How Likely Is Gun Control in America?

Like many Americans, I have been consumed over the past days by the senseless murder of innocents and the American love affair with weapons. Like many who have spoken out recently about the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in my heart I too believe that gun control is the only answer.

But as a rational observer of American politics I do not see a realistic scenario in which guns will not continue to be an ordinary and familiar element in our lives. Keep in mind that the 2nd Amendment speaks directly to weapons that would be used to support a militia, in other words, an Army. Thus, assault rifles are precisely the type of weapon the 2nd Amendment wants to have in the hands of citizens.

But, the only legitimate first step, repealing the 2nd Amendment, is not realistic, not with so many Americans opposing such a move. With weapons already in the hands of the citizenry numbering in the hundreds of millions, effective gun control is not much more than a pipe dream. Physically, those existing weapons have been made to last for 100 years or more and would almost certainly be grandfathered into any gun control legislation that may pass. Those weapons will not disappear from our lives — their confiscation is unthinkable — no matter how weapons are restricted in the future. How can they be controlled? Not by any scenario I believe is politically feasible.

Americans should admit that we live in a country where gun ownership is worshiped and guns themselves are objects of quasi-sexual fetishistic fantasies and dead children are quickly forgotten by most, with the exception of close relatives and friends. That’s the harsh lesson taught by Columbine High School and too many other examples.

The bottom line concerns a realistic scenario I see that’s based on our recent history with gun violence. People will rant and rage over the bloody slaughter of innocents for a few months, demanding politicians pass meaningful gun control legislation while the powerful gun lobby wraps their arms around politicians from both parties and pressures them to protect the right of every American to own weapons. What we will get in the end is pablum that will allow both sides to declare some sort of moral victory. Then we’ll hope and pray that we've seen the last of senseless mass killings. But when it does happen, as it inevitably will, outraged voices will be raised once again for meaningful gun controls. That’s life in America, where people love their guns.

America is an “exceptional” nation favored God over all others, or so the conservatives would have us believe. Just tell me how it is that, when the far greater majority of those conservatives proclaim themselves as born-again Christians, they are such fanatical gun worshipers? Was it Jesus who told them to buy assault weapons, or 30-bullet magazines? Would Jesus arm himself to the teeth and shoot the first person who tried to break into his house or steal a loaf of bread? What in the world happened to love thy neighbor as thyself? Or turn the other cheek? Naturally, that hypocrisy fits right-wing ideologues like a glove.

So, to finally answer the question posed above, America will adopt meaningful and effective gun control when an openly gay woman Cardinal is elected Pope.

Mayan Calendar Doomsday Prediction

Oh my God. Doomsday approacheth on high. Tomorrow we’ll all wake up dead. Oh, shit! Oh shit! What to do? Should I quickly wrap up my Christmas shopping? Pun intended. Should I run to church for final absolution or shoot the pastor because he’s way too friendly with the altar boys? Should I run across the street and punch that asshole I've hated forever in his stupid mouth? What to do? What to do? I’m so confused I feel blonde.

Well, one thing for shit sure I’m not paying all those bills that have piled up from Christmas shopping. Fuck ‘em. Let’s see if those bastards can collect when I'm taking the deep dirt nap. Ha ha.

But wait. What if the Mayans were wrong? Hey, think about it. If the Mayans were so smart why didn't they kick the Aztecs’ ass? And what about Columbus and all those rapacious Conquistadors? Why didn't the Mayans sink the Spaniards’ boats and engage in a little creative cannibalism they were famous for? Maybe the Mayans were as stupid as we are and didn't know shit about shit.

Still, doomsday is doomsday. So, after giving it a lot of thought I’m gonna hedge my bets. Tonight I’m going to bed with a crucifix in one hand and a miniature plastic Mayan calendar in the other that I bought off some Chinese guy in Chichen Itza for one-third the going rate. Maybe one will balance out the other and I’ll wake up in a brave new world with Winston Smith sitting on my bed. It could happen.

What Dave Brubeck Meant to Me.

It was somewhere in my late teens (1961-1962) that I discovered Dave Brubeck. At that time in my life I was mostly listening to classical music and was transitioning from regarding Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven as my drop dead favorites to Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Shostakovich. I was starting to really dig dissonance and rhythmic atonality.

