George Herbert Mead and the Good Society

           As a social or political activist, George Herbert Mead is ignored. That is tragic because his work offers two tools essential for serious social change: A passion to challenge the status quo and a conceptual apparatus that is as liberating as anything offered by Sociology and the other social sciences.

     Start with the status quo. In a 1929 essay entitled "National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness" Mead sought to find a replacement for the extraordinary social cohesiveness generated by war, hatred, and in our time, conflicting religions. Was a dreaded enemy the only way to unite a society? Or, was there another road to "discovering unity in the midst of the diversity of individual concerns"?

    Mead never offered a blueprint of what he called "the good society". Instead he stressed that instead of relying "upon our diaphragms and the visceral responses which a fight sets in motion", we needed to find unity in the only available spot: In our minds, in the power of men and women to change societies if they used the marvelous gift of reflection. Unlike any other animal on earth, people could consciously analyze their past and thus move into the future on the basis of a corrected consensus about the goals of the "good society".

   To prove his point, Mead devised the concepts of the "I" and the "Me", two tools that are indispensible for anyone seeking "International-Mindedness" in the 21st century. The "me" refers to the attitudes of others which one assumes. Thus, as a child sent to Catholic schools in the 1950's the nuns taught me that Jewish people killed God and that Protestants would receive a hotter seat in hell because they had a chance to be Catholics but refused the invitation.

       The "I" is the response of the individual to the attitudes of others. I can say yes, no, let me think about it, or be indifferent to what they (the nuns, my parents, Osama Bin Laden) tell me.

     As a youngster, we were told to only associate with Catholics. The absence of alternative attitudes of others  moved me to embrace what the nuns told me. In fact, I then walked with eternal confidence and arrogance because I knew that I would sit at God's right hand when I and my Catholic friends died.

   The beauty of Mead's work is that, as a young adult or a senior citizen, I can reflect on what they told me and on how I responded to what they told me. In my case the "Me" and "I" meshed because I eagerly accepted as truth what they taught me in school. Change occurred when, exposed in college to the attitudes and beliefs of alternative others, I needed to make sense of what so many conflicting others were telling me.

   Jump from the level of the individual to the good society, especially to a society free of the prejudices generated by America's division of the entire world into white, black and nonwhite people. Say, like President Obama, I accepted what they told me. My skin is tan but I am black. My mother is white but I am black. South Asians are often darker than blacks but they are nonwhite. White is a color but not a color when it comes to prejudice because they taught me -and I accepted- that only blacks and nonwhites are people of color.

   To achieve serious social change we could use Mead's concepts to ask a series of potentially revolutionary questions: Who taught me that my mother was irrelevant when it came to skin color?  Were my teachers some of the worst representatives of America's past? Did they convince me to accept the hideous one drop rule? Did I buy into that poison and am I passing it on to my children? And, if I accept that I am black and that Indians and Pakistanis are nonwhite have I learned to define Americans by what divides Americans?

   Equally important, when it comes to "International Mindedness" can we as Americans ever create a sense of worldwide unity if we divide close to seven billion people into whites, blacks and nonwhites?

     Mead offers us an alternative. I can reflect on what they told me. I can consciously and confidently decide that what they taught me is stupid, ugly and divisive; and I could even use the bully pulpit of the Presidency to create new and just international attitudes of others. For example, we can prove that the idea of "races" is a fiction. There is one race, the human race and if we could achieve an international consensus about that fact, teachers would tell me - in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Bagdad and Mumbai - that I am indissolubly linked  to everyone on earth. They might even tell me that, instead of being self-segregating barriers to interaction, body type differences -skin color, eyes, hair-, are actually delightful and diverse manifestations of the indissoluble unity of everyone on earth. I would thus find somatic differences to be appealing rather than, for the seriously prejudiced, repulsive.

  A pessimist or his close relative the realist would call this utopian. Mead would say nonsense. Do teachers somehow set great store in intelligence but refuse to use our intelligence to reflect on the nonsense they taught me?

    I and we can produce serious social change whenever we wish. We only need to follow Mead; eagerly challenge the status quo and to do it by consciously and courageously asking if what they taught about me -especially about "race" and ethnicity- is nothing more than a huge pile of  putrid cow dung.

Real Immigration Reform

    In 1952 Senator George Aiken made this argument about enforcing the immigration laws: If Congress was going to absolve farmers from responsibility for hiring illegal immigrants it needed to do the same thing for urban employers. Why? Because Aiken correctly told his colleagues "that I have a suspicion that there may be more aliens illegally employed in the cities of the United States than there are on the farms."

    Again in 1952,  Senator Hubert Humphrey assured the Senate that the situation for Mexicans resembled a form of "economic slavery". "We have been so used to bleeding the people of Mexico for cheap labor that it has become a habit for some people." Moreover, "I think the government is a party to a crime that is going on."

   As President Obama considers our contemporary situation he needs to remember that we are repeating history. The United States has relied on illegal immigrants -especially Mexicans- since at least 1924. Today, in economic sectors like construction, restaurants, hotels, horticulture and farming, the reliance on illegal workers is as great as ever. So, if the President means to make real changes, he needs to confront two issues: Our hypocrisy and our structural reliance on the people we supposedly wish to exile. As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told Congress in 2006:  "Although they broke the law by illegally crossing our borders or overstaying their visas, our City's economy would be a shell of itself had they not, and it would collapse if they were deported. The same holds true for the nation."

   My guess is that President Obama will repeat history: Confronted with the opposing forces that want illegal immigrants (e.g., the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) and those who do not (e.g., many residents of Southern Arizona), the President will make cosmetic changes and the nation will lose the change for real immigration reform.

   Here is my suggestion: Before focusing on issues like enforcement and illegality, let's ask Americans to change our disposition toward cultural difference. If we realized that immigrants (both legal and illegal) can help us positively transform American culture, the axis of the debate would change. Instead of trying to keep people out, we might be willing to let them in because they help us as they help themselves.

   Right now the stress is to assimilate, to become real Americans. The problem, of course, is what is a real American? Do the millions of evangelicals represent the immigrant ideal? Is it the gay community in San Francisco or the thriving Hasidic community in Brooklyn? Or, is the immigrant ideal the Chicanos who have institutionalized in hundreds of universities a program of study that is distinctly anti-American. Take many courses in Chicano (or Asian or Native American) studies and the immigrant learns that Americans are. among other things, ruthless imperialists who have exploited newcomers since 1607.

     Advocates of assimilation ignore a crucial insight of Fernando Ortiz. Whenever immigrants enter a culture they also change it rather than assimilate into it. Ortiz called this process of cultural creativity transculturation and he wisely criticized American sociologists for being blind to the world that was actually there. Cultural change is always going to occur. As with Chicano or Asian Studies, it can produce a negative assessment of the host culture or, cultural creativity can be embraced by everyone as a means to change what is troublesome or even poisonous about the host culture.

    Take prejudice. America divides the entire world into white, black and nonwhite human beings. This is demonstrably stupid! My grandsons, for example, have Spanish, Colombian, French, Irish and Japanese heritages. They do not get a color, they are labeled bi-racial, and by definition they are outsiders. Since my grandsons represent a rapidly increasing segment of American society, how do we welcome them into a culture that can't even call them nonwhite?

   Why not look at immigrants as a peaceful and even delightful way to reevaluate American culture? Maybe we have as much to learn from them as they have to learn from us? For example, many Jamaicans, Cubans, Trinidadians, and Puerto Ricans are confused by our way of thinking; they take very diverse human fusions for granted and use ethnicity -rather than skin color- as an axis of self and personal esteem. Perhaps we ought to do the same thing? Be real revolutionaries. Forget color and define ourselves by what unites us: Our membership in a culture that wants to move into the future by allowing immigrants to be contributors rather than passive recipients of the already established cultural truth.

       Go, for example, to the GQ Website for May 18th, 2009 (http://men.style.com/gq ) and look at the piece entitled "Bush's Bible Briefings". Among other things, the President learned that his soldiers, wearing the "full armor of God", used "their chariot wheels like a whirlwind."  That God was apparently Jesus Christ and he was going to bring righteousness to a region dominated by Muslims. Is that the ideal envisioned by those who preach assimilation? Or, can we construct a new meaning of Americanism, one that is rooted in a brand new disposition toward cultural difference?

  My suggestion is that we think of America as a marvelous Banquet of Cultures. We would not only be open to others, we would be as potentially excited by cultural differences as we are excited by the opportunity to try and enjoy different foods. Why do we run to ethnic restaurants but run away from - or even ridicule - the people who run those restaurants?

   And why do universities argue that an international experience is a wonderful way to positively shape mind and character but neglect the international experiences that already exist in fifty states? Students do not need to travel abroad. The cultural diamonds are already in our own backyards.

   Openness would be a two way street. Immigrants would have to agree that, potentially, they have as much to learn from us as we have to learn from them. And neither side would have to like everything at the cultural banquet. On the contrary, those of us committed to equal rights for all might have sharp criticisms about any culture that restricted the rights of women or gay Americans.

  Thinking of America as a Banquet of Cultures is a vote for the open road. It recognizes that we are living between past and future; and that we can all be imaginative forces in the reconfiguration of a society that seeks to improve itself rather than wear, like former President George Bush, "the full armor of God".

Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Emile Durkheim

     "I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country... Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country."  

   The words belong to Condoleezza Rice; she said them on May 3rd, 2009 and they raise this question. Can a person or nation be said to have values if they are willing to compromise or disregard them under varying conditions?

    I think not; in fact, I have more "respect" for someone who admits that they act like Torquemada than I do for the verbal legerdemain of the Bush administration's torture team.  They discarded their alleged values when they let circumstances dictate interrogation tactics but, rather than admit the truth, they produced a series of rationalizations that spotlight the anomic consequences of letting circumstances dictate policy.

       Ms. Rice, for example,  argues that after 9/11 fears of more attacks  understandably warranted extreme interrogation tactics.  Nothing illegal supposedly occurred but that defense is only possible because the Bush administration defined torture in a manner that mocks any English dictionary on earth. Read  Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee's  memo of August 1, 2002, and you learn that for torture to exist "the damage must rise to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant bodily function." Thus, I could take a lit cigarette and endlessly scar you yet it's not torture; or I could water board you 183 times and it's entirely legal because lawyers like Bybee torture both prisoners and the English language.

       Even more important, Bush, Rice or Cheney focus on the legality of their actions but neglect their provable inhumanity. This is not hyperbole because the August 2002 Bybee memo stresses, on page 1, that "we further conclude that certain acts may be cruel, inhuman or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A's (of the United States Code's) proscription against torture."

    In Guantanamo the torture template came from the Chinese Communist interrogation tactics used against American soldiers during the Korean War. The worst thing was to be forced to stand for long periods; "returnees who underwent long periods of standing and sitting reported that no other experience could be more excruciating." The Bush team precisely imitated the Chinese Communists in Cuba; they acted in a cruel, inhuman and degrading manner yet Bush and Cheney somehow want us to believe that the Chinese( or Cuban) Communists were horrible while we remain a beacon of moral light in a darkened world.

           Values do not resemble silly putty; they cannot be twisted and distorted in the service of expediency.   As Admiral Alberto Mora told the Administration in 2004, "it's a transformative issue." Whether it's water boarding or endless standing,  "the Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America -even those designated as unlawful enemy combatants."

     Ironically, Emile Durkheim made the same point in 1898. With the French government's cruel, inhuman and torturous treatment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus as a backdrop, Durkheim argued that the only protection against such abuses was a profound and unalterable commitment to a value he called "individualism". Durkheim used the word in this sense: He meant to glorify "the individual in general". He wanted to champion, not egoism, "but sympathy for all that is human, a broader pity for all sufferings, for human miseries, a more ardent need to combat them and mitigate them, a greater thirst for social justice."

        A contemporary synonym for individualism is human rights. Durkheim forcefully stressed that they provide "the only system of beliefs which can ensure the moral unity of the country" or, in 2009, of the world. Unfortunately, many critics of the Bush administration only focus on the legality of torture and inhumanity; simultaneously, former Vice President Cheney has done yeoman's work to focus the debate around the issue of efficacy. Reveal the memos that show that torture worked and America will embrace cruelty as eagerly as attorneys Bybee and Yoo.

    Spotlight legality or efficacy and you miss the greatest crime of the Bush Administration: They spit on the human rights guaranteed by Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. That article clearly indicates that what went on In Guantanamo -or in any of the outsourced sites- "are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever." This moral bulwark applies to all human beings; there are no exceptions because, as Durkheim repeatedly noted, a respect for individualism is the only way to transcend the political, ethnic, religious and other differences that normally separate six billion people.

   When Durkheim wrote he was preoccupied with the loss of cultural "solidarity" created  by the industrial  revolution and especially, in the late nineteenth century, the "death of god".  How could societies create any moral consensus in a world that had suddenly lost its ultimate moral arbiter?  Durkheim meant to fill that void with human rights and his demand is even more important today than it was in 1898.

   Durkheim (and Weber) saw God disappearing; however, today gods are as important as ever. Americans tend to focus on Islam but Latin America contains roughly 70 million fervent Christian evangelicals and, by some estimates, close to forty percent of the American people are born again Christians, many arguing that the bible is the inerrant word of God the father, God the son and God the only Ghost.

   Besides the profound divisions created by the advocates of their god(s), the contemporary world is still separated by the same kind of cultural divisions that fractured the world of Sociology's founders. Only a profound and unalterable commitment to human rights offer us a way to transcend our differences and create a moral umbrella that protects everyone on earth against the interrogation  temptations of  the next obscene terrorist attack.

   So, in discussing the memos just released by the Obama Administration, let's remember the Bush administration's literal crime against humanity: They undermined the legitimacy of the only rights than can protect each of us.

    Durkheim might have argued that Common Law Three is sacred; it is so important that no end ever justifies cruel, inhuman or torturous tactics.

Georg Simmel, Global Capitalism and Anarchy

     To gain insight into the systemic variables that produced the gravest economic collapse since the 1930's, start with the work of Georg Simmel.

      In 1900 Simmel published The Philosophy of Money. It is a devastating critique of Karl Marx, especially when it comes to the creation of economic value. Simmel argued that Marx missed a crucial point. Like the hidden cement that supports a pillar, below any economic base is a lively interaction of people adding and subtracting value through an animated process of exchange. This occurs in any society, at any time. Think, for example, of the many diving (for buried treasure) companies established in England in the late 1600's. Initially companies with no track record saw their stock value increase by as much as 500% because of the technology that would supposedly dredge up gold and other valuables. When the ships actually unearthed worthless guns and tackle, the stock's value dropped like a rock because of the lively interaction that revalued what was supposedly a sure thing.

    Simmel stressed that economic value is never inherent in the object itself (e.g., an antique chest or a security rooted in subprime mortgages). Value is created when men, women and children establish a personal and societal scale that extends from the highest values through indifference to negative values, e.g., the "toxic securities" on the balance sheets of so many of today's American, European and Asian banks.

    Simmel also argued that the object in demand (junk bonds in the late 1980's) becomes a value of practical importance to the economy only when the demand for it is compared with the demand for other things; only this comparison establishes a measure of demand. Thus, on the Antiques Road Show, a sixty year old toy has one value if its paint is tarnished; another if the paint is superb; and still a third value if the pristine toy is still in its original box. The comparison establishes the criterion that people use when, in the lively interaction of an auction, they outbid one another for what is supposedly a very valuable object.

   Our contemporary predicament is that the invariable and incessant process of comparison that creates economic value occurs in a global economy dominated by the capitalist economic system. As Robert Heilbroner put it in The Nature and Logic of Capitalism, the system is unique because it seeks wealth, not as an end in itself, but "as a means for gathering more wealth".  Capital "is therefore not a material thing but a process that uses material things as moments in its continuously dynamic existence." A superb capitalist is at least a bit irrational because he or she uses capital to create more wealth which, ideally,  is then endlessly used to create more wealth. Eventually the "best" capitalists vie for first place on Forbes list of the richest people on earth. The criterion is not how they made the money; but who has the most billions at a particular point in time.

   Now, take Simmel's insight about the creation of economic value and place it in a capitalist system.  By definition the need to endlessly increase wealth demands that capitalists ceaselessly create new and innovative commodities for their customers. For consumers it can be the prestige attached to the latest Rolex watch compared to the latest Patek Philippe. For investment bankers it is the need to constantly create points of comparison that offer more profit from one investment rather than another. Thus, Sidney Homer receives the accolade of "brilliant bond specialist" because he devised the idea "of separating bonds from their dividends and selling the two securities separately." Edward Chancellor writes that the "breakthrough" allowed banks to take an "illiquid" asset like a home mortgage and convert it, through securitization, into a tradable security. In the pursuit of profit more "innovations" followed when the securities were subdivided into categories ranging from low to high rates of interest based on the comparison between levels of risk.

    From the early eighties until today a plethora of new "financial products" followed one another in rapid succession. Currency rate swaps, interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations and CDO's squared! In a global economy dominated by capitalists the need to create these better opportunities is a systemic variable; it cannot and will not disappear because, in capitalism, the pursuit of profit demands that imaginative bankers continually create the new enticements that, in comparison to others, induce institutional and individual investors to square their wealth by buying and trading the latest way to supposedly make more money than ever.

  From the point of view of the larger society, the inventive investment bankers or hedge fund managers are amoral and anarchistic. Simmel used the word "heartless". Bankers and other investors diligently make money selling long or short and, when the always animated process of creating economic value produces a bubble as big as that in subprime mortgages, the predictable (by Simmel)  result is what William Cohan calls the "wretched excess" of leveraging a bank like Bear Stearns to the tune of 34 to 1. It's unregulated lunacy; meanwhile, when the "House of Cards" collapses  the short sellers have no need to worry about the global ripple effects of their investments. So what if a Bear collapse "forces all security firms to mark their own assets down in the financial equivalent of mutual assured destruction". Anarchy and "heartlessness" are built into this system and one of the most absurd debates of our time is whether government regulation is necessary.

     Serious regulation is not only necessary; it is absolutely essential because the systemic needs of global capitalism will always produce new financial products; and the animated comparisons that create economic value will always produce the bubbles that today threaten everyone on earth.

