Power Concedes Nothing

This is from a speech given by Frederick Douglass Aug 3, 1857 at Canandaigua, New York to celebrate the anniversary of the West Indian Emancipation .  It is an image of his eyes that grace the top of this page.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Buyer' Remorse

When the Truth is found
To be lies
And all the Joy within you dies
Don't you want somebody to love
Don't you need somebody to love
You better find somebody to love

I have loved this president as I have loved no other in my lifetime. For a brief moment he helped me believe, as I believe still, that the cause and the power of ordinary citizens still has a place in this world, and for that I will always love him.

The Federal employee pay freeze announced yesterday by the President is sad news indeed. It is not just that it is a meaningless policy gesture, bad politics, and bad economics. Though it is but a minor set piece of petty political theater, there is a symbolism here which is unmistakable. It is the triumph of the big lie over rationality and hope:

Here we have Eric Cantor framing the issue:

“The YouCut [The Federal Employee Pay Freeze] proposal was one of many specific spending reductions offered by House Republicans over the past two years, and we are pleased that President Obama appears ready to join our efforts.

Here is the same Mr. Cantor in an unguarded moment of imbecilic candor several months earlier(emphasis added):

From WSJ FEBRUARY 4, 2010.

GOP Chases Wall Street Donors
Data Show Fund-Raisers Begin Capitalizing on Bankers' Regret Over Backing Obama

Last week, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio made a pitch to Democratic contributor James Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of J.P. Morgan, over dinner at a Capitol Hill restaurant, according to people familiar with the matter.

At the dinner, Mr. Boehner said congressional Republicans had stood up to Mr. Obama's efforts to curb pay and impose new regulations. The Republican leader also said he was disappointed many on Wall Street continue to donate their money to Democrats, according to the people.

A spokeswoman for J.P. Morgan declined to comment.

 "I sense a lot of dissatisfaction and a lot of buyer's remorse on Wall Street," said Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.), the second-ranking House Republican and a top Wall Street fund-raiser for his party.

Buyer's remorse indeed. I want to cry.  Actually, no I don't.  I want to start kicking ass and taking names.

While I cannot blame Obama, I cannot pretend that I am not deeply disappointed. I still need someone to love. 150 years ago, as the war effort of the Union drifted sideways, Lincoln was heard to remark, “Give me a general who will fight”. Until we find such a general, we are on our own. When the power of bold speech surrenders on the field of action, the truth itself is left weak and wounded, stripped of its power. Only our faith can restore it.

I am thinking tonight of a different leader from another land and a different time, facing the full fury of the ultimate big lie:

4 June 1940

"I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation.

The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

MultiKulti

Willie Nelson has a remarkable ability to pick a line out of a song, wrap his voice around it, and deliver it into a microphone in such a way that, when it comes out of the speakers at the other end, it separates itself from the surrounding music and separates you from whatever it was you were just thinking about. It hangs there in the air long enough to sink in and register as something worth thinking about. I heard him do that the other night with this line:

“The world's getting smaller, and everyone in it belongs”.

 I've been thinking about it since.

Recently the BBC reported that Angela Merkel has declared that multi-culturalism has failed in Germany.

Here is Angela Merkel: 

“We are a country which at the beginning of the 1960's actually brought guest workers to Germany. Now they live with us and we lied to ourselves for a while saying that they won't stay, and that they would all disappear again one day. That's not the reality.

This multi-cultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other, this approach has failed, utterly failed.”

I know that there was a political dimension to this statement, but even allowing for that, I've got to say, and I don't mean to trivialize this, she doesn't seem like a very nice person. Perhaps that is too narrow and too personal. Let me say rather that she is giving voice to a spirit that is abroad in the world which shames us a species.

In the broad sweep of history, there seem to be ideas that we have of ourselves which gain ascendancy, explore their flaws and limitations on the stage of events, and are replaced in turn by different ideas. In the thirties, a tide of narrowly selfish, nationalist militarism swept a generation of young people into the maelstrom of world war. Advances in the technology of destruction have made a scenario of generalized all-out warfare unthinkable today.