Of course I had heard the Take Five single on the radio and thought it was terrific. But, when a friend who also was into classical music told me that if I liked the counterpoint in Bach and Mozart I should buy Brubeck’s album, I ran out and bought it. And immediately fell in love with every track on the album. I was hooked, big time, by the incredible, almost indescribably pulsating, complex rhythms that the Quartet generated (especially by Paul Desmond’s soaring interpretations of Brubeck’s chords). That first listening was almost a religious experience; I'll never forget the thrill of hearing Blue Rondo a la Turk or Pick Up Sticks for the first time.

From that moment the Dave Brubeck Quartet was my favorite jazz group. Well, followed very, very closely by John Lewis’s fantastic Modern Jazz Quartet and then by Stan Getz's great tenor sax.

What wasn't obvious to me then but is in retrospect was that at least part of my admiration for and fascination with Brubeck was his insistence on playing with an integrated group, first in the Army during WWII and later with Eugene Wright as his bassist. When Brubeck cancelled a number of engagements in the early 1960s at concert halls and college campuses because he refused to appear without “The Senator” on bass, I was pumped up by his principled stand and his refusal to let money overrule his convictions. It matched my personal commitment and felt exactly right.

Brubeck’s stand was an affirmation of the role art can play in the real world, especially if artists are committed to living their principles. It somewhat counteracted the searing revulsion I felt for the morally challenged assholes in Hollywood, especially Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, who made sure actors, writers, and directors were blacklisted and denied employment in the field because of their political beliefs or associations, real or imagined. Brubeck had the courage of his convictions and I loved him for it. Of course, his music made that all the easier.

America without Romney as President

So, exactly what will America be like now that the Mittster is dragging his whipped butt back to wherever it is he and Ann have decided to live with their hundreds of millions in the lap of luxury? Let’s explore those things, starting with ripping down the famous signs that boast “We Built It!” and brag that “It’s a great time to be Republican.” Can I have an AMEN, brothers and sisters?

Right up front I want to be brutally honest. With this election America is rolling asshole over elbow straight downhill to perdition. Sweet Jesus, save us from our sins.

In entire Red States, like Tennessee and Utah, the old white Republican guys line one side of the fence staring daggers at America’s future: the young, Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians, and women of all ages. Diversity, brother, it’s all about diversity and there’s a lesson yet to be learned by the GOP.

The worst is we will live in a world of creeping liberalism where marijuana is legalized, gay marriages are accepted and homos aren’t treated like the repugnant moral scum they are, and workers have the right to unionize. In short, we have resoundingly reelected a president (Electoral College votes, of course) who will accelerate the nation’s decline into the black hole of secularism. No racism is meant by that comment. Really.

The liberals will drag our country’s great name into the barnyard stink and slime of ordinariness. America will no longer be regarded as truly exceptional, a shining city on a hill — a place apart with a better way of life, one to which all other peoples and nations aspire, which is the way it should be. Now, we’ll be ordinary, plain vanilla ordinary. Just another Westernized country with kids who can’t do math and don’t know science from shit. Oh, the sinful shame of it all. Why, oh why has God abandoned us to the Democrats and given us the arid desert instead of sweet dessert?

Sob, sob. Obamacare will never be repealed. We’ll weep salty tears and have to live with the frightful prospect of covering 48 million uninsured, with making sure people with pre-existing conditions won’t be hosed by health insurance companies, and infants and children can stay on the WIC Program. Catastrophes one and all for what should be a Red State nation that believes in the power of rugged individualism and fuck the losers.

No longer will vigilant patriotism be a must — America, right or wrong. America first. America, land of the free, home of the brave. America, love it or leave it. And now that Romney-Ryan are history, the federal government won’t be able to emphasize law and order to control the unruly, lawless, free-thinking, and godless masses. But, perhaps worst of all, a Republican President and Vice-President won’t be there to remind all of us that chaste, spiritually minded, and religious people are vastly morally superior to those who are not. Oh, the bitter loss.

