Why We Are Not A 'We'

Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times is one of the most thoughtful newspaper columnists. Two days ago he wrote a piece about how the current political climate of the U.S. has taken a dangerous turn permanently delegitimizing the presidency and tacitly encouraging violence, particularly from the fringe far right: “Where Did ‘We’ Go?”

The Facebook poll asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” is the most recent example, but Friedman also mentions the crazy rhetoric of Lou Dobbs, whom I have repeatedly criticized on the pages of Chico Lingo, and too many other examples in the media, particularly in the blogosphere and cable news channels, which also hasten our downward spiral into a country no longer a community, but a country at war with itself.

But I believe Friedman does not go far enough in analyzing the ‘why,’ the reasons the United States seems more fractured than ever. Why do ‘we’ seem to be incapable of tackling problems affecting all of us without a descent into vitriol and even hatred of our opponents? What happened to compromise and practicality and giving each other the benefit of the doubt? Here are some interrelated whys:

1. We as a society do not have patience anymore. TV and visual images are in part to blame. Give your opinion in fifteen seconds, do it loudly, and that’s what we now call ‘debate.’ We have commercialized time on TV: that’s the reason for these ridiculous lightning-round debates that solve nothing, convince no one, and just end up reinforcing prejudices because that’s all the time you have on TV (the most pervasive, influential medium). Plato, eons ago, warned how the focus on images would degrade our ability to think and reason: The man or woman who focuses on images loses the highest form of the self, the thoughtful self.

2. We don’t read anymore. The market for serious books is dying. Just look at the publishing industry. In fact, what is published now is too often celebrity books, memoirs of scandal, books by pretty and famous people who have little to say beyond the adrenalin moment. Disposable literature. Our kids are not reading, but instead play video games. My kids are great readers, but it’s because I’ve kept them from turning on the TV whenever they feel like it; I’ve kept them from mainstream, materialistic American culture. “After you do your homework, watch TV for an hour, but that’s it.” I may be an anachronism, but my kids are excellent students and know who they are because of their own, real accomplishments.

3. We are a diverse culture, but now minorities possess growing power and responsibility and the traditional majority does not easily want to cede being ‘the standard,’ that is, being the face of America. Latinos, as we all know, have grown in number to become the largest minority, surpassing even African-Americans (who themselves are uncomfortable with perhaps not being the ‘official minority’ anymore). The Asian population has similarly increased. Soon, demographers predict that the traditional ‘white majority’ (comprised of families with English, Italian, Irish, German, and other European ancestry) will be the minority.

I can only imagine what these demographic trends have meant in, say, a small town in the Midwest or the South where new Latin American immigrants speak Spanish and bring strange customs to your town. The strength of New York City, where I now live, is that these cultural, religious, ethnic, racial interactions happen every day. You are not so easily susceptible to the TV or talk-radio smear that Latinos are this way, or Jews are that way, or Muslims are sinister, or strangers with accents are suspect, because you see these people every day. They may be your friends. Your kids go to school with their kids.

Prejudices based on abstractions, the raw meat of today’s dangerous political rhetoric, don’t easily take hold when you can see with your own eyes that excellent parents are in every culture, excellent friends may exist in every religion, brave characters with all sorts of funny accents ennoble you. But this is not a kumbaya moment. Irresponsible idiots also come in every shape, size, and color. But the point is that abstractions don’t work on you anymore when you actively seek out and live in diversity. You must judge the individual; you need to pay attention and listen; above all you need to have the patience to understand whoever might at first seem alien to you.

4. The United States is a mature economy, while other countries like China, Brazil, and India are gaining the kind of prosperity we took for granted. Fifty years ago, it must have been a heady time when we were unquestionably the most important economy in the world. But now that’s not true anymore. We are still the biggest, but many have caught up and surpassed our per-capita wealth. Others, the newcomers, have rapidly become significant sources of brain power, savings, and economic and military power. We can’t dictate terms anymore. Our companies have to fight it out to survive, and few have the unquestioned might of yesteryear’s behemoths. The world, most importantly, is moving away from an American-centered world economy, with negative implications for the dollar as a reserve currency.

We’ve also lost manufacturing jobs. The lowest skilled are the most vulnerable to this changing world. They are the most susceptible to zealots and slick-talking TV and radio gurus who appear to have all the answers. And many are listening, because over the years they have been trained to think ‘listening’ is just watching TV. It’s not. TV stupefies you. Period. Talk radio? Turn if off.