   In America we waste time worrying about creeping socialism when the government is, by definition, the only institution that offers a shield against the anarchy and amorality that is at the heart of  the capitalist system.

       To not recognize the need for serious enforcement of meaningful financial regulations is to lay out a red carpet for the lively interaction that will produce the next era of wretched excess - and the next lobbying effort by "financiers" arguing that government regulation inhibits the creation of  the wealth that flows from them to the rest of us.

   It's a crock; and the crock will break again unless we check the systemic variables that, by definition, produce amorality and anarchy.

A Challenge to Attorney General Eric Holder

    Attorney General Eric Holder recently made some very necessary comments: “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be a nation of cowards.”

   Continuing, Holder said “that we Americans simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with given our nation’s history. This is in some ways understandable. And yet, if we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

       Eric Holder is right. So, in the interest of a very frank conversation, here is my initial challenge to the Attorney General: Who said Eric Holder is black? Use the net to pull up a photo of the Attorney General and he is barely tan in skin color. His moustache is black but his face is not. In this country, we teach one another that seeing is not believing. We call Holder black even though he is not and we compound our everyday stupidities when confronted with individuals from, for example, India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. Many South Asians are much darker in skin color than the Attorney General but, in the United States, they are not black. So, if you are tan, you are black; but if you are actually black or close to it, you are “nonwhite” but not black. Think of Governor Jindal in Louisiana: He is darker than Holder but not black.

      To move to the other side of the color spectrum, Chinese, Japanese or Korean Americans are much lighter than many so called whites but they are nonwhite even though they are lighter than many whites. It’s moronic but we affirm this demonstrable insanity each and every day.

    Mr. Attorney General: A courageous discussion of race would begin by noting an undeniable fact: Millions of our most recent immigrants thankfully explode our way of thinking about race and skin color. Like Governor Jindal, “Asian” and Latinos offer us a wonderful opportunity to challenge the poisonous manner in which we have learned to define ourselves by what allegedly divides us, the color of our skins.

     So, why is Eric Holder black? He is black because, using the hideous one-drop rule, the very worst representatives of U.S. culture –the slave traders and owners- divided the entire world into three color categories: White, black and nonwhite. This vocabulary of racial placement is now centuries old but we continue to use and affirm it without challenging its most fundamental consequence: It makes white people the role model for more than 6.6 billion human beings. As Albert Murray told us more than forty years ago the word “nonwhite” houses all the fundamental assumptions of white supremacy and segregation.

      The Attorney General rightfully complains that “outside the workplace the situation is even bleaker in that there is no significant interaction between us.” But, if white is the designer original and the other colors are at best “knockoffs”, why would whites not segregate themselves from blacks and nonwhites? And why would they voluntarily have a frank discussion about the color codes that threaten to unravel the basis for white supremacy. In the early part of twentieth century Sicilians were labeled “dark whites”. That put them into the “proper” color category and they have remained there even though many Sicilians are darker than Eric Holder.

      Mr. Attorney General: If you really want to challenge our racial order, begin by asking the nation to understand the origin and evolution of the white, black, nonwhite division of everyone on earth. Let’s have a frank discussion of how pernicious these words actually are. For example, why is President Obama’s father black? He was a man from Kenya but as soon as he crosses into the United States the color of his skin supersedes the importance of his ethnic origin. Race trumps ethnicity and Mr. Obama can never melt into the pot because, as the Attorney General rightfully suggests, that pot never included the ingredients black and nonwhite. On the contrary, from 1924 to 1965, Congress gave roughly 65% of all legal immigration slots to only three nations: England, Germany and Ireland. We needed to whiten up the nation before the negatives overwhelmed us with so called “mixed race” mongrels.

   Mr. Attorney General: Start with the colors of our skins. It is so obviously ugly, demeaning and stupid to call Chinese, South Asians, and Latinos nonwhite that it could open the door to an even deeper analysis of our problems.

       In a biological sense, there is one race, the human race; it is the only one that actually exists and it long past time for us to recognize that, like skin colors, race is a social construct, invented yet again by the very worst representatives of U.S. and European cultures.

      Mr. Holder, if you really want to avoid cowardice, let’s start with the poison created by the slave trader color scheme, and then have a national debate, not about race relations, but about the legitimacy of the concept of races. It is the foundation stone of the poison you so admirably wish to eliminate yet even though there is a general consensus that race is a social construct, we do not seek the revolution that can occur. In essence, since the concept of race was devised by the very worst Americans, it can be eliminated by the very best Americans.

     If social reality is a human construction –and it is- then we can move into the future on the basis of a corrected past. Recognize the concept of races for a fiction and then create identities that define us by what unites us rather than by what divides us. For example, from my perspective everyone on earth is a fusion and fusions believe that instead of being self-segregating barriers to interaction, body type differences are delightful and diverse manifestations of the underlying and indissoluble unity of 6.6 billion people.

      Fusion is a core identity that happily allows room for other forms of self and group expression. Fusions think of differences in nationality, religion, ethnicity or geography as potential sources of interest rather than as a reason to discriminate or self-segregate.

  Mr. Holder: The new words are less important than the power that all human beings have. We alone make social reality and if you really want to have a frank discussion about skin and race, the way to begin is to challenge the ghastly inheritance that divides Americans and everyone else on earth into whites, blacks and nonwhites.

Sociology as Revolution

    Here is my argument. Sociology is the most revolutionary discipline on earth. Use its concepts and insights and, like a passenger in an air balloon, you get to see self and society from utterly unique perspectives. You get to see why people think and act as they do; and, still in the balloon, you get to decide if you want to come right back down to earth, or, before descending, create better and more just ways to think about 300 million Americans; or, in a more ambitious mood, the earth’s almost seven billion inhabitants.

     Let’s start with a “fresh” example. I recently came into a summer class wearing a very loud, flowered shirt, new shorts, and some snappy sneakers. They were checkered Vans for those in the know and I felt pretty sharp, or at least conspicuous. It was an 8AM class so, after the students sleepily surveyed their professor, one said “fresh”, and another said “fly”.

      I immediately looked down at the zipper in my shorts. Was I was literally exposed? I saw no problem and I also saw no flies in the room. So, what was Paul talking about? And why had Marcus used the word “fresh”.

   Ultimately the students explained to Professor Rip Van Winkle that I had just received a compliment. Used in this fashion, “fly” and “fresh” meant that I looked good. I was initially confused because I had no idea that the students had already exercised their inalienable right to create and recreate social reality. They had taken two old words –fly and fresh-, they had attached a new meaning to those words and they had then achieved a consensus among themselves that fly was a compliment. My problem was that I was not part of the new consensus. In essence, I was “fresh” to the kids, but, stuck in traditional meanings, my mind was stale, or at least out of the loop when it came to the latest meanings of everyday English words.

      While my students never put it in sociological terms, what they did was engage in the social construction of reality. Admittedly they only redesigned the tiniest part of the social universe, yet, in the process of freshening up the language they underlined one of Sociology’s most important insights: People are in charge. Only women and men produce the beliefs, values and practices that make up any human society; and, as an additional asset, people actually have the mental muscle required to recreate social reality whenever they wish. My classroom examples focused on everyday changes but, at times, even two pintsize letters and a period can demonstrate our power to consciously create even revolutionary social change.

      Think of the word Ms. It did not exist until the 1960’s and women’s desire to achieve equality with men across the social spectrum. To activists, words like Miss and Mrs. pointed backwards, toward the sexist world that already existed. So, to find a storehouse for a radically revised set of beliefs about women and men, a group of women decided to invent a new word. Again, it is two lousy letters and a period but the ripple effects of this change are still with us. For example, if women and men are equal, then women’s work no longer exists. And a man who says that he is willing to “help” with the dishes may catch flak because using the word help implies that the sink and suds are still a women’s preserve. Offer to wash your fifty percent of the dishes and we can talk; otherwise Ms. Smith may have a few very pointed words for a man who is stuck in time.

          People are in charge. They can create and recreate social reality whenever they wish. It is a marvelous gift but, if people actually have all the power I claim, why does the contemporary world experience such persisting and ugly manifestations of violence, injustice and inequality. Are we masochists? Do human beings have, as Freud once argued, a biologically based instinct to death? Or, is there another explanation for why people often fail to exercise their power to create and recreate social reality?

      Sociology makes this argument. People never inherit a clean slate. On the contrary, each of us is always heir to a mountain of already accepted beliefs, values and practices. At home and at school, at places of worship and on the streets, adults and adolescents teach us what to think; and, as children, it is exceedingly difficult to challenge the legitimacy of received wisdom. We learn to think like our parents and our teachers; and it is even possible to passionately embrace nonsense, plus pass that nonsense on as truth to our children and students.

        Consider the word Caucasian. In roughly 1795, this was the very human creation of a German named Friedrich Blumenbach. He invented a typology of so called races and, for whatever reason, he said that the best looking people on earth came from the Southern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. He could have said the Andes or the Rockies but he chose a nearby Christian standard and 213 years later otherwise intelligent people unknowingly use a word invented by a man who argued that the beauty ideal for everyone on earth is to look like folks from contemporary Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran. It’s silly once you think about but, if you are a young or older adult and you never knew until now the origin of the word Caucasian, why would you challenge the received wisdom? Caucasians exist; it is a scientific fact or at least that is what my teachers told me.

