Losing Faith in Zion

A friend of mine who served in the Israeli army has a story he likes to tell about his service there, and what it portends for the future of the country. One day, my friend’s unit commander comes by with a box of candy bars. He asks my friend, a recent immigrant to Israel from Canada, to pass them out to the unit and to make sure everyone gets one. As my friend is passing out the candy bars, a recent Russian immigrant in his unit grabs the box and says, “rak rusim,” or “only for Russians.”

My friend told this story in the context of explaining that there are essentially two kinds of Russians. The first kind is thoughtful, lyrical, and deeply cerebral; the brilliant chess-playing scientist. The second kind of Russian is atavistic, brutal, and cruel; the sadistic general in Rambo III. Today in Israel, there are about a million Russian immigrants in a country of 7.6 million, most of whom I can charitably characterize as “more from column two than column one.”

Most people, when they speak of the destructive forces of demographic change in the Jewish state, are referring to the high birthrates among the nation’s Arabs. But the demographic changes within the Jewish population itself are far more worrying to me. You can cut a deal with outsiders. You can work them into society, or let them have their own. But you can’t cut a deal with your own people. If they’re the majority, they just take over.

Avigdor Lieberman, the ambitious pugnacious foreign minister under the Netanyahu government, is also the head of the Israel Beitenu party, which means “Israel, Our Home.” Israel Beitenu’s membership is mostly composed of recent immigrants, mostly from the Former Soviet Union, many of whom have little or no natural affiliation with the somewhat parochial concepts of Judaism and Zionism; concepts that sit at the core of the Jewish State. Fair enough, but the more global concepts of Democracy and Human Rights so often seems missing as well. Lieberman, himself a former club bouncer and immigrant from Moldova, serves in a coalition government, but has no loyalty to anyone but his immediate tribe. He has roundly rejected any and all overtures towards peace, and openly mocked his own government in doing so. He is the classic dictatorial thug and his constituency is growing faster than any other in Israel.

Lieberman and the Russian influx is one of several growing demographics who do not share my values towards Israel, the Middle East, or Humanity as a whole. Ultra-religious groups are flourishing. Shas, the party of religious mizrahim (“Easterners”); Jews hailing from the Middle East, has carried all of the autocratic instincts and backwater fundamentalism with them from their native homes. Were it not for being Jewish, Shas might sit comfortably amongst the sectarian squabbles so often found in Iraq’s tenuous coalition governments, supporting militia cult leaders similar to Muqtada al Sadr, and declaring all outsiders apostate, as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef did when he said, “Gentiles were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel.”

The old imagery from Exodus, with its brave departures from the horrors of Nazi Europe is fading fast in the relentless sunshine of the desert. Israel’s founding ideals of pluralism, social justice, and a mostly agnostic, pragmatic state are retreating behind concrete military barriers. The Kibbutz, with its quaint notions of egalitarianism, shared responsibility, and deep community, is eroding into more and more settlement blocs. Zealotry and expansionism is the order of the day, even as the immediate existential threat of war with Israel’s neighbors pales in comparison to the longer-term threat of demographic overrun by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Israel is not what it once was, but what can I do about it? Can I fall in with the remaining secular democrats? Is this really the Israeli Alamo for people who are human first and Jewish second? What will Israel look like in twenty years? I don’t know, but when I look at the numbers, and compare them to what I’m seeing, the trends, both cultural and demographic, don’t look like something I want to be a part of. Someone, tell me why I’m wrong. Please.

It's the Complexity, Stupid!

Looking at my responsibilities as a mostly upstanding citizen of this great land, I can feel overwhelmed. It's easy to pine for the days when my bills were paid by someone else, when my only jobs were to learn and avoid a criminal record. Life's just so damned complicated now.

The daily responsibilities of a career, a relationship, homeownership, pets, laundry, and keeping in compliance with the rules of daily life are all manageable on an individual basis, but are tough to shoulder all at once. I haven't even had kids yet! No wonder people are willing to pay a premium for the convenience of someone else doing their taxes, cooking dinner, even raising their kids.

Life is more complicated than it was. In the nineteenth century, I may have lived in squalor, worked a menial job, and paid half my salary towards the rent with no prospect for retirement. I may not have expected to live that long in any case. But life was simpler. How many bills could I have been responsible for? How many monolithic bureaucracies could there have been involved in my life? How many decision points would I face on a daily basis compared to today? Would I worry about career advancement? Sending kids to college? Would I think about the DMV, pizza or Chinese food? Calories? Cavities? IRAs? Gas mileage? My commute? What to watch on TV?

I'm hard pressed to imagine a life in the 19th century that I'd pick over one in the 21st. For every emperor, cowboy, pioneer, and swashbuckler there were many thousands of forgotten, nameless, short, painful lives. But it's easy to be nostalgic when it's you in the modern drudgery compared to the guys that actually got written about sometime in the past.

So much of the discontent of modern times in America is fueled by nostalgia. Nostalgia offers a highly distorted view of bygone days, but within that view is a kernel of truth. The world really was simpler.

People are pragmatic. They understand, for example, that terrorists like to use planes as projectiles against landmarks. In boarding planes, they understand the necessity of security. But that understanding has limits. Walking through a metal detector to get on a flight is no big deal. You tell me there are bombs in people's shoes? OK, I'll take mine off to be x-rayed. Bombs made from liquids in bottles? All right, I'll put my shampoo and conditioner measuring 3.4 ounces or less in a clear Zip-Loc bag, and place it on the belt. You want my laptop to go through too? Whatever. You want me to take everything out of my pockets and stand there while a machine looks through my clothes, or get groped by someone in a blue shirt? Hold on. People have limits.

People don't want to get in trouble. They understand, for example, that an IRS audit, tax evasion charges and all the rest are not worth the cost of a visit to H&R Block, or an update to their TurboTax. At the same time, when they factor in their clothing donations, mortgage interest, gains and losses from investments and a dozen other things, they're happy to get a refund from Uncle Sam, even if it was their money to start with. You tell me I need to prove that I have health insurance too? Even after I spend a whole weekend in February sorting through receipts, 1099s, W2s, and bank statements to try and recover some of the money I'm owed? Hold on. People have limits.

The government has a lot of power to make life better. It can prevent religious zealots from crashing planes. It can raise the money needed for security, roads, power lines, education, health care, food safety, and a dozen other things we take for granted in daily life. We can even add to that list and make the world better in doing so. But none of it will be appreciated if it's a headache on people. No matter what the upsides may be, nobody wants to get photographed naked, or spend all day on esoteric forms under penalty of law. We pine for simpler times, forgetting what all this complexity has given us.

But it could be simpler. The wise politician should think about the experiences of daily life, and look for ways to make it easier. I can picture a simpler, clearer and fairer tax code that relieves a lot of stress, pays down the deficit, all while providing massive incentives to hire people and grow wealth. I'd bet we could even raise taxes if only it were simpler than it is today. I'd imagine that there's another way to handle airline security that leaves me alone as I try to get to my flight. Policymakers should look at the activities of daily life, the responsibilities of citizenship and ask themselves, how can we make this easier on people?

The world's complicated enough. Simplicity and clarity are the missing mantras of our time. Don't just make my life safer, cleaner, more enlightened or privileged. Make my life easier. I'd vote for that.

Life in the Big City

Last August marked 5 years that I've lived on East Confederate Avenue here in Atlanta. When we bought our house, the property next door had an old Ford Aerostar van parked wheel-well deep in the mud. The van was smack in the middle of my neighbor's back yard, neatly garnished with scrubby weeds, rusted construction equipment, moldy sheets of styrofoam insulation, and regularly serviced by a family of stray cats. But somehow the house looked like a work in progress.

Over the years, a pile of cinder blocks arrived, and later moved to the back of the yard. A construction dumpster was filled, emptied, and refilled, eventually taken who knows where. Piles of wood ebbed and flowed with the seasons. Scaffolding was erected over the house, siding stripped, windows removed and replaced a few feet to the right. Scaffolding was dismantled and neatly stacked on the side of the house. The roof was reshingled, mostly.

Diana was born on our block, and eventually married Johnny, all long before we arrived on the scene. The two of them lived next door when we moved in. They both have adult children who come and go, bringing their own children, sometimes depositing them with the happy couple for good. There is now a teenager, a tween and a toddler who call Johnny and Diana mom and dad. An old swingset arrived, and was placed in the middle of a circle of stones that holds chaos back like some druid ritual. Other wayward relatives have taken up residence. Graying men with the haggard look of drifters lean over their balcony for a smoke, leering over our property and ourselves as we relax on the back deck. Somewhere in the process, the neighbors picked up two ratty little terriers who bark in their front yard all day and into the night until someone calls the cops or tells them to shut up. Somehow there are now 5 ratty little terriers, each with its own grudge against passers-by as they move along on foot down our sidewalk. At least the van is gone.

Minor skirmishes sometimes occur. Johnny asks to cut down a perfectly good tree limb that leans over his property. I'd been told explicitly by our predecessors here to never let him cut a tree. That same towering oak is majestic on my side, and a mangled mess of half-sawed stumps with haphazard shoots on Johnny's. After some consideration, I told him he couldn't cut the tree, having looked up chapter and verse of city ordinance to ensure my position in the matter.

