due to the mental illnesses for which they couldn't get treatment in America unless they had good jobs with benefits - which they couldn't get because of those mental problems. For crimes that are in many cases victimless, we spend more per inmate than it would cost to send them to Harvard.

Prison isn't some kind of live-in gym with cable TV, the way it's often seen by people who've never been there - it's dirty, dangerous, chaotic, and abusive, with inadequate food and medical care and, often, little opportunity for inmates to gain the skills they would need to lead legal existences and make a living after release. These mostly nonviolent inmates - who, as noted, are the majority - are not effectively protected from the gangs that effectively have more power inside the walls than do the staff.

Inmates are often exploited, as Will said, as near-free labor. They're also financially exploited in other ways. A couple of examples: to make phone calls to their families, they have to buy phone calling cards, for which the phone company charges them a special rate, several times higher than what you or I pay for long-distance phone service. They just about have to augment the food by buying more on their own, from vendors with monopolies who, again, charge them much more than the same stuff would cost you or me in a store. It tends to stay very cold in a prison building for much of the year, and the uniforms are like thin pajamas, so they have to buy sweatsuits to stay warm, from - again - a vendor with a monopoly that charges them two or three times what the same sweats would cost you or me at a department store. There's a large prison-industries lobby in this country that fights legislation aimed at providing alternatives to incarceration, because they're making a lot of money with things the way they are.

Prison does not reform people and make them likely to stay out of trouble - they emerge much more likely to be re-arrested and facing ongoing sanctions that make it much harder to function in society. While there are real "hardened criminals", predators who are without conscience, they are a small minority of inmates. The rest are ordinary people, usually minorities, usually with drug problems, who would be better handled by alternatives to prison like drug court treatment programs or community service combined with vocational education. It's a deeply unbalanced system. To offer a couple of examples, if they'd been poor and had black or brown skin, both George W. Bush and his wife Laura would probably have ended up in prison, him for his DWIs and other substance abuse and her for the reckless-driving tragedy as a young woman in which she ran a stop sign and hit and killed someone. They were white and well to do, so no one even considered locking them up.

The fact is that our system is badly broken. The U.S. incarcerates more of its people than any other country in the world. It's racially biased; for example, research indicates that black people and white people are about equally likely to be users of illicit drugs, but blacks are several times likelier to be arrested and incarcerated for it. In regard to other crimes, members of minorities are likely to get longer sentences for the same offenses than are whites.
The U.S., alone among western democracies, still uses the death penalty, which is not only barbaric under any circumstances; the state has a responsibility to protect the public against true predators, but can do so via a sentence of life without possibility of parole. The death penalty is often applied to people whose real offense is being unable to afford a competent defense attorney, and it's impractical as well as evil in that its attendant legal costs make it more expensive than incarcerating someone for life without parole. It's also, in many places, a useful way of disenfranchising members of minorities, because they lose their vote and in some places can't regain the right to vote after they've "paid their debt to society."

I think one of the roots of the problem is the tendency in American culture to take a punitive, Puritanical perspective where the first thing on people's minds when someone does something wrong is punishment, rather than problem-solving.

Our prison population is now over two million in a country with a total population of about 300 million, and growing faster than we can build new prisons. Almost all of those folks do get released and come back out into the community, and as it stands they're more likely to be "menaces to society" because of having been in prison, not less likely. Our system is not rational, not pragmatic, not moral or humane. It's barbaric and I think it's something that people in the future will look back on and wonder how we could have thought this was acceptable, just as we do now about slavery.

Thanks, Sera!
It seems as if there's a sort of life cycle for political parties - a new party is usually idealistic and is always organized in reaction to a critical mass of people's dissatisfaction with something, often the venality or other flaws of existing parties. Susanna's account of the sudden rise of the Republicans as an abolitionist reform party captures a good example. Over time, once they get to a position of some power, they become corrupted by that power and more and more concerned with covering their asses, as Rusty said, and hanging onto power and its benefits rather than using that power to serve a larger good. The Republican party again serves as an example, this time later in the 19th century when the Civil War left it as the party in much the stronger position for a generation, and that led to corruption like that of the Grant administration and to the first Gilded Age of no-holds-barred social and economic Darwinism and class warfare.

It has been looking to me for a while as if the two major parties we have now have just about outlived their usefulness, at least unless one or both of them go through some drastic changes that bring them back closer to their roots. Obama's amazing win last night and the Democrats' current ascendancy notwithstanding, it wouldn't be a surprise to see a previously obscure party become very prominent in a relatively short number of years now. The one I'm watching is the Modern Whigs; they're moderate and pragmatic enough to appeal to a lot of people, and they're gaining new members fast - they're hoping to be running candidates for some offices, though probably not the presidency, in 2012.

Almost forgot, McCain is also not clear on the difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites and was speechifying about how we have proof that Iran is supporting Al Qaeda, until Joe Lieberman literally grabbed his sleeve and pulled him away from the reporters to whisper in his ear that Iran is Shi-ite and backs the Sadr militia in Iraq but Al Qaeda is a Wahabi Sunni group more likely to be getting aid and comfort from the Saudis than Iran.

McCain appears to flounder when he tries to talk about war and geopolitics. He insists that we should keep our troops in Iraq until they 'win' but offers no explanation of how he would define that victory; he infamously gave the casual, off-the-cuff comment that we might need to occupy Iraq for another 100 years. It might be that this subject is tough for McCain because he's kind of fuzzy on his geography, having pontificated on the troubles on the Iraq-Pakistan border (I guess he didn't notice Iran sitting in between them), referred to Hugo Chavez as a radical Middle Eastern leader, and in another remark put Spain in Latin America.

He also said several times over the last couple of years that he doesn't understand economics; he said he would rely on his VP to be the expert in that area, then picked Sarah Palin, whose expertise seems limited to abuse of authority, slander, shilling for the oil industry, speaking in tongues, shopping, and gutting large animals... but not economics or foreign affairs.