1, 2, 3 and 4 might lead you to think I’m pessimistic about the future of the United States. I’ll tell you how pessimistic I am. Last weekend, I went to Home Depot twice (about 30 miles total), because I had purchased the wrong-size American flag to hang next to our front door in Connecticut. Our three-year-old flag, which was faded and torn, I tucked away in my closet. I’m just gonna keep it. It fills me with pride to see our new flag fluttering amid the spectacular colors of autumn in the Litchfield Hills.

I am proud of my country. But let me give you some advice. Turn off the TV. Stop listening to Lou Dobbs, and see him for what he is: an idiot who wants to make money by making you watch him. Pick up a good book and read it carefully. Raise your children to be thinkers, to focus on their homework, to work hard. Make an effort, by picking up the phone or knocking on a door, to meet a neighbor vastly different from you, a Muslim, a Jew, a Mexicano who can barely speak English. Don’t just meet him once, but get to know the person, his kids. If his child befriends your child, and they marry (as Laura and I did nineteen years ago), work on understanding their family. Some things you will never understand. Other things you will uncannily see eye-to-eye. But no one will ever be able to tell you they don’t belong in your neighborhood.

Diario de Oaxaca

This morning I was walking south on Broadway after leaving my son Isaac at school, and two familiar faces stopped me in my tracks. Peter Kuper and his daughter Emily. Peter, a friend, is the famed political cartoonist for Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. He gave me a copy of his new book, Diario de Oaxaca.

As I continued strolling down Broadway, I felt as if I had just won La Loteria. Right now, after you finish this blog, buy this book. It’s the best book I’ve read all year. Beautifully crafted. Well-written. Irreverent. Bilingual. The work of an artistic duende. ‘Reading’ is not quite the right word here: this book is an experience, into Oaxaca, political protests, bugs, Monarch butterflies, perros, and searching for the truth around and in front of you.

Diario de Oaxaca is Kuper’s sketchbook journal of his two-year stay in Oaxaca, Mexico to get away from George W. Bush, to seek peace of mind, to work. He and his family arrived when a teachers’ strike, for better pay and more funding for schools, was unfolding in the zocalo: sit-ins, barricades, marches, and eventually the response from the governor of the state of Oaxaca, which was to kill. October 27, 2006: three teachers and an American journalist dead.

The artwork of protest and death, buses aflame, bored soldiers occupying the zocalo, a woman carrying fruits on her head in front of a giant battering ram twice her size, the Day of the Dead ofrendas in Oaxaca commemorating those killed during the teachers’ strike. It’s breathtaking. It takes you to Oaxaca. It creates atmosphere in a way that prose cannot. Peter Kuper has created a remarkable eyewitness account of those turbulent times, which repeat themselves in Latin America’s version of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.

Diario de Oaxaca is visual micro-history: what Kuper experienced in Oaxaca, from the teachers’ strike to an earthquake, both of which he complains were wildly misreported in the media. How do you make sense of a world in which the ‘news’ is often not true, but mostly spin? How does your immediate world fit into the major currents of history, particularly when you have experienced what people are writing about, and the 'official reports' hardly resemble what you have seen with your own eyes? These are questions Kuper is asking about Mexico as well as the United States.

After the teachers’ strike was crushed by the government, Kuper turned his curious eye to entomology. Bugs and butterflies. His family traveled twelve hours to Michoacan, to the remote forests where millions of Monarch butterflies return to have sex and die, presumably a glorious death. Every night bugs invaded their home in Oaxaca. Scorpions. Black widow spiders. Unfathomable creepy crawlies. If only we could stomp on some of our politicians too!

Diario de Oaxaca is a remarkable book. On display is a mind that experiences the world in an astonished play that questions this world at the same time that it communicates its fractures, absurdities, and terrors. ‘Political cartoonist’ as a term to describe Peter Kuper, even though he uses it himself, does not do justice to the work. This is a book I will never give up. It’s curiosity in action. In words. In stunning, thoughtful artwork. It creates an unforgettable new world.

P.S. Take a look at Peter Kuper's show of original art from Diario de Oaxaca at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, and read a recent interview at Design Arts Daily. 

Yankee Fan

How and why did I become a Yankee fan? I watch almost every game on the YES network. I have gotten to know the players’ little routines when they come up to bat. Show me only a silhouette of a batter getting ready for a pitch, and I can tell you who it is in the Yankee lineup.

