Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Can a Rock Band Change the World?
U2’s Bono performs at the Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona, Spain. Manu Fernandez/Associated Press
By Jeff Keuss, SPU Associate Professor of Christian Ministry
When we hear the blending of music that matters and music that moves us, we do more than listen. We ask questions that are at the core of our identity. Rock music is often discounted in theological circles as mere distraction from what we are called to be and do in the name of Christ. Music that does nothing more than make people fantasize about becoming rock stars is a good example. But when we hear music, regardless of genre, that calls out the “Better angels of our nature” and causes us to reflect on our core vocations — as spouses, parents, leaders — then we need to inline our ears and consider what is going on in that music.
Lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, identified U2’s goal in a 1981 interview in Rolling Stone magazine. He said the band sought to move beyond “punk rock” and re-establish rock and roll as a vehicle for people to think about their actions in relation to one another:
“The idea of punk at first was, ‘Look, you’re an individual, express yourself how you want, do what you want to do,’” Bono told the reporter. “Kids were sold the imagery of violence, which turned into the reality of violence, and it’s that negative side that I worry about. … We want our audience to think about their actions and where they are going, to realize the pressures that are on them, but at the same time, not to give up.”
As a band whose career has charted countless No. 1 hits and filled stadiums with fans of all ages for three decades, U2 has certainly earned a place in the history of rock and roll as one of the most successful rock acts ever. But can a rock band, to borrow Seattle Pacific University’s vision statement, move beyond fame to truly “engage the culture and change the world” as Christ would have us do?
Eugene Peterson, Seattle Pacific alumnus of 1954 and author of The Message, thinks so. In a foreword to Get Up Off Your Knees (Cowley Publications, 2003), a collection of sermons inspired by the music of U2, he wrote: “Is U2 a prophetic voice? I rather think so. And many of my friends think so. If they do not explicitly proclaim the Kingdom, they certainly prepare the way for that proclamation in much the same way that John the Baptist prepared the way for the kerygma [preaching] of Jesus.”
While it is true that U2 is a band where three of the four members are self-described Christians, they are not a “Christian rock band” in the sense that we would understand in the States. They prefer to compete in the public marketplace, not preach to the choir. That impulse motivates imaginative and compelling lyrics at the symbolic intersections of faith and apathy, hope and despair, love and betrayal, grace and damnation. And that impulse reminds us that true leaders speak without boundaries.
If U2’s early albums (War, 1983; and The Unforgettable Fire, 1985) were about kerygma — getting the word out — and their later albums (Achtung Baby, 1992; Zooropa, 1993; and Pop, 1997) were about the musical form of that kerygmatic vision — R&B, Euro pop, retro disco, electronica — then their latest CDs have been about putting it all together.
The years after Zooropa and Pop have been enlivened by Bono’s renewed passion for the social gospel, only hinted at during the mid-’80s by his now-famous cry “Thank God it’s them instead of you” in Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Today U2’s music challenges people to stand up from their comfortable lives and look into the eyes of the oppressed, who were the concern of Jesus’ ministry.
Through decades of conversations with some of the greatest activists, economists, and political leaders of the 20th and 21st centuries — Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, and Mother Teresa, among others — Bono has made overcoming debt for developing countries a mandate for his life. That vision began with Live Aid in 1985 and Bono’s 1986 trip to work with various development organizations in Ethiopia with his wife, Alison Stewart.
Taking seriously the commission of Leviticus 25:10 — “Proclaim liberty throughout the lands and to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you” — Bono became actively involved with such programs as Drop the Debt, End AIDS Now, and Jubilee 2000 and galvanized a vision of responsive activism that brought secular and Christian groups together rather than letting them remain sectarian. Today he is co-founder and spokesperson for the ONE campaign, one of the most influential anti-poverty and debt-relief organizations committed to collaborating with the private sector, faith-based organizations, and government agencies.
For theologians, one indication of what a church values is the way in which a community of faith worships together. Similarly, transformational leaders gather people together in ways that exemplify what they value and seek to embody. From their earliest concerts, U2 has seen the gathering of people as an opportunity to invite people into causes larger than the music and spectacle of typical rock shows.