             All people, at all times, in all nations experience the same Catch 22: We have the inalienable right to create new versions of social reality but, before we get a chance to create ourselves, others create us -by, for example, telling us about Caucasians. To freshen up the world, we need to work with the beliefs, values and experiences we already accept and share with the members of our society. It is a dilemma unless you have the conceptual tools offered by Sociology. Then you can act like the magician Houdini. He was once locked in a cell and struggled for hours to escape. Nothing! Frustrated, he pushed the door and it opened because it was never locked.

   That is the promise of Sociology. Use its conceptual tools and you see self and world from unique and energizing perspectives. We can destroy the social construction called race. We can stop using skin color as a crucial axis of identity.

       Since we are in charge, we can recreate any society we wish. All we have to remember is that the gate that leads to the air balloon is open, if we push it.

Is There a Platinum Lining in Sky High Gas Prices?

        Let’s start with some numbers. In August of 2008, the United States consumes almost 21 (20.7) million barrels of oil each and every day. That adds up to more than100 million barrels every 5 days, a billion barrels every fifty days, and 7.6 BILLION barrels each year.

    The numbers are important because they put contemporary solutions into perspective. Senator Obama, for example, wants to open the spigot of the nation’s strategic oil reserves and give us 70 million barrels of extra gas as a short term solution. His gift is 3 1/2 days of oil; that clearly qualifies as a short term solution.

     Senator McCain wants to open up the nation’s offshore oil reserves; he argues that we should let companies drill for new oil and we can tap into the 18 billion barrels of oil that the U.S. Interior Department’s Minerals Management Office says is potentially recoverable. This oil appears in six, eight or ten years. No one knows at what cost, and, assuming that we get every drop of the oil, and that companies only sell this oil in the United States, we get a little more than two years of supply. That’s better than 3 1/2 days but it nevertheless qualifies as very short term reasoning rooted in politics rather than the future of your children and ours.

   In trying to understand the rise in prices one sure “culprit” is the additional and ever growing demand from China and India. Reading some stories I get the feeling that the Chinese and Indians do not have the right to get in the way of our ugly habits. They should not imitate us; instead, the idea is to provide the cheap goods and somehow do it without draining the world’s supply of oil. Since neither China nor India possesses significant oil resources, that is a difficult trick indeed.

   China and India are certainly part of any equation that tries to understand rising prices. In fact, since they now use so little of their oil to power transportation needs, we can expect that their demands will significantly increase as they both complete highway systems to rival those in the United States.

      Neglected is the role of the Middle East. While countless commentators stress that five nations control roughly 65% of the world’s oil reserves (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates), it took analysts at a Canadian investment Bank, CIBC World Markets, to highlight these points: China has a billion people. The Middle East has roughly 250 million. But, as CIBC’s Jeff Rubin and Peter Buchanan note, while exports from the Middle East fell in 2007, daily consumption increased by 300,000 barrels a day. That increase offset much of the reduced consumption in places like the United States, and, even more crucial, “the increase in the Middle East’s own consumption matched the increase recorded by China, a country with quadruple its population.” (http://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/feature1.pdf

   Today Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates use (per capita) even more energy than we. By creating such a huge demand, we help fill their coffers and they are using the money to be, energy wise, the biggest gas guzzlers on earth. Dubai boasts about having the world’s largest indoor ski slope and one Middle East nation after another heavily subsidizes the use of oil. Saudi drivers pay only 45 cents a gallon and they turn on their subsidized lights or desalinate their water supply by bathing in oil. Rubin and Buchanan write that “oil makes up 50% of all power generated in Saudi Arabia and over 80% of Kuwait’s power. In essence, why turn off the lights or reduce consumption when cheap oil is a birthright item; and so too the subsidies provided by the state.

          Bottom Line: Especially with the increasing demands from China and India, we are not likely to get much help from the Middle East in increasing our own supply of oil. On the contrary, the United States relies on six nations (Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria and Iraq), one with significantly declining production (Mexico) and others with highly volatile politics (Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Venezuela). As we complain about Hugo Chavez we demand his oil and we also have no compunctions about embracing what many call the “kleptocracy” in Nigeria.

   Given so much negative information, where is the platinum lining in this sordid story? I again turn to CIBC and a provocative piece entitled, “Will Soaring Transport Costs Reverse Globalization?” (http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/about/pdfs/oil.pdf) To fuel their celebrated supply chains, corporations like Wal-Mart depend on container ships. You put the goods in a boatload of forty foot steel rectangles and you use boats that, as they go faster than ever, use more oil than ever. Rubin and Tal note that, in 2000, it cost (at $20 a barrel oil) only $3000 to ship a container from China to the U.S. Today it costs $8000 to ship that container; and if oil hit $200 a barrel, the cost jumps to $15,000 a container.

    To a large extent, China’s advantage in cheap labor and other low production costs just disappeared! Suddenly sky high oil could open a spigot that once again makes America competitive in manufacturing. In Bad Money, Kevin Phillips writes that manufacturing was 29% of U.S. GDP in 1950; the figure for 2005 is a pitiful 12%. With the rising price of oil we could level the playing field if Obama, McCain and Congress knew a good opportunity when it kicked them in their butts.

                Given increasing demand and the political volatility of many oil exporting nations (e.g., what happens if Israel actually attacks Iran?) the cost of oil could easily reach the $200 a barrel figure suggested by the CIBC. A politician with real vision would therefore root policy in an insight from the Apollo Alliance. Any energy or environmental problem is both a technical and a political problem. Many people will buy electric cars and use cloth bags to shop because it is the right thing to do. Others will do as they please – unless someone shows us how to, simultaneously, use less oil, save the environment, and produce the jobs that come with prosperity.

    We need to take advantage of whatever opportunities do and will exist because of rising fuel costs. We need an economic strategy -heavily subsidized by the government- to develop new energy resources. We could be in the lead on solar, wind and other technologies; and we could use those technologies to fuel the factories that will take long term advantage of China’s –and other Asian nations- long term disadvantage.

     Wal-Mart –the largest retail company on earth- might actually begin to “buy American”. While certainties are out of the question, the possibilities are endless if we can get our “change agent” leaders to show the courage and foresight they allegedly possess.

Free Markets and Free Trade: Two Dangerous Illusions

      Let me begin with four examples, across three centuries. In 1760 American spermaceti candle manufacturers faced a serious problem. Well off consumers flocked to their product but the supply of raw material for the candles –the head matter from whales- was in short supply. If one manufacturer bid against another, the result would be a bidding war, raising the price of the raw material and the candles as well. To fend off this pre-capitalist disaster, manufacturers conspired to fix the market. As Eric Jay Dolan explains in Leviathan, on November 5, 1761, America’s eight largest candle manufacturers formally created an oligarchy, “The United Company of Spermaceti Chandlers”. They established a “maximum price” they would pay for head matter; they threatened to field a fleet of their own vessels if the sellers did not comply, and, in an early manifestation of “doublespeak”, they promised “to use all fair and honorable means to stop any potential rivals from building new candle works.” The last thing this “free” market needed was more competitors, so the existing manufacturers made certain that no one was able to buy the machinery needed to launch a new business. Before it even appeared, competition was crushed as efficiently as the monopolized screw presses that compressed whale head matter.

   Move into the early twentieth century and the electric light bulb cartel. General Electric and Westinghouse began to fix prices in the late 1890’s. In the real world, it was easy for Goliath to crush David, but if one Goliath fought another, the result could be a tie, or, even worse, two bodies on the ground. Setting prices guaranteed a stable, fixed market, but, as with the candle makers, the threat of additional competition was more than this market could bear. So, General Electric and Westinghouse made deals with Corning Glass and with the machine tool industry. This was the effective ultimatum offered by General Electric and Westinghouse. Sell glass to anyone else and we will go into the glass business and crush you. Sell machines to anyone else and we will go into the machine tool business and crush you. If I remember the figures rightly, as late as 1929, Westinghouse agreed to a roughly fifteen percent share of the light bulb market; and they also agreed to pay a penalty to General Electric for any sales over their allotted share of the American light bulb market.

     Here are two contemporary examples. As Gabor Steingart notes in The War for Wealth, in 2006 China passed a law that “pressures the Western auto  industry to outsource all of its production to China” The law mandates that anyone who “assembles more than sixty percent of a vehicle outside China is slapped with a 25% punitive tariff on parts they import to China.”

   The Chinese want to protect their own and they are not shy about doing so. Meanwhile, in the United States we hypocritically applaud ourselves for championing free markets and free trade. As Joseph Stiglitz’s stresses in Making Globalization Work, we bragged about opening our markets to 97% of the goods produced by the least developed countries. Bangladesh was free to send us as many jet engines as they could; however, when it came to the 3% of the market that actually mattered to countries like Bangladesh –i.e., textiles and apparel – the U.S. did its best to make sure that the “free” markets excluded the Bangladeshi products that threatened U.S. manufacturers.