Johnny and Diana aren't bad people. They're just bad neighbors. From what I've gathered through neighborhood gossip and by living adjacent to their property, they had hard lives, made bad decisions, and became religious, charitable people who buttress a large complement of friends and relatives who have had their own share of hard life and bad ideas.

Yesterday, before an open house to sell our place and move back to DC, Katie and I went next door to ask Johnny to keep the dogs inside, at least from 2 to 4. He was very apologetic, sincere in his frustration about the situation, and determined to make it a little better. I played bad cop to Katie's good cop, and we felt like we made progress without letting things get as ugly as they could. During the conversation, Johnny mentioned that Diana thought we were in the CIA, or something maybe a little more sinister. That's probably because of the travel we do, the lack of kids, and the hometown we share with Jack Ryan and J. Edgar Hoover. Katie was quick on the draw with the vague reply, "we're in health care," as I stood silent, looking at my feet. The dogs were quiet when we needed them to be.

Tonight, from about 5 until a little after 6, Johnny was working a jackhammer into his foundation not a stone's throw from my porch. I sat inside patiently, foregoing the mild night air, preaching tolerance to myself, not allowing rage to take root. I sat inside, knowing it would stop soon, and it did.

As Johnny was shoveling debris into a pile before heading inside for dinner, I opened a beer and walked onto my porch, pretending to be on the phone. I spoke a mix of Hebrew and semitic-sounding gobbeldy-gook, throwing in a few extra glottal stops and khhhs for added effect. It was a confident, animated conversation with myself in no particular language, punctuated with the occasional "ok, man... yeah I know... say hi to Fatima and Ahmad, all right?" for authenticity. Before going inside, I finished the call with "salam habibi, yallah bye," and hung up, pressing the off button to make that cordless phone beep that makes it sound that much more real.

Tolerance is all well and good, but sometimes a little fun at someone's expense makes it all better.

States, Rights and the Union

I wasn't alive for Brown versus the Board of Education, or the National Guard protecting children on their way to school in Little Rock. I never saw Governor George Wallace live on TV, or knew a time where interracial marriage was a crime in some states.

But I know very well that many of the underlying issues charging these events, people and policies are still alive and well in the South, and elsewhere in the United States. To paraphrase Mark Twain, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme sometimes.

National standards for education, active integration of schools, and a broadening of the state and local tax base to ensure a fair distribution of public money for students are controversial, racially loaded matters in today's state politics. Demagogues who speak for the elusive, increasingly rare "real Americans" magnify mostly white rural people's natural tendencies towards fear of the outsider. Despite radical change in the way that homosexuality is perceived by the general public, gays are still banned from the military in a craven compromise, and some states go as far as to ban gays from adopting children, despite an absolute lack of rational justification.

Knowing all that, I can imagine what it must have felt like back in the 50s and 60s to see the federal government step into the superstitious, social morass of local culture and politics. Armed soldiers marched against an immoral chorus of parochial interests shouting above everything else, "you can't tell us what to do down here!" Knowing how people feel about the Living in the South today, I feel less than one step removed from that mentality, and one motion away from its reprise.

What do I mean by this? The bottom line is that, when left to their own devices, the Southern public will vote against anything other than what is in their immediate self-interest. Without a federal mandate for civil rights, health care, public safety, or rule of law, there would be none in these places. Without the net influx of federal cash to Southern states, the South would more closely resemble Latin America, with a small contingent of cloistered, extraordinarily wealthy property owners variously employing, exploiting or ignoring everyone else. In short, it would revert to the quietly revered antebellum era.

To those who disagree with this take, I ask, what is there at a local level that would prevent it from happening? Would the oft-caricatured-but-uncannily-accurate corpulent and corrupt Southern governors borne out of the landed aristocracy decide that it was time for the state to ensure that everyone had a good education, access to the courts, and basic labor standards? What if it meant raising taxes to achieve those ends? What if it meant increased scrutiny in their own dealings? Having lived here for 6 years, I no longer have much faith in the much-touted Southern State to handle its own affairs in any way approaching basic moral values. However tone-deaf, arbitrary or inefficient it is, the federal government is the only thing holding this region back from real crisis.

Let's get beyond pure conjecture here. In 2008, Georgia's state budget was $21 billion. This budget provided what amounts to a fairly bare-bones set of offerings in terms of Medicaid reimbursement, education, transportation, public safety and justice. In 2011, Georgia must achieve a budget of $15 billion, even with almost a million new residents. There is no talk of new taxes. Quite the opposite. Candidates for office speak of further tax cuts. All the services that can be cut already have been. The only policy for solvency here is to allow businesses to make greater profits off the backs of working people than they can elsewhere. Cut labor regulation, code enforcement, corporate taxes and legal obligations, and you'll be more attractive to some kinds of businesses, but not the ones I want to work for.

I love many things about life here, but I really, truly doubt its ability to govern itself according to the standards of modern morality. The economy has been brutal, but they've already been bailed out once, giving them a free pass from tough political decisions like cutting services, or raising taxes. What happens next time, once an even more ideological government steps in? What happens when standards for education, transportation, safety, labor, and the other things we depend on for our level of civilization can no longer be guaranteed by the State? What do we do as a country when a state is unable or unwilling to provide a standard level of decency? Do we mandate some kind of legal tough love? Do we cut them lose from federal protections and obligations? Do we send in the troops?

Last time the feds came in, it involved morality. This time, the brewing conflict involves money. Which is a higher-stakes game?

Good luck to all my friends and neighbors here in Georgia, and the good people of all walks of life who live in this state and beyond. Seriously, you'll need it.

Pushing Against the Crazy

I know a lot of people who have followed current events closely for most of their lives only to start tuning out just as so much information about the world is so easily available. The internet, propelled by Google, stands at our command and prepared to serve our curiosity no matter if we're home in bed, in the car, cruising at 30,000 feet, or at work sitting in a bathroom stall. No wonder we're sitting in a bathroom stall.

So there's endless information available anywhere on the planet, vying interminably for your attention. People with MBAs work around the clock to keep your eyes glued to their story so you'll watch the ads they sell. In this race, news must compete head to head with all other forms of entertainment. Weather programs are compendium of natural disaster, chronicling alphabetically named storms from their emergence in the jungles of West Africa to their destructive demise along the Gulf Coast. Then you get your Local on the 8s. Trainwrecks are at a premium. One starlet after another implodes in edited slow motion for all to see, leaving a small space for another Disney Channel child actor to become a temporary sex symbol. Tell-all books hit the presses as soon as presidential administrations end. Every cough from the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a harbinger of Economic Consumption. Bloggers say whatever comes to mind.

In the middle of this unrelenting din of iniquity, some guy with a handlebar moustache and the Fury of the Almighty whispering in his ear decides to burn another people's holy books, and somehow enough is enough, even for the nuttiest among us. Fox News proclaims that it won't televise any footage of such an event. Serial racebaters decry this bonfire. The city of Gainesville, Florida is horrified to be the home of such unhinged demagoguery. An attention-whore preacher goes a step too far.

Let's celebrate this. America's immune system of ideas successfully repels a potential pandemic. The press, while free to do what they please, will not give this man his final platform. Finally, after such a sordid history, decency wins over the lynch mob. Maybe our 24-hour information machine is good for something after all. Maybe we're just good.

Even as the sages at Gatorade and Nike tell us that so much of winning is psychological, as soon as the commercial's over we're back to The End of The World Live Via Satellite.

For all the squawks and shrieks and scratches in the dust of the Chicken Littles getting rich off of doomsday, the public must reply with something noble and edifying. The world, America included, will be all right. The sun will come up tomorrow. We'll have food on the table and a roof over our heads. Our enemies, both within and without, will not destroy what's moral about us. At the margins, the world will be a little better in ten years than it is now. Your 401-k will come back. Someone will start hiring. We'll balance the budget.

This is optimism. When it comes to selling ad space, optimism is cheap. When it comes to our own sanity, it's the dearest thing we own.

It's 9/11 9 years later. God bless us all and give the world peace.

The Whole Mosque Thing

When 9/11 happened, for those of us who were nearby, it felt like a local experience. It happened in a specific handful of places. Over the weeks that followed, we learned that the perpetrators were a specific group too; part of a small hard-core movement of nihilistic Islamic extremists.

Over the months that followed 9/11, it didn't feel so much like a local experience anymore. Everywhere you went in America, people had United We Stand bumper stickers, American flags flew everywhere, and housewives coast-to-coast had New York fireman calendars. People became wary of those who wear turbans, even though most of them are Sikhs.

Over the years that followed 9/11, it stopped feeling like it all came down to some cabal of dastardly villains lurking in the mountains outside Tora Bora. We were all over Afghanistan. Soon enough, we even took over Iraq looking for any sign that they too were involved in the events of that day.

For such a big event, 9/11's implications started out as relatively small. It was a terrorist act committed by specific people on specific places. Before too long however, everything had some relationship to the event. It seemed like people speculated on the impacts of ice cream sales in a post 9/11 world. Every small town had contingency plans. Laramie Wyoming was sure it was next on the list. Before we knew it, the whole thing went past a normal conflict between nations. It blew up into a full-on clash of civilizations.