During the 1983 “War” tour, members of the band waved a white flag to challenge their audience to look beyond mere nationalism and embrace a larger humanitarian spirit. And during the 2005 “Vertigo” tour, thousands of lit cell phones texted support for African relief work through the ONE campaign. Now, during the current 360° tour, audience members line the stage choosing to wear a mask with the face of the imprisoned Burmese Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi during the song “Walk On” as a sign of solidarity, demonstrating how U2 has continued to lead its fans into acts of selflessness and social action that many churches would do well to emulate.
The closing tracks of U2 albums usually function as benedictions and “songs of sending” — an overt turn to the liturgical and a direct assessment of Christendom and the Christ that can sometimes get lost within it.
Whether it is the direct biblical quotation in “40” from War, or the reframing of Pilgrim’s Progress for the e-generation in “The Wanderer” from Zooropa, or the whispering cry of the Psalmist in “Wake Up Dead Man” from Pop, or the call of grace from All That You Can’t Leave Behind — U2 continues to draw its productions to a close with an invitation to something more, more than words and music can convey. This is continued in How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb with the final song “Yahweh”:
Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don’t make a fist …
Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I’m waiting for the dawn
The band became superstars in the late ’80s singing about the already-but-not-yet character of God’s reign in “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and they now seem to rest in the assurance that amidst the uncertainty and pain in this life, to paraphrase Rattle and Hum, Love has indeed come to town, and for now maybe that is what we need the most. As Bono sings in “A Man and a Woman” from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb:
You can run from love
And if it’s really love it will find you
Catch you by the heel
But you can’t be numb for love
The only pain is to feel nothing at all
How can I hurt when I’m holding you?
Bono once asked Christian songwriter Michael W. Smith if he knew how someone could dismantle an atomic bomb — a question that would lead to the title of U2’s 2004 album. After Smith replied that he didn’t, Bono simply answered, “Love. With love.”
And this is what U2 has given us as probably the highest watermark for transformational leadership — that in the end, the world will change when we truly learn to love it as Jesus did. Jesus did not call us to evoke change through willpower or blind agendas. Rather, akin to St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13, change will come when we realize that of all virtues a leader can offer us, the greatest of these is love.
View a video of Keuss' Day of Common Learning presentation at iTunesU.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
The Purposes of Political Combat
You have been paralyzed into stasis by the status quo, which has injected its subtle toxins into your bloodstream by means of radio frequencies between 530 and 1700 kilohertz and a lone television cable-news channel, whose incomprehensible power overruns the combined effect of two others like it; nightly newscasts on three broadcast channels; and the vast majority of newspapers and magazines in the United States. Rallies of surly citizens claiming the mantle of Revolutionary War Bostonians in the spring of 2009 and rude questioners at political gatherings with elected officials home from Washington in the summer of 2009 were harbingers of the inexplicable political reversal that has since been made flesh by electoral defeats in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and polling numbers suggesting a catastrophe in the offing for President Barack Obama’s party come November, when elections for all 435 House seats and 33 Senate seats take place.
How can this be, my America? You had given Obama and the Democrats a nearly free hand; not since 1977 had the political balance in Washington been tilted so completely to the advantage of one of the two parties. Seventy million cast their ballots for Obama, and on that same night, Democrats won a 78-seat majority in the House of Representatives and (after much recounting) the 60 seats in the Senate they needed to enact legislation almost at will. Under such circumstances, partisanship should no longer have had any meaning or held any sway, for, O my America, you asked for change, and you gave the change agents the power they needed to enact change; but after only a few months, the works got all gummed up. It will now require procedural tricks and sleights of hand to effect the very change you sought—and in effecting it, and thereby following your will, Democrats may seal their own fate in this election year. Thus has partisanship worked its ugly dark magic, turning the political system upon itself when the verdict of the electorate in November 2008 should have been final.
_____________
The preceding paragraphs re-present a distillation of liberal thought about the political circumstances of the present moment. The degree of bafflement liberals express at the surprisingly perilous position in which Barack Obama and the Democrats find themselves is understandable; after all, such peril was nearly unimaginable to everyone just a year ago. The results of the 2008 election had been so decisive, the condition of the post-Bush Republican party so parlous, and the double wound to the Right caused by the difficulties of the Iraq war and the financial meltdown so infected that Obama and his party appeared to have an all but free hand.
