What Kim Jong-Un Wants

What does Kim Jong-Un want from this week's summit from President Trump? More than anything else, he wants what he has always wanted, like his father and grandfather before him: to split the U.S. off from its allies South Korea and Japan. The worst part is, he is already getting what he wants.

Now, I am not in any way an expert on Korea. But no Korea experts are involved, or apparently allowed to participate, in Trump's North Korea summit. Trump himself has openly refused to prepare for this summit, raving about how his first impression of Kim's body language will tell him everything he needs. [Pro tip: if you are planning to make a crucial strategic decision based on an adversary's body language, do not let the adversary know that. Too late, I understand.] That I know more about Kim Jong-Un's goals than the President of the United States is a scandal. I'm just a random person who tends to remember what he reads in the newspaper.

One of North Korea's longstanding diplomatic goals, maybe on a tactical level their most important goal, has been bilateral peace talks with the United States, meaning two-way talks, just us and them. The United States has refused, insisting since the George W. Bush administration on six-way talks instead. And for many years, we did participate in those six-way talks, refusing North Korea's requests for one-on-one sidebars. Our official reason for demanding six-way talks has been that if the North Koreans are building nuclear weapons, all of North Korea's neighbors need a seat at the table. I mean, that's true enough.

The six-party talks from 2003 to 2009 involved the U.S., North Korea, Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan. Why would we insist on the presence on Russia and China, who aren't always particularly helpful to us? Because we refused to be in a room with North Korea without South Korea and Japan there. The North Koreans could bring their friends, because we weren't showing up without ours. If North Korea wanted to talk to us, they have to talk to our regional allies, too. Because we were never hanging Japan and South Korea out to dry. That was our longstanding, bipartisan position.

Trump's two-way summit gives the North Koreans what they have long wanted: a chance to deal with us separately from the South Koreans. Just giving them that is a major concession. A lot of people have focused on the fact that giving them a presidential-level meeting is also a massive gift, and that the normal plan would be for Kim to have to earn a face-to-face with POTUS by giving concessions and having a deal almost done. But any meeting with the North Koreans that doesn't involve the South Koreans is an even bigger concession, maybe the biggest.

Kim Jong-Un wants, more than anything, to get the United States out of his potential sphere of influence. Because what he ultimately wants is South Korea. He doesn't want to negotiate peaceful reunification. He wants to unify Korea by taking the rest of it over, and the thousands of American troops in South Korea make that impossible. If he could do that without a shooting war, negotiating reunification on his terms by using the threat of military force, I think he would. But he may also like his chances in a straight military rematch with South Korea. But he knows he can't fight us. He wants us to leave, so he can use his military muscle on South Korea (and, secondarily, to intimidate Japan). This is why there was a flare-up a few weeks ago after regularly scheduled joint drills between the U.S. and South Korean military. Kim hates that most of all.

Now a normal president of the United States roped into two-way talks with the North Koreans would still not sell the South Koreans out, or the Japanese. Obama and Bush refused to hold two-way talks with Kim's government, but if they had they would have kept America's commitments to its allies clearly in mind. But those commitments have never fully entered Trump's mind. He does not value America's international commitments and instinctively dislikes them. Jis recent misbehavior at and after the G-7 summit makes that all too clear. And Trump is, unfortunately, stupid. He is more than capable of giving away Japan and South Korea's security without thinking.

In fact, he is stupid enough that he's eager to do that. He's already mouthed off about pulling all US troops out of South Korea, which would be Kim Jong-Un's geopolitical wet dream, and Trump is not smart enough to make Kim trade for that. He's talked about that as something he wants. It's like holding a summit with Fidel Castro in 1964 and suggesting, during the run-up to the meeting, that it might be easier just to get rid of Miami.

Can Trump be trusted to protect South Korea's interests? Two years into his administration, he has not appointed an ambassador to South Korea. I don't mean hasn't gotten one through the Senate. I mean, hasn't given the Senate a name. Any name. And Japan is one of the G-7 countries at which he was venting his intemperate toddler fury this week. You tell me: can a man who gets into a fight with our closest ally over milk be trusted to protect the security of our Asian allies?

Kim Jong-Un has already won. This week, he gets to find out how much he's won.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, rather than here.

Brexit vs Breakfast: Food and Free Trade

The United Kingdom officially triggered Article 50 today, meaning the two-year march to Brexit has begun. The UK is leaving the European Union, and leaving without any concessions, any deals, any accommodations. It's the "hard Brexit." There are many reasons this is a bad idea, but let's keep it simple: the United Kingdom cannot feed itself.

Britain does manage to grow somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the food it eats. The last numbers I saw were 54 or 55 percent. So better than half, but not nearly self-sufficient. And Britain does export some food and drink (read: beer), exporting things that its farmland and climate are good for and importing other things that it can't grow, or can't grow well. (If there are any British grapes, there should not be.) But the UK imports more than twice as much food as it exports. Britain depends on imported food from its neighbors, and has throughout its modern history.

Why is this? Because Britain's population is too large for Britain's own farmland too feed. Too many people on too small an area, with a good chunk of that area unfarmable. (Britain has plenty of lovely mountains.) They couldn't feed themselves if they tried. In fact, they have been trying, very very hard, and they can't.

This is not a question of farming more land: just about all the arable land is being farmed already. England has no field untilled, no stone unturned. And it is not a question of efficiency, because British farmers are already incredibly efficient, already wringing the absolute maximum yield from each acre. That they can feed more than half their massive population from that amount of land is actually pretty impressive. They cannot do better than they are already doing. In fact, they're getting close to some ugly short-term/long-term tradeoffs, where they could increase this year's harvest by a few percent at the cost of making the land less productive later. That is not a way out of their problem.

Now, the British are obsessed with British farmers. UK supermarkets slather their products with labels for British beef, British cream, British etc. etc. But that obsession just masks the basic problem that Britain doesn't produce enough beef, butter, and so on. The imperative to buy and cook home-grown products functions to distract the public from the larger problem that there's not enough home-grown food.

Likewise, British farmers are heavily subsidized by the EU, and this deal -- or rather, complete lack of deal -- kills those subsidies, which may or not be replaced. So this may hurt British farmers, too. But that complicated and murky policy question is much less important than the far simpler problem of not being able to feed your own population without buying food from other countries.

Where does most of that imported food come from? All over the world, but about half of the gap is made up by European Union farmers. Remember, England's traditional breadbasket is Ireland. It's been dependent upon Irish farming throughout its modern history. (Yes, even during the Potato Famine; Ireland exported food to England during the Potato Famine, and met its quotas, while the Irish themselves starved.) And of course, England's other nearest neighbor, France, is an agricultural powerhouse, blessed with acre after acre of prime farmland. So the EU produces more than a quarter of the food the British eat.

Now, I'm no economist. But it strikes me that if your country is dependent upon imported food, you never, ever want to leave a free-trade agreement. Tariffs on agricultural goods can only drive up the price of food for your people. God forbid you ever get into an actual trade war with the people who sell your citizens at least five meals a week.

Throwing up trade barriers on food makes that food more expensive, obviously. And, free markets being what they are, making one quarter of the country's food more expensive makes all food prices rise. If Irish beef is more expensive because of taxes, then people can charge more for British beef too, and will.

This makes daily living more expensive for everybody, but it hits poorer people much harder, because more of their income is taken up on basic necessities. Rich people spend a much smaller percentage of their income on food; even if they buy more expensive groceries, or go to fancy restaurants, it's a much smaller part of their monthly budget. (Having excess money for things beyond basic needs is what being rich is.) But if, say, one-third of your monthly income goes to the groceries, a spike in grocery prices can be truly painful.

The "elites" that Brexiteers love to jeer at are not going to be hurt by this; they will still have their French wines and their long lovely dinner parties. They will just pay a small surtax on those pleasures. It's the poor and hard-working Little Englanders, the people who voted for Brexit to stick it to the London elites, who will get it stuck to them at the supermarket checkout. They are the people who are going to be bringing home less bacon, and paying more for what they bring.

If this all seems like a stupid and self-destructive idea, well, Britain has never been Europe's farming superpower. But in the EU it's become the banking superpower, making enormous money as the financial capital of Europe because the whole bloc could locate its premier financial services in one city without worrying about financial borders. And now that those borders are returning ... oh, wait. What was the plan here again?

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Typhoid Mary and the Anti-Vaxxers

The measles outbreak in Southern California has been generously made possible by California law's "personal belief exemption," which allows adults to refuse vaccinations for their children or themselves based on their so-called "personal belief" that vaccines cause autism. Here "personal belief" is extended to include not simply religious and moral teachings -- the question here isn't that religion teaches that vaccination is morally wrong -- but factual errors. This allows people in Orange County, to construe medical fallacies as "belief." So it's time for a short history lesson about Mary Mallon, who went down in history as Typhoid Mary, and her commitment to her personal medical beliefs.

About a hundred years ago, some doctors told Mary Mallon that she was carrying the germs that cause typhoid fever. She had no symptoms, because she herself was immune to the disease (she might have had it when young and survived). But, the doctors told Mary she was a typhoid carrier, one of the first ever discovered,who was infected with the disease and could infect others, even if she never felt sick herself. Mary didn't believe them.