Jeter seems to signal a kind of “Stop” with one hand toward the umpire right before he settles into the batter’s box. Matsui looks at his bat up and down, his back becomes straight, and his shoulder muscles twitch right before he is primed for the pitch. Teixiera has the strangest stance: his neck juts forward, his back is rigid, and he seems almost off-balance. A-Rod reminds me of a coiled snake, his bat waving languorously behind his neck, ready to strike.

I used to be a more ambivalent Yankee fan. I had never been into baseball in Texas, where I grew up. Everything was football, and my team in El Paso, my brothers’ team, was and is the Dallas Cowboys. But I did go to dozens of games at Cohen Stadium to cheer the El Paso Diablos. But major league baseball? I didn’t care in El Paso as a kid; I didn’t care in Boston, even though I pulled all-nighters at Harvard College for four years and lived a jog away from Fenway Park for another year.

I moved to New York in 1990, and I still watched more football than baseball on television. The Giants were in the same division as the Cowboys. The Yankees were winning World Series then, in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000. Yet even during those glorious years, I can’t honestly say I was yet a Yankee fan. I would watch the important games; I saw snippets of the parades in the news when they won another championship. But I hadn’t bought into the team with my heart. I didn’t know every player. I had never been to a Yankee game in person.

Probably two or three years after the start of the millennium, I made it a point to see a game. I think I was walking my kids to a store, a play or a movie near or around Times Square, and I stumbled into the Yankee Clubhouse. You can buy tickets here? How do you get to Yankee Stadium anyway? I had stupid questions; but thankfully somebody answered them.

From the Upper Westside, holy mole, it was so easy to get to Yankee Stadium! Just a short subway ride to the Bronx. Why hadn’t I done this before? The kids cared more about the hot dogs and chicken fingers than about that first game, which I think was against the lowly Devil Rays. For a few years in a row, I bought tickets for three or four games during the summer, and I got hooked.

I began to know the players, their habits. I started watching the Yankees more religiously on TV. I have never gotten to the point of hating the Red Sox, but I do want to crush them in the playoffs. When the Red Sox won their first World Series in a gazillion years, the next day I gave a friend of mine, a transplanted Bostonian who dies for the Red Sox, a bottle of champagne. I knew what it meant to him. I was a fan too, and I knew what it would’ve meant for me and my team.

We’re playing the Toronto Blue Jays tonight, and losing in the seventh inning, 4-2. Last night, a nasty brawl begun by Jorge Posada and some bald-headed pitcher for the Blue Jays, I forget his name, emptied the benches. The Yankees have to keep playing well; they have the best record in baseball right now. But is this the beginning of a slide, or just a blip in a great season? My heart’s into it now. It matters if we lose now. I can’t imagine missing a single game now. (Don’t trade Matsui.)


(Matusi hit a two-run homer in the eighth inning to tie the game, and Cervelli slapped a single to center to score Gardner in the ninth: 5-4, Yankees win!)

Investment Character

I am reading the biography Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder, and thoroughly enjoying it. Years ago I read Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor; I teach parts of Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis; each year I read Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report to understand some of what they are doing and why.

I would not consider myself a Buffettologist in the sense that I copy whatever stock investments Warren Buffett makes. But I do try to understand what he does and why, and apply those principles to companies and industries I am familiar with. Do your own homework, I say. Understand where your money is, and why it’s there. That’s the way to be an intelligent, independent investor.

As I’ve read this biography, I am not surprised to learn Buffett was/is good at math and calculating odds; I am not surprised to learn his friend Charlie Munger is much the same way. Ideas pour out from their heads; they are passionate about investing, and they believe they are right. ‘Didactic,’ is how they describe themselves. Other words that come to mind are ‘relentless,’ ‘iconoclastic,’ ‘anti-social,’ and ‘obsessed with details.’ They are also honest, self-critical, and loyal to those whom they think deserve loyalty.

When I have taught my summer course on Investment Analysis, I have always argued that number-crunching is only half the battle to becoming a good investor. The other half, and maybe even the most important part, is having the right kind of character to be a successful investor. I think you can train someone to understand and calculate the right figures from annual reports, 10-K reports, and 10-Q reports. I think you can teach someone to use discounted cash flow analysis to get a sense of whether the current stock price correctly values, or undervalues, future earnings.