Indeed, the combined effects of a war gone sour and the capitalist system’s apparent self-immolation seemed to Obama and his team to have brought a decisive end to one ideological era and inaugurated a new period in which the American people were now consciously and explicitly seeking liberal activism from their politicians.
It was by no means an unreasonable presumption. The 2008 election, with its 53-46 margin in favor of Obama, and his victory in the unlikely states of Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana, followed on the 2006 midterms, in which Democrats crushed Republicans and regained control of both chambers for the first time in 12 years. Both elections were cast as, and indeed seemed to be, referenda on the failures of the Right—not just standard political failures, but failures on a grand scale that invalidated the modern conservative governing project.
Those failures were considered moral ones, expressed in the political and personal corruption in which Republican politicians had engaged and around which much of the 2006 elections seemed to revolve. They were seen as economic, with Republicans shouldering the blame for the economic meltdown of 2008. And they were thought managerial, in the decision to go to war partly on the basis of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and then the failure to do what was necessary to win that war. Liberals and leftists were tireless in arguing that these failures were not coincidental but linked, that they shared a common root—the essential heartlessness and soullessness of the Republican party and the conservative movement. And the electorate appeared to respond exactly as they had hoped it would.
It therefore seemed only logical that the thoroughgoing rejection of the Right was pretty much the same thing as an endorsement of the ideas and policies of the anti-Right. After all, liberals had had to concede as much when things had gone against them, hadn’t they? For years following the 1994 congressional election, a common presumption in political circles was that the United States had proved itself to be a “Center-Right nation,” at least as far as the voting public was concerned. Leftist thinkers like Thomas Frank found themselves compelled to devise a theory to explain why Americans chose to vote in ways injurious to their own supposed best interests. “The matter with Kansas,” Frank said in his bestselling 2004 analysis, was that its people had been conditioned to respond to hot-button cultural stimuli on matters like abortion rather than to support redistributionist economic policies designed to improve their own well-being. The same line of argument had been offered a decade earlier about Southern and urban ethnic voters by the reporters Thomas and Mary Edsall in their 1992 book, Chain Reaction—only in that case, the Edsalls said, the stimuli had been primarily racial.
It had further become axiomatic in liberal circles from the 1970s onward that the Right had secured the superior political posture on matters of security, regarding both crime at home and America’s position abroad, by ginning up (knowingly in a state of cynicism, or desperately due to personal neurosis, or innocently as a result of stupidity) a state of peril in relation to supposed threats that were little or no threat at all—Cuba, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union. The terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 came as an almost undisguised blessing for the Right, according to one version of this theory popularized in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11; they became a means of generating new security fears, most especially fear of Iraq, which made possible the engagement in an unnecessary war whose purpose was to rally people ’round the flag and the Republican president—until things went horribly wrong.
Bombarded by these various catalysts, the argument ran, the American people had entered into a period of unreason in which they reacted to averse changes in their lives and communities by embracing symbols of power and authority rather than insisting on concrete and specific political changes that would make their lives better and easier. The most telling statement of this theme came from Barack Obama during his run for the Democratic nomination in early 2008, when he said of rural voters that
our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
These words were revealing not only in the condescension he displayed toward the very people he insisted his campaign was designed to help but also in the way they expressed Obama’s—and, by extension, the specific Left-liberal attitude he both embodies and exemplifies—distrust of and contempt for politics itself.
I am using the word politics to describe the arena of public policy, in which matters involving the direction of the United States are hashed out. Players in the arena range in size and import from the president to an individual voter, from the Senate majority leader to a school-board member in his home state of Nevada, from Charles Krauthammer to a commenter on a blog or a caller to a radio show. The arena is host to conflicts over matters large (weapons systems) and small (the food pyramid), bitterly disputed (abortion) and barely discussed (depreciation schedules), of historical import (war) and entirely evanescent (a la carte cable pricing). But conflicts are what they are, and politics is how they are adjudicated.
The great military strategist Clausewitz once said that “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” but the opposite is true as well. In a stable republic like the United States, in the 145 years since the end of the Civil War, Americans have managed not to war with each other because we have come to accept implicitly that we handle our disagreements in the arena of politics.