After all, she wasn't sick. She was never sick. She certainly didn't have typhoid fever. So how could other people get typhoid fever, which she didn't have, from her? It made no sense. She preferred that the doctors go about their own business and let Mary get back to her own. Mary didn't believe in the idea of a "disease carrier." More broadly, she didn't really accept the whole germ theory of disease. It just didn't make sense to her.

So Mary just kept on doing what she was doing. Which was working as a cook.

Of course, everywhere Mary worked, numbers of people who'd eaten her food began coming down with life-threatening cases of typhoid, and a few of them actually died. This was how the doctors had originally found Mary and diagnosed her as a disease carrier: she was the one person who had worked in every kitchen involved in a mysterious string of dangerous typhoid outbreaks. But what could Mary do? She didn't understand why this kept happening, but it clearly wasn't her. She was healthy as a horse. She just needed to keep looking for another kitchen job. She kept finding them.

Did I mention that Mary didn't believe in washing her hands before preparing food? Mary didn't see the point. She wasn't sick, so what could happen?

Eventually, Mary was put in enforced medical isolation; the legal mechanism might have been a little hinky, but eventually the authorities couldn't let her keep going from cooking job to cooking job and infecting people. (At least three people Mary cooked for over the course of her career died; there may have been more.) They finally decided that Mary Mallon did not have the freedom to disbelieve the doctors if she was putting public health at risk. Her personal belief that she was not infectious was outweighed by the fact that she kept infecting people.

After a few years of forced isolation, they let Mary out. They had trained her for a new job, as a laundress, which was basically safe. As long as Mary didn't prepare food for people, everything would be okay.

But Mary preferred cooking, and it paid better than the laundry did. So after a while she took an assumed name and began hiring herself out as a cook.

After continued outbreaks, they put Mary back in isolation for the rest of her life. Was this an infringement of her liberty? Certainly. Her liberty was taken away from her entirely, because she insisted on endangering other people. What Mary believed, or refused to believe, was ultimately not the point.

I've been thinking about Mary a lot lately, because of the anti-vaccine movement. Our culture gives a lot of deference and liberty to people's beliefs, and rightly so. But refusal to believe a scientific or medical fact is not a belief. You can believe that God loves everyone, or that the good in human nature outweighs the bad. You can believe that God doesn't want you to eat cheeseburgers or shellfish. But you are not free to believe that mental illness is caused by sleeping in the moonlight. You are not free to believe that eating pork causes leprosy, or that fluoride in the municipal water supply is a mind-control drug. You are not free to treat your child's case of flu with bleeding or leeches. These are not beliefs. These are mistakes. They might be harmless mistakes. But if they grow to the point that they endanger others around you, you lose any right to them.You are not free to smoke in an enclosed public space because you believe that smoking has nothing to do with cancer. You are not free to have unprotected sex after an AIDS diagnosis because you don't believe that AIDS is sexually transmitted. You are not free to drive your infant around in a car without a car seat; medical evidence has accumulated to the point where that decision has been legally taken out of parents' hands.

There is a deep American conviction that we are entitled to our beliefs. But this is true for things that are ultimately beliefs because they cannot be tested for truth or falsehood. "Jesus loves me" or "Our people were singled out by God" are not testable beliefs in the conventional sense. They are choices of perspective. "MMR vaccine causes autism" is not a belief of this kind. It is a claim of fact that can be tested. And those tests have proved it false. We are entitled to our own values. We are not entitled to simply make things up. That was Typhoid Mary's mistake.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Shakespeare "Authorship Debates" and Amateur Scholarship

So, just in time to ruin my New Year's celebrations, Newsweek has seen fit to publish a credulous article trumpeting the old who-wrote-Shakespeare conspiracy theories. I won't give Newsweek a link, but you can click through Amanda Marcotte's smart takedown at Rawstory if you're curious. The original piece is full of breathless non-facts like "Nobody ever recognised Shakespeare as a writer during his lifetime" [except for at least three dozen separate individuals, writing both in print and manuscript, because Shakespeare was famous]  "and when he died, in 1616, no one seemed to notice" [except the six different poets who wrote memorial verses for him]. Apparently you can always say, "there's no evidence" even when there is evidence.

Now, I'm on record about this question on this blog, and under my professional name, and I've been quoted about it in a major newspaper, so I don't want to belabor the key facts here. As the above example suggests, this isn't really a debate about facts anyway. But this phony debate often gets cast as insiders vs. outsiders, the stuffy Shakespeare establishment, with all the PhDs and whatever vs. the free-thinking, imaginative amateur scholars. So I'd like to clarify a few things about how academic and amateur Shakespeareans work.

1. Professional Shakespeareans constantly argue with each other and are rewarded for new ideas.

The standard position of the Francis Bacon/Earl of Oxford/etc./etc. fans is that "orthodox" Shakespeareans are all sticking together because we are afraid of new ideas. This ignores the fact that academic Shakespeare scholars argue with each other constantly about any question that can reasonably be disputed. Winning arguments with each other is how we get ahead in our careers. And winning an argument that brings in a big new idea, or overturns an important old idea, is the gold standard. The academic Shakespeare establishment isn't a conspiracy. It's a boxing ring.

This is one of the reasons that academic writing can be hard for general readers to enjoy: it focuses on highlighting the new idea that the writer is putting forward, rather than the ideas that the reader might find most interesting. Something that's interesting to you as a reader but that every scholar's agreed on for the last fifty years won't get much attention, while today's new idea, even if it's quite small, will get the most attention. And because every argument a scholar puts forward is liable to being torn apart by other scholars, scholarly writing tends to be carefully hedged and to carefully shore up even pretty small issues so that they don't give another critic an opening. That's another reason academese is hard to read.

I don't write my scholarship to highlight how much I agree with more established Shakespeareans. It's just the reverse. I once criticized something written by the then-head of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (whom many Oxfordians especially dislike) so, ah, energetically that I was publicly accused, in print, of having been "unfair" to him. (Of course, I don't think that I was unfair, but hey, to offend and judge are distinct offices.) Scholarly writing demands pointing out where other scholars are wrong.

A member of the "Shakespeare establishment" who could make a strong case that Shakespeare's works had been written by someone else would stand to benefit enormously. Even if it weren't a completely bullet-proof case, the rewards for making a reasonably strong case, opening room for legitimate doubt, would be huge. You'd immediately become a major player in the field. If I thought I had the evidence to back up a case like that, you'd better believe that I would make it. And so would a lot of other people like me. Yes, that would mean publicly disagreeing with many important senior scholars; that would only make it sweeter.

(On the other hand, the reward for believing Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is nothing, just like the reward for believing that the sky is blue and water is wet is nothing. No one beats someone else out for a job because they both believe the same thing that no one else doubts. One of the frustrations many literary scholars have teaching beginning undergraduates is those students' deep commitment to arguing things that are so obviously true that they're not worth bringing up; making arguments like that is not what professional academics value at all.)

The reason I don't make a case for someone else writing Shakespeare is that I can't. The reason that a large group of other people inside the academic world haven't done it is that they can't either. If there were evidence to make a good case, someone would certainly be ambitious enough to make it. But it never happens.

2. Amateur scholars are welcome in academic debates.

One of my generation's two greatest historians of Shakespeare's theater is an independent scholar named Dave Kathman, who doesn't have a university job or a PhD in literature. Dave works as a financial analyst in Chicago, and does the Shakespeare-theater-history thing as a hobby. But he's enormously productive and valuable as a scholar. There's only one PhD-holder in my generation who's more important to that specific field than Dave is. (That scholar is an Oxford professor, very much part of the establishment.) Dave has found original documents that we had not known about, because he looked in archives people had not thought about trying. So suddenly, thanks to Dave, we have apprenticeship records for Shakespeare's boy actors. We can prove when they joined the company, and we can closely estimate their ages. It used to be we knew very little about the boys who played female parts, but now we know more about them than we know about some of the adult actors.

Dave doesn't get turned away because he doesn't have a PhD in our field, or because he doesn't teach college. He's been welcomed and valued, because he makes important contributions. He has also made a strong argument that changed the way we think about an important primary document from theater history, a piece of old paper that's obscure to outsiders but which turns out to underwrite a lot of other theories about what was going on in the 1590s. Dave made strong case for that document being from a different year than we thought, and belonging to a different acting company. This, of course, led to a debate. Shakespeareans debate things. And Dave was opposed by some very high-profile senior scholars who were committed to the old way of looking at that document. But they didn't pull rank on him. No one said, "I teach at an Ivy and you don't have a PhD in English, so you're wrong." They had to meet him on the facts, and some eventually had to concede that he was right.

We don't turn amateurs away because they're amateurs. An amateur who makes a strong case can win the day.