The spirit sweeping the world today is a spirit of smallness and limitation in a time of unbelievable abundance. “Leave me alone” it says. “I'm having porridge now, and I don't want to be bothered with anything larger than my bowl of porridge.” You see it in nativist movements, both here and abroad, and in the tendency to ascribe poverty to the moral failings of the poor. The rich, by contrast, are intrinsically virtuous. This spirit of smallness divides, but does not conquer. It leaves us split into tiny principalities of identity, each with its own fortified castle keep. Each living in fear of encroachment by their neighbors.

Living in a multi-cultural society challenges us on many levels. We are conditioned from birth to ascribe right and wrong to almost all of the choices before us. How to do things, how we recognize personal space, grooming choices, cuisine, etc. These are the fabric of which cultures are constructed. It is natural enough that we should feel challenged when confronted by cultures other than our own.

But the truth is simple: Failure to find a way forward in a multi-cultural world is not one of the available choices.

For me, successfully multiculturalism can be summarized in two words: San Francisco.

I am a distinctly non-urban person. All of my instincts, all of my natural preferences are oriented towards rural living, but I absolutely love San Francisco. Going there is like finding an extra 300 horsepower engine under your psychic hood. It is the only place I know where you can get a taxi ride from a guy from Nairobi who has a Phd in psychology. He gave up a full professorship at Berkeley because he wanted a more direct and personal view of his subject for a book he is writing. He's married to a woman from Taiwan, who works down in San Jose as a semi-conductor engineer. Her gay brother has also come over from Taiwan. He works down on Market street as a stock analyst, but at night he plays pedal steel in a Texas swing roadhouse band.

Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but that is how it always feels when I go there. It's got all the same problems as any large urban center, but it has a population that has become accustomed to discovering that in a city full of remarkable people with remarkable histories, it is a mistake to take anyone for granted. It doesn't matter whether they are selling you coffee from a roadside stand or performing brain surgery, everybody has a story, and everybody has a position of value. Concepts of class and role and 'place' break down and personhood reigns. It is a glorious, cacophonous jumble of humanity to be celebrated and enjoyed.  If we are to have any future at all, it is our future.

“The world's getting smaller, and everyone in it belongs”.

And so it is, and so they do.

I'll leave the last word to another old hippie song writer:

“Why on earth are we here, surely not to live in pain and fear?

Why on earth are you there, when you're everywhere?

Come and get your share.”

Brief Interlude

I'm taking a short break from the software death-march that has become my life for the last couple of months. A few of weeks ago, just as we were launching into our final push toward a release date, our long delayed move to new quarters finally happened. While I was cleaning out my desk, I found an old copy of ComputerWorld which I had saved because of a letter on the then-hot topic of foreign outsourcing of IT jobs. This is from ComputerWorld March 08, 2004.

A Loss of Prosperity

In macroeconomic terms, foreign outsourcing is nothing more than profiteering on the spread between the wages and benefits paid to U.S. workers and the wages of the most desperate and vulnerable people on earth who can be herded into office buildings in Third World economies.

In political terms, foreign outsourcing is the most blatant attack on worker's rights and the most serious threat to the existence of the middle class and the Social Security system in U.S. History.

In sociological terms, foreign outsourcing will result in a dramatic polarization in U.S. Society, divided between the massive numbers who will see their livelihoods ruined by outsourcing and the wealthy few who will profit immensely from it.

Great men of the past built a society that is the envy of the world by inventing ways to increase the level of prosperity enjoyed by all. Now a cadre of intellectual and moral midgets has discovered how to profit from strip-mining that hard-won prosperity.

Pardon me and a few others if we don't celebrate their little discovery or if we regard these business experts as cynical, shortsighted, self-serving fools.

John S. Powers
Software Engineer
General Dynamics Corporation
Fairfax, Va.

As I read this now, I might quibble with the level of hyperbole particularly in the first couple of paragraphs, but other than that, I think he gets it about right.

After things settle down a little bit at work, I hope to breathe some new life into this site.

Let Them Eat Seed Corn

The other night I tuned into Chris Matthew's show and caught some low-level Heritage Foundation apparatchik defending the notion that unemployment insurance is reducing the incentive for people to find work. Chris and his other guest were doing a pretty fair job of pinning this guys ears back, but I really wanted in on the fight. This same talking point is really making the rounds.