(I’m not surprised Ben Graham did not give much weight to future earnings, because I also believe projections into the future are dicey figures easily manipulated to prove whatever you want to prove. Understand the nature of the business at hand, and how it can remain profitable forever, or be easily susceptible to margin pressures, inflation, taxation and so on, and that’s how you can truly value ‘future earnings.’ You won’t get an exact number, but you’ll get a sense of whether this business is worth owning. It’s better to be approximately right than exactly wrong. I think Buffett said that.)

But my point is that while number-crunching is largely teachable, having the right investment character is for the most part not. I don’t care what anybody else thinks, and I don’t look for others’ approval of my investment ideas, nor for my clothing, nor for my unorthodox political positions, nor my blog entries. I have always been that way. As a toddler, my mother called me ‘viejo Josisah,’ which was the name of a crotchety old man she once knew in Chihuahua. I was grumpy; I loved being alone; I was, in a word, ‘didactic.’ Now I am a rumpled, ornery man on Broadway, with what I consider to be a plain look on my face but which my wife Laura says looks like a permanent scowl.

That kind of investment character makes it easy to go against the crowd, to not panic when others are decrying the end of capitalism as we know it, or to not join the party when the champagne corks fly to the ceiling because of Internet stocks, China, or whatever the next new fad is. I also don’t like debt. I try to keep things simple. I try to see things as they are, not as I wish them to be, at least for my investments. The recent market meltdown, although painful, was not enough to change my ways; I had enough liquidity to survive.

So ‘Know Thyself,’ that Socratic maxim, is so important to me as an investor. If you know you don’t have the right kind of investment character, then lowering your costs with an index fund is about the smartest thing you can do. If you think you have the right math skills and character, and you start running your own individual stock portfolio, and then you panic when others head for the hills, or you slavishly follow the momentum of euphoria, then learn from that. Those that learn from clear-eyed self-reflection and analysis will be winners on Wall Street. Those that don’t will embody Mr. Market’s schizophrenia.

Half-mud, half-dead

It has taken me about a week to recover from our Costa Rica vacation. We arrived at one in the morning on Monday night/Tuesday morning. I woke up with a severe head cold, and my back was killing me. The zip-lining near the Arenal Volcano was fantastic, but now I was paying the price.

I have always acted differently when I am sick. When I was younger, I ignored any ache or cold, but if my sickness truly debilitated me I either lashed out at whoever was near me or I sunk into a temporary depression. This week, barely able to walk, my head, eyes, and nose gushy with fluids, I slept. I slept until I couldn’t sleep anymore, and I kept quiet and observed everyone around me, Laura, Aaron, and Isaac going about their business without me.

It was a strange experience not having almost any reaction to my week-long illness; I was probably feverish. I wanted to recover. I thought about my father and his chronic back problems, which eventually reduced him to a walker in his mid-70’s. I really did not want to become my father. I lay in bed, wincing with pain, not quiet able to breathe right, and I felt like part of the bed, as if I were sinking into the mattress itself. I imagined I had been abandoned in a mud pile. I was now half-mud.

It’s not bad being half-mud. You have no responsibilities. You lie in bed, or mud, and look at everything. Conversations occur around you, about you, but you are not a part of them. A crash in the other room? Somebody else rushes to see what it is, to clean it up. For me, for that week, there was no drive within. That was the fascinating part. No anger. No self-loathing. No urge to do. The kids needed to get ready to go back to school? This pain-in-the-ass was the ultimate observer. ‘Action Bear’ (Laura’s oft times moniker for me) was in hibernation. Half-asleep. Probably delirious.

There was a point, later in the week, when the bed felt too soft, when I stopped thinking about the strange colors in front of my eyes, when I thought about what bills needed to get paid by the end of month. That’s when I knew I was better. I missed being half-mud, half-dead, and I even wanted to go back. I imagined for a few hours before I rose like Lazarus from the dead why Lazarus would even want to get up from being dead. I mean, if you could be half-dead, looking at the world but nothing else, that would be the ticket.

As I hobbled to the mailbox and to Broadway Farm for pounds and pounds of California yellow peaches, nectarines, and a watermelon the size and weight of a bowling ball (Do all young teenage boys eat this much fruit?), I missed my half-mud existence. Zabar’s. Dry cleaning. The mailbox again. Returning emails. Filling out back-to-school health forms. My back was killing me. But I could more or less walk now. I said to Isaac, as he watched me grimace on the sidewalk, “It feels as if a crazy carpenter has driven nails into my spine.” But yeah, I was getting better.