3. Shakespeare "authorship disputes" are actually OLDER than professional Shakespeare scholarship. 

In fact, the "authorship controversy" started in the days when every Shakespearean was an amateur. It didn't start until the 19th century, which is long enough after Shakespeare's death to raise difficult questions. (No one in the 16th, 17th, or 18th centuries expressed any doubts. But sometime after Shakespeare had been dead for 200 years a few people suddenly decided that it was impossible that he wrote his works.) But university courses on Shakespeare come even later still, as do doctoral degrees in English literature. Those don't get underway until the second half of the 19th century.

So this didn't start as an argument between professors and outsiders. There were no professors of Shakespeare. Everyone was an amateur (and that includes some of the greatest Shakespeare scholars who have ever lived).

But when literature departments got organized and people started writing research dissertations on Shakespeare, none of the maybe-someone-else-wrote-it stuff got used by the new group of pros. It wasn't because people conspired to exclude it. Someone who could prove that case in 1865 or 1915 would have been highly rewarded, the same way someone would for proving it in 2015. But the evidence for other candidates has never been there. And you can't get away telling your PhD adviser bullshit like "No one ever mentioned Shakespeare as a writer during his lifetime." Your adviser will know that's a lie.

The "Shakespeare authorship" arguments are like astrology: an old idea that professionals working in the field have outgrown but that stays popular with a slice of the general public. Like astrology, the Shakespeare-authorship game has trouble generating new hypotheses that can stand up to a rigorous test. And so authorship debates, like astrology, tend to recycle old claims over and over again, giving them a certain time-in-a-bottle quality. I'm having trouble finding anything in that Newsweek story that you couldn't find somewhere else by, say, 1940. In the academic world, a piece that just repeats things from decades ago is completely unpublishable. But the authorship hobbyists are more than happy to dish out the same old cabbage, no matter how many times it's been served before.

Journalists writing "news" stories about these conspiracy theories need to spin the Shakespeare-not-Shakespeare idea as somehow, well, new. But it's not new. It's a very old idea, nearly two hundred years old at this point, and it hasn't made any progress in a long time.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

Thinking Like the Plague

The Ebola panic in the American media seems uncannily familiar to me, in the worst possible way. Anyone who studies Renaissance literature for a living has read many accounts of terrible epidemics, and many stories of epidemic hysteria. (In fact, some people have written learned and illuminating books about literary responses to the plague; I can't pretend to be one of them.) Smallpox is a terrible affliction. Bubonic plague is worse. But human responses to those diseases often made them more dangerous, just as today's hysteria about Ebola threatens to make Ebola more dangerous.Of course, dangerous diseases require precautions. But there is a panicked mindset that poses as a defense against the plague but makes it works. It is plaguethink: the plague's herald and accomplice. Even when the disease itself is controllable, plaguethink can lay entire communities to waste.

Plaguethink has two basic precepts:

1. A conviction that nothing can be done to stop the disease.

2. The idea that you can save yourself by abandoning the sick.

From those two ideas often come two emotional responses:

3. A phobic horror of the infected, leading to stigmatization and poor treatment.

and, not often but not always:

4. A tendency to interpret the disease as a carrier of religious or moral meaning.

The important thing to remember is that none of these ideas has EVER been true. There has NEVER been a completely unstoppable and invincible disease. If there had been, we would not be here. There have been terrible, terrible diseases. But the "superbug" is a fantasy. Even before modern medicine was developed (and believe me, European Renaissance medicine could be spectacularly ineffective), there was NEVER been a disease where there was absolutely nothing you could do.

An epidemiologist once told me that most bubonic plague patients were not contagious. (The minority who were contagious were very contagious, but most sufferers were basically not contagious at all.) And most of those people would have recovered and lived if they just got basic nursing care, by which I mean basic 14th-century nursing care: someone to give them food and water and occasionally change their sheets. For most people that didn't happen because people decided, incorrectly, that fighting the disease was hopeless and that abandoning the sick is the way to safety.

Now, the abandon-the-sick idea perverts a common-sense idea (you need to take steps to avoid contagion) into something inhumane and destructive. "Try not to catch the disease" is reasonable. "Save yourself and let the sick die" is something else entirely. Leaving the sick to die alone, and running out of town to keep yourself safe, is unnecessary and unhelpful.

It is not even a plan. "Just don't get it yourself" is not a plan, and it will not keep you safe. It leaves the disease unfought, which keeps the disease alive and dangerous. Letting the disease flourish but hoping it stays away from you will NOT work over time. You cannot keep out disease with a wall, or a moat, or a retreat to your country house, or with a border. The disease will get around all of that sooner or later. You cannot keep yourself safe by sacrificing other people to the illness. The outbreak itself has to be defeated, or no one is safe.

I mean, Elizabeth I, who theoretically owned everything she saw unless she went to the beach, actually came down with smallpox. (Her doctors nursed her through it, and she rode it out.) even the most powerful person in the country could not throw up real barriers against contagion.

During outbreaks of bubonic plague, people would leave the sick to die alone in their houses, and abandon that house, or that neighborhood, or simply flee town. What do you think that did? It left the disease alive and kicking, ready for the country-house crowd when they got back. And, well, that epidemic was spread by rats. Deserted neighborhoods full of dead bodies didn't make that problem any better. Plaguethink helped the disease spread. It always has.

During the 1980s, you could hear people talk about AIDS with the same terrified plaguethink. Put all of the infected on an island somewhere! That would be as pointless as it would have been inhumane, but the people who said those crazy things weren't thinking of fighting the disease. They were offering it a sacrifice to appease it.

Today, the voices of plaguethink are roaring on the media every day. Travel ban! Stop the flights! But those measures are counterproductive. They will not stop Ebola. They will let it plague us. You cannot keep out a sub-cellular organism with airport screenings. Of course you can't.

If we actually want to be safe from Ebola, we have to stop the outbreak in West Africa. Letting the outbreak flourish, because we've deluded ourselves that it's hopeless to fight it, will let it remain a danger forever. And the idea that we can't fight the outbreak, which people in the media take for granted, is an obvious lie. Nigeria has contained the outbreak in Nigeria. It can be done. And in this country it really is under control, no matter how it's being spun. The epidemiological forest fire in Liberia needs to be extinguished, and that will require outside help from the United States and Europe. But it can be done, and has to be. Letting Ebola run amok in Western Africa and trying to keep it out of this country is hopeless, especially when you define "keeping it out" as zero cases a year. You wouldn't build a fire-break to keepmamwildfire away from your house but not have anyone fight the wildfire. That. Would eventually fail. So the travel ban, and the stigmatization of health workers who fight Ebola in Africa and come home, is the worst possible thing. It is the 21st-century equivalent of letting rats feed on dead plague victims. 

Worst of all is the stigmatization, the ritual humiliation, of health workers who have put themselves at risk. It is a disgraceful instance of brave and mature people being attacked by the childish and terrified. Those health workers are not a danger. They are our best hope. "Quarantining" them in medical tents without a toilet or shower makes no medical sense. (Ebola spreads through body fluids, jerks: anyone who might be carrying it shouldn't be kept away from a toilet.) Worse, it actively takes the disease's side against the health care workers. It is a declaration of unthinking allegiance to the plague.

Ebola needs to be fought. But it is not a terrible god. It is a pest. It cannot be appeased; it can only be fed and allowed to flourish. It is not a messenger of divine or immanent truth. Itis a sub-cellular parasite, a strand of DNA with an adjustment problem. It is not a great danger to the United States. But plaguethink could make it one.

Cross-posted from dagblog

Who Lost Scotland?

Today Scotland votes on independence: a fifty-fifty referendum on leaving the United Kingdom. It's gone from a long shot to a statistical dead heat, and nobody can say for sure how the vote will go. But what's certain is that Scotland's old relationship with the rest of Britain is finished. The Scottish independence movement will not just go away if they come up a couple percent short; they're never going to give up now that they've gotten this close. And if a united United Kingdom squeaks by, Scotland will expect to be given much more autonomy than it's had so far. In fact, this week the leaders of all three major parties have had to promise them that autonomy. So no matter how the vote goes, it's fair to say that David Cameron and his Conservative Party have managed to lose Scotland. They should pay a price for that.

The format of the vote is Cameron's fault. Cameron insisted that the most popular middle-ground option, so-called "max devo" or maximum devolution, which would have kept Scotland inside the United Kingdom but given it more power over its own affairs, be kept OFF the ballot. He made sure that it was an all-or-nothing vote: accept the status quo or leave the nation entirely.

I'm sure Cameron viewed this as masterful strategy: getting what he wanted by allowing no other workable option. You can choose between having it David Cameron's way and having this delicious shit sandwich. But it's backfired. Given a choice between a radical break and Cameron's status quo, many Scots would clearly prefer a radical break. Some of the most persuasive arguments I've heard  for a "Yes" vote on independence have been from people who said that what they really wanted was max devo, and that they were given no choice.

Pro tip to David Cameron: when people would rather eat a shit sandwich than spend time in your company, you're in no position to play the tough guy.

Now, of course, the danger of secession is so high that Cameron has had to troop up to Scotland with the Labour and Liberal party leaders and promise something close to max devo anyway. But many Yes voters hear that as an empty promise. For good reason, too: there are no specifics about what these "new powers for Scotland" would mean, and it's a promise to do something the voters want if the voters agree to give up all their leverage first. A promise like that isn't worth the paper it's not written on.