I know how serious that day was. I understand the threats that face the United States and our allies. Having spent years in DC wondering if the sirens roaring past were responding to a bombing, or whether the street that was cordoned off had a suspicious package on it, I get it. That's terror. Beyond that, I get the whole geopolitical thing. There is a simmering movement of dangerous religiously-motivated people intent on doing us harm. Their representatives can be found on every continent. We need to do everything we can to stop them from carrying out their grizzly plans.

But it's the proportionality that I don't get. Terrorism and the motivations behind it are actions and ideas. They're not nations or races. Terrorism isn't a religion. We've taken something rather specific and made it into a universal, existential, all-out world war of faith. It's exactly what those bearded guys in caves wanted.

If this were truly a clash of civilizations, if this was an epic battle of capitalists versus communists, allies versus the axis, GI Joe against Cobra, I'd say it's not such a good idea for them to build a base right where they blew up one of ours just a decade ago. But this isn't some $100 million budget action movie. This is the West against primitive fundamentalists with street smarts and good networking skills. We took a group of cavemen with bronze-age mentalities, and turned them into the Decepticons to our Autobots in desert camo, adding hordes to their legions.

When we treat Al Qaeda as representatives of an equal, opposing force, we eliminate their intrinsic disadvantages as the little guy in asymmetrical warfare, giving them both the pity rights of underdog status, and the clout of a billion allies. When we lump all Muslims in with them in assigning blame for 9/11, we make the war a lot more symmetrical than it might have been. We make the war they wanted, the one we can't win.

If we're really better than Al Qaeda and the rest of them, we build that mosque right there at Ground Zero. We should make it an American institution, just like the JCC, the YMCA and baseball. At night we light its minaret up red white and blue, and during the day we teach water aerobics to the elderly of Lower Manhattan. I don't care what they'd do in Saudi Arabia. The whole point is that we're not them. The real danger is if the rest of the world forgets that.

Let's get back that proportionality. Hunt them down, arrest them, kill them. But don't turn this into the Lord of the Rings. Don't send the message to a fifth of the world that they're our enemy. Bush at least knew this much. Obama knows this too, but he's too damn timid to stand up to the demagogues like we need him to do.

America should do what America does best. Kill the ones who need to be killed with Special Forces. But kill their potential sympathizers with kindness, inclusiveness, and tolerance. Build it right there. I'll even make a donation in the name of peace and real moral victory.

Airlines and Falling Down

Steven Slater is a fifteen minute folk hero. Everyone who has endured the growing squeeze on the working stiff, the added frustrations of customer service for all concerned, or the aggravation of air travel has to feel something for the guy who lashes out. It seems that ever since 2001, the experiences of going to work, dealing with other people, and air travel have all taken a serious turn for the worst. Mr. Slater just put those looming menaces of the zeitgeist on flamboyant display. Catharsis happened.


Everyone has had enough of taking abuse from a boss because they have no choice. Lots of us have had enough of taking abuse from strangers who pass their own abuses onto the guy next to them. From finding a place to drop someone off at departures to the baggage claim area, air travel just plain sucks, and it sucks the most for the people in the industry. They face the trifecta of crappy pay, pissy people, and air travel itself. Out of toil and obscurity emerges the hero.

Mr. Slater: we thank you for your childish outburst. If it makes the world a little easier for all of us working stiffs, you have done the world a real service. If people are a little nicer to one another on the plane, if TSA reconsiders making everyone take off their shoes in line, if airlines rethink the checked baggage fee, we will have you to thank.

To those of you who would consider "going postal," think of Mr. Slater. For the video game satisfaction of blowing one's boss to Kingdom Come, you will face a life in prison, a bloody standoff, or suicide. People will die. Your family will be ashamed. Your glory will be far overshadowed by your infamy. No one will learn anything. Instead, think of something clever. Pull a fire alarm, release crickets in the cubicles, reveal the boss's darkest secret. Go out in Facebook Fame.

For once, someone who screamed, "Enough!" didn't do something so stupid or dangerous to overshadow the proper public response, "Why?" Let's hope we can really learn from this.

The Paradox of Capital

A lot of people have been fired in the name of productivity.

The boss hires a third party consultant to deliver the bad news. An administrative assistant meekly collects the victim's personal items, handing him a cardboard box in exchange for a career. A rent-a-cop escorts the victim from the building, shaking his head, saying, "you know, I'm just doing my job." Everyone else breathes a sigh of relief, opening their Outlook calendars and canceling that vacation. On a Friday afternoon, another poor schlub is cast out into the austere wilderness of the job market.

Down the hall from the ritual beheadings, a kid fresh out of school takes an unpaid internship in the hopes that it will lead to an entry-level position at a place that is letting go all of the employees who have enough tenure and health insurance claims to cost the boss something. He's living at his parent's house, and delivering pizza at night for a little extra cash.

In the boardroom, company executives pour over a PowerPoint full of graphs and tables that show the employee raises, benefits, hours, and wages of those poor souls without stock options or an MBA. They're able to close down half the accounting department because of some new software. Their product can be made at half the cost across the world. Their competitors are ravenous. This is no time for a raise. There will be no bonus this year. The people downstairs should be glad we still need them.

Competition is spoken of as a virtue in the same way that gladiators who kill other gladiators are spoken of as honorable warriors. Competition trims the fat, separates the wheat from the chaff, culls the sick from the healthy. You must compete or die, but playing the game leads to glory. But for a civilization, as opposed to a conglomeration of individuals, competition can be a race to the bottom just as easily as a race to the top.

Neoclassical economics is rational and internally consistent, but it considers power to be some extraneous variable even though it is square in the middle of the behaviors it intends to model. Neoclassical economics posits that the tension between labor and capital can produce high-quality goods and services, and it does, provided that the tension between the two is balanced. Too much power in one direction or another can mess up the whole market dream. If labor has the upper hand, products are crumby and expensive. We hear that all the time. It's the unions who did GM and Chrysler in. That's probably true, but if it is, so is its converse. If capital has the upper hand, products are stellar and cheap, but labor doesn't even have the money to buy what they make.

One man's productivity increase is another's job, is another's mortgage payment, is another's tax payment, is another's grocery bill. Too many of us are caught in what Marx rightly called a "paradox of capitalism." The guy who costs the company money in wages is the same guy who'll be buying the company's product at the mall. Hardcore businessman Henry Ford recognized this, and paid his people enough to afford a Model T. We're feeling the consequences of low wages: people can't afford to by what they're selling.

In order to save capitalism, the people in charge need to brush up on their Marx. We've had enough Hayek and Friedman for now. Stock markets are doing ok, executives have never done better. Capital is plentiful and ready to work. This is a labor crisis.

Unlike Marx, I believe that this tension between labor and capital will always be there. The alternatives on either side are untenable. But I've heard enough from the monied interests who claim that there is no choice, that people should take what they can get and like it. I'm tired of the corporate apologists who tell us to suck it up. People are making the same amount of money as they did in 1998, and have far higher expenses, even as our GDP has increased about 20 percent. Capital has too much power. Labor is more than just a cost of doing business, like the price of wheat or pork bellies. We depend on it for prosperity as much as we depend on capital for production.

Maybe productivity can come from somewhere else instead of that guy they just fired. At least for a little while. Please?

America

Poplar Bluff, MO
101 degrees Fahrenheit (38C)

I got off a Delta jet in Memphis this afternoon, picked up a Ford Focus at the rental lot and pointed it north along I-55 , crossing the Mississippi river and into the flat cotton fields of Arkansas. The road was the highest ground for miles in all directions. With Jimi Hendrix live at the Filmore blasting on the stereo, I held the car straight and steady at 75 on into the Missouri Bootheel. The air conditioning could just barely keep up.

At Hayti I took a left west through Kennett, past fields and copses, gravel roads going perpendicular away from the tarmac to somewhere unknown, dusty towns, shuttered gas stations and high, dry corn. The land went from board-flat to a gentle rolling stretch of crops, weeds, low-slung houses and trailers, punctuated by the occasional creek. Speed limits dropped outside of towns: White Oak, Holcomb, Campbell, Qulin, and picked up again at the last intersection, speeding the traffic into the foothills of the Ozarks.

Poplar Bluff feels huge. It's a town of a little under 20,000 with all the modern conveniences. Like everywhere else these days it has its share of empty strip malls. Like everywhere this hot summer, it feels wilted, distorted in some mirage. Like everywhere, people seem run through the ringer, but resilient. People churn their way along the main road, through a McDonalds drive-thru, past an accountant's office, down to Walmart, off into their subdivision, and home after a day of who-knows-what.

When I checked into the Holiday Inn there were guys in Forest Service uniforms unloading duffel bags from dented old government pickups. There was a lineup of Union Pacific railway trucks with Texas tags. In the pull-through at the front entrance were two massive tricycle motorcycles, waxed to the gills, pulling low trailers with coolers on top. Off to the side there were 5th wheel campers attached to Chevy Avalanches and Ford Excursions.

With all the nervous energy of travel, I had to get some exercise. Crazy as it sounds, I put on my running shoes and headed out the door into a wall of heat. Taking it slow, I jogged down the main drag, moving from parking lot to parking lot. There were no sidewalks, just a gravelly shoulder and high grass. I jogged through a Burger King drive-through, past a Taco Bell, a KFC, and a Dairy Queen, along car washes with 40-year-old designs, and office parks. I turned right into a neighborhood and headed down a gentle slope, past ranch houses, along driveways, each with American cars and trucks. One house had cute road signs and gas station logos on it. There was a car parked there that had a bumper sticker that reads: God, Guns and Guts Made America Free. Everybody who drove by nodded or raised a hand from their steering wheel.