They won't come right out and say it, but they keep implying that the long-term unemployed are simply malingerers who are using their weekly check to hide from the new realities of the job market. Maybe they think getting this line out there will help them defend the ridiculous string of votes that the Republicans have taken on this issue. This guy, James Sherk on Matthew's show kept insisting that “science” shows that with unemployment benefits “workers spend more time unemployed and take longer to find work.” He goes on to say that it encourages people to look for better jobs that pay better wages.  I don't doubt it, but more to the point, so the hell what?

I don't need a study to know that a population experiencing a famine is less likely to consume the seed corn that they need for the next year's planting if they are getting some sort of emergency food relief. I guess if the Heritage Foundation were to analyze that phenomenon, they would conclude that people suffering through a famine would rather just sit there with their hand out than rely on the resources that they already have.

I've got a friend who is an architect. He is one of the finest men I know. He's not a great self-promoter, but he is the ultimate team player. He has been out of work for about 18 months and he has just lost his jobless benefits. I imagine that if he had really hustled from day one, he could have, in fact, managed to find a job as a stock clerk or fast food cook by now, but the way things are that's hardly a sure thing. Instead, he has been actively networking with everyone he knows in the building trades. He has taken community college classes to upgrade his drafting skills to the latest software. He has gotten his LEED accreditation in the use of green technologies. He has resumed work on his Masters degree. Those are all the right moves. Snatching up the first paper-hat job he could find is not. The seventeen years that my friend has invested in his career as an architect, represent not just the seed corn of his own life, but multiplied by the millions, they represent the seed corn for our entire nation.

I know something about the cost of aiming low out of expediency from my own life. When my wife and I were expecting our first child, we moved from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City to take up a new job just as winter was closing in. Two days before I was supposed to start, my new company filed for Chapter 11 and informed me that there was no job. I have had the experience of sitting across from one hiring manager after another and trying to convince them that I really was a talented programmer who just happened to be driving a taxi to make ends meet. It is not an easy sell. You are damaged goods. I was very, very lucky that I was able to rebuild my career from that point, and though I worked very hard at it, hard work was not nearly enough. It set us back for years. It is just a fact that if we push a substantial number of our fellow citizens down that path, some of them will never recover and we will be the poorer for it.

How Have We Become So Poor?

A few weeks ago I was having lunch with my wife and daughter in a small sandwich shop. At the next table there was a man about my age. He looked to be pretty well-heeled. His appearance and behavior were not that unusual, but for some reason he has stuck in my mind. He was droning on and on about government spending and taxes and deficits. Mostly I just tried to tune him out but I kept getting drawn back in. At the end of about every third sentence he would earnestly close with the same phrase almost as if it were punctuation, “We just can't afford it anymore.” And on and on and on it went. Then the conversation shifted and he started to go on at great length about his ongoing quest for the perfect bottle of Merlot, and I thought to myself that perhaps he could afford a little more than he realized.


Contrast that with this quote from Abdul Rashid Kahn out of Greg Mortenson's wonderful book Stones Into Schools.

"All I really want for my people is a school so that we can provide education for our children. ... To achieve that, I am willing to give up all of my wealth—all of my sheep, all of my camels, all of my yaks—everything I have, if only Allah will grant this one request."

Abdul Rashid Khan is the leader of the Kirghiz tribesmen in one the most remote regions in the mountains of Afghanistan. Perhaps we could lobby to get him an appoint to Sloan School so that he could teach a new generation of business leaders about the nature of true wealth and true poverty.

There is a wonderful scene near the end of Schindler's List where Schindler is looking around at his car and his jewelry and agonizing that each one of his little indulgences represent a life that could have been saved but was not. If you take that sort of thinking too far you can make yourself crazy. Life is for living and we need comedians and artists every bit as much as we need welders and computer programmers. We need some ease and some comfort and some joy. But there is some limit to the value of self-indulgence. It may be hard to define with precision, but it is there nonetheless.

How many bottles of Merlot would you trade to leave the next generation a better world?

Independence Day

It is a day to celebrate, to remember, to reflect.

We all like to feel that we are noble and nothing makes us feel more noble than invoking high-minded ideals. It is always a trap. None of us are ever as noble as our aspirations, but our aspirations protect us from self-examination better than they protect our fellows from our own critical eye.