On the other hand, if No squeaks by, Cameron is in the position of having more or less promised to give Scotland the thing that he didn't want to give them and that he made sure was not on the ballot. So instead of exactly what he wants or an unpalatable alternative, he now faces a choice between exactly what he doesn't want and an unpalatable alternative. It's a kind of strategic masterpiece, carefully orchestrating his own defeat. It's a shit sandwich David Cameron prepared for himself, with his own two hands.

Now, most of the Scottish voters are far to Cameron's left, and he may think his Conservatives will gain politically if a whole region of Labour voters leave the country. But that's almost the definition of short-sightedness, and Conservatives who collude, even indirectly, in the breakup of the United Kingdom have failed at everything their party stands for. No one will admire a Conservative Party that allowed the dissolution of Great Britain. How could they? Churchill famously said that he hadn't become Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. David Cameron now risks being the Tory MP who presided over the dissolution of Britain itself.

I'll admit that in my heart I'm hoping for a No, and a continued Great Britain. That's not because I'm a great Anglophile. (I'm from Boston, after all, where declaring independence from Britain is considered a heroic tradition.) But history, as I best understand it, suggests that Scotland will be dominated by its larger, wealthier southern neighbor no matter what, simply because that neighbor is larger and wealthier. Union, on balance, probably allows Scotland better terms in that relationship.

Remember how England took over Scotland: the King of Scotland inherited the English throne. After many decades of anxiety that the King of England would somehow get the Scottish throne and take over the country, the reverse happened. The King of Scotland took over England, and that ultimately put Scotland under England's power. For the last four hundred and eleven years, captive England has led conquering Scotland in chains, because the fundamental power difference is about things that no treaty can change. It's political gravity: the smaller country falls into the larger one's orbit. That underlying fact won't change with today's vote. But the strength of England's hold on Scotland will, win or lose.

cross-posted at Dagblog

Fear Itself: Ukraine Edition

The single most important thing Barack Obama needs to do about Ukraine is not to panic. The single most important thing anyone else in the United States can do about Ukraine is not to panic Barack Obama. Developments in the Crimea are extremely dangerous, and that's exactly why everybody needs to calm down.

I have no idea whether or not Obama is handling this situation well or badly. Neither does anybody else who's not party to what he's telling other international leaders on private lines. How Obama is handling things is about what he's saying to people like Angela Merkel and about how those people responding. I don't think there will be any way to measure his success or failure for a while.

On the other hand, it's clear from the other side of the planet that Vladimir Putin has panicked and committed himself when he shouldn't have. There is virtually no endgame in which Russia doesn't lose more than this stupid adventure was worth. There are many endgames where things spiral out of control because Putin continues to panic or is too afraid of losing face to do what's in his own self-interest. He's dangerously unpredictable right now, and that is more than bad enough. What we really don't need right now is another nervous world leader scared to lose face. That's a recipe for a  spasm of pointless bloodshed that will leave scars on that region for a generation.

Of course, the American news media is essentially an industry of panic. So your TV is full of panicky or opportunistic people shouting loudly that Obama should panic right now. They're saying that Obama has to do something, by which they mean look like he's doing something. They complain that Obama is not tough enough, by which they mean that he does not act tough enough. Again, I have no idea how tough Obama is or isn't being behind closed doors. What I do know is that acting tough is seldom a sign of actually being tough. And acting tough because other people call you weak is absolutely a confession of weakness.

I don't know anything about the Ukraine situation. But some things are obvious:

1. There is not a military solution to this, and any military intervention will make things worse. The point is to keep the violence from expanding. And fighting a top-five military power on its own borders is not winnable; any "victory" would cost far more than it would be worth. It just can't be done.

Anyone demanding that Obama "get tough" by flexing military muscle needs to go to their quiet corner, get their binky, and soothe themselves for a while.

2. What's already happened cannot be reversed quickly.  Obviously, our preferred fantasy outcome is that the Russian troops just pack up and go back to Russia quietly, cleaning up their litter as they go. But that's just a fantasy. They may eventually leave peacefully. They will not immediately leave peacefully. Getting them out without bloodshed will take some time. Attempting to get them out by force won't be quick either, and there's no way to predict how it would go.

Anyone demanding, in essence, that Obama make this never have happened is simply freaking out, and should be disregarded.

3. No Russian leader is going to pull back an invasion force because the President of the United States tells him to. It doesn't matter who that President is. I mean, that's just crazy talk. This is not about us.

4. There is no workable solution to this that doesn't leave Russia access to its naval facilities in Crimea. Even if you, like me, know approximately zero about Russian history, you know that access to a warm-water port has been one of Russia's key strategic goals for centuries. That didn't change in the last six months, and it's not going to change in the next six months either. Putin's panicky invasion is at least partly a response to fear of losing key Black Sea bases, and that's a totally reasonable fear that he has acted on foolishly and unreasonably.

If this ends with the Russians backing out but keeping their naval bases, that is the best case scenario. Those bases are their only legitimate strategic goal. If you hear people complaining that Obama is "too soft" because this ends with the Russians keeping their main Crimean base, those people are out of their minds. If this ends with the Russians only in those naval bases, that would be the best outcome imaginable.

5. There is no military situation that panicking will not make worse.

Not panicking is not itself the solution. Obama can't turn this around simply through the force of his personal calm. But he can't do anything positive if he doesn't stay calm. This problem demands a cool head and a steady hand. Flipping out and getting emotional will only invite disaster.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Inflation and the Dragon

One of the hardest things for many people to grasp during the Great Recession has been the idea that inflation is too low. We generally talk about inflation as pure economic evil, something that could never possibly be too low. But it is.

If you say inflation is too low, some people will bring up the high inflation of the 1970s or, more hysterically, the hyper-inflation in Weimar Germany during the rise of the Nazis as proof that Inflation Is Bad. But that doesn't really make sense. Inflation is bad when it gets too high, but that doesn't make a modest amount of inflation bad. The sun is bad in Death Valley when it's 130 degrees, but that doesn't make sunshine a universal menace. 15% inflation would be a very bad thing, but that doesn't mean 1.5% inflation is a good thing. 130 degrees Fahrenheit is murderous, but so 13 degrees is also a killer. A lot of our public debate about inflation is like trying to treat a case of frostbite while people keep shouting that heat is a terrible thing and then angrily tell you a long story about forest fires.

Some of the people warning against any inflation under any circumstances either should know better or actually do. They have various political or ideological motives. Some are under the spell of fringe economic theories, like Hayek's. Some are simply seeking short-term advantages for particular business interests, such as the banking sector, that benefit directly from low inflation although the wider economy might suffer. Some, including a healthy slice of libertarians, take their economic thinking from science-fiction or fantasy media and games. The enthusiasm in some quarters for the fictional virtual currency BitCoin is partly driven by genre-fiction economics. Bitcoin imitates gold to the degree that the processing of making it is called "mining"and there is a fixed maximum that can be generated, in imitation of the old gold standard, so that eventually the BitCoin money supply will become inflexible and incapable of expansion. This will make BitCoin immune to inflation (assuming anyone accepts it at face value), and in fact make the currency deflationary. Inflation and deflation are about how much money there is compared to how much stuff there is to buy with the money; when the money supply grows too fast, prices grow too fast. If the amount of goods and services money could buy kept growing, but the money supply didn't because all the money had already been created, as in the BitCoin plan, then the existing money would become more and more valuable as prices kept dropping, as in the Great Depression. BitCoin enthusiasts think this a good idea, partly because they read books like Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and partly because World of Warcraft has been on the gold standard for years.

So I'm going to stoop to the fantasy-example level. Let me use The Hobbit to illustrate the dangers of an inflation-free world.

Tolkien's world, like most fantasy worlds, seems to feature virtually no inflation. A piece of gold is a piece of gold, with value that never ebbs. (This kind of tidiness and solidity is part of the appeal to many digital goldbugs, who like fixed numbers and find the arbitrary and negotiable nature of money 
unsettling.) In fact, Tolkien's world is probably deflationary, in that ancient treasures seem only to appreciate in value. Treasure just gets more precious with time because, as in most heroic fantasy set in an idealized pre-industrial world, there is virtually no economic progress.

The Hobbit of course features a dragon, Smaug, who is sitting on a vast hoard of gold and jewels which represents basically the entire money supply for several hundred square miles. Smaug is quite literally wallowing in his wealth. He has made a big pile of it and is sleeping with his belly on it, while everything else around him for miles and miles is a wasteland. This is all sensible enough draconian behavior because there is no inflation, and therefore Smaug has nothing to lose.

In fact, a deflationary world is excellent for Smaug. The money underneath his scaly belly only gains in value as he naps. If prices in the rest of the economy keep falling, then Smaug's gold will actually buy more this year than it would have last year, and buy more next year than it would this year. He doesn't have to worry about investing his money, or making more, because the money he has keeps gaining in value. The rich get richer by doing nothing.