      Here are my conclusions:

·         In the realm of commodities with serious economic import, free markets are as rare as an atheist in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Markets are more or less free; but to talk about free markets as if they were the rule is to embrace the absurd.

·         Controlling markets in capitalism is normal, and so are oligarchies or cartels like OPEC. Too much competition can be ruinous so it is perfectly rational –I did not say ethical or just- to try and control markets by fixing prices or eliminating the competition before it even appears.

·         Given the flat world possibilities of globalization, the inescapable exposure of one capitalist to the competitive efforts of another is greater than ever. Thus, the likelihood of corporations conspiring to fix prices, limit supply or influence public policy is greater than ever. In the United States, casino owners recently imitated the candle makers in 1761. In the name of eliminating immoral or addictive activity, they pressured Congress to bar credit card payments on all Internet gambling. This legislation effectively stymied the online competition that was reducing the profits of fixed site casinos from Connecticut to California.

       As long as we believe in the reality of free markets and free trade, the government is to keep its hands off business enterprises. However, once you admit that markets, through time, have imperfections as big as a sperm whale, somebody or something has to come to the rescue. Paraphrasing James K. Galbraith in The Predator State the government must assume a crucial role in at least policing markets because, as the casino and other lobbyists prove, private enterprise is inextricably linked to public policy. Otherwise the lobbyists would not be in Washington actually writing the laws that give them the competitive advantages that mock the ideals of free markets and free trade.

     Given the systemic need of capitalists to control markets, I would have the government involved in far more than police work. However, we can only have a reality based debate about the proper role of government once we face two facts: One, free markets and free trade are illusions. And, two, the language of free markets and trade is far too often a smokescreen for hypocrisy and the basest forms of self rather than public interest. When the British controlled Egypt in the nineteenth century, they waved the banner of free trade to impose countervailing tariffs, not on imports from Britain, but on the products of Egyptian industries. Very quickly, in the name of free trade, they wiped out the Egyptian tobacco industry.

    In the same time frame, the United States did very similar things to the tobacco industry in its Puerto Rican colony. This is perverse and we will continue to encounter this type of perversity until we accept, once and for all, that free markets and free trade are social constructs that smell like a load of buffalo chips.

Senator McCain and the Devil of Death

           I’m 64 and I have no idea why death is supposed to be an angel. Death is a devil; it is the end of all things, the ultimate pit stop or, even worse, a universe without blogs.

          The numbers act like triggers; sixty-four may be young to some but sixty-four comes with a series of unwanted questions. You’re still here? When are you going to retire? Or, even more unsettling, one of your students says, “My father had you back in the seventies”.  It’s jarring to know that your first students’ grandchildren are on the way in, as you are on the way out.

       You are going to die. Possibly tomorrow. So an admonition from Ortega y Gasset becomes your only credo: You have a moral obligation to live each moment with as much intensity as possible. I try to do that but America’s age norms want to prevent me from working. In the United States we generally conceive of life as a bell curve. At 64 I am going downhill so it is time to move to one of the nation’s ecological graveyards. I can pick Phoenix or Miami; I will carefully choose an adult community (55 or older) and I will play and talk to my own kind about whom we were, not what we can or will be.

    I recently told a colleague that I had just started a new book. She looked at me like I had problems. She seemed to imply that that part of my life was over. It was time to stop typing and use the computer for age appropriate activities: Watching black and white movies or, even more in vogue, getting my exercise by bowling via a Nintendo Wii.

   Senator McCain sees things differently. He believes that life is a line and it ends when he dies. While he waits, he has the right to do whatever he pleases, even become President of the United States.

    I’m not sure. And I think that the nation needs to make Senator McCain’s age an issue in this campaign. I do not mean that it should be a negative issue. I applaud the Senator for seeing life as a line and I think he should continue to walk on that line as long as he pleases. But, so far, nobody wants to use the Senator’s candidacy to initiate a national conversation about the rights, responsibilities, and possible limitations of life as a line vs. life as a bell curve.

        In a slight change to their vision of life as a bell curve, the Italians just upped their retirement age to 59! That builds in a spectacular sense of expectation and entitlement. A person who lives to 80 will spend a quarter of their life on the public dole. Is that good? Is it bad? Is it nuts? Where will society get the financial resources to support so many retirees? And why not use Senator McCain’s candidacy to ask even more basic questions: Does American society want to teach people that they ought to retire? Or, even worse, do we want to teach people that after a life of hard work, they are entitled to retire; they are entitled to live well; and they are entitled to have younger people pay the piper? As Roger Lowenstein stresses in his just published, While America Aged, it is that sense of entitlement that helped ruin General Motors and bankrupt the city of San Diego.

     Senator McCain’s career and candidacy suggests that he thinks differently. Why not say that in a speech? Tell us that he disagrees with many of his age cohort. He wants to achieve things for as long as he is able and he wants young people to follow his example. By all means, cover your butt. Prepare for old age. But, instead of living in Phoenix, try the middle of New York City. Live with Americans of all ages and for those of you who are amazed that my brain still functions at 72, I offer this response. I am not the problem. The problem is what Americans learned about the aged. Many of us are as capable -or even more capable- than ever and we would appreciate the rest of you recognizing that obvious fact.

   I hope the Senator makes this kind of aggressive speech. Those of us who conceive of life as a line need all the encouragement we can get.

     But, and this is a big but, there is still the devil of death. The Senator can talk about his 96 year old mother all he wishes but, let’s face it; he is going to die sooner rather than later. In addition, the Senator has had cancer. So have I. And while the doctors tell me that the cancer is gone they still have me appear for the periodic exams that check for the reappearance of that devilish disease. So, with all the rights and responsibilities of life as a line, are there also limitations? Should certain jobs be out of the question? Does a 72 year old man have the right to be President of the United States?

           While this is anything but an easy question it is also one that we need to openly debate and discuss. So far the age issue is taboo. But raised in the context of the rights, responsibilities and possible limitations of life as a line, raising the age issue is legitimate. Anyone in their seventies who is honest knows that the devil is lurking around the next corner; given that fact, does it make sense to talk about two terms when it is questionable the person will make it through one?

   My inclination is to say that 72 is too old to begin a Presidency; but I can be convinced to go either way so I hope that, as a nation, we will openly discuss the elephant that to date is still standing in the corner.

White People Do Not Exist

       People call me white. But if I compare my skin color to that of a white shirt or white copy paper, I’m not in the same ballpark. To resolve the issue, I went to two paint stores, got color charts,and discovered that, according to the staff at Home Depot and Lowe’s, I am actually beige, a ringer for light brown.

      A cynic might argue, who cares? You’re white because American culture says so. I agree. Yet why are we so willing to utterly ignore reality when the issue is skin color? If a short person said he was tall, a fat person said he was skinny, or a senior citizen said he was an adolescent we would be surprised and even confrontational. What are you talking about? Do you have a problem? Or, do I have one because a short person claiming to be tall is not in touch with the world that is.

            We ignore the obvious truth when the issue is white skin color and that brings to mind a famous play by Luigi Pirandello, “It Is True If You Say So”. So called white skin color is an ugly manifestation of our inalienable right to engage in the social construction of reality. Roughly five hundred years ago English people began to call themselves white; like baggage in the ship’s hold, the Puritans brought that label with them on the Mayflower, and white became a still unquestioned axis for a hierarchical categorization of everyone on the face of the earth.

       White never appears alone. To do its work of denigrating more than five billion people white needs a series of inextricably linked opposites. In the United States, we have black people, people of color, nonwhites, and none of the aboves. Especially in states like California and New York, the last category is rapidly increasing because our color chart creates challenges when we encounter, for example, a South Asian who is darker than an African American. So called “multiracial” Americans also present a problem; typically a youngster who is Korean and European American never gets a color. “Racial” mixing trumps everything so the child is colorless –but not white- in a world of colorful people.

    White is the linchpin that holds this insanity together. Blacks, nonwhites and people of color only exist in relation to white as the designer original; the bizarre thing is that while white is a color at the paint store, it is not a color when it comes to classifying people. Only people of color get a color. White people never get a color because they are white and white is not a color when white people use color to teach everyone in America that only colored people are colored.

     It is funny; and it is also a venomous way to describe one another.

   Ultimately, we are confronted with two conundrums.One is that we call people white even though they are beige. Second, the colorful words we use to describe six billion people are at best arbitrary but,even when more than fifty million immigrants (e.g., Arabs, South Asian,Latinos) crash our operating system of skin color beliefs, we do nothing to bring our beliefs into line with the world that is actually there.

       Pirandello is correct: It is true if you say so. But, to more accurately understand our willingness to ignore what two eyes see, the problem boils down to a never ending battle between rationality and rationalizations. In heaven the truth will set you free; on earth it challenges taken for granted assumptions. Paraphrasing Ortega y Gasset, people will put up with many things, with the best and the worst. The only thing people will not put up with is being unsure what they believe about the nature of things.

     The truth –white people do not exist-confronts a set of beliefs that order the world on an axis of white supremacy.So, when it comes to a choice between fact and fiction, we rationalize. We anxiously embrace the fiction because the ripple effects of affirming reality are endless.