I kept going, pounding the concrete, winding up a hill next to some boarded-up pre-fab buildings, transformer stations, and tall pine trees. Down at the bottom of a hill there was a dry creek bed running through a tunnel under the street. Smoke billowed out from below me, fresh scorch marks were on the grass off to the right. I hit a dead end with campers and boats lined up neatly in driveways, and I turned around back up the hill.

Everyone seems ready to work. Everyone wants to do something respectable, put food on the table, and keep the cable TV coming and the bills paid out of the fruits of their own labor. Everyone is ready, sitting here, idle, churning their way down the wide boulevards from store to store, making the exchange of money for goods and services like bees stopping to pick up nectar in exchange for carrying some pollen.

It feels hot, angry and abuzz with discontent. People want something better. They want to be part of something great even as they want to be self-made independent individuals. They want schools and roads, but they're tapped out or freaked out about paying for them. Charity and good are abundant even as they battle against hardscrabble self-interest. Everyone is waiting for a message that straightens the contradictions out, makes sense of it all, puts their lives in the right direction. Friends aren't enough. Family is dysfunctional as usual. The church helps, but it won't put you to work. Low-paying jobs provide a meager subsistence and a modicum of dignity. People beg for benefits and a week's vacation down at the lake.

So much idle restlessness is a force in itself. It can be tapped for something great, or it can lead us to ruin. As I jogged through Poplar Bluff I felt the presence of some crucial moment in our history. Some fundamental change is happening in America, but I have no clue how things will turn out.

But I'm optimistic. After all, what choice do I have?

May You Live in Interesting Times

So goes the Gypsy curse.

But there's something seductive about interesting times. Many of us imagine what we'd be like in a true crisis. We'd like to think that we would know what to do in that situation, that we'd be the one who avoids getting trampled in a stampede of panic, that we might be the one to save a child from a burning house. Beyond just retaining control over oneself, we imagine that we'd rise to the occasion of interesting times. We'd be the person we always thought we were, if only something would come along to let us prove it.

Much of human mythology serves as a corollary to the Gypsy Curse. The story goes like this:

A young man from an inconsequential town somewhere in the hinterlands is called to fight some existential battle. He is reluctant at first, but once the gravity of the situation is made clear by wise but impotent elders, he becomes a champion of the cause. After much travail the young man becomes a sage himself, a battle-hardened beacon of morality. He defeats the great enemy and returns home to his inconsequential town to settle down in peace, get married, have kids and grow old and wise gracefully. That story is found with little variation in Star Wars, King Arthur, Frodo Baggins, Superman, Perseus, Moses and many others. Sure, sometimes there's no girl in the end, and sometimes the hero is actually of noble blood, though raised by farmers, but the myth gets at that yearning all the same. We all want to live in Interesting Times so we can be heroes too.

The Gypsy Curse also comes up in today's conspiracy theories. People would like to think that 9/11 was more than just an act of wanton violence, that despite all possible evidence to the contrary, Barack Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, or that the Federal Reserve makes us all the pawns of 19th century industrialists. There is no reason to get into the business of refuting or supporting these claims. Whatever the truth may be, it is certain that it won't satisfy that human desire for Interesting Times. There will always be another conspiracy to uncover.

Today, many of us believe that there is something sinister lurking in the back rooms of American government, multi-national corporations, and other seats of power. Matt Taibi writes that:

The people who really run America don't send the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney to the White House to cook up boat-rocking, maniacal world-domination plans and commit massive criminal conspiracies on live national television; they send them there to repeal PUCHA and dole out funds for the F-22 and pass energy bills with $14 billion tax breaks and slash fuel efficiency standards and do all the other shit that never makes the papers but keeps Wall Street and the country's corporate boardrooms happy. You don't elect politicians to commit crimes; you elect politicians to make your crimes legal.

Another way to put this is that the truth is less interesting than fiction, even if it's sometimes stranger than said fiction, and sometimes even worse than we could have imagined. The genius of true evil is in its banality-- its numbing of the passions that might actually put up a fight against it. Good and evil aside, epic battles are extraordinarily rare. Much more common are the thousands of small decisions, deals and compromises that are at the root of any cooperative endeavor, be it public or private. There is nothing more numbing than a shareholder report that arrives in the mail, or a committee meeting on CSPAN, and there are few things that are more important.

About heroes and villains, Taibi also writes:

In 9/11 lore the people who staff the White House, the security agencies, the Pentagon and groups like PNAC and the Council of Foreign Relations are imagined to be a monolithic, united class of dastardly, swashbuckling risk-takers with permanent hard-ons for Bourne Supremacy-style "false flag" and "black bag" operations, instead of the mundanely greedy, risk-averse, backstabbing, lawn-tending, half-clever suburban golfers they are in real life.

Evil is boring. If you want to do something about it, you'll have to be boring too. There will be no war, no sudden illumination of the truth. You'll have to fight tooth-and-nail just to stay awake as you toil at a computer screen for days, months, years, even decades. You'll have to resist the powerful draw of the Gypsy Curse.

The Need for Certainty

With most recessions there is some sort of market imbalance that needs correction before everyone goes back to business as usual.

Over a particular winter in the 1630s, everyone in Holland got into the tulip business. People made lots of money on tulips, prices grew exponentially, and at some point, everybody snapped out of it and realized that it was just a flower. Cue economic collapse.

But life went on. In the 1720s, everyone went gaga over getting a piece of the South Sea Company, a British joint stock company that had near-exclusive rights to all sorts of commerce in Spanish South America. Everyone bought South Sea stock, the price went up, and at some point everyone realized it was grossly overvalued, and everything fell in on itself. In response, parliament passed the "Bubble Act" coining a term we know all too well, mostly because passing a law didn't do much good.

During the recent Great Recession, the same thing happened, with houses this time. But houses aren't tulips, or shares. People live in them.
Of course, houses are only part of the problem. There's finance and corporate profit too.
So here we are. Why is this different? Why can't we get over it like the tulip people did, or the shareholders, or the dot-commers for that matter? For my money, the answer is in the little guy. People depended on their houses for money, so much so that they weren't even making more at their jobs, even in good times when they could shop around for wages. Now they have no house and no job.

In a perfectly just world, bankers would have gotten equally screwed in the deal, but letting nature take its course would have been disastrous. Banks were literally talking about shutting the ATMs down in a matter of hours without some sort of guarantee from the government. That's a taste of what was at stake. For better or for worse, the banking sector is fine now. We made them whole. They're back to making money trading abstract things like repackaged debt, just like before, but with a few new rules to stop it from happening again quite the same way.

Banks got a massive bailout and a new law that defines the rules of the games they play in less uncertain terms than before. They may not like being told what to do by regulators, but they have one thing you and I don't. Certainty. The rules are known. The full faith and credit of the Federal Reserve is guaranteed as before, and they can go back to playing, just with more capital padding their leveraged investments than before.

But things are still not well. When people don't have a job, or a home, they're not going to spend money. When people don't spend money, nobody else gets paid. When nobody is getting paid, that means that people don't have a job, or a home, etc., etc., etc...

We tried the classic solution to this problem, stimulus spending. The theory is straightforward. When demand for stuff is weak, the government can step in to give people jobs so they'll spend money, which will give other people jobs, etc., etc., etc... It's generally thought to be ok to go into debt if you have to in order to do this. It'll come back in economic growth, and if you don't spend the money, the whole economy will spiral down the toilet of deflation. That's the theory, and it sort of works. I even think it sort of worked this time.

So what's the problem? Speculation happened, a bubble grew and popped, the government stepped in and did what the textbooks say they should, but everything is still anemic. Money is out there. Banks and corporations are sitting on billions. But businesses are still finding new ways to do more with less, instead of investing in new people, new capital, or new products. The American workforce is 30 percent more productive than Europe's. The dollar is still the preferred currency because our long-term prospects for growth are still better than almost anywhere else in the industrialized world. But people with real skills are looking for work and not finding any. Creative entrepreneurs, people with ideas and a work ethic to match are still just trying to scrape by. Small firms are 99 percent of all corporations in America, employing half the American workforce. This matters.

The answer for the little guy is the same as it is for the banks. Certainty. Small business owners don't know what their new liabilities are going to be when health reform rolls out. Some aspects of the law will help, like tax credits and subsidies for plans. Small businesses will no longer be at a disadvantage to a large company when it comes to benefits. Some aspects of the law will cause new headaches, like reporting more and more information to the IRS. People ready to invest money in a business don't know what they'll owe in taxes next year. They fell like all bets are off under a Democratic administration. Even if the answers to these questions are out there, the people who need them haven't heard. At very least, this is a major failure of communication.