Of course, the strong Republican women who voted for Romney en masse, those who are the type of “feminist” who believes in what they call the “natural order of the household,” will continue to volunteer, build wonderfully meaningful scrapbooks, make red-white-blue quilts for their boring colonial houses, and exult in “Godly Life” weekend getaways with female friends and their look-alike, milk-white skinned daughters with blond hair and long flowing dresses. A guess is Republicans never made the connections drawn by Ira Levin in Stepford Wives.

Well, at the very least we Godless progressives know that eventually the devout Republicans will swallow their tears, choke back the rising vomit, remember their Tea Party Christianity, and drop to their knees to pray for their misguided fellow Americans. Who against all that is right and holy committed the grievous sin of voting for Obama and other black-hearted Democrats like Claire McCaskill and Elizabeth Warren. What they won’t do for certain is stop listening to assholes like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the murder of crows hanging around Fox News. Some things take a while to change. Other things just take longer.

The Missing Ingredient in American Politics

Note that this post first appeared in the St. Louis Suburban Journal on 10-24-12

When I was young I loved to watch my mother bake all kinds of desserts. Not much time passed before I was asking if she would teach me; and so, eventually, she did. Since I was an independent sort, it wasn’t long after that I boldly insisted I was ready to bake a cake from scratch without her help. Although reluctant, she finally agreed and wrote out the list of ingredients.

I eagerly donned one of her aprons and got busy measuring, pouring, mixing. And then I waited anxiously, not able to open the oven in fear of spoiling all my hard work. But when the pans came out the cake was flat. I forgot to add baking powder and the batter hadn't risen. The cake was ruined.

A similar situation has developed today with American politics. The polls reveal that people across the country have very low opinions of politicians. For example, a Gallup poll on Confidence in Institutions found Congress ranked last out of the 16 institutions rated and half of the people polled said they had "very little" or "no" confidence in Congress.

Most of those disgruntled people would probably find comfort in Samuel Clemens’s famous quip, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Or with that consummate politician, Ronald Reagan, who hit the nail on the head when he said, “Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

Something vital is missing in our relations with our elected leaders. From my point of view that missing ingredient is trust.

Most people I talk to in West County, Republicans and Democrats, express uneasiness at the role big money now plays in election campaigns and in Washington. Getting elected to national office takes enormous campaign chests, so aspiring politicians cozy up to people with money and brazenly hold their hands out. We all know where that leads. Joe Lieberman has been accused of being a shill for the insurance industry. Chris Dodd was roundly criticized as Wall Street’s front man. And George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were attacked for being in bed with the energy industry. No small amount of truth resides in each of those characterizations.

Of course, the ridiculous promises politicians make and the out and out lies they tell about their opponents during election campaigns stretch the trust factor well past the breaking point. I mean, does anyone really believe the nonsense you hear crawling out of the mouths of politicians on the make? Today, lying in political campaigns is a must, especially given an electorate that does not demand honesty and integrity from candidates. It’s almost as if most Americans no longer care that they are being lied to if the lie strengthens their preconceptions.

Congress made the trust problem worse when they exempted themselves from Social Security and Medicare and created retirement and healthcare programs for themselves that are shockingly generous. How can you believe in someone who has purposely elevated himself above life’s uncertainties but has the nerve to tell you that he understands your plight? Get real. Add to that the role lobbyists play today in influencing the passage of legislation and you have what has become a nearly perfect storm of voter mistrust.

Here’s how things have changed in my lifetime. Although I didn't always agree with Senator Jack Danforth, I greatly admired and respected him. I was convinced that if he told voters something it was because he believed it. I looked up to Danforth because of his unimpeachable integrity. But he’s long gone from office and couldn't be elected in today’s political climate. To top it off, a few months ago we learned that Senator Olympia Snow, always a voice of reason, is retiring. She and Susan Collins are two of the few moderates in Washington and now Snow, like Danforth, will also be gone.

I don’t have a magic formula for putting that missing ingredient back into national politics, not with rivers of money flowing into election campaigns from sources that the Supreme Court has allowed to hide under the cloak of anonymity. To find a solution acceptable to both parties, Republicans and Democrats would have to sit together and hammer out a meaningful compromise. No one who follows current events believes that will happen soon, not given that recent polls show the gulf between Republicans and Democrats has never been wider. How sad for all of us that an essential ingredient in representative democracy seems destined to stay missing well into the foreseeable future.