      Knock out white folks, and, like a house ofcards, the whole structure collapses. Six billion people suddenly need to invent new ways to see one another; and, especially when it comes to whites in the United States, that means we would be one small part of humanity rather than its hallmark. After five hundred years on the throne, that’s hard to take but there is no choice if we are to create –for our children and grandchildren- a world where skin color is as unimportant as the size of your feet or your hands.

    Here is what I suggest. Remember another admonition from Ortega y Gasset. Our destiny is “action. We do not live in order to think, but the other way around; we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.”

   When it comes to skin color we have done a miserable job. We can easily think of better ways to survive. So, those of us who seek revolutionary social change need to deliberately create worldwide cognitive dissonance. It is our obligation to spread the news to every web site on earth. White people do not exist. They are a social fiction that deserves to be deleted as fast as an unwanted email. And, since we know that whites and many people of color may be reluctant to admit the truth, let’s remember to take it easy, but take it.         

             We must deliberately create tension and anxiety in billions of everyday interactions. For example,if someone calls me white, I no longer accept this designation. I try to empathetically understand their point of view but I will no longer confirm their provably false definition of who I am. More important, imagine the dilemmas and possibilities that would ensue if Latinos, Asians, Arabs, Indians and Pakistanis also put us in our place. “You people need to look in the mirror; you’re a mirage and I refuse to endorse your colored people version of the world.”

     This will be anything but easy. But if we think in order to live, let’s think differently. And that will never happen until white people get the message. They do not exist; and, however unsettling, that’s the future –ready or not.

Senators Obama and McCain, President Hoover and the War in Afghanistan

        C.B. Curtis was U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic. On April 21^st, 1930, he sent this query to his superiors in Washington: “Can’t you persuade Al Capone to offer him (Rafael Trujillo) more money than he is making here to come to the United States as his instructor? That ought to attract Trujillo.”

     I found this message in files at the President Hoover library. Curtis wanted the President to intervene – “a naval vessel should be sent without delay”-and overthrow Trujillo, who had just overthrown the regime of Horacio Vasquez.

     The State Department responded with this message: The U.S. government would recognize whoever achieved power in the Dominican Republic. As Assistant Secretary of State Francis White explained to Curtis, “the President feels, I may say confidentially that our interventions in the past have not been very successful and he does not want to land forces nor even to send a ship unless it is absolutely essential for the protection of American lives.”

     In a sharp break with the policies of President Wilson, Hoover recognized the limits of American power. In 1930 the Haitian occupation was still in place and the eight year Dominican intervention(1916-1924) paved the way for Trujillo. He was trained by the Marines. Hoover wanted no part of more interventions but he did make one concession. Trujillo’s mentor was in Haiti; let Colonel Cutts see if he had any influence. In a long memo Cutts explained that Trujillo was “the most Americanized” of all the Dominicans; he copied us with great delight. But, even after all our money and training, Trujillo would install a “dictator type of government”. Cutts could do nothing about a man who had “a Jekyll and Hyde personality”.

              Herbert Hoover was an educated pessimist. We trained Trujillo; he was the “most Americanized” of all the Dominicans and look what we got: A dictator, a killer and a thief. For example,Trujillo always kept $600,000 in cash in a small bag –just in case.

      Trujillo ruled with viciousness for thirty years and his reign should be a warning light for those demanding more U.S. troops for Afghanistan. We can offer the best training available; we can Americanize them by spending, as in Iraq, millions for a system of zip and area codes. We can even try and fund (again in Iraq) a no smoking campaign. But if the interests of our clients and proxies are different than our own, they are going to use our training to further their survival, not ours.

       Both of our Presidential candidates want to substantially expand our involvement in Afghanistan. But, as former U.S.Ambassador Thomas Schweich stressed in the New York Times Magazine on July 27^th,2008, the Taliban are at least partially funding themselves via the opium trade;and while Afghan President Karzai may be against the Taliban, his reelection chances rest on turning a blind eye to the trade that is so essential to hiselectoral constituency. The government, judicial, police, and military corruption that is endemic to any Narco-State (i.e., Colombia) is likely tocontinue in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. We can use our troops; we can train and arm the Afghans as we are doing in Iraq; but if Obama and McCain expect outcomes that transform the Afghan nation they are, to use a phrase of Max Weber’s, political infants.

    This is, admittedly a pessimistic assessment. Unfortunately it is rooted in a history of one failed intervention after another. Recall, for example, that in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson also intervened in the Dominican Republic. That went so well that Johnson sent down “bag men”carrying sacks of dollars to pay off the police chiefs who paid for hundreds of phantom officers. The cash flew up to Miami and when Johnson justified the intervention on the basis of insurgents producing “1500” headless bodies he engaged in the same kind of exaggeration as President Bush in 2003. We never found the weapons of mass destruction and we never found the headless bodies.However, Johnson actually had Ambassador Bennett and Ellsworth Bunker search through hundreds of photos looking for headless corpses. They finally found one but, as they sheepishly told Johnson, they had no way to know if the person was a good guy or a bad guy.

        Hoover was right. Our interventions almost overwhelmingly end in failure and farce. ThinkCuba in 1898 and think twenty-one years later when General Enoch Crowder wrote a new constitution for Cuba while he lived on the U.S. battleship Minnesota floating off the Cuban coast.Cuba got its constitution and the people got General Gerado Machado, a brute to rival Trujillo.

       Senators Obama and McCain: Root policy in pessimism. Our history demands it.  In addition, remember that, one, it is easy to start a war; and, two, you may get in for one reason and stay for another. A January 1965 memo in the Pentagon Papers makes this point: Seventy percent of the reason we were then in Vietnam was to avoid humiliation. The public rhetoric stressed anti-communism; theprivate reality was that we blew it and we did not want to admit that fact tothe rest of the world.

   And finally, think of Iraq. True or false,we went in to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. Five years later we have a predicament which has nothing to do with the reasons for the intervention. As Terrill and Crane note in a monograph published by the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, “we can’t stay, we can’t leave and we can’t fail.” In essence, our occupation produced only one “success”: We managed (as Juan Cole puts it) to destabilize the cockpit of the world economy and it is costing us lives and $12 billion a month to try and discover some way to end an occupation that is even more farcical than our century of cruelty and idiocy in the Caribbean.

     Senator Obama: You often remind us that you made a good call when you opposed the Iraq intervention. Use that common sense in Afghanistan. It is an extraordinarily complex society, full of devilish divisions, including religion, tribe, ethnicity, drugs and geography. The Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba were cultural picnics compared to the complexity of Afghanistan. Yet we failed miserably in each and every instance.

    So, remember, not the Maine, but Herbert Hoover. He knew a bad thing when he saw it so he refused to spit in the wind.

Senator McCain, West Point, the U.S. Army War College and the War in Iraq

      In his assessment of the War in Iraq Senator McCain says that we need to listen to the soldiers. I agree. The problem is that the counsel offered by American soldiers often contradicts the policies advocated by Senator McCain. Read the monographs published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and you learn that many soldiers think that McCain is not only wrong; he is dangerous.

      In a speech delivered on April 11, 2007 Senator McCain talked about the need to win the “war on terror”. However, as early as December of 2003, War College Professor Jeffry Record wrote about “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism”. He thought that defining our struggle as a war on terrorism made little sense: “You can kill terrorists, infiltrate their organizations, shut down their sources of cash, wipe out their training bases, and attack their state sponsors, but how do you attack a method?”

      By all means go after Al Qaeda but a war on terrorism is not only unwinnable, it is endless. After Iraq do you then move on to Sri Lanka, to Peru and to Colombia? What’s the strategy for defeating fighters from a good Christian nation –Colombia- when they behead opponents using chainsaws?

            Suggestion number one: Don’t classify the post 9/11 world as a war on terror. “The GWOT as it has so far been defined and conducted is strategically unfocused; promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate scarce U.S. military and other means over too many ends. It violates the fundamental strategic principles of discrimination and concentration”

       Suggestion number two:  In an October, 2005 War College paper, Terrill (head of the U.S. Army’s Military History Institute) and Crane made this point about a disengagement strategy from Iraq. “Deemphasize rhetoric”. If, as Senator McCain stresses, “Iraq is the main battleground in the war on terror”, you are making life much harder for the Iraqi government. Mainstream Muslims will view the war in Iraq “as part of a campaign that includes Israeli actions against Palestine and Russian attacks in Chechnya.” Terrill and Crane stress that “the United States does not need to burden the Iraqi government with the specter of collusion in what may be seen as anti-Muslim policies.”

       What is Senator McCain’s response? He dramatically ups the ante by proclaiming (again on April 11, 2007) that “the war on terror, the war for the future of the Middle East and the struggle for the soul of Islam, of which the war in Iraq constitutes a key element, are bound together. Progress in one requires progress in all.”

          It is heavenly rhetoric; rooted in ignorance and put in its place when you read a December 2005 Army War College essay entitled “One Hundred Osamas.” Professor Sherifa Zuhur writes that one probable result of our war in Iraq is 99 deadly clones of Bin Laden. This is so because, among other things, the cheek to speak about the essence of their religion moves Muslims to ask a powerful question: “Who designated the United States as the ultimate authority determining the future of the Middle East?” Muslims will decide their own destiny and it will be much easier to succeed if Americans finally grasp that Muslims share a “holistic view of life; everything is religion, everything is Islam; financial, social, intellectual, theological, military and political.”