Today we celebrate the declaration of our liberty by a man who felt himself at liberty to enslave others and enrich himself from their labor. I do not mean that as an attack on Jefferson's character. In his time, Frederick Douglass would write quite eloquently about how, even as a child, he was aware of the terrible effects of the institution of slavery on the mind and soul of the slaveholder. But I wish to use the fact of Jefferson's slave holdings as a point of departure for thinking about the Declaration of Independence and its present value for us.

1776 is impossibly remote for us. We can read all of the history that we like, but it is not really possible for us to comprehend the reality of a world in which a slaveholder could publicly champion universal human rights and be taken seriously. It was a world where women could not own property and had few civil rights. Travel and communication were glacial. My point is that when we idealize our founding moment we strip away much of the utility that it holds for us. It is easy to imagine some bright shining moment in our past when we were clearer of purpose and more visionary. If only we could recapture the spirit of that moment, all of our troubles would find solutions. No such moment has ever existed. It is only because those times are so remote from our own that we can imagine that it did. We are a nation founded as much on contradiction as on principle and both have shaped our history.

I find it enormously freeing to remember that our present times are not so different from our past. It is easy to imagine Thomas Jefferson, cloistered in a sweaty garret in Philadelphia, struggling to find the words to express the intentions of the Congress and the broader aspirations of the citizenry. We all know the words. They form a litany in our heads, but they roll far too easily off of the tongue. The words have become a convenient semaphore for our core beliefs, whatever those core beliefs may be, but we no longer struggle to find our own words or to get to the heart of every matter for ourselves. Those men were committing treason against the most powerful nation on earth. In so doing, they ceded to themselves the authority to live by their own lights. They recognized that claiming that authority was, by its very nature, a sober and sobering business. Whatever their flaws, they were serious about their business, and as their heirs, we do well to remember and honor them.

But as we struggle to live the freedoms they struggled to establish, we are heirs also to the sober business they took upon themselves. It is a mistake to rely too heavily on their guidance. We also must live by our own lights. They cannot see for us the world in which we must live. They cannot identify the opportunities before us nor evaluate the perils that we face. We can, however, remember what they taught us: It is up to us find our way. It is our right and our responsibility.

Only those things which cannot be changed are beyond the bounds of our judgment. We cannot abolish gravity or mortality and we cannot change any of the immutable failings of our nature. But what is immutable in the human character? If you consider the variety and range of human society across the globe through all of history, you would be hard pressed to define a constant more in evidence than our seemingly unlimited adaptability. What are the limits of humans to create a set of social arrangements which support Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness? It is too soon to tell. It may always be too soon to tell, but there is no rule of political or economic life to which we are bound by any force stronger than our own reason. Let us not be too quick to accept the notion that experience defines the natural limits of the possible. Things which make no sense are not our masters.

Contradiction hides too easily behind principle. Standing on principle has become very fashionable, but it degrades our internal dialog as a nation. If you believe that smaller government, lower taxes, and market forces will solve all our problems, you don't need to think seriously about the problems left unsolved or exacerbated by lower taxes, smaller government, and market forces. Believing that we should use the government to achieve universal health care, alternative energy, and the eradication of poverty does not resolve the issues of waste and misdirected resource inherent in the administration of huge powerful bureaucracies nor does it account for how the required resources will be produced. There is no magic formula for establishing a prosperous, harmonious civil society. Like a good marriage it is the product of constant effort, honesty, compromise, and commitment.

The government is not merely a particular set of institutions chartered by particular documents. It is all of the forms by which power is distributed and controlled in our society. It is law and it is convention. It is the power of monopoly and the power of wealth. It is the power of intimidation and the tyranny of misinformation. All of these forces govern our lives and we can never escape the pull of them, yet the Declaration reminds us that they are all subject to our consent and our judgment. We are the sovereigns here. We have the power to act wisely and the power to be foolish, to succeed or to fail. It is up to us, but we are working without a net.

I am not such a fool as to think that there are easy answers to our present difficulties. If there is an end to human history it will not be a pleasant or triumphal one. But there are things that are worth believing in even if they are not true¹. I choose to believe that we can do this. Everything else is negotiable.

1
Stolen shamelessly from “Secondhand Lions”