If there is one thing the Obama administration should do that they haven't, it's this: A covenant with the small business owner, writ large. A ten-point guarantee of what the government can offer in terms of certainty. A national TV oval office pledge to veto any legislation that would violate this trust. Here are 10 points I'd like to see:

1. A pledge to leave taxes where they are under a certain payroll threshold, say $1 million.
2. A pledge to leave taxes where they are under a certain income threshold, say $250 thousand.
3. Set a little money aside for small business loans with very generous terms.
4. Set a little money aside for small business grants, issued competitively with business plans.
5. An insurance arrangement that covers against losses for businesses in the program who meet certain terms.
6. An insurance arrangement to mitigate the risk for investors who are interested in bankrolling small businesses.
7. A privately operated program for business owners to go into group purchasing arrangements with other businesses to leverage their buying power for capital investments.
8. A clear, simple statement of small businesses' stake in health reform, both how it helps, and what's expected of them.
9. Assistance accessing foreign markets, and tariff reductions.
10. A domestic and international marketing blitz for American small business.

Providing certainty and support to this area of the economy is what has been missing this whole time. The costs of this package pale in comparison to any stimulus, any bailout, and combine the dynamism of the private market with the security that comes with a government guarantee. America's comparative advantages have always been in our inventiveness and optimism. Economic policy should do everything it can to maximize those advantages. Presidents should do everything they can to push us forward despite everything else.

Nothing happens while people are scared. No one can be optimistic about the prospects of taking a big risk in these times. This administration and our president have let us down in this regard. Policy isn't enough. Certainty is an emotional commodity, albeit one that happens with a good insurance policy, a good loan, some good rules and a good message. It's more than sentimentality. It lets people take risks. Help us feel good about America again. Give us what we need to help ourselves.

Gandhi Cage Match, Anyone?

It's no revelation that non-violent protest and civil disobedience would represent a fundamental change in the way the Middle East does business. But it sure is revelatory to see it happening. When Hamas talks about Gaza flotillas being worth 10,000 rockets, something basic is shifting.

The Israeli left would be wise to follow suit. If they don't, there will be no one on the Jewish side that will attest to our morality after peace is settled, and the narrative is written that the oppressed are the victors. That could do more damage to Israel's standing abroad than any invasion, wall or checkpoint.

This article is the second in a week that's pointing to a real, serious change that has little to do with diplomats or generals.

If there's any truth to the concept of a cult of personality, both sides will need a Gandhi... but what happens if two Gandhis were to meet? Any bets?

Moral Authority in the Holyland

The only way I'm able to make moral sense of the Israel-Palestine conflict is by looking at the shifts in momentum that occur between the two sides every few years.

Narrative 1: Israel elects some war hero who has seen the light, and decides that trading some land for some peace is the only way out of this mess. Then the Palestinian side rejects all offers, ends up fracturing into hardliners and reformers, and it becomes impossible to negotiate. Then some genius blows himself up in downtown Tel Aviv.

Narrative 2: Israel elects some war hero who believes in dealing with Palestinians in the most cynical, base manner. The hero makes it his mission to expand settlements, jail and assassinate Palestinian leaders, and impose blockades and sanctions everywhere possible. Palestine retaliates in kind with homemade rockets, and some luminary drives a bulldozer into a crowd in Jerusalem.

Real life is usually some mix of these narratives, but the point is that both sides all retain enough moral authority to scuttle a deal, cower to extremists, or take raw political advantage of the moment.

People embroiled in the conflict, Israelis, Palestinians and their surrogates, will come up with compelling arguments for why they have moral authority. And they're right in their own ways. But there is a larger morality in play-- world opinion, which is usually too distracted by people's own parochial interests until things become crystal clear. For someone to win, the morality needs to shift far to one side so that the world demands a settlement.

In comes the most promising change I've seen in years. Hamas and Hizballah have decided to take on non-violent tactics over blowing themselves up and launching rockets from the backs of camels. Witness the Gaza flotillas, or the heavy PR pressure they're laying on the world from all quarters. I've been waiting for this for years. Palestine has real, serious grievances, but they squandered all claims to them with endless petty, violent acts. This changes the game.

Narrative 3: The only modern, westernized nation in a vast region, the product of recent immigration, imposes strict conditions on its indigenous ethnic groups. The indigenous people, fractious as they are, jockeying for power in their own conflicts, respond with terrorism and self-pity. They end up jailed and oppressed. Until they change their approach, go non-violent, and win. Both sides end up coming away just fine. The powerful, western people retain power over their domain, and the natives win self-determination.

That's South Africa's story. The conflict and its resolution all happened within roughly the same time period as Israel and Palestine have been at it. The power dynamic is the same. The cycle of violence remained unbroken until the powerless changed their approach. It's really up to the powerless here.

Israel can make all the overtures to peace they want, but the peaceniks will always look like naive cowards to a plurality of their population. They will always risk a double-cross. At the same time, Israel's warmongers can make Palestinians miserable, but this only means they'll have less to lose.

Palestine can make Israel's life miserable with terrorism, but they won't win, and they'll suffer under more necessary restrictions to their movement. If they go for peace, Israel has little reason to go along with it. If the Palestinians do nothing, they'll be marginalized as their land slowly gives way to Jewish settlements, and their status as second-class citizens is secured.

The only way out of this dilemma is for those with little power to renounce violence and make a big stink about their situation to the rest of the world. That's exactly what's happening. I just hate to be on the side of the Afrikaners this time around.

Terrorism

When 9-11 happened, my first question was, "who did this?" My second question was, "what are their terms?" I was in the streets of DC that morning, having had a job interview canceled on me, watching the F-16s scramble overhead while people poured out of office buildings.

It may seem odd, but that morning I had lots of time to think. Maybe it was anarchists. They're always so angry about trade agreements. The World Trade Center makes sense. I bet they want an end of corporate hegemony. Maybe it was radical vegetarians, like in 12 Monkeys. Any minute they'll come on TV demanding the freedom of all animals from their cages and feedlots. I was wrong, of course. But then again, my thinking wasn't all that different from the experts that sent us to Iraq.

And that wasn't the only day a terrorist act has occurred. Many came before 9-11, and many since. With that, and every other attack, there are a few common points. Someone's claimed responsibility, and someone's made demands. The problem is that it's always someone different, asking for slightly different things. In almost 10 years since 9-11, I've never heard a satisfactory answer to either of those questions for any of the dastardly deeds committed across the globe, yet somehow we're embroiled in at least two wars.

It comes down to this. You can't go to Terrorist Headquarters and ask them what they want. In this context, the nearest analog to an "evil empire" is found in a bunch of caves in Central Asia. For all the World War II metaphors, Neville Chamberlain wouldn't know who to appease, and Winston Churchill wouldn't know who to fight. This is new territory. This is the decentralized, atomized and anonymized 21st century.

How do you fight a war when who you're fighting, and what they want is unclear, and when who they are changes all the time? Take the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad. Here's a guy who tells the court that terrorism won't stop until the US leaves Iraq and Afghanistan, stops flying drones over Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, ends its monitoring of certain Muslim-Americans, and who knows what else.

Whether you agree with his position or not (I don't), who is he to name the terms of a cease-fire? Who does Mr. Shahzad speak for? Can I threaten thousands of lives, get arrested, and speak for all Americans? Everyone who's right-handed? If I did, should anyone take me seriously? But if you say you speak for Muslims, there's an audience of suckers who always do.

Guys like Daniel Pipes keep viewing the problem of Islamic terrorism as if there were a specific country, army, or group of people to invade, conquer and maybe assimilate. For the hawks, bombing Iran, rounding up all Palestinians, and maintaining permanent garrisons across half the world is the only response. Not knowing who they're fighting, they pick everyone. They propose the most disproportionate of responses to a relatively small threat.

And it is a small threat. The worse-case scenario for a terrorist attack is something like a small nuclear device going off in a city. That would be terrible, but this is nothing in comparison to all-out conventional warfare that nations regularly engage in, or the specter of Mutually Assured Destruction that loomed over us all during the Cold War. We shouldn't allow any terrorist act to happen on ours or our allies' shores. But we can't pretend that this is war in any real sense, with any serious historical comparison to the bloodshed of the past.

Some people on the left think that terrorism will stop if the West embraced a certain set of conditions. All of this would stop if the Palestinians got a fair shake. Leave Iraq and Afghanistan alone, and they'll leave us alone. But whose conditions are they? Who can guarantee that all elements of Islamic society will be satisfied once we cross everything off some list? There is a subset of individuals who are genuinely interested in taking over the West in the name of Islam. Are they the leaders of a particular country? Do they have a real army? No, but they exist, and they should be dealt with.

Terrorism is a tactic. It's not a people or an ideology. It's used by different people with different ideologies. There is no Al Qaeda Mission Statement, no bylaws, no dues structure. Most people are neither paranoid and belligerent nor are they naive and foolhardy. Knowing what we don't know, most people might agree that you can't defeat terrorism in a traditional war, nor can we negotiate a cease-fire with someone who isn't there.

To me, all this lends itself to a mixed approach. Neither nuke nor negotiate. It also represents an opening to define the terms of this battle, instead of being led by them.

Clearly the world would be better off if the West worked towards resolution of some of the major geopolitical issues relevant to the Muslim world, like Israel/Palestine, oil dependence, economic and political development, and a hodgepodge of others. But we can't expect that changing the context alone will lead to an end of terrorist aggression.

Clearly we can't let a gaggle of bearded illiterate cave-dwellers threaten our cities and towns. But they will cease to dominate the discourse of the Middle East when people there have something better to do, like going to school and working. In the meantime, as we do what we can to improve the context that feeds this abhorrent thinking, intelligence and special ops cleans up the crazies. But invading a country and killing thousands of civilians is no way to create good will.