By this weekend, I was back. My back had but a hint of my previous torture, and what was left of my cold was a weak cough. Gone was the Pumpkin Head of the half-mud man. Did you have the swine flu? somebody asked me. No, I don’t think so, I replied. But perhaps for one week I did live the strange and sweet existence of a Pig Man in the Half-Mud.

Costa Rica

We have been trekking through Costa Rica, a lush and spectacular country. We arrived in San Jose, stayed one night, and the next morning traveled for five hours by buses and boats to remote Tortuguero on the Caribbean coast. It did not rain a single day during our three-day stay, a miracle in the rainy season.

On an expedition through the canals of Tortuguero we saw white-faced monkeys, spider monkeys, two sloths, crocodiles slicing through the muddy water, baby blue herons, howler monkeys, toucans, caimans, small, shy turtles on logs, and half-a-dozen iguanas. Laura, Aaron, and Isaac have been enthralled by the stunning variety of nature on this isthmus, and so have I.

Our second night in Tortuguero, we joined another eco-expedition to witness the giant sea turtles laying and burying their eggs and dragging their massive bodies, the size of Smart cars, back to the sea. In the pitch black, our guide, Carla, told us last year jaguars had eaten about 200 of these sea turtles, the flippers and the heads, and abandoned the bodies in their shells on the beach. As we walked through the jungle in the darkness, with only the guide’s small light ahead of us, I wondered what it would be like to be eaten by a jaguar.

The next leg of our trip was to Arenal, and we flew from Tortuguero in an Australian single-propeller plane. That was an experience. The plane barely seated seven people and their luggage, and I was in the co-pilot’s seat. We flew over mountains to get back to San Jose, the ride was smooth, and I was as fascinated by the busy panel of instruments as by the breathtaking 360-degree view of eastern Costa Rica.

After traveling on more rough, winding roads for hours, we arrived in La Fortuna, to the Hotel Nayara. Our room overlooks the Arenal Volcano, has hot water and a Jacuzzi, Internet service, which is how I can write this blog, and air conditioning. The kids: “Can we build a house just like this hotel?” I have also marveled at the construction details of this hotel: richly dark hardwood floors, an open air restaurant with friendly macaws and parrots, deliciously comfortable beds, rough-hewn exposed ceiling beams interlaced with bamboo. The Hotel Nayara is an oasis.

Yesterday we zip-lined over and through the rain forest canopy at the foot of the volcano, dangling hundreds of feet in the air on a cable, zooming through the forest from platform to platform, in the same moment terrified and thrilled.

The best was a zip-line of 760 meters (2490 feet, or eight football fields). At that moment, a cloud enveloped the forest as we stood on a platform next to the treetops. You couldn’t see the other side of the cable. The guides strapped us one at a time onto our pulley and harness, and when the line was clear and we were ready, pushed us into the white oblivion. Laura and the kids screamed with delight as they raced into the clouds. I felt like a giant cannon ball shooting through the whiteness. As openings appeared in the clouds, I marveled at the forest below and how lucky I was to have said yes to this experience.

Last night we visited the closest observation point for the Arenal Volcano. In the evening, strips of lava dribbled down the mountainside, the volcano continuously smoking. In 1968, the volcano had a massive eruption, devastated six square miles of land in minutes, and 78 people died. The last major eruption was in 2000, with minor eruptions occurring as recently as last year. Why are we fascinated by this awesome power? I have been to the volcanoes in Hawaii, and Arenal, perhaps because it is younger, pointier, and closer to human habitation, is as beguilingly ominous.

Next we travel to the beaches of Manuel Antonio National Park on the Pacific Ocean. I can’t wait for that adventure.

Reaching Back In History To Stop Thinking

I read an Op-Ed article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “Our Unconstitutional Census,” by John S. Baker and Elliott Stonecipher, which reaches back to a selective version of the U.S. Constitution to argue illegal aliens should not be counted in the 2010 Census because counting them undermines the equal representation of certain states and their citizens. That is, states with large populations of undocumented workers get apportioned more House members and electoral votes than states without. The current census, as authorized by Congress, counts everybody, legal or illegal.

The authors wrap themselves in the Constitution and even the first 1790 census, which counted all inhabitants, to give legitimacy and authority to their argument: “The census has drifted from its constitutional roots, and the 2010 enumeration will result in a malapportionment of Congress.”