        From a speaker who does not know the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni, it is all American audacity to search for the soul of Islam. So, button up your lips and replace rhetoric with knowledge: Political Islam is a misnomer and “if the United States continues to promote secularism, in one form or another as the antidote to extremist or revivalist Islam, it will not reach hearts and minds.”  

       Suggestion number three: “Avoid setting the bar too high, or being too specific, when proclaiming visions of postwar end states.” After a long examination of previous U.S. occupations (e.g., Cuba and Vietnam) Terrill and Crane correctly conclude that we have rarely done well. Moreover, they never stress two of our worst failures, in the Dominican Republic and in Haiti. We not only put Trujillo in power, the Marines trained him for the job. He was our monster and that is Terrill and Crane’s point. Be a pessimist and never promise, as Senator McCain does on his website, that we are going to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq and never leave until “a competent, trained, and capable security force is in place and operating effectively.”

     By my count, we have been training the security forces in Haiti since 1909. Things are not going well. And, as the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point notes in a report dated July 22, 2008, a final defeat of Al Qaeda is very unlikely. Withdraw or “win” but, either way, “if Jihadists believe Iraq remains a viable arena for Jihad, or they sense an opportunity to humiliate the US, they will travel to Iraq even after a withdrawal, much as earlier generations of fighters arrived in Afghanistan long after the Soviet Union withdrew.”  

    Suggestion Number Four: “The United States must distinguish between its campaign against Al Qaeda in Iraq and the larger and more difficult task of building a stable, peaceful Iraqi government capable of governing Iraq independently.”

      This is from the Combating Terrorism Center’s July 22, 2008 report and it is echoed by an earlier West Point analysis. That is, “the vast majority of militants in Iraq have nothing to do with Al Qaeda …those insurgents are a mix of Sunni nationalists, Ba’thists, Shi’a militants, and Islamist organizations. Mistaking any of these groups for Al-Qaeda is not simply wrong; it is dangerous.” (My emphasis)

     So, never “conflate” two separate threats, which is exactly what Senator McCain does. In his April 11, 2007 speech, he assures his listeners “that it is impossible to separate sectarian violence from the war against Al Qaeda.”  They are joined at the hip even if our best soldiers say it is not so.

   To summarize: No one can ever a war on terror. Deemphasize rhetoric. Lower the bar that defines success. Recognize that “the Iraqi War has increased Jihadi radicalization in the Muslim World."  The July 22^nd, 2008 report says that “we found that the rate of deadly attacks by Jihadis has increased sevenfold since the invasion.”

     And, above all, separate the “tactical” threat from Al Qaeda in Iraq from the strategic need to deal with an insurgency whose roots are as old as dirt. West Point estimates that it takes “approximately 14 years for a government to win against an insurgency; and the longer the war goes on, the more foreign fighters will gain experience there.”

   It is informed, important advice, from some of America’s best soldiers and their professors. Unfortunately, Senator McCain is not listening. And that makes him a very dangerous man.

Georg Simmel and the Strength to Contemplate “Racial” Chaos

                  One theme of this blog is that the great sociologists still offer provocative and important insights about everyday life. In this case, one of Simmel’s most brilliant essays –How Is Society Possible? – inadvertently tells us how to achieve revolutionary social change.

     Let’s start with the word possible. Simmel never discussed justice, equity or the utopias forecast by a Comte or a Marx. Simmel wanted to know what make life predictable. How did a person from New York successfully navigate a variety of encounters with a person from Kansas? In addition, Simmel focused on social glue like age norms. You married at one age and retired at another. Age norms helped make society possible because they offered shared recipes for living that extended from birth to death.

   To achieve this level of social order Simmel stressed “generalizations”. A contemporary synonym is social identities or labels but, whatever word you choose, Simmel argued that society was absolutely impossible without the generalizations that, “like a veil, hid my uniqueness as it simultaneously gave it a new form.” In a sort of sociological challenge, Simmel said to try and talk about anyone without, almost immediately adding a culturally based generalization. This is Bob, my brother. This is Kathy, my colleague. This is Barak Obama. He is a Senator, a Democrat, black, a husband, a father, a son and a Presidential candidate.

   For Simmel the generalizations function like storehouses of cultural knowledge. At a preconscious level, they tell us –and others- how to think and act in an indefinite number of social situations. To the extent that the generalizations mean the same thing to me that they mean to you, society is not only possible, it is as predictable as the sun in the Caribbean. Lack a consensus and, using another generalization, you can be as unwanted as a Pakistani in New York. The Pakistani may be darker than most African Americans but he or she is not black. America lacks a consensus “racial” generalization for South Asians so they become a “none of the above”. They are racial nothings; it is not a pretty generalization but it provides a modicum of social order until Americans make up their minds about South Asians, Arabs and other racial “misfits”.

   Besides generalizations, society is possible because people are simultaneously “inside of it” and “outside of it”. If only because any society includes contradictory or competing information, people have the chance to question the received generalizations. Simmel called this our “extra social” nature and it does in fact make change possible. When women used two pintsized letters and a period to create a new generalization –the word Ms. - they began a revolution whose ripple effects are almost endless. Simmel said this helped make society possible because it offered a way to include change in an evolving society. Thus, to the extent that contemporary men grasp and accept the meanings implied by Ms., social interaction is once again both predictable and possible.

   Simmel added one last insight. Never expect perfect harmony. But also understand that “individuality finds its place in the structure of generality, and, furthermore, that in spite of the unpredictable character of individuality, this structure is laid out as it were, for individuality and its functions.” Any society offered many thousands of recipes for living; from how to eat, to who we could and not marry. Follow the rules and a society can even manage for, say four hundred years, to define groups of people by what divides them; for whites and blacks the structure is laid out before they are born and as long as we use the approved generalizations, the structure is maintained and society is possible.

      To repeat, Simmel never discussed issues of justice, equity or freedom. But, since this is a blog about “race” and ethnicity we must discuss those issues. What American society does is use a series of generalizations –race, white, black, person of color, nonwhite- to positively and negatively define the “racial” status of everyone on earth. As Albert Murray noted, the generalization nonwhite contains all the assumptions of white supremacy and segregation. White is the designer original and all the “nons” are nothing but God’s knockoffs. Nonwhite is a horrible generalization and Simmel tells us what is necessary to abolish it.

   We must do nothing less than make society utterly impossible. Since the “racial” generalizations cited are vital storehouses of societal knowledge, this is a revolution at the deepest levels of everyday interaction. It invites chaos because, if another person uses these generalizations, we will refuse to abide by the rules of the game. For example, if anyone calls me white, I will not accept that generalization. I try to be polite and empathetic but I nevertheless stress that white people do not exist and the proof is in the pudding. Look in the mirror and white people are actually beige or light brown.

    Some people call me “impossible”. But, that is exactly my intention. Because Simmel is correct about what makes society possible, the best way to achieve serious yet peaceful social change is to reject poisonous generalizations like white and black and embrace chaos until we achieve a new consensus rooted in new generalizations. As Simmel stressed, society is impossible without generalizations that, like a veil, hide our individuality. We are stuck with the need for generalizations but, because of our extra social natures, we are not stuck with nonsense and hate. Race, white, black, people of color and nonwhite can be eliminated if we agree not to use them. Each of us is an “impossible” revolutionary if we vote for chaos and agree to have a national debate about the conscious and deliberate creation of new generalizations that will define three hundred million people by what unites us rather than by what divides us.

   Feminists paved the way. Without reading Simmel, they invented a new generalization that demands that men stop being men in the traditional sense of that social identity.

   So, let’s use feminists as role models. Let’s make society impossible and willingly contemplate “racial” chaos because, as Simmel shows, that is the only way to destroy the old order and create a new one.

Senator Obama and the Flap about Speaking Other Languages

    Drive into Abilene, Kansas in 1917 and you saw this sign:

SPEAK THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

If you don’t know it – learn it

  If you don’t like it – move out.

           The sign appeared at the height of “The Americanization Movement”, a crusade (begun in roughly 1900) to transform the immigrants who threatened America’s Anglo Protestant core. Among others, Italians, Polish, Portuguese, and Greek immigrants promised to rot that core for at least two reasons: They came from inferior cultures; and they refused to relinquish their original beliefs, values and practices.

        Like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, the newcomer’s accents and behaviors said that they were “hyphenated” Americans (e.g., Italian-Americans); Uncle Sam only wanted 100% Americans so the hyphens needed to immediately lose any attachment to their country of origin. As Theodore Roosevelt literally shouted it out, “This country is a crucible, a melting-pot in which many different race strains are being fused into one. If some of the material remains as an unfused lump, it is worthless in itself, and it is also a detriment to the rest of the mixture.”

     It was this mixture of self-satisfaction, ethnocentrism, and zeal that led, in 1924, to a gigantic contradiction. As the Americanizers enthusiastically celebrated the melting pot metaphor, Congress passed, in 1924, immigrant legislation that slammed the door in the face of virtually everyone on earth. So called Asians took the biggest hit; they got zero slots. But the core was protected and revitalized to such an extent that, from 1924 to 1965, England, Germany and Ireland received almost two-thirds of America’s legal immigration slots.