But this is the problem. Deflation creates an incentive not to invest money, and not to spend it. So that money and the economic value it creates get sucked out of the economy. In deflation, you should never buy anything before you have to, because it will get cheaper the longer you wait. And you don't need to bother investing, because money just gains value by sitting there on the floor. Deflation rewards you for becoming, in the most literal sense, a hoarder. Maybe all that saving sounds virtuous. But if no one ever buys anything, then no one makes any money either. And if no one invests their money, no new businesses can grow. In fact, there is no new money; there's just the old money that gets more and more valuable while everyone else becomes poorer and poorer.

And so the area around Smaug is a wasteland, not simply because he's set it on fire at one point but because no one else can make any money or do any business. Nobody mines any more gold, or works gold into objects. Nobody grows any food. Respectable hobbits turn to lives of crime. No business can take place, because there is no capital. Capital is an accumulation of resources set aside for further investment; money that just gets piled up in a cave for years is not capital. And in fact, Smaug could only burn the area down because he had no further economic need for it. He'd grabbed all of the existing wealth and had no interest in anyone creating more, because his wealth would grow in value by itself. The Desolation of Smaug is actually the Depression of Smaug. And it's the platonic ideal of a deflationary economy: an enormous hoard of money with virtually no goods or services worth buying.

But let's imagine the basic economic conditions changing just a little. Let's say that Mirkwood, Long Lake, and the areas to their east actually have an annual rate of, say, 5% inflation. Now Smaug is still enormously wealthy with his ill-gotten gold, but he's not actually getting richer. In fact. he's getting a little poorer every year he holds onto that gold without doing anything with it. Its value is slowly leaking away. This sounds terrible and unfair to some people, who respond by inventing dumb things like BitCoin, but in fact this leakage moves people to more economically virtuous behavior.

What is a dragon to do? He could just be satisfied with his diminishing net worth, but let's face it: he got where he is because of his overpowering greed. So he has to do something. The only thing to do is to make more money. And the quickest way to do that is to leverage the money he has. If inflation is slowly eroding the value of Smaug's gold, Smaug needs to invest his gold for a rate of return higher than inflation. 

So Smaug, with 5% inflation nibbling at his tail, wants to make a 7% to 10% annual return on his gold. So let's say he hires some dwarves, Thorin and Company, to reopen the mining shafts in the Lonely Mountain and to work new gold into new, value-added cups, rings, and whatnot. He tries to sell off some of existing inventory of goldsmithery to the local Elvenking, or to the men of Long Lake, in exchange for other investments. Naturally, the dwarves don't work for free, and neither men nor elves willingly make deals that lose them money. Smaug has to work out arrangements that are profitable for everybody, so that Thorin et al. make enough to keep them motivated while Smaug nets the 7%-10% he's looking for. And suddenly, we have capitalism. The gold is no longer piled up doing nothing, but actively fueling more enterprise; it has become capital. (The "saving" Smaug indulged in in the other scenario may sound virtuous to those who equate saving and virtue, but it is literally the least capitalist behavior possible.)

Now, Smaug's various partners, employees, and trading partners are also facing 5% inflation, so they are also going to want to build their money into more money by investing in new things. And they also have to eat, so some of their wages and profits are going to be consumed. But money someone spends is money someone else earns. The area around the Lonely Mountain will have to become less lonely, because all of those people are going to need places to eat, sleep, buy new shoes, and so on. Bilbo Baggins moves to town and starts selling everyone second breakfast. And Smaug needs all that to happen, because his business can't survive without those things around. He's not going to burn it down again. Instead, his gold is going to circulate out into the community, through many hands, and fuel growth. Pretty soon, you have a bustling Lonely Mountain Economic Zone.

And in fact, this is pretty much the happy ending in Tolkien; once the hoard gets broken up and distributed into many different hands, rather than re-hoarded by Thorin, peace, love, and commercial industry abound.

Of course, if inflation gets too high, the economy suffers. If inflation is devaluing your money faster than you can make it, the economic incentives break down pretty seriously. But deflation also wrecks the incentives and ruins the economic system. A little inflation, in moderate doses, provides a compelling reason to make more money from your money, and money making more money is what makes the economic world go round. Moderate inflation is good for nearly everyone. Deflation is strictly for dragons.

cross-posted from Dagblog

The Tragedy of the Will

Twenty years ago, while I was talking politics with my friend Mike, he said that Reagan's great achievement was what he called "the Nietzschification of the Right." I didn't grasp what he meant at first, since I typically encountered Nietzsche quoted by leftist literary critics. Mike's point was that Reagan had transformed American conservatism from a stodgy, rationalist enterprise into an emotional, charismatic movement like the New Left of the 1960s. Main Street conservatism gave way to Movement Conservatism, founded upon passionate emotion and conviction. I've thought of that conversation a lot over the last two decades, through the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich, the second Bush Presidency, and the flood tide of the Tea Party. Mike's case has gotten stronger year by year. Mike himself has been furloughed in the government shutdown; he's now a government regulator.

Part of the right wing's Nietzschification has been its emphasis on the will as the decisive force in events. The current version of conservatism has become convinced, more and more thoroughly, that any reality can be reshaped by a sufficiently powerful imposition of one's will. Nothing is impossible if you just believe. But this turns out not to be true. In the actual world, reality takes belief's lunch money on a regular basis. Movement conservatism as practiced by Reagan was still largely the art of the possible; he was empowered by his movement's fervor, but mostly did what he could get through Congress and what his military forces could manage. When he did unrealistic things, like raising the deficit sky-high with tax cuts that were sold as likely to pay for themselves, the consequences either got shunted to the future (because Reagan's huge national debt would eventually be someone else's problem, i.e. ours) or borne by people without any political muscle to fight back, such as the mentally ill or the homeless. He ignored the consequences he could afford to ignore. But when he lost some Marines in Beirut, he pulled the Marines out. He didn't try to will the situation to his preferred result.

By the second Bush presidency, much of the Republican party had lost its ability to make that distinction. The Iraq War is nothing if not the disaster of policy makers who felt they could reshape the world simply by willing it. This is the period during which a White House source talked derisively about the "reality-based community" and ranted about how the Administration was "creating new realities." That's the force-of-will worldview right there. And you heard an enormous amount about will during the Bush II years. Military strategy was often cast as about demonstrating sufficient amounts of will, as if once our enemies realized we were serious, nothing else would matter. (This of course leaves out the possibility that our military enemies might themselves bend intense willpower toward achieving their goals. Since our primary enemies were hardened religious fanatics, that was more than a possibility.) This led Matt Yglesias to coin his phrase "the Green Lantern Theory of Foreign Policy," after a comic book superhero who could do anything with sufficient willpower. The last decade demonstrated just how poorly that theory worked.

Now the conservatives in the House are not merely trying to impose their will over policy realities, but over the reality of the political process itself, as if they could guarantee a victory over Obama simply by being more committed to the goal. They have made demands and not gotten what they demanded, and they have no plan but to stick to those demands. That's it. They ultimately believe Obama will cave because the power of their belief itself will make him cave. They don't have any other plan, and they have no endgame. Recently, some Republican senators from swing states angrily asked Ted Cruz what his strategy was, and he answered, apparently unconcerned, that he did not have a strategy. When this provoked his fellow Republicans to vocal rage, Cruz allegedly responded by calling them "defeatists." Think about the mindset that reveals. Someone with no game plan at all, someone who has no idea of how to try to win, takes the suspicion that he will therefore not win as a sign of a character flaw. Those who expect to lose simply because they cannot see any possible way to win are defeatists. Winners, evidently, do not need plans in Cruz's view of the world. They just need to believe in themselves.

That the Republicans, and especially the Tea Party wing of the Republicans, might actually suffer a political defeat seems to strike them as inconceivable. Their plan is to will themselves to victory. The fiscal and political health of our nation is in the hands of people too unrealistic even to calculate their own selfish chances. They are not unrealistic by chance, but by design. They are not simply poor gamblers, bad at estimating their odds. They are opposed to realism on principle. Realism is just defeatism. They are committed, more than anything, to the primacy of will over reality. That is the beating heart of their value system. To accept facts that they cannot change would be a betrayal of their most important principle. To do so would leave them lost and rudderless. Of course they can't make concessions to reality, let alone to Barack Obama. They cannot bring themselves to concede that "reality," as we know the term, even exists.

cross-posted from Dagblog

God Bless the National Debt

cross-posted from Dagblog

Let's get one thing straight: without a national debt, there is no national defense. This has always been true.

We can all sputter righteously about the evils of borrowing and debt, but a United States government that did not borrow would either have to do without any military at all or else make do with a tiny, ill-equipped military with troops who almost never got their pay, which is what we had before the Washington Administration. Access to credit has always been central to effective government operations, and especially to effective military operations. Gimmicks like "debt ceilings" and "balanced budget amendments" not only threaten the effectiveness of basic, everyday governance but make the government completely incapable of responding to an emergency.