But the article fails to mention one fact that undermines their argument: the first 1790 census counted slaves. African slaves, who did not get the right to vote until 1870, eighty years after the first census, not only were counted as three-fifths of a person (enshrined ingloriously in the Constitution), but Southern states benefited by having more electoral votes and more representation in Congress per voting citizen, to the loud complaints of Northern states, for the selfsame eighty years.

The authors of the Wall Street Journal article also perform a sleight of hand, probably unnoticed by the casual reader, but certainly noticed by this one. They take the word ‘inhabitants’ as the correct mandate of the 1790 census, but instead of mentioning that inhabitants for George Washington and his census included non-voting slaves (he was a Founding Father, wasn’t he?), the Wall Street Journal authors use the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of ‘inhabitant,’ as a bona fide member of the State, entitled to its privileges. Did African slaves have all the privileges of the State in 1790? Could they vote? Of course not.

What is important to note is not only how this article reaches back selectively to its version of the Constitution, but how much harsher the current authors are on non-voting inhabitants than George Washington and other Founding Fathers. Baker and Stonecipher want undocumented workers to count for zero in the 2010 census. At least, and it’s not saying much, George Washington wanted each slave to count for three-fifths of a person in the 1790 census. Perhaps the Founding Fathers had some empathy for the downtrodden, or for the businesses dependent on the downtrodden.

Many would persuasively argue that today’s undocumented workers are analogous to Washington’s and Jefferson’s slaves. Immigrants work menial jobs, often in agriculture, and suffer violence and discrimination, living outside of society and blamed conveniently for all manner of social ills. African slaves were of course forced to come to America and subjected to brutal, systematic violence. But is there any doubt that if slavery were still legal in the United States that we would be capturing our slaves from the poorest, most vulnerable parts of the Third World, including Latin America? What is the same now as before is the need for American industry and society to prosper, often on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable, and for these workers to be used to the maximum while keeping them as marginalized as possible. We win; they lose. It’s not more complicated than that, but perhaps it’s not the kind of reflection in the mirror Americans want to see.

Reaching back to ambiguous and even contradictory standards, such as the Constitution, often seems to bolster certainty and conviction, until one takes a more careful look. This reaching back is the problem. It is done to stop critical thinking and gain acceptance of a viewpoint that may have hidden biases having little to do with that ‘historic standard’ held so high. Anyone telling you there exists a pure beginning we should return to is asking you to stop thinking and march in lockstep behind them. Readers, think and analyze. That is the true measure of a good citizen.

When Ideology Trumps Practical Reason

It’s a long, hot August, and the vote on Sotomayor nears. Why does it matter? She will win confirmation, so why does it matter if some, or a significant amount, of Republicans vote for Judge Sotomayor? It matters because it is a vote about fairness and objectivity. Do such concepts exist in American political discourse anymore?

The Republicans should have investigated Sonia Sotomayor aggressively, and they did. But the majority of Republicans, at least from their stated positions in the media, have not judged Sotomayor’s qualifications as a judge for the Supreme Court. That is their mandate. Instead of zeroing in on her judicial record, they focused on her off-the-cuff speeches. If you want to judge the qualifications of a judge, you look at how she decided cases, you look at her written opinions, you look at her legal experience, and you look at her education.

The problem, of course, for those ideologically-obsessed Republicans is that they had nothing ‘official’ to work with. They had prejudged her, and they couldn’t get the facts to fit their pre-conclusions. Sotomayor was a Phi Beta Kappa student from Princeton and graduated from Yale Law School. After hearing her in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have little doubt she is smarter and more practical than the senators from both sides of the aisle who questioned her.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, and there are thousands which are part of the record of the Second Circuit, Sotomayor voted with Republican judges who sat next to her on the Court of Appeals. When you look at her judicial record, there is little evidence of ideology, but plenty of evidence of practicality and following legal precedent.

But facts don’t matter to ideologues. Facts don’t matter to those without a spine to publicly rebuke Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich or Ralph Reed. Facts don’t matter to those who have decided they don’t like you because your name is ‘Sotomayor’ and you are a Latina. The facts, which are used to judge a nominee’s qualifications for the Supreme Court and not how she will decide specific cases, support a unanimous or near-unanimous vote in Sotomayor’s favor. But she won’t get it, and that’s the current state of the Republican Party. It’s trapped in its ideology.