This isn't a simple "us versus them" scenario. They never are. In many ways, soft and hard power work against one another. Too much diplomacy and good cheer allows cynical, genuinely evil people to take advantage of us. Warfare makes people mad, generating an endless supply of suckers for the cynical and evil among them, making diplomacy all the more difficult.

A fractious enemy requires a fractious approach. Anyone who proposes a simple solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism is either crazy or selling you something.

Those who forcibly argue for simple solutions to today's geopolitical dilemmas are either: 1. psychotic, 2. a human rights lawyer, or 3. a defense contractor. Each are part of a solution, but think that they're the whole thing. For them, there is wisdom in knowing the limitations of your own powers of persuasion. This goes doubly for the 1's. This goes triply for Daniel Pipes.

For our leaders, there is wisdom in identifying, isolating and ignoring the 1s, while using the 2's and 3's in a mix of varied tactics to achieve a strategy leading to an end of terrorism, peace and prosperity. Having clear objectives and listening to the right advice is what being in charge is about.

Interests that employ terrorist tactics don't have anyone in charge. They don't have rational, obtainable objectives. There is no negotiation with that, but like our own hawks, not knowing exactly who the enemy is, or what their objectives are, leads to endless, all-out, incoherent war to the death. We must think bigger than they do.

It's time to re-imagine an end to this mess, present a vision of that image, and make it happen. That's leadership.

Japan, Now and Then

The first thing I noticed on our arrival was the massive, silent crowds. Coming out of the Tokyo Central Station at rush hour, cars whiz by, people move across intersections en masse, and hardly a voice is heard. Nary a scrap of paper blows in the wind. It is the quietest, cleanest big city I’ve ever seen. Even for a city-smart Tokyo native, New York must feel like Lagos, Nigeria. Clean, Courteous Canada must feel somewhere more average, like Chile.

As a foreigner, the Japanese rules of daily life can seem halakhic-- mysterious, complex, and eminently practical. Food is always a central source of rulebound behavior, and a good starting point for explaining how things work in Japan. Before nearly every meal at a restaurant a hot towel arrives. The towel is for face and hands only, and is to be folded neatly and placed on the tray it arrived on. If your meal is a sandwich from a convenience store it will come with a plush moist towelette whose package reads, “let’s wash our hands.” Chopsticks should never touch the table. Place them strategically on a napkin or the edge of a dish so that the ends are in the air. Never leave your chopsticks stuck in your in rice. Don’t put soy sauce on the rice. Don’t pour your own drink. Don’t blow your nose at the table. But it’s OK to slurp your noodles.

Such extensive rules aren’t for nothing. Like religiously devout communities, the military and certain secret societies, long lists of rules produce a cohesiveness among their followers. At times it can seem to be less of a society and more of a hive. Everyone has their place, everyone takes pride in his job, everyone does what they are told. I’ve never seen “please” and “thank you” wielded as weapons in quite the same way as they do here. The tradeoffs between our own strict individualism and Japanese version of harmonious collectivism are obvious and manifold. Empathy gives way to pragmatism. Order comes at the price of fervent compulsion. But people here live good lives, with close connections between friends and family, a long, healthy and balanced way to be.

Any good diagnostic approach takes a look at what happens when things go wrong. A cultural look at Japan is no exception. While eating at a French restaurant in Kyoto, our meal was punctuated by the shouts and cackles of the sloppy drunk. Across the room, a boisterous table of young Japanese men and women was falling into excess and disrepute, seemingly egged on by a Western guy with wonderful command of Japanese language and terrible command over its delicate ethics. He laughed and shouted with heavily Italian inflections, so let’s call him Enzo. The group got louder and louder, banging on the tables, spilling glasses of wine. Enzo was at the center, encouraging his friends to drink and get louder, the familiar Pied Piper of Sin found at social gatherings everywhere. The other men were soon completely out of control, redfaced yelling and flailing. One soon slumped over into his meal, remaining passed out for the duration of the event. No one knew what to do.

There was a cultural contradiction in play. On one hand, it is unacceptable anywhere, but especially in Japan to ruin the meals of others with boorish behavior. On the other, conflict is avoided at nearly all costs, unless, like a police officer, it’s your job to conflict with others. No one could do anything, no matter how irritated they must have been, it was a room of poker faces, ourselves notwithstanding. Aside from a few furtive glances, people remained focused on their meals. Nobody even nodded a head. The waitstaff were getting shifty, huddling together and puzzled on what to do, but no one did a thing in a situation that would have been dealt with nearly anywhere else in the world, no matter the level of accustomed disorder. Eventually it was the girls who noticed the shy glances and the nervous waiters. It was the girls who told Enzo in near whispers to kindly keep it down. It was the girls who got the check, and managed the extraction of their unconscious friend from his booth seat. (It’s always the girls, isn’t it?) Utterly unabashed, Enzo stumbled out the door to his bicycle as a taxi arrived for the others. After barely able to get his leg over the frame, he took off weaving into a quiet street. As our last course arrived, an ambulance raced past the restaurant headed in Enzo’s direction, making us believers in Karmic intervention, as if God Himself could somehow enforce the unspoken rules. I hope he was only bruised, waking up with a headache and a lesson.

Putting the occasional Enzo incident aside, most of the time, Japanese culture functions with a high level of fluidity. People know what to do and they do it well. With a culture of universally understood and personally internalized rules of conduct, Japan has come a remarkably long way in short order. We know the stories. The first big story takes place during the 92 year span between Admiral Perry’s famous demand that Japan open itself to the West and the end of the Second World War. Japan transformed itself from a highly refined yet insular economy governed by feudal traditions to a centralized military and industrial powerhouse that dominated the Pacific Rim. During the Meiji period, Japan’s feudal lords retooled themselves into family-led mega-corporations that were the forerunners to many of the brand names known today, like Mitsubishi and Nissan. Within living memory, Japan went from a largely medieval set of economic and political conditions to an advanced, modern state. The second big story is the development of Japan’s export-led economy and the establishment of a stable, enduring democracy. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the same companies that powered Japan’s earlier economic development and war effort reorganized themselves to sell a massive array of industrial products to the world. Between 1965 and 1980, Japan’s GDP grew elevenfold; from $91 billion to over a trillion dollars.

Japan’s postwar growth was coordinated by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and underwritten by the Bank of Japan in a vertical arrangement where money and production directives came from public bankers and bureaucrats. MITI decided which company would produce sedans, and which one would produce trucks. The Bank of Japan would guarantee loans giving them a majority stake in many of Japan’s industrial interests. It wasn’t just a vertical arrangement. Companies coordinated efforts horizontally as well, cooperating to produce cars and other durable goods that were competitive with European and American companies.

Conventional wisdom in the West was (and is) that vertical economic liberalization and horizontal competition between firms creates economic growth. Japan’s 20th century success story is a major exception that should not be overlooked by economists and policy thinkers. No country has ever undergone the fundamental changes that Japan did in a generation. No country has been able to repeat Japan’s successes at state-run enterprise. No country has developed a rational and efficient means of production through collaboration. Why Japan? Russia’s history is a rough parallel of transformation from a feudal state to an industrial and military superpower with heavy state intervention in all aspects of economic life. Europe and America underwent similar transformations, though over a far longer time period and with less state involvement.

For my money, the difference between the Japanese and the Western or Socialist models is not economic or political. It’s cultural. Without universal cultural conventions that place a high degree of trust in authority and a high value on social harmony, Japan’s story of growth might have looked more like our own narrative of hardscrabble competition and studied independence. Policy follows values. Consider a few assumptions that work on the “vertical-horizontal” conception of culture presented earlier. Russia is an authoritative, competitive place. America is not particularly authoritative but it is extremely competitive. Japan is authoritative and cooperative. To assume that the same policy that works in one place can be grafted onto another is dangerous. Just ask Latin America and Africa what they think about Western economic advice. Japan was well-served going their own way. We should not be surprised at other nations’ success arising out of seemingly foolhardy policy.

It is enough to say that Japan does things differently. Having now spent some time in Japan, the large tour buses, group photos and smartly dressed women in white gloves leading everyone with a flag makes more sense. Compared to Japan, the rest of the world must seem like differing degrees of chaos. When Japanese people are abroad, many people have noted the Japanese tendency towards cloistering. It is not unusual for a group of Italians, Americans and Mexicans to end up going out for a beer together, but it is tough to imagine a lone Japanese traveler joining them. In Saipan I saw Japanese tourists studiously avoid contact with Westerners and natives, all while enjoying the simple freedoms afforded elsewhere like spreading out, laughing out loud, and leaving cigarette butts on the ground. Despite these small liberties, Japanese people travel lightly and quietly.

It’s no wonder that so few people here speak good English, despite years of compulsory study, or why there is so little written in Latin script, despite the country’s cosmopolitan outlook. Japan takes what they want or need and leaves the rest. They are utterly uninterested in adapting their way of life to suit others’ needs. Everything works fine here, thank you very much. We’re happy to help where we can, but Japan is Japan. For Westerners who feel starved for individual expression in Japan, the only route to salvation is through assimilation. Expatriates must join the ranks or face a polite though thorough alienation. While I could imagine retaining an identity as an American in most parts of the world, something fundamental would have to change for me to function successfully over the longer term in Japan.