Alexander Hamilton, our first Treasury Secretary, understood how important it was to finance government operations, because he had served at Valley Forge, where American soldiers went without food, without blankets, and without shoes. Hamilton did not blame the British for that suffering; he blamed the Continental Congress and he was right. (Congress was also to blame, after the Revolution, for refusing to pay the veterans of Valley Forge the pensions they had been promised. Next time you hear a "principled conservative" rhapsodizing over the Articles of Confederation, that's what they're rhapsodizing over.)

Hamilton (and Washington) understood that this was no way to run an army or a country, which is why they supported the Constitution, and why Washington backed Hamilton's program to put the nation on a sound financial footing. That footing required America to pay its debts, but also to contract them; nationalizing the debt, assuming the individual war debts run up by the thirteen states, was a key element in the program. God bless the national debt; it is part of the legacy of the Founders, and we'd be in trouble without it.

Of course, our national debt has grown much larger since FDR's presidency, an increase which is generally associated with New Deal social programs. But the largest New Deal program still kicking, Social Security, has taken in $2.6 trillion dollars more than it's paid out. (Social Security only "contributes to the deficit" to the extent that the trillions that have been taken from it for other purposes will need to be repaid.) But it was also under FDR that the United States went from having a fairly small standing army to having a huge, permanent military establishment. We did not demobilize after World War II as we did after previous wars. Instead, we built a global military bent on maintaining a significant technological edge over the rest of the world. That takes money. More than money, it takes financing. You don't maintain a fleet of superb fighter planes, or train people for Seal Team Six, by waiting for next month's withholding taxes to come in. The Army, Navy, and Air Force that we've had since the Forties are only possible because we undertake public debt.

The public's power to borrow is most important in emergencies, when there are pressing needs that simply can't wait. If we are ever attacked by a foreign power, we need to win the war first and pay for it later, just as we did during the Revolution. You don't wait to repel an invader until you've saved up for ammunition; if you do, it will be the invader collecting next year's taxes anyway. The same goes for responses to terrorist attacks or natural disasters. Cleaning up September 11 could not wait until the next April 15. Hurricane relief can't wait until we've moved other things around in the budget. And when the Mississippi floods, you have to stop the waters while they're rising, not when you've saved enough in this or that government account.

If politicians feel that the government debt has grown too high, they should consider raising revenues to pay for the programs they've voted for, rather than playing shenanigans with arbitrary "debt ceilings." (The debt ceiling doesn't prevent Congress from putting the government into debt; it just prevents the Treasury from issuing the bonds that keep the country running. It's like sending your kids to the market for a hundred dollars of groceries, handing them forty dollars, and forbidding them to let the store put the rest on account.) What the "debt ceiling" does is prevent the government from responding appropriately to emergencies when it's too close to whatever the artificial magical number is. What would we have done if, God forbid, there had been an earthquake and tsunami in California last month, when the Treasury had officially "exceeded its borrowing authority" and Congress was dithering around? Making it illegal to borrow for present needs, no matter the severity of those needs, is reckless and irrational.

And what would a federal balanced budget amendment do, except render the federal government permanently unable to respond to any event that hadn't been explicitly written into the budget eighteen months in advance? Surely, no one can believe that a "balanced" annual budget would not have every possible penny of the year's revenue spent in advance. The political process would demand that all of the year's revenue be spent, either directly or in tax rebates; if it would really take a Constitutional amendment to keep lawmakers from spending more than that, we should always expect that they will spend every cent that they are able. And how then would a "Budget-Balancing" United States respond to an unexpected military threat, or natural disasters, or any other crisis? How would it be able to respond even to a sudden economic downturn, which would unexpectedly lower the government's incoming tax revenue and throw the budget out of balance in the middle of the year. Imagine, for example, that the country underwent a massive financial crisis followed by a long economic slump while we had two separate armies fighting overseas. I know you can picture it if you try.

If the Republicans had passed a balanced-budget amendment back in 2005, when they had the White House and both Houses of Congress, our nation would likely have gone bankrupt in 2008, unable to deal with the banking crisis or to pay and supply our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are lucky that no such suicidally absurd provision appears in our Constitution. And we are lucky that Alexander Hamilton long ago set us on a wiser and sounder path.

God bless the national debt, I say. I am grateful for its role in keeping our country healthy, safe, and sound. And may the credit of the United States extend without blemish for a thousand years.

Longing for the End of the World

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, for most of May Christianity has been in the news. Or rather, a tiny splinter of Christianity has. The leader of a tiny religious organization predicted the Rapture on May 21, and there was lots of news coverage.

It was all actually very standard: a strange fringe belief held by a small minority of Christians dominated the news, mainstream Christians were left out of the discussion entirely, there was a lot of joking and teasing about the strangeness of the strange belief (I'll admit to doing some), and then there was the inevitable complaint that the teasing amounted to persecuting of Christians. To this I say: no one likes being teased but, hey, it's not the end of the world.

The belief in the Rapture, which holds that a tiny minority of God's favorites will be taken directly to Heaven before the difficulties of the End Times (presumably so they don't have to suffer for their faith or do anything to help other people during a time of terrible suffering) is a new idea that's emerged over the past century or so. It was entirely unknown to any Christians for eighteen or nineteen centuries and is still completely foreign to the beliefs of most Christian groups. And yes, the people who espouse this belief all claim to derive it directly from the Bible, in a plain-and-open reading which somehow no one else (including St. Jerome) was smart enough to see for nearly two thousand years. I guess the rest of us must not be reading the text, um, directly enough.

If I seem grouchy, it's not so much the belief in the Rapture that's annoying me but the habit that many small, divisive and extremist groups have of referring to themselves simply as "Christian" as though they were the main body of believers rather than a very, very small sub-group with thirty parishioners in Wichita. When you're that small and special, you need a special name. At least the Branch Davidians admitted they were a branch, and not the whole tree. On the other hand, the fringe preacher in Minnesota who denounced Barack Obama as an unbeliever while giving the legislature's daily prayer had built up to his attack by talking about universal Christianity that went beyond denominations. One minute he's talking about not being divided up into Lutherans and Calivinists and "Wesleyans," and then, BAM! he's throwing the President of the United States out of the universal body of Christianity. It's an old move by now, and I'm tired of it.

My branch of Christianity isn't expecting or predicting the end of the world, let alone trying to hurry it along. And the truth is, I'm not hoping for it. It's a flawed and problematic world, full of suffering, but it's God's world too and I like it. I'm more than happy to let God set the schedule for Armageddon, and I'm in no rush.

But I understand why some of my fellow-Christians feel differently. One of the tough things for American Christians in the 21st century is that we have a very marginal place in Christianity's grand narrative. We're much, much too late to have been there at the beginning, or any of the beginnings. We're not the founders, or the forerunners; that part of the story is taken. And we don't play the role of the persecuted martyrs, who became heroes and heroines by suffering for their faith. Some of us actually stoop to making up imaginary affronts, trying to share some of those martyrs' glory. But really, we have it incredibly soft in this country. We're not going to have to face the lions, ever. None of us are famous and glorious Christians.

Longing for the end of the world, waiting impatiently for it to arrive, is longing for a better, more prominent role in the Christian story. If you can't be there at the beginning, you can be there at the end. A big part in the last chapter is like having a big part in the first. Some Americans hope for the world to end so that Jesus will save them, not simply from their sins, but from their ordinariness. It's not enough to be an ordinary Christian, somewhere in the long middle of a millennia-long history. Some people want, need, a special role in the main story.

I understand exactly how they feel; the people waiting for the world to end are wrestling with one of the subtlest and most daunting challenges of Christianity itself: the excruciating humility it takes to accept God's love. The beautiful thing about Christianity is that God loves you, whatever your flaws. What's appalling about that is what makes you special is your membership in the human race, your identity as God's child. God doesn't love you because you're smart or pretty or funny, because you can jump especially high or are extra good at carrying a tune. God loves you because God loves you, and loves every one else for the same reason. That is very hard to take.

So we see a lot of people who profess themselves Christians, loudly, but who are driven by a need to be more than merely God's beloved. They need to be God's special beloved, the favorites, loved and chosen above others. You see this need expressed in many different ways: in the longing for the End Times, and opportunity it holds to take center stage; in the insistent declarations of persecution and tribulation by people who get religious holidays off with pay; in the Washington "Family" and its obsession with divine "anointment" of leaders; and by the belief in a very selective company of the saved (something that does come from traditional mainstream Calvinism), while the vast majority of the human race is damned. The Rapture belief combines the first and last of these; only a tiny minority get Raptured, while the rest are left behind for punishment by a God who only loves a few very special children.

In short, they believe in Nightclub Heaven, with a guest list and a velvet rope. I believe in festival-seating heaven. It's an old split among Christianity.

If I ever go to Heaven, that will be terrific. Eternal life with God is more than enough. I don't need VIP seating. I'll gratefully take standing room, the 600-millionth-odd saved soul from the left. And I hope everyone else gets in, too. I don't need God to love me more than other people. How can you love your fellow human beings without wanting what is best for them?