Before Democrats get too cheery about themselves, it has happened to them too. No political party escapes the tug of ideology, and as a party succeeds and stays in power it begins to think that somehow it should always be there, it deserves power, and it is historically destined to win. Power corrupts, and it corrupts through ideology.

But when reasonable practicality erupts and interrupts, the country is better for it. Obama is now funding charter schools at unprecedented levels. This was a Republican cause. But perhaps this is a way to improve the education of our children, while giving parents a choice. Moreover, we need more Republicans like Lamar Alexander and Lindsey Graham, who declared they intend to vote for Sotomayor based on her qualifications to be a judge, not on her likelihood of being a Republican puppet on judicial matters.

I don’t know what happened to reasonable political discourse, the middle ground of give-and-take, the focus on making things work. I in part blame our current political discourse on the flash media of ten-second opinions. This show is for entertainment, even when it is labeled ‘news,’ not for edification.

I also think another problem is the discomfort the white majority feels about this country becoming more Latino, more Asian, more African, less Christian, more Secular. We are becoming a reflection of the greater world, and the United States, economically, is also becoming a smaller portion of that world over time, as the rest of the world develops by leaps and bounds. Some will exploit these inexorable trends and the discomforts they cause, for money and power, while others will try to make our community work together as one. If this American experiment is to keep succeeding, practical reason must triumph over ideology.

Business News Blather

I used to watch the TV for business news. But now Kudlow’s and Cramer’s shouting leave even more ringing in my ears than the express trains zooming past the local subway stop at 86^th Street. I have read the Wall Street Journal for decades, but I have noticed that after Murdoch took over more news stories have political slants and headlines are unnecessarily more pessimistic in the age of Obama.

I don’t get the parade of blond people at Fox News. Are they really trying to be that obvious about who is in their camp and who they could care less about? The CNN anchors who read Twitter responses: are they serious about that? That isn’t democracy, but stupidity, on display for the world to see.

I have become a full-fledged media skeptic. I do think that many of the quick and easy responses encouraged by modern media are often nothing more than rants. That’s one of the reasons I have not allowed comments on Chico Lingo. I read other blogs for years, and still do, and the comments are rarely thoughtful or interesting. I figured if someone wanted to comment on what I wrote they could send me an email, and I have received dozens. Or they could start their own blog.

I know I am in the minority, in more ways than one, on turning away from the flotsam of the news cycle. My only use for democracy-as-hyper-mediocrity is that I try to take advantage of the paranoia or euphoria through my investments. I ignored the doomsday scenarios of March, and kept my investments exactly the way they were. So I have benefited from the recent run-up in stocks. New money I have added to my short-term bond portfolio, simply to have more emergency reserves in case we return to the brink of depression. I am also paying off debt in advance, even if my debt levels were relatively small compared to my net assets.

I watch the crazy flamingos of speculation, the fast money, the lightning rounds, and I am happy to be patient and contrarian and independent. Investors should do their homework, and this knowledge will allow them to ignore the garbage advice that washes up on their shores.

One of the reasons, as I pointed out to my wife Laura, that I did not panic after the recent vicious bear market was that my mutual fund and individual stock positions were still mostly in the black, or with slight losses, at the bottom of the precipitous drop. I have invested patient money, for decades in some cases, and so a downturn cuts into my gains, but isn’t deep enough to even put me in the red.

Too often I hear of friends who invest to get rich quick. To me, that’s not investing, but speculating. I even had a close friend who would invest for a major appliance, for a month or two, score a quick profit, and buy the refrigerator he needed. It was ridiculous to me then, and is ridiculous to me now. But most media outlets encourage this kind of behavior. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, oil traders who invest in oil futures for quick bucks were labeled “investors” in paragraph after paragraph. That’s editorializing in news stories, and makes the point against Obama that he is against “investors” in this market when he or his administration considers putting limits on oil traders.

I don’t think we should expect much from CNBC, the Wall Street Journal or Fox Business News in terms of investigative journalism. They are promoters of Wall Street, and sometimes that’s good and too often it’s horrible. The best single article I have read about the current shenanigans in the finance industry came from the New York Times, about how subprime brokers have resurfaced as dubious loan fixers, by Peter Goodman.