   America never opened its doors to the world. It opened its doors to people from certain parts of Europe and, when Senator Obama recently asked us to learn more than the English language he touched a cultural hot button that stretches from Senator McCain right back to his hero, Teddy Roosevelt. Our Anglo Protestant core may be pure European but one strong strain of our culture doesn’t like foreigners in general and immigrants in particular. We are better than they are. And even when they do exactly what we ask them to do, we still give them a very hard time.

   Consider these stories from two of my students. One is second generation Italian, the other is second generation Spanish. After arriving in the United States, each of their fathers learned to speak English and they speak it with authority and fluency. However, both men still have heavy accents. Let the family go to a restaurant and the students said their dads are often ridiculed – with ‘can you believe this’ stares or requests to repeat and repeat- when they order the meal. In Connecticut, the allegedly liberal Constitution State, the servers treat the fathers like hyphenated Americans even though the men speak two or more languages and the wait staff speaks one.

        Americans are superior; even when we are making fools of ourselves.

    We could argue that accents are all-American; that anyone who takes the time to learn the language deserves applause rather than humiliation. Instead, many of us criticize the immigrants for their halting efforts; or argue that they do not want to learn English oblivious to what is happening, for example, on Spanish TV. Here in Connecticut the daily ads feature an English language tape set that sells for $400; buy the tapes hawked by opera singer Placido Domingo and the price can double. So, is the logic is that “these people” do not want to learn English but they are willing to pay big bucks for language programs whose salespeople stress the tight linkage between success and speaking the English language.

    If we really want newcomers to learn English why not follow the example of Israel? Faced with new immigrants speaking many languages, they instituted, in 1948, ulpans, schools where the newcomers learned –for free- the Hebrew language. The ulpans are still in place as I write and they offer one means to assist newcomers to learn a basic skill – the dominant language of their new country of origin.

   Senator Obama never disagreed with learning English; on the contrary, he said that “the immigrants, absolutely, need to learn English.” What pushed the 100% American cultural button was his sense of envy for Europeans who spoke two or more languages. Critics of Obama argue that it’s a necessity in Europe; to interact across the continents many countries people must speak more than one language. In America we can speak English from Augusta to Eureka. So, we don’t need to learn another language. Only the immigrants have that obligation.

    This is self defeating nonsense. In Iraq we have almost no one who speaks Arabic. How do you gain good intelligence if you cannot speak the language? Equally important, a friend –he is a born abroad bottle engineer- tells me that in meetings in Europe, the conversations seamlessly move from one language to another. Will Americans sit there like ignoramuses? And, as China gains more and more economic power, will we tell them to speak in English or we will do business elsewhere?

   In a global economy, remaining monolingual helps guarantee economic suicide. But, another, arguably more important reason to learn a second language is to open ourselves to other people’s cultures. Words are like trunks; they contain layers and layers of stored beliefs and values. Efforts to learn another language helps us poke through the trunk and, as we see how other people think, we have the opportunity to examine our own way of thinking.

  So far as I can see one essential component of creativity is the willingness to continually expose ourselves to different beliefs, values and opinions. So, in assessing Senator Obama’s suggestion do we want to imitate the bunker mentality of Theodore Roosevelt?

   Or, do we want to see how other people think and grow as human beings because we are as open to other languages and cultures as we are to the “ethnic” food those “worthless” immigrants create in some of the nation’s best and most expensive restaurants.

Obscene and Immoral:

The “Fast Tracking” of Illegal Immigrants in Postville, Iowa

       Even the Rabbis were illegal!  Two brought in from Canada blessed the fowl; meanwhile government documents about the Agriprocessors kosher plant reveal that the rabbis often ignored God, Moses and the Ten Commandments. Described only as a “Hasidic Jew”, one floor supervisor duct-taped the eyes of a Guatemalan worker”; he then “took one of the meat hooks and hit the Guatemalan with it.” The warrant notes that, “apparently”, the sightless man received “no serious injuries”. (http://www.aila.org/content/fileviewer.aspx?docid=25454&linkid=177821)

         On the Web, the Agriprocessor homepage assures us that they “approach their business in the context of a deep religious tradition.” Perhaps it is a Neanderthal faith? Or, instead of burning people at the stake, these guys slowly roast the workers over an assembly line that recorded numerous amputations. The government’s application for a warrant stresses that, “Your affiant is aware, from his training and experience, that those who employ illegal aliens often exploit the aliens in various ways…exploitation can take on many forms, such as requiring employees to provide money or other things of value to maintain employment or secure better working hours or tasks, providing sub-par working conditions, failing to pay overtime, and physically harassing or mistreating employees.”

   If forced to take a multiple choice exam, Agriprocessor could check only one box: All of the above. The government was right but, when it finally served its warrant, Washington focused on the exploited rather than the exploiters. The infidels got a fine while the workers were “driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled” out of the slaughter house to, believe it or not, the National Cattle Congress. As Erik Camayd-Freixas stresses (http://www.galleons.org/Joomla/content/view/94/1/) the National Cattle Congress “is a sixty acre cattle fairground that had been transformed into a sort of concentration camp or detention center.” Converting 23 trailers into courtrooms, Homeland Security forced its staff and interpreters to work overtime. On a white collar assembly line that lasted from 7A.M. to midnight, the Fed “fast tracked” workers who, since they often could not read and write, heard interpreters offer this deal.

          Admit that you used a false social security card (five months in jail) or plead guilty to “aggravated identity theft”( a mandatory two years in jail); in essence, even though you cannot read and write, you would admit that you deliberately stole the social security identity from an individual who did not know that he had been robbed! As Camayd Freixas explains, of the 983 cards examined by the authorities, only one “happened to coincide by chance with an (actual) reported identity theft.”

    Confused? So were the workers. Therefore, lawyers who each represented 17 clients had the interpreters explain that, since aggravated identity theft meant far more time in jail, the worker needed to accept the lesser charge and move the line along. Fast tracking resembled the kind of justice meted out in Guatemala, so as the workers sometimes pretended to read the charges, they “signed” the documents with a comment like this. “Your honor, you know that we are here because of the needs of our families. I beg that you find it in your heart to send us home before too long, because we have a responsibility to our children, to give them an education, clothing, shelter and food.”

         Legally the Judge had no choice. Morally, he made this comment. “I appreciate the fact that you are very hard working people, who have come here to do no harm. And I thank you for coming to this country to work hard.”

     Reading this comment, I was reminded of another found at the Presidential Library of Ronald Reagan. Considering –twenty-five years ago- a possible legalization of 3 to 6 million workers, the President noted that he did not want to reward people for breaking the law. In addition Ronald Reagan “did not want to run the risk of corrupting people who for the most part revealed a strong devotion to the work ethic.” If he amnestied them into America, they could be eligible for welfare; perversely, America would be corrupting the Mexicans whose presence allegedly corrupted the country that allowed them to work so hard.

   Here are two indisputable facts. First, the Latinos arrested in 2008 and in 1982 are, overwhelmingly, hard working, family centered men and women. Second, a memo sent to President Reagan by his Attorney General indicates that, even in 1981, more than 75% of the illegal immigrants worked in foul secondary industries like meat packing. We have relied on illegal labor for more than eighty years but, rather than embrace the facts, we punish the hard working people on whom we rely.

     It is, for example, supreme hypocrisy to complain about the illegal workers and forget the yeoman’s work they are doing to shore up the Social Security system. Money deducted from false social security cards goes into the “Earnings Suspense File”. Camayd-Freixas notes (and he is quite correct) that that fund now contains more than $600 BILLION. Social Security happily blends the illegal money into the legal accounts, with this result: People like the workers at Postville “currently subsidize the retirement of legal residents at a rate of $8.9 billion a year.”

      President Reagan worried about corruption. The problem was that he focused on the wrong group. It is our senior citizens who are receiving welfare; more specifically, a senior who lives in Phoenix, basks in the sun, and complains about the illegals better hope that the Guatemalans keep on working. Otherwise Phoenix may dry up as fast as the senior’s social security check.

   Here is what we need to do: Listen to Senator Barak Obama. He asked people –all people- to accept responsibility for their children and their families. Can anybody be more caring, more responsible than a worker who, in one case, walked for forty days to cross the Rio Grande and wind up at Agriprocessors?

    On a continent that extends from Buenos Aires to Anchorage, these are the best of Americans.

   And the sooner we accept that fact, the sooner we will follow the advice of Rabbi Henry Karp. In a May 31^st, 2008 letter to Davenport’s Quad City Times, the Rabbi noted that “all Americans with immigrant ancestors should be joining together in efforts to bring about just and most important of all, humane immigration law reforms. We should dedicate our efforts to the memories of our ancestors who came to these shores and provided us with the good lives we enjoy today.”

   In my own case, my father arrived in 1916. I do not know if he was legal or illegal. He never learned to read and write; and he worked in a factory for 43 years so that I had the opportunities he never enjoyed. One way to respect this legacy is to embrace –with an amnesty- the hard working immigrants who want to do for their kids what my father and mother did for us.