Why Global Warming Will Triumph

Last week something happened that I came to realize represented why I'm absolutely convinced modern culture as we know it is doomed. Naturally, I'm thinking here about the coming catastrophic effects of global warming.

What happened was a 40^th birthday party for one of my daughter's best friends, a lovely young woman I'll call Katie, which of course is not her real name. The celebration was held at a local, up-scale, private country club to which Katie and her husband belong. It is, I must admit, an organization that would not have me were I so foolish as to apply for membership

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The club and its golf-tennis-swim facilities are situated in the midst of a sprawling, park-like subdivision of large single-family houses well set back from the road on expansive lots (ranging from one to more than three acres). It is a place that exudes comfort and a certain upper middle-class style, though one remarkably absent architectural charm or merit. But, if your taste runs to large, design-bereft subdivision houses you might feel perfectly at home.

But, I digress. I chanced to witness the celebration owing to my wife's sudden illness. She had been invited to participate but was trapped in her sick bed, unable to move other than to bemoan her miserable fate. So, the task of delivering the appropriately salacious card and a few well-chosen gifts fell to me.

The first thing I noticed on driving into the main country club parking lot around 2:00 in the afternoon was that all the vehicles were monster SUVs or luxury sedans made by Mercedes Benz, BMW, Cadillac, Jaguar, or Lexus. My poor little Hyundai resembled Ashputtle before attending the prince’s ball.

Once in the club I went straight to the 19^th Hole but only saw some 20 or so tipsy men dressed strangely in lime green or bright yellow pants decorated with little blue whales, brightly colored ducks, or crossed golf clubs. And belatedly remembered that that watering hole was restricted to male members only (pun intended). On hearing quite a commotion from the bar I headed in that direction and spotted Katie surrounded by more than a dozen female friends in a state of considerable gaiety.

Half eaten plates of finger food and glasses in varying stages of emptiness occupied the tables and competed with stacks of opened presents. In short, the women were having a wonderful time, having started drinking at their 9:00 tee-off and continued unabated throughout the day. I delivered the obligatory kiss on the cheek, card, gifts, and my wife's genuine apologies for having to miss all the fun. After taking my leave, I walked past four or five tables of older women playing cards or just drinking and talking in the comfort of the plush surroundings.

Over the next several days I couldn't stop thinking about that experience and what it portends for our collective future. First, I must say that that club is one of some two dozen private country clubs in a metropolitan area of nearly three million people. Second, the far greater majority of the members of those clubs are upper-income and successful in their business ventures. Third, although I cannot make this statement based on anything other than personal opinion informed by several decades working as an urban planner, I am certain that the greater majority of those individuals are Republicans by party and conservatives by ideology who scoff at global warming/climate change and oppose doing anything whatsoever to combat its adverse effects, largely because they believe it doesn't exist.

But, the most critical reason that I believe people like my friends, Katie and her husband, people I genuinely care for, oppose action on countering the effects of global warming is neither their party affiliation nor their ideology but is an intense desire to remain entrenched in and deeply nourished by their comfort zone. Let's be honest. Who would not relish a life with maids, nannies, luxury cars, country clubs, elite private schools for the kids, vacations to Hawaii or Aspen (in winter), and trust funds sufficient to bail you out of trouble when the occasion arises? A life where wives don't work and husbands take off from their jobs whenever they feel like it.

Who would voluntarily give up such a genuinely comfortable and enjoyable life? I can guarantee no one in that country club would. No one. Simply asking people like that to shed their security blankets would be thought absolutely and mind-bogglingly insane. Or, far worse, socialist. And what about the millions of Americans who do not enjoy that lavish lifestyle but dream about attaining it one day and living in the lap of luxury? How likely are they to give up that dream voluntarily? What about close to zero?.

If you multiple that club times the well more than 4,000 similar institutions in the U.S. and by the many millions of Americans who want a better life you have a small inkling of the problem we face. Polls in the U.S. tell us that about 40 percent of the general population believes global warming is a hoax. The far, far greater majority of those deniers are Republican. Although I have seen no polls conducted with those who make more than $250,000 annually, I bet most of those people would be global warming deniers who would adamantly oppose reducing their lifestyles or their patterns of consumption to cut the nation’s carbon footprint. What, me sacrifice? Get real.

