Coffee, Tea or ME, ME, ME!

This week we feature a guest blog from anthropologist and museum curator Patrick Dowdey. Reader contributions and comments are always welcome.

The primaries are over now, and we’ve gotten to have a really good look at the ‘tea-party’ movement and its candidates. A really good look: they have the media’s fickle attention in a hammerlock; you hear more about them that even celebrity canoodlings. And I think that’s my first conclusion about the TPers: many of them seem to have Attention Deficit Disorder. Not in the  sense that they can’t concentrate: they concentrate really well. Rather in the other meaning of the words, that they can’t ever ever get enough attention.

The “Mama Grizzly” of the TP is of course Sarah Palin, and she’s a really good example of the breed. Loves the lens, loves the cheering crowd, but terminally bored with all the gruesome old work of governance. Loud and weird is the mantra, and anything to get a rise out of people, make them look at me. And if Sarah Palin is the Mama Grizzly, Newt Gingrich is now grown into the Old Grandad. Newt is still good for a meaty quote; but for all his years in the Congress, what can he point to in the way of legislation or anything done for the American people? How much of the Contract with America did he fulfill? What have any of these people done for their constituents? We’ve forgotten how to ask these questions as we spin from rally to rally, from accusation to attention-grabbing accusation.

That’s one kind of Boston Harbor party-goer. The other kind is the monied kind, the Meg Whitmans and Linda McMahons of the new political universe. They too make a lot of noise, this time bought and paid for with their private fortunes, Whitman’s (Cali Gov) from eBay and McMahon’s (Connecticut Senate) from World Wrestling Entertainment. They don’t seem so much desperate for attention as desperate to run things, big things -- like a government so out of control as to extend health benefits to all citizens and provide unemployment in the deepest recession since WWII.

Both sets of Teepees run with the advantage of being pretty new to the major political scene, people mostly untarnished by the Bush debacle (and the Abramowitz, Craig, De Lay and Trent Lott side-debacles...BP tea anyone?) and thus able to campaign exactly the way W did without mentioning the name of America’s worst president ever. All hold out hope to people with little detail on how that hope will be realized and little to point to in the way of political accomplishment beyond campaigning successes. W was like that, good at the electronic moment, preternaturally bad at actual governance. They lead, but where?

It’s all pretty weak tea to me. Like Harry Reid, I’m a strong coffee voter, and I will gladly buy you a cup. Let’s turn off the noise and talk awhile.

Photo: Meg Whitman, credit: flickr, matthewfilipowicz

Nation Becoming A Dysfunctional Family

The most catastrophic depression since the 1930s is no time for a family feud.

Dear Cousin Kathleen:

I was delighted to hear from you even if only by way of a response to my recent blog, "Taming the Borrowing Beast," particularly, "The last time the United States operated on balanced budgets. . . was during the Democratic Administration of President Clinton." I was puzzled, however, at your stirring into this issue the claim that the Clinton administration "did more to promote and further abortion and overturn laws protecting the most innocent of our citizens: the unborn; so he's hardly a hero to me for balancing the budget. . . ."

However, if your question, "Which is the bigger evil?" is limited to right here and now, USA 2010 with eleven million unemployed and a deeply compromised economic future, I can answer that question with confidence.

The biggest evil is clear: It is family feuding over divisive issues that are not immediately focused on weathering the worst economic crisis the United States has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. We can't afford the luxury of arguing about anything else. Our foolishly happy addiction to irresponsible credit expansion during the last forty years leaves us, in the words of a repentant Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, with no more choices between "good" and "better," but only between "bad" and "worse."

We are a marvelously diverse and contentious country of many shapes, sizes, colors, races, religions and sexual orientations. We're a nation of immigrants from every corner of the earth; a miniature United Nations of people lives on every city block and in every small town. Our family mirrors our country, every bit as diverse and very contentious. Members of our family enjoy round the world friendships, and we have married people from many distant lands. These differences make life exciting and interesting; but there are times when we have to put them aside; now is such a time.

Our family's refusal to allow strong feelings about hot button religious, political and sexual issues to sunder friendships and family ties, can be a model for taming the current ugly, divisive style of political debate. Name-calling and exaggerated metaphors, like "murder" of the unborn, have led to the real murder of a live adult—in a church; and if we are upset by stoning sinners in Muslim nations, we might take notice of the new 'Scarlet Letters" we're pinning on some already deeply troubled women.

The answer is not to avoid discussing our differences—as if this were possible for our contentious Irish elements — but in remembering the law of love that holds our disputatious family together.

Your Father, Kathleen, as you know so well, was talented in keeping religious rhetoric in bounds with humor. Other members of our clan share this talent. That's why no one, whatever their cultural roots, wants to miss one of our family parties.

l remember Aunt Martha's greeting to a prospective in-law. Opening the door to him, Aunt Martha, then in her 90s said, "I've been told not to discuss religion or politics with you, so let's talk about sex," accompanying her words with a 90-year old's bump and grind. Our soon to be relative responded with an equally welcoming break-the-ice belly-laugh!

Just to show I haven't lost my contentious edge, I'd like to try to soften some of your certainties, Kathleen. Justice Blackmun, the principal author of the Supreme Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade, tried to resolve competing recent definitions of abortion with much older understandings. English Common Law (controlling in the United States in the absence of legislation, of which there was none until the nineteenth century) did not forbid intentionally terminating a pregnancy anytime before "quickening" (when the foetus can be felt to move).

Saint Augustine held that only God knows when a foetus becomes infused with a soul (i.e. when God breaths into human "nostrils the breath of life," that makes a human a "living being," Genesis 2:7). No human can know that until the devine "breath of life" is revealed when a live child is born. I remember when Catholic priests would refuse to baptise a foetus even to console a women who suffered a miscarriage.

I don't know when or how our current crop of clerics came to know what only God knows, but while clerical advice is entitled to respect; so too is one's own conscience. It is the ultimate human arbiter even when it disagrees with an infallible pope, or resists coercion by authorities burning heretics at the stake or denying health insurance to sinners.

photo credit: flickr, Brianna Lehman