With the looming presence so much silent order and authority, it is no wonder that many Japanese seem have a quiet yearning for liberty. Instead of a noble, romantic sort of suffering, this yearning often manifests as stunted and perverted. People in Japan expect foreigners to be fast and loose with the rules. As we walked down a quiet Tokyo street back to our hotel, a drunk business man followed us, seemingly in hopes that we would witness some devious act between us. Riding the Tokyo subway after about 10 in the evening, all women face the leering glances of drunk businessmen, sad pick-up attempts, and lame exhibitions of bravado. I had the luxury of witnessing this as an outsider, but as a 6-foot blond, Katie attracts attention in ways that similarly dressed Japanese women could never expect. It was seldom flattering. On one occasion, as we climbed the stairs to a train station, a man approached Katie and asked her, “how much,” just as I stood there. Perversion, insularity and drunkenness is a poor combination-- an unfortunate confluence of values and actions. No one is perfect.

Japan is far from uniform in all places and all circumstances. Despite its fast pace and formalism, Japan functions on a human scale while moving at a humane rate. In Takayama, a traditional town in the mountains famous for shrines and sake, we found a more open culture. Visitors and residents alike smiled far more than in the cities. The pace was slower, the prices lower, the social pressures relaxed within reason. We stayed in a family-operated Ryokan; a traditional Japanese Bed and Breakfast. The family spanned four generations, headed by a woman who was well into her eighties who bounded up and down the stairs full of energy, enthusiasm, and a sense of humor.

On one of our last nights in Tokyo, after days of ramen, sashimi, miso and yakitori, we looked up a Greek a restaurant for a change of pace. While we had an address, we were in a large, crowded place with no posted addresses, and few readable signs. After about 20 minutes we still couldn’t determine what street we were on. A man in his mid-thirties stopped and asked us in good English if we needed help. We showed him the address and he used his phone as a homing device to find the restaurant. It was hopelessly on the other side of a few intersections and a sprawling train station. We invited him in for a beer, which led to a pleasant evening that entailed a couple more beers and dinner. The man looked like so many others racing past, coming off work from a long day at some company or other. But he stopped and stayed. At the end of the meal we went to pay the check. The man was flabbergasted to find out that we were buying. The whole time he’d expected to pay his own way. I will always remember the upright earnestness that is at the center of Japanese character, and I will try to help them when they lose their way in my hometown.

For all this talk of insularity, there is an insatiable curiosity for the rest of the world. Jazz clubs abound. For the seas of bad suits that traverse Japan’s cities daily, there is a thriving fashion industry. With all of the prepackaged uniformity expected of Japanese products, it is host to some of the finest art, design and architecture in the world. Japan’s museums house supreme examples of art and history representing all places and times, from Mesopotamia to modern folk art. The Kyoto train station is a hub of commerce on a geological scale, with ten open-air stories linked by skyward escalators and viewpoints, all abuzz with activity, all atop a modern, spotless transportation hub.

In a globalized world full of challenge, adaptability and openness are high-value commodities. When people must face the challenges of their day, something has to give and Japan is no exception. Japan’s birth rate is one of the lowest in the world, with the highest life expectancy; portents of disaster for Japan’s social institutions. Looking at the trends, it's tough to imagine how Japan can retain its standard of living without a massive and rapid influx of immigrants. With a rapidly aging ruling class, Japan will not be able to adapt to the highly dynamic and competitive world economy, but Japan's past dynamism was a result of the uniform rules and trust in authority that is seldom found in heterogeneous places. For many reasons, economic, social and cultural, a country cannot sustain itself indefinitely with the stifling authority and growing needs of old men, but the solutions pose problems of their own. Unless there is some heretofore-unknown model where a few young people can prosper while the elderly are legion, something has to change. Unless Japan's immigrants can accept the rigors of Japanese management and lifestyle, it is unclear how the country can continue to pursue its current social and economic model.

So what will happen to Japan? What happens when outsiders enter and gain influence within a nation whose successes have been predicated on homogeneous social order and cooperation? Will immigrants from the youthful and chaotic world majority upset Japan’s delicate cultural ecosystem? Culture changes out of necessity far more effectively than it does out of choice or fiat. The degree of necessity points to the degree of cultural change. In Japan’s case, that change is likely to be profound. In Tokyo, a few foreigners add some color and character to an otherwise drab, pinstriped subway ride, but they are almost all guests. What happens if they move in? We'll have to wait and see.

A few observations about Japan:
The time zones are strange. Despite its middling latitude, in high summer, the sun rises at 4 am and sets at around 7 in the evening.

People bike everywhere on the sidewalks and expect pedestrians to be aware and move at a moment’s notice.

At baseball games, cheering is the almost exclusive province of cheering sections. The rest of the stadium acts like it’s watching golf.

Old men don’t care about the rules. We saw an older gentleman unbutton his pants to relax on the train, sprawling in plain view. I guess old men always think they’re the exception.

There is a lot of Italian food in Japan. I don’t know why.

All Westerners must ritually ignore one another when passing on the street. Nobody wants to acknowledge that they're an outsider, even though it's plainly obvious.

Immigration: Arizona and the USA

Lat last year, I went down to the border region of Arizona for a work trip. I'd never been to that part of the state, nor had I really spent any time in a US-Mexico border community. It seemed like every tenth vehicle was a pick-up or an armored truck with official decals belonging either to Arizona or to Homeland Security.

Along the interstate outside Tucson, I saw half a dozen traffic stops along a 10-mile stretch, police in paramilitary dress leaning into driver's side windows. When I headed south from I-10 on a state road towards Nogales, I came across a movable checkpoint. Pointed south as I was, they waved me by.

On my way back from Nogales a few days later, I took the interstate back up to Tucson to catch my flight home. Along I-19 there was another checkpoint under an overpass on the northbound side of the divider. I got in a short line of cars, each being questioned. Dogs and guys in sunglasses were standing around looking at everything and everyone passing by. When it came to be my time, I rolled down my window, and faced a border security officer. Here's a loose transcript of my interaction:

"Hi," he said.
"Hello."
"What's your citizenship?"
"US."
"This your car, man?"
"Nah, it's a rental."
"Where you from?"
"Atlanta. Headed to the airport right now to go home."
"Where you coming from today?"
"Nogales."
"How long were you in Nogales?"
"Three nights. At the Rio Rico."
"What were you doing in Nogales?"
"I was there for work. Working with the community health center there. Mariposa Health Center."
"Mariposa, huh? All right, have a good day."

For a run-in with the law, the interaction was pleasant enough, but it was a border stop, with standard border questions, and I was about 30 miles away from a border. I started wondering if they had the right to search my vehicle out there without a warrant or probable cause, as they would have down at the Nogales crossing. Could they do that even if I'd never left the United States?

These are a few examples of daily life along the border today. The state of Arizona has just endowed its police officers to make stops on the basis of suspicions around a person's immigration status, but I suspect that the hassles and indignities will be only marginally worse for the average border resident, with a few egregious abuses of the law happening against a few hapless American citizens caught out late with an accent and no ID. I also suspect that it's the part of a larger trend towards eroding freedom in the name of security.

I don't like what's going on, but something has to be done to slow or stop illegal crossings of our borders. Not only is it a matter of what's legal or fair; it's also a labor issue, a human rights issue, and a superhighway for contraband. Nations, and by extension, their citizens, have a right to decide who comes and goes. They have a right to know who's already here.

What's interesting to me are people's views on what to do about it. Among the most vociferous opponents of illegal immigration, the most common calls are for sending the National Guard to garrison and patrol the length of the border, to dedicate further billions in military presence and law enforcement. People have talked in all earnestness about nearly unlimited police powers to deport and detain those suspected of being here illegally, even stripping the citizenship of their children who were born here. Will they come knocking on my door if they suspect that I'm harboring them under my floorboards?

Most people who come here illegally come here to work. And yet somehow, enhanced IDs, or Social Security cards with biometrics are an attack on civil liberties. Run a few Google searches and you'll come up with 10 conspiracy theories for every 1 rational view on the subject. Are they afraid that a card with their finger print on it will mean that the government will know the color of their underwear? Do they honestly think the government couldn't already find out? Do they think the government cares what they do?

You already need to present a Social Security card in order to work. What's wrong with being sure it's a real one, or that it's you who owns it? Keep it in your sock drawer the rest of the time.

How can a fancy ID scare people when a military state with expanded powers to question and search individuals does not? I suspect that the answer is simple.

They're white and they don't live anywhere near a place that has checkpoints on the Interstate. Even if they did, they'd be beyond reproach. They can go about their lives as before, problem solved, liberty assured.

"Martial law in America is fine, as long as it doesn't affect me." What a narrow view of liberty. Don't Tread on Me. Me me me... my rights... me me me...

I'm sure it would be possible to root out nearly anyone who is here illegally using military and police enforcement. After all, how long would I last looking for work in North Korea?

A good system to keep track of who can work here legally would take care of a lot of our problems. It'd certainly cost less than a full-scale militarization of a 2000-mile stretch of desert. It's how most places deal with the matter. I know, I know. A Social Security card won't stop under-the-table cash businesses like prostitution, smuggling or landscaping. We'll need more security than just the Social kind, maybe a lot more. For each of those vices, there is a point at which it no longer makes sense to get it from Mexico. We can get there without violence.

People used to say that America's future was in the great expanse of the West. I now worry that it's along the rusty barbed wire and checkpoints of the South.