So, we have a national situation where all top Republicans, including Romney Ryan, oppose implementing policies to reduce our carbon footprint and a global situation where nearly two billion Asians desperately want a consumption-oriented Western lifestyle with access to energy, cars, clothing, and food in amounts commensurate with that desire, and are working hard to get just that. What those situations must lead to, since neither Americans nor Asians are likely to change their desires, is global geo-engineering “solutions” to climate change and all the unintended consequences we are unable to foresee. The critical assumption, of course, is that those currently poorly formulated “solutions” will work fast enough, meaning within the next 30 to 40 years, to significantly reduce CO2 so that the worst effects of greenhouse gases can be avoided.

My bet, if one were possible, would be to go short against that assumption. But I'm 70-years-old so it's neither here nor there as far as my life is concerned because I'll be dead before the shit really hits the fan. My grandchildren and their children are another story entirely. I'm very, very happy I'll miss all that.

Thomas Sowell’s View of the Housing Bubble

As is typical of Thomas Sowell, his argument concerning the role of the collapse of the housing bubble in the Great Recession is blatantly and intentionally one-sided. According to Sowell, the federal government basically forced banks to give loans to unqualified buyers who then went into a financial nose dive and defaulted on their mortgages. He does correctly, at least in part, pin-point actions of the federal government that caused a rise in risky mortgages. But if people defaulting on their mortgages was the only problem the national economy faced, collapse of those risky mortgages alone would never have caused the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

Contrary to what Sowell writes, the causes of the Great Recession were very complex and required the cooperation of Democrats and Republicans in Congress and Presidents Clinton and Bush. Without getting into mind-numbing detail, basically what happened was the 1999 Congress repealed the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act, which regulated the way banks operated (what it did was prevent banks from gambling with their clients and their own funds). The 1999 bill that paved the way for the Great Recession was sponsored by Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas) and in the U.S. House of Representatives by Jim Leach (R-Iowa). The third lawmaker associated with the bill was Rep. Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (R-Virginia), Chairman of the House Commerce Committee from 1995 to 2001. During debate in the House of Representatives, Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) argued that the bill would result in banks becoming "too big to fail." Dingell further argued that, if passed, the bill would necessarily result in a bailout by the Federal Government. But Dingell’s voice was in the minority and the bill was passed into law in 1999 as the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act.

At nearly the same time, the federal government deregulated financial instruments/agreements called mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), credit-default swaps (CDSs), and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Specifically, in 1999, Congress passed legislation prohibiting the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency that oversees the futures and commodity options markets, from regulating financial derivatives — MBSs, CDSs, and CDOs. That deregulation, coupled with the result of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, allowed financial institutions to gamble big time by bundling housing mortgages and selling them as secure financial instruments to investors around the world. That deregulation was vigorously supported by Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and by two U.S. Treasury Secretaries, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. The head of the CFTC, Brooksley Born, resigned in protest, stating publically that deregulating exchange-traded financial derivatives dramatically increased risk to the national economy.

Shortly after that, the Federal Reserve, pushed by Alan Greenspan, kept interest rates very low, increasing the home buying trend by encouraging thousands of marginally qualified buyers to jump into the market. Add to that the federal government’s move to get more minorities in the housing market (Sowell’s argument) by loosening mortgage restrictions.

So, what most main-stream economists think happened is that banks desperately wanted to rapidly expand their services and profits and lobbied hard for massive federal deregulation. The Congress and the President(s) were happy to oblige and passed legislation that opened the door to the practices that brought about the Great Recession.

Certainly, Sowell’s one-sided idea (the federal government did it) is largely supported by conservative organizations, like the Wall Street Journal and the National Review, but are rejected by most main-stream economists. Nearly every open-minded person who has examined what led up to the Great Recession sees multiple precipitating causes, including massive federal deregulation of banks that led to an unsupervised market, Alan Greenspan’s keeping interest rates way too low in 2002-2005, federal loosening of mortgage restrictions, and the housing bubble.

Note that my brief description above doesn’t go into what happened in Congress during W’s first few years in office when additional financial deregulation laws were passed.

I must conclude with a personal observation. Real life is seldom as simple or straightforward as hardline ideologues, conservatives or liberals, want it to be.