And that has led to another implicit acceptance, which is that the system cannot afford to have us arguing, as Henry Kissinger described North Vietnamese negotiating tactics, over the shape of the table. So with very few exceptions, we operate by consensus on the legitimacy of the essential architecture of the government. And because time is finite and there are limits even to the natural human drive to disagree, our politics actually function with a great deal of overall consensus, a consensus driven by the overall stability of the body politic. Among elected politicians, even the pacifistically inclined find it necessary to vote for increases in the defense budget, while those inclined toward libertarianism will support Social Security increases and extensions of unemployment insurance. That may not be their inclination, but they are compelled to it by the logic of a stable political system.
When a stable political system finds itself in imbalance, however, something more complicated and unpredictable begins to happen. Principled differences will tend to crystallize every now and then around one or two events or issues or pieces of proposed legislation. The crystallization almost always occurs when one party or ideological tendency attempts, or is thought by the other party or ideological tendency to be attempting, to extend the bounds of the consensus in such a way that it shifts into something else. Once the conflict crystallizes, all bets are off, and the games in the arena begin.
This is what politics is at its core. Now, elections are the primary vehicle for the conduct of politics, because they are adjudicated at a given time and place and feature a winner and a loser. The methods used to win elections and defeat rivals are always in low odor in a democracy, because they are confrontational and impolite and lack nuance. But those methods work, and so they are used. The odd part is that the people who use them successfully, politicians and their staffs and consultants, often want to limit these methods exclusively to election seasons; they want to believe that there is a time to run for office and a time to govern, and the time for governing ought to function under different rules. According to this way of thinking, “politics” is something low, while governing is something high; you engage in politics because you have to in order to secure the power to engage in governing, which is your sworn and devoted duty.
Thus it was that Barack Obama could invite his 2008 rival, John McCain, to a health-care summit in February 2010 and greet McCain’s criticisms of the president’s health-care bill by saying, “Let me just make this point, John. Because we’re not campaigning anymore. The election is over. We can spend the remainder of the time with our respective talking points going back and forth. We were supposed to be talking about insurance.”
McCain wanted to discuss the particulars of the health-care legislation passed by the House and Senate. The purpose of the health-care event was to create some form of momentum that would help Obama and his vision for health-care reform carry the day. Nonetheless, Obama had determined that the conversation at that point was to be about “insurance.” He was annoyed at McCain’s effort to introduce political considerations into the discussion. Such a thing was lowering, the stuff of campaigning. “The election is over,” said the president. Two weeks later, speaking heatedly before a crowd in Pennsylvania, he insisted that “the time for talk is over.”
Talk is politics. Governing is action.
By saying “the time for talk is over,” Obama was echoing his own words a year earlier about the $787 billion economic-stimulus proposal he was then trying to work through the legislative process: “The time for talk is over, the time for action is now.” At every step of the way in the course of pushing his relentlessly ambitious domestic agenda, Obama has invoked this duality: His opponents want to fight; he wants to do. They are playing politics; he is above politics.
The obvious objection to my argument here is that Obama doesn’t mean this; in belittling his opponents and their propensity to talk, he is playing politics himself, attempting to throw them on the defensive. But the habitual nature of his response, and the response of those who support him, to the populist uprisings against his agenda over the past year suggests he is not the least bit disingenuous.
Obama really does seem to believe that the opposition to his core policies—the creeping nationalization of health care, the effective nationalization of the American automotive industry, the imposition of onerous regulations on energy production, and the expiry of tax cuts that will lead to gigantic effective increases—is not principled. Rather, such opposition deserves to be dismissed as bad faith—the efforts of the status quo, big business, and the politicians in their pockets. Or it is to be explained away as evidence of psychological or spiritual impairment created by the wounds inflicted upon sorry and ignorant souls who are being manipulated by forces beyond their control.
How is it that Obama can fail to see that changes of the magnitude he is seeking would compel those who believe that those changes are dangerous—who honestly believe that they are bad for the country and whose belief is grounded in powerful ideas about how society should be ordered—to marshal their forces to do whatever is in their power to prevent them from taking place? And that it would be wise not to dismiss or belittle the energy and resolve of the opposition, but rather to take their full measure and plan accordingly?