I'm all too competitive and ambitious in my daily secular life; I spend approximately forty percent of my working hours trying to distinguish myself from others and further my personal career. But I don't see the life of faith as a continuation of those secular values. Christianity is not about pride. And jockeying to be the brightest light in heaven, Christian tradition tells us, is a very, very bad idea.

In the end, the division between big-tent-heaven Christians like myself and VIP Room Christians is a question of how we imagine God. For me, believing in God and salvation cannot be separated from believing in that God's unique talent for wooing us to the right path. You gotta have faith in the shepherd. And a shepherd this good doesn't lose much of the flock.

Nor do I have any interest in serving a God who wants to elevate me and cast down most of the rest of the human race for punishment. That plan is not worthy of the God I was raised to believe in, and it doesn't much resemble the teachings in the Gospel.

I'm not so different from the people longing for the Rapture. I also hear whispers in my heart, too often, telling me that I am better than other people, or that I should be rewarded and those people should be punished. I've heard that. But I also know one thing: that ain't Jesus talking.

Run, Donald, Run!

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, Barack Obama has given in to the birther lunatics -- or rather, to their enablers in the national press -- and released his long-form birth certificate. Which of course, won't stop the lunatic birthers. But it's not clear that Obama actually intends it to. This is in many ways a classic Obama move. Obama does seem justly and genuinely exasperated with the press corps, but he also likes to position himself as the reasonable alternative to unreasonable opponents.

More vexingly, at least on the surface, the timing of the release gives aid and comfort to Donal Trump, who is already taking credit for the release. That's very annoying, in that it feeds the national media's silly obsession with Trump and prolongs The Donald's free-media "campaign" for the presidency. It even makes it more likely that Trump will actually put his big money where is bigger mouth is, and attempt to get on primary ballots. He's riding high, and the media is stoking his already-formidable self-regard. If Trump's grandiosity is sufficiently cultivated, he may decide that the White House is his for the spending, and start staffing up.

That result, as I say, would very annoying. But that doesn't mean Obama would be displeased. If the White House just released a document that seems to validate Donald Trump's candidacy, we might consider that the Obama people want to validate Donald Trump's candidacy.

There's a saying that Obama's been extremely lucky in his opponents. And that's true. But it hasn't always been luck. He's shown a talent for attracting such opponents, and for subtly goading them into self-immolation. And he's certainly developed an appreciation for the pleasures of campaigning against a turbulent freakshow of an opponent.

Donald Trump is the media freakshow personified. He's been doing reality TV since before reality TV was invented. He's spent decades making himself ridiculous on camera, and his special gift as a media star is his utter inability to realize how silly he is. The joke is on Donald, and the funny part is that he isn't in on it. He is not a serious candidate. He's not a serious anything. And if someone decided to run negative ads on Trump, the sheer wealth of material boggles of mind. Only another narcissistic buffoon could believe, even for a second, that people would vote for someone like Trump. That any media figures floated the idea only shows that they are doing entertainment and not news.

Trump would be a dream opponent for Obama, a kind of white Alan Keyes. But more interestingly, he could be a monumental headache for Republican hopefuls in the primaries. If he actually took even a half-serious run in the primaries, he could make advertising in the earlier states crazy expensive. He's certainly capable of wasting a hundred million dollars, even if he doesn't actually have that much money to waste. And even if he doesn't run, he sucks up media oxygen that other candidates need, and he makes it even harder to placate the crazy part of the base by pandering to them so shamelessly. (Maybe you could say that The Donald is giving cover to the other Republicans by keeping them from press scrutiny. But the press doesn't do serious scrutiny any more. And if they do find a mini-scandal about a candidate not named Trump, the later it breaks the more it hurts.) Good luck trying to build name recognition when the TV is obsessing about Trump like he's a royal bride. And good luck trying to get past the crazy conspiracy theories in the primaries when Trump and the cable news hover over them like flies on a horse apple.

Obama's deepest political instinct is to pose as the reasonable centrist, so that the other side has to either make a deal with him or risk looking crazy. This can be frustrating because it leads him to make deals again, and again, in order to perform his "reasonableness," even when the question should be out of doubt. Releasing yet another form of his birth certificate is like his various compromises over health care and the budget: splitting a difference that he long ago split. But where this should pay dividends is when the other side refuses to take the deal. Barack Obama didn't release his long-form birth certificate to prove that he was born in Hawaii. He released it to prove that the doubters are too insane to care about proof.

What messes with this strategy is a press corps which is fundamentally unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality any more, a group that takes both reasonable and insane positions as equally valid, and presents them as equivalent. They can't tell a serious budget position from a cooked one. They can't bring themselves to cover national news instead of conspiracy theories. Almost nine percent of the country is out of work, at a minimum, and they want to talk about birth certificates. They have absolutely no idea how crazy they sound. Obama isn't just fighting the Republicans. He's fighting the press. What he needs to do is communicate past them to the American people, who actually care about actual things.

The question for the next two years is this. Will the real world pop the media bubble at last? Or will they manage to distort the debate so much that the voters lose touch with reality?

Ever Notice That The Birthers ...

never talk about Biden becoming President?

If you really didn't believe that Barack Obama was Consitutionally eligible for office, wouldn't that make Biden (who shared Obama's fat majority in the Electoral College) President? Yet that never comes up.

Even if you were magical thinker enough to believe that Biden, by running on an ineligible man's ticket were ALSO somehow disqualified from office, wouldn't that make the Speaker of the House President? I can see how that notion might be unpalatable to Republican activists when Pelosi was Speaker, but now that there's a Republican Speaker you hear exactly the same amount of nothing about it.

Where's the Birther movement demanding that Boehner be sworn in as President?

Even the Birthers aren't interested in their own theory as something that might be real. They're interested in it as a tool to reject reality completely.

Let me translate the demand to "see the birth certificate":

Obama shouldn't have been President, so none of this should happen! I will not eat my peas! No laws that I don't want can ever ever ever ever pass! And it is NOT bedtime, Mommy! Not not not!

Birtherism is not an attempt to follow a legal or Constitutional principle. It shows no interest in what the Constitutional ramification of an ineligible POTUS might be. It's simply a way of shutting out cognitive dissonance, and refusing to believe that more than half the country voted for Obama.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Deniers and Caretakers, Republicans and Democrats

cross-posted at Dagblog

American politics these days doesn't make a lot of sense if you expect people to act with sensible self-interest in mind. The Democrats, who were elected with large majorities after the other party's policies led the country to disaster, are apparently afraid to argue for their own policies. The Republicans, after suffering a resounding defeat because their policies led to disaster, have handed their party over to an angry faction that wants to push those failed policies even further. The Democrats can't win this way, and anything the Republicans win will come with a mandate to follow deeply unrealistic policies that will damage the country and ultimately enrage the electorate. "The best lack all conviction," as Yeats said, "while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity."

But American politics makes more sense if you imagine our political establishment as a dysfunctional family: say, the family of a drunk or addict who can no longer work steadily. Like our country, addicts' families are consumed with the hope that the central problem will fix itself. Any day now, Daddy will stop drinking and start holding a job, and then everything will be happy, the way it used to be. Any day now, the economy will turn around, and there will be jobs and growth and profits for everyone. Like addicts' children, we look with pathetic hopefulness for any small sign of the impending miraculous turnaround. Daddy's been sober for two whole days! He even halfway apologized to me for that thing the other day! The stock market's up 200 points this week! Green shoots!

But Daddy (or Mommy) is never going to start coming home from work after just two beers. If s/he ever recovers from addiction, it will be a long and difficult process, and there's nothing anyone but the addict can do to make that recovery start. Neither is our economy going to replace all of the jobs it's lost in the next quarter, or the next eight quarters, through any natural cycle. Nor is victory, in any sense of the word, around any of Iraq and Afghanistan's many, many corners. None of these problems can be fixed quickly or easily, and none will fix themselves.

Of course, from outside, it looks like the addict's family should just get as far from that person as possible. It's true, they'd be better off without him or her. But there usually many reasons, some emotional and some practical, that make breaking away difficult or impossible. If both your parents are addicts who can't keep a job and you're twelve, you don't have a lot of good options. You don't even want the ones you have. Lots of people, for completely understandable reasons, prefer their own dysfunctional parents to foster care (which isn't always terrific). So kids with alcoholic or addicted parents choose two basic approaches to dealing with their unmanageable reality.

Many of the Republicans have chosen the denial strategy. Daddy is not a drunk! Everything is great! We. Are. A. Happy. Family. We just need to get out of the way of Wall Street, and let the free market do its work, and everything will be like old times, except better! Also, if we simply "persevere" in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will win completely. Except, hooray, we've already won! If you weren't so ungrateful, and would just appreciate Daddy a little bit more, there wouldn't be all this unhappiness!

Denial tends to carry with it an enormous amount of scapegoating. Denial is always very fragile, and facts are constantly threatening the illusion of happiness and tranquility that the deniers work so hard to maintain. That's why they tend to lash out in a rage at anyone who (even inadvertently) brings up any of the unbearable truths and thereby forces the denier to think about them. Those people are ruining things for everybody. On the other hand, Daddy or Mommy, who actually are ruining things for everybody, have to be lionized, because the alternative is just too hard to take. That also means Daddy's or Mommy's many failures need to be explained away, by off-loading them onto yet more scapegoats, who are off course merely "out to get" the addicted parent and by extension the family.