The individual investor has to protect himself. But ‘Caveat Emptor’ only works if there is full disclosure in plain English, if abusive behavior is eliminated and illegal behavior prosecuted, if you are not lied to by whoever is selling you stock in a company, a bond, or a mortgage. That’s the proper role of government and what George W. Bush could never understand.

America in Retrenchment

I have the sense, as I have read disparate news items from Apollo 11’s moon landing forty years ago to the healthcare debate, from Henry Louis Gates’ arrest in his home near Harvard Square to the Republicans’ petty delay on voting for Sotomayor, that the United States as a country is getting smaller and meaner, instead of more ambitious, experimental or collectively enthusiastic and purposeful about the future. I may be wrong. But I see a country fighting to keep what it has, rather than solving its problems and moving toward opportunities.

It is always dangerous to abstract and claim any country seems like this or like that. We are a collection of 300 million individuals, from different backgrounds, religions, races, and classes. And what you understand is often what the media wants you to see and hear, through their weird prism where glib contradictions, petty arguments, and the scandals of celebrity culture attract eyeballs and ears to TV sets, radios, and newspapers, the point of any media empire however big or small.

But those caveats to my impressions of America’s retrenchment have always been there. Either we have had leaders who overcame our personal or collective pessimism about the direction of this country, or optimism was truly a part of society, for whatever economic or political reason. So I think the United States may truly be changing from what we used to be.

The fortieth anniversary of the moon landing exemplifies, for me, how far we have fallen in our space program, not how much we once accomplished. We should be going to Mars and beyond. Where is the enthusiasm to explore a new world? Where is the collective will, along with the nuts-and-bolts practicality, that embraces the challenge, the technological breakthroughs, and the sacrifices of such missions?

‘We don’t have the money,’ many might say. ‘We need to fix our country before we can represent the human race in space again.’ Yet many of our economic problems were self-inflicted. We chose a laissez-faire capitalism, particularly during the disastrous Bush years, that destroyed limits on risk-taking for banks, that unleashed profit predators on hapless, uneducated consumers of mortgages, and that fueled a society of pointless consumerism.

Meanwhile, our children watched too much TV, played too many video games, and were rarely encouraged to read. I am not surprised that the biggest group of foreign students in one of my classes is Chinese. These students are invariably polite, hardworking, aggressive, technically capable, and fluent in English. I see the future in my class every day. What happened to our work ethic? What happened to the peddle-to-the-medal desire to rise from the dirt and make something of yourself? My father and mother were like that; the Ukrainian woman I met on Broadway, who works several menial jobs so that her daughter can finish dental school at NYU, is like that. But I feel they are aberrations in contemporary America.

Part of the problem is the United States became too developed. You see this size problem when investing in companies. It is easier to grow a $100 million company by 20 percent, than a $100 billion company. America is not a growth story anymore, but a story of fixing devilishly persistent problems like the uninsured, high infant mortality rates, swaths of our society still disenfranchised and in poverty, and racism. The problems of race are not what they were in the 1960’s. I believe we have made progress. But I also believe it is foolish to think we don’t have a problem anymore, or that racism and ethnic discrimination will not take different, unexpected turns like African-Americans and Anglos closing the doors on Latinos.

Which brings me to Professor Gates and Judge Sotomayor. It was one thing, in the early years of the civil rights movement, to be a liberal by giving minorities the chance to educate themselves and to compete equally for jobs, local political offices, and so on. But that’s not where we are anymore. Many from the traditionally disenfranchised classes don’t want just a break anymore; they want and deserve the keys to Harvard and the Supreme Court. Barack Obama already has the keys to the White House.

I am sensing further retrenchment in America to the progress of the disenfranchised. It is one thing to be patronizingly liberal, to grant an opportunity to someone you still may look down on. It is another for someone to replace you at the highest levels of power. Perhaps what I sense is this unease in parts of America that are white and non-Hispanic; you certainly see it in a wing of the Republican party. They are unwilling to concede Sotomayor is exceptionally qualified to be on the Supreme Court, even after she handled the hearings well, even after her judicial record was scrutinized and determined to be moderate. Her detractors will not be convinced by anything reasonable. They have prejudged her, or are careful never to counter the smears of Limbaugh in front of their constituencies. These senators are digging in their heels.

What I hope will counter America’s retrenchment is having leaders and cultural educators strive to make the United States as one again. One nation about freedom. One nation that is bold, yet tolerant. One nation that focuses on problems to solve them. One nation that corrects mistakes, instead of repeating them. A nation more about the future than the past.