Obama’s failure may reside in his contempt for politics. For the national counter-assault against Obama is a manifestation of democratic politics as they ought to work. A rather vague promise of change during his presidential campaign morphed afterward into an agenda of astonishing size with an astonishing price tag. The passage of a $700 billion bank bailout supported by Obama before the election was followed by his $787 billion stimulus package. No sooner had that $1.5 trillion been committed than the president began advocating cap-and-trade legislation that would cost $800 billion through the election in 2012. And then came health care, with a cost of, at the barest minimum, $900 billion over 10 years, and very likely double that or more.
Americans did not take this grandiose and ruinously destructive plan on faith, nor should they have. A majority of them may have voted for change, but that change was change from something, from George W. Bush primarily, and not necessarily change toward something, toward a wholesale revision of the relation between the state and the economy. In response to Obama’s call for an end to talk and a time for action, an engaged and concerned citizenry used whatever political means were at hand—from spontaneous rallies following a financial consultant’s call on a little-watched cable-TV show for a revival of the Boston Tea Party, to a Senate victory in Massachusetts for a candidate promising to be the 41st vote to block health care.
In using politics to slow down and thwart him, Obama’s rivals are not simply talking. They are acting as citizens in a democratic republic. When challenged by their president, they, too, decided that the time for talk was over and the time for action had begun.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
Card Issuers Retreat From Niche Plastic
By ROBIN SIDEL
![[CARDS PIC]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tLwmZT2LRNAShJ6zCpVNeJ3_VX-G6dIFBq3p17OP7_SRt2B0jd3M8xqkbzNAT8tbrou16sqofIQxzFdSNConiLaI-4y1bgryfxJkgWHPOerbfmrvY4m7ahNe_rTr-1tLAo9oJQEgYVWsZXfCAzEo7f=s0-d)
Getty Images The Starbucks Duetto Visa card was launched with optimism in 2003, above. Now it's being dropped.
Credit-card companies are pulling the plug on some of the specialized, rewards-loaded plastic they pitched to consumers when credit was easy and wallets were wide open.
Next week, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. will drop the Starbucks Duetto Visa card after it failed to attract enough customers to make the credit card financially viable for the New York bank. J.P. Morgan recently terminated credit-card deals with beauty retailer Avon Products Inc., the University of Maryland, the New Jersey Devils of the National Hockey League, and the Detroit Pistons and Orlando Magic of the National Basketball Association.
Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., also among the giants of the U.S. credit-card industry, are reducing the number of niche-appeal cards. Bank of America, of Charlotte, N.C., now has about 4,400 affinity cards, typically pitched through college alumni associations, social groups and charities, down from 5,000.
"Issuers are taking a long, hard look at what they're offering and focusing on getting [the] best cards into [the] best customer hands," said Megan Bramlette, a managing associate at Auriemma Consulting Group, a financial-services consulting firm that specializes in credit cards and other payment forms.
When times were good, card issuers made it easy for Americans to fill their pockets with plastic stamped with the label or logo of retailers, colleges and professional associations. Such cards typically lure customers with rewards programs, rebates and discounts. Most cards can be used anywhere, but the rewards-related goodies are tied to the brand that is emblazoned on the plastic.
Co-branded and affinity cards have become too expensive as credit-card companies try to reduce expenses amid the surge in late payments and delinquencies by card users. Issuers usually pay partner firms or groups an upfront fee and percentage of profits throughout the term of the contract.
Banks also fund the bulk of rewards programs and maintain customer accounts.
The retreat by J.P. Morgan Chase's unit is part of an effort to stem card-related losses that are expected to haunt the company for the rest of this year. Chase now has about 110 co-branded credit cards, down from more than 200, and expects to eliminate more cards this year.
The Starbucks Duetto card, offered with coffee company Starbucks Corp., generated lots of buzz when it was introduced in 2003 because customers could use it either as a traditional credit card anywhere or turn it into a prepaid card by loading money onto it and using it at Starbucks.
"It was difficult to get the type of scale behind the program that we wanted," said Gordon Smith, who runs J.P. Morgan's credit-card business. "It was innovative and creative, but if these cards are small, there isn't much earnings power for the partner or the bank."
Chase is keeping its most successful partner cards, including those offered with Continental Airlines Inc. and Marriott International Inc. The bank also recently entered a new card partnership with Hyatt Hotels Corp.
Analysts said such cards are among the most successful specialized cards because customers typically have solid credit histories and often use them for the bulk of their spending in order to