And there you have the Tea Party. They don't so much have a plan as they have rage and a need to put it somewhere. Dealing with the actual structural problems of our economy is off limits, and recognizing the actual causes of the crash and the current depression recession is too painful, so somebody else has to be for blame. Wham! Obama caused the recession! Illegal immigrants caused the recession! The stimulus caused the recession! You know how everything was going fine before the stimulus! This is all straightforward denial. Let's take our country back!!!

On the other hand, you have the Democrats, especially Obama and the rest of the party leadership, who take on the role of caretakers. Caretakers are the children (or the spouses, in cases where the spouse can't get the kids away from the addict) who take on responsibility for the family's survival, trying to work around the addict and avert the worst consequences of their addiction. They can't fix the underlying problems, but they can try to keep the house from being taken away and their younger siblings split up in foster homes. So maybe the caretaker kid tries to use his or her pay from bagging groceries to make sure the younger kids are fed. Maybe they lie to their parent's boss when the parent is too hung over to work and lie to the landlord when the rent's past due. Maybe they try to manage the family's food stamps or welfare check. Maybe they hide things to keep the addict from selling them. They almost always do their best to manage the addicted parent, to keep them more functional: making out rent checks to be signed, cleaning up their work clothes, trying to get them to work on time. (The great Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth got taken out of school as a boy so he could go on tour with his actor father and keep him sober enough to perform.) In every case, the caretaker learns to work around the addicted parent's intractable and unreasonable moods, which can't be contradicted.

Obviously, this kind of caretaking lies firmly on the spectrum of behaviors called "enabling," because it allows the addict to continue being an addict. But it's unfair to ignore crucial distinctions and judge people, often minors, who are trying to protect young siblings and themselves. The shibboleth is that you need to let the addict bear the full weight of her or his own actions, but that weight doesn't just fall on the addict. A teenaged kid with a drunk father, three younger siblings, and an eviction notice on the door can't afford to get thrown on the street so Dad can have another chance at achieving clarity. She's going to keep her dysfunctional parent going as best he can for as long as he can, because she needs to.

So it is with Obama and many of the Congressional Democrats. The economy melted down two years ago and a number of influential people didn't want to do anything about it. So Obama accepted the caretaker's role, trying to fix what he could given his circumstances. He couldn't get a stimulus bill that would have fixed the economy through Congress, but if he didn't get any through Congress that was going to mean people out on the streets. So he accepted the smaller stimulus. The economy is still dysfunctional, and there's no way to fix its underlying problems, and it will still cause lots more misery. (That's one of the downsides of being a caretaker: even after you nearly kill yourself to fix one problem, your addict parent goes and creates another one a few weeks later. You lie to help them keep a job, or scrape to get their work car back from the tow yard, and next month they get fired anyway and total the car.) But at least Obama tried to limit the damage when he could.

"I did my best to limit the damage," isn't a winning slogan, and never will be. But the Democrats' failures are, by and large, the failures of basically responsible people trying to avert concrete and imminent bad results. It's easy to say that the Democrats should have gone bigger, staked everything on a large-scale economic recovery plan and forced the Republicans to vote it down. But saying that ignores that the Republicans and Blue Dogs almost stopped the stimulus that actually did pass, and proposing a larger, more sensible program would have meant no stimulus at all and an even deeper mess. It's easy to talk about what would be better in the long run, but no decent person finds it easy to make that kind of human sacrifice for a strictly hypothetical "long run."

It's easier still to simply scapegoat the caretaker for everything that goes wrong. If he's got all the answers, why aren't things better? Almost every dysfunctional family has its share of deniers who scapegoat the caretaker most of all. Because after all, the caretaker's incessant labors are also an incessant reminder that everything isn't right. Everything else aside, Obama will earn the wrath of the deniers simply by trying to help the economy. Because as long as he tries to fix it, he will be reminding people that it's broken.

None of this is to excuse Obama from his choices, or to take those choices out of context. He has always had a choice, legislative possibilities aside, in the economic advisers to whom he chose to listen. If he could never have gotten a larger stimulus package passed, he could still be taking advice from the economists who understand the true scale and scope of the problem, and who would argue for more bottom-up solutions designed to help middle Americans. Instead, he has consistently given ear to the Geithners and Bernankes and Summers, who recognize that things have gone drastically wrong but prescribe a series of smaller-bore solutions focused on preserving large firms and major investors. Some of their suggestions, such as using TARP to rescue General Motors, have worked admirably while others, such as HAMP, seem to have done very poorly. Obama has clearly chosen the advisers who urged him to save enough of Wall Street to keep it from taking all of Main Street with it, rather than those who urged him to save Main Street for Wall Street's long-term health.

Even this choice, though, seems largely an attempt to deal responsibly with the hand Obama has been dealt. The truth is, elected during an economic crisis he did not foresee even when he was accepting the nomination, and having little previous interest or knowledge of economic policy, Obama was forced to choose between two sets of experts. One set told him that things were bad, but that they could fix things and that they could fix them using the resources that Congress would be willing to appropriate or had already appropriated. The other set told him that things were far worse than that and there would need to be a massive series of interventions, starting with a massive stimulus that Congress would never be willing to approve. Obama chose the team that told him things could be fixed with the tools at hand; if the other team turned out to be right, there was nothing to be done about it. In the same way, if you give a fifteen-year-old kid who's the caretaker in a dysfunctional family a choice between a plan that relies on short-term fixes and a plan that involves getting her addict parent to quit drinking or drugging, she's going to go with the short-term plan. There's no way to make the other plan work anyway. And to be honest, from a policy maker's perspective attempting a fundamental fix on the economy is much, much scarier than listening to plans for tweaking it. The big interventions might seriously lead to dangerous places. Like kids in an abusive drunk's home, the Democrats aren't going to do anything drastic unless circumstances force them to.

But in the end, certain problems have to be dealt with. After we run out of all of the safe, reasonable fixes, it's drastic steps or failure. Denying the problems won't change that.

Being a Good Friend to Israel

Israel has always needed its friends. And now that Israeli forces have killed nine civilians on the high seas, and Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defense Minister, has followed up by blaming the aid flotilla to Gaza for "political provocation", Israel is going to need its allies' friendship more than ever. Over the next few days, there is going to be a loud outcry from some quarters inside the United States that the US is not backing Israel enough, that they are letting Israel down. Those voices are wrong. The United States has already let Israel down, and so have the people who will complain that Israel is not getting enough support. If we had been better friends to Israel, this terrible and wicked thing would not have happened in the first place.

The best friends are the ones who want the best for you, not the ones that want to make the biggest show of friendship. And when you're in need, the best friends are the ones who give the best help and the soundest advice, not necessarily the ones who are focused on displaying their loyalty. That advice includes talking sense to you when you need it, and the friend who won't or can't do that is a sorry friend to have.

If you've had too much to drive, the best friend you have is the one who takes your car keys away. The worst is the one who loudly declares that if you say you can drive, you can drive, and tells you not to listen to the haters. The guy who unconditionally supports your decision to drive while plastered really is sincere, and he wants you to know how much he likes you. It's just that you may never see him again. The guy who tells you you're drunk and lets you curse him in a rage, but ends up driving you home, is the guy.

For a long, long time now, American political discussion of Israel has been dominated by the better-friend-than-thou camp, the people concerned with demonstrating their superior loyalty to Israel. And those people have shouted down anyone who doesn't back every Israeli action, no matter how foolish or self-destructive, as not true friends of Israel: indeed, tried to brand anyone who talks sense to Israel as its enemy, an anti-Semite or "self-hating Jew." These people have been more concerned in displaying the intensity of friendship than in living up to the full obligations of friendship. Think that killing civilians is counter-productive? Then, according to the self-proclaimed friends of Israel, you're an anti-Semite, and you should shut up. If you were a real friend, you would support any military action by Israel, no matter how bad a strategy it is in the long run. Are you saying Bibi Netanyahu can't hold his liquor?

Self-declared friendship for Israel has won out over candid friendship in American politics, to the extent that American administrations have felt either unwilling or politically unable to restrain Israel's strategic mistakes. No one in high office is allowed to take Israel's keys, and anyone who suggests that they shouldn't drive faces enormous pressure to show their "support" for Israel (by slapping them on the back and even buying them one for the road). Even as the Israeli government has grown more short-sighted and reckless, we've become more passive and enabling, more reluctant to preserve Israel from self-destruction. At this point, they don't believe we will ever have the guts to take their keys, which makes them more reckless still.

If we had been better friends to Israel, they would never have gone so far down a road that risks so much and leads to so little. If we had been better friends to Israel, we would have tried to talk sense to them long before this. If we had been better friends to Israel, they would never have felt that they could forcibly board ships flying NATO flags in international waters. But we haven't been. We've only pretended to friendship, and let them go to hell. This week pundits will complain that we've stopped being real friends to Israel, but the truth is that we haven't even begun.