Sometimes civil liberties don't disappear in trenchcoats of guys in sunglasses. Sometimes they roll away in plain sight riding in the backs of Humvees.

(I suspect this is a perfectly acceptable arrangement for the guy in the driver's seat.)

Maybe a new ID system is a sacrifice of freedom. I don't think it is, but if freedom has to be given up in the name of security, we should share that sacrifice as a nation, and not leave the burden for all of us who look a little Mexican. In the long run, I think we'll all be better off for it.

Immigration: Run with it

Ever since health care reform passed, there's been an understandable "what now" amongst the chattering classes. First, Financial reform. Few aside from market fundamentalists and bankers themselves are against this, at least in principle.

Someone who knows more about the specifics may have good reasons for why this piece of legislation is rotten to the core, but the vast majority of us look at the shape of our economy, the narrative that got us here, and are unequivocal about being in favor of instituting a few rules to keep this from happening again.

I know next to nothing about what's in the financial reform bill, but the principle of the thing makes me an unhesitating yes. Having a strong, yet uninformed opinion on this issue has been really enlightening to me as someone who was steeped in every nuance of health care reform.

People can't be expected to follow every detail. It is wise to expect visceral reactions to public policy, not well-reasoned arguments. Knowing that, politics is about riding those visceral waves to the shoreline of reelection.

As a voter, are you honestly going to tell me that a vote for Goldman Sachs is a vote for America? This is clearly an uphill slither for even the most silvertongued politician.

Financial reform may flame out, burn out, get squashed, explode or otherwise disintegrate, but it's clearly a winning issue for those in favor, and a tough vote for those against. If your only concern is politics, it is wise to pick issues that are more likely to put you on the winning side. There's nothing novel about that. What's interesting is in when there's risk for you as well as the other guy.

After finance, the choice facing the Democratic caucus is between climate change legislation or immigration reform. Policy priorities aside, they'd be crazy not to make a run at immigration. For Democrats, climate legislation has few natural constituents, bad potential soundbites (climate tax?) costs a lot, and has abstract, tough to quantify outcomes at the other end. For Republicans, this is very easy to vote against, while it's not so easy for, say, a Democratic representative from Michigan to vote for.

Immigration reform galvanizes America's fastest growing constituency, costs relatively little for a big piece of legislation, and has very clear outcomes in its policy. The one thing running against it are the soundbites (amnesty), which clearly doomed the legislation when Bush made a run at it. Democrats face some fractious politics. This is not 'a heads I win tails you lose' proposition for them.

But they can spin this as a real, net positive, especially for working class whites who are increasingly alienated by their messaging and feel their livelihoods and way of life threatened by unchecked illegal immigration. When you take a step back, crying "amnesty" is pretty abstract, while "security," "American jobs," and "fairness" are pretty concrete.

On the other side, there is an increasingly emboldened and unhinged conservative apparatus. It's outside the control of any particular entity, Republican or otherwise. In a different scenario, the GOP could benefit from their energy, but without an ability to define what issues are taken up in congress, they are playing with fire. A majority in any chamber will give them a means to at least direct the fire towards the other side of the aisle.

The essential compromises of a humanitarian, constitutional immigration reform package are unacceptable to the current conservative zeitgeist. In other words, any policy forged out of good will and in the service of a democratic system will be abhorrent to them.

Looking towards November, who stands to lose more if congressional candidates have to take a position on immigration in the primaries? This is the moment where candidates must appeal to the nuttier side of their party over the interests of the general public. It's a terrible moment for Republicans to face a vote on immigration. Their base will elect nutcases with party appeal, and little chance to win a general election.

Visceral reactions to things can run for or against a particular political interest. Ask any gun control activist. With immigration, unless it is a purely military solution, there will be grown men in tri-cornered hats yelling about amnesty.

Meanwhile, Latinos, low-wage workers, law enforcement, and a dozen other groups will seek a solution to a problem that our country has spent decades in need of a resolution. Whose side would you rather be on?

On European Superiority

All too often I hear laments from left-leaning friends along the lines of, "if only we were more like Europe, we wouldn't be run by the backwards savages we know to live between the coasts."

It drives me crazy when European commentators and leaders take such sentiments for gospel. There is an implicit assumption in this talk that they have some special understanding of American culture because they watch us on TV, or that they have absolute moral authority over us because of the superiority of their social safety net.

Take this quote today from French President Sarkozy welcoming us to the "club of states which do not let sick people down."

Sarkozy was also sure to remind his American audience that:

"The idea that we have such a violent debate so that the poor are not left on the streets without a cent when they are sick ... Excuse me, but we've solved this problem more than 50 years ago (in France)."

Standard protocol would call for Mr. Sarkozy to congratulate us on what was a difficult achievement and be done with it. Instead, he opted for a pollyannish teachable moment, choosing to belittle something many of us fought hard for. Such statements are the diplomatic equivalent of calling someone who's ugly "ugly" in front of all their friends and then saying, "hey, I'm just being honest." It may be accurate, but it makes you into a jerk. Would Sarkozy have spoken this way to an Asian or an African audience?

Look, a lot of good things have come from Europe. Art, food, culture, the fundamental underpinnings of democracy. I like a lot of things about life there, and wouldn't mind if some of those ideas came to be on this side of the pond. But we're not Europeans, nor should Europeans expect us, or anyone else in the world to be.

Someone should remind Mr. Sarkozy that we're allies. We buy a lot of cheese and wine from him and if it weren't for us, Mr. Sarkozy would either be speaking German, or dead for having a Jewish grandparent. Hackneyed and jingoistic as those reasons may be, they make a good case for showing a bit more deference towards an ally in the afterglow of a major domestic achievement.

I have been lectured by Europeans on many occasions about our social inequalities. Many are the times I've been told of the shock and amazement at the homelessness, poverty and sickness, and in such a rich country. But it's far more often that I've witnessed these deficiencies first-hand. It's a daily occurrence and has been for most of my life, one for which I will offer no excuse. I just don't understand why they think they have license to bring it up in any circumstance.

But just look at Europeans' general approach to the rest of the world from the 16th through the 20th centuries. It is a long story of colonization at best, and gross expropriation of human and natural resources at worst. Now that they do nothing but vote in the UN and send a few troops to Afghanistan, they seem ready to put their past behind them in favor of the banal negligence of EU foreign policy.

We have our problems, but Mr. Sarkozy could stand a moment of self-reflection before making observations of others. Consider how intimidated and appeasing the European journalistic and intellectual classes are towards Islamic fundamentalists. Consider the ghettos outside of Paris, teeming with unemployed and radicalized immigrants, or the difficulties a third-generation German of Turkish descent has when trying to become a citizen. Consider the unAmerican-ness of the French ban on headscarves in public places. Consider Europeans' easy willingness to ban speech for the sake of some allegedly universal propriety. We have different problems, and different values.

And despite this, the 21st century European view towards the rest of the world has ascended from that of a zookeeper to a zoologist. Congratulations on the Ph.D. Now shut up.

There is a larger point in play here. When I hear progressive voices cheering this sort of talk on, all I can think of is the degree that they have internalized the belief that we're just plain inferior to Europeans.

We're American. We still use Fahrenheit. Maybe it's not the most rational or parsimonious way to do things, but it's our way, and any changes should be done our way as well. That is, kicking and screaming and all too slowly.

The bottom line is this: Americans who care about our inequalities should fight the moral battle tooth and nail to improve the lot of our fellow citizens. They should work just as hard to convince those who don't care about inequality that doing something about it is the right thing to do. But they should not countenance for one second this sort of talk from Europe or anyone else. They should not be made to think that America will be better off if it were more like Europe. America will be better off if it were more like America.

America will be better off when we are more like the America that we all hold in our hearts and minds. That's the America that the rest of the world wishes we were, the one that causes people from around the world to go to desperate measures to become a part of.

Our vision as progressives must come from our own uniquely American beliefs or it will never take root. We can't just borrow policy ideas from others and expect them to be plug-and-play. We can't wish our moral culture to somehow become amenable that of Europe's. We have different values and must respond to our problems within the structure we're given, not the one we wish we had.

Finding evidence for or against something is the easy part. The thinking that changes people is around the values supporting that evidence. Are they progressive or conservative? Problem-oriented or vision-oriented?

I would wager that most people would rather fight for a more perfect union than be called backwards rednecks who need to get better. It's hardly a secret that pride in our country is the emotional operating system of the culture wars, and that the culture wars are really about who has the moral authority in this country. There was a time when people were ashamed to protest against interventions to help the poor and sick. What happened?

As far as the voting public is concerned, when progressives ceded their pride for America, they also ceded the right to judge what's right and wrong.

No one should expect people to buy into a national code of ethics when all they have to offer are rational, parsimonious solutions without a hint of vision or a modicum of patriotism. Modern American progressivism will never get anywhere if their message is always related to the endless resolution of problems. People get behind inspiration, not rational arguments. You have to work towards something, not just away from something else.

If we are to win as progressives, we must work to shape America's moral culture on American terms, neither ceding morality to religious fundamentalists, nor transplanting it from outsiders who are somehow supposed to know better. These are our battles, not Mr. Sarkozy's.

Progressive ascendancy will happen when progressive thinkers know not only when to take criticism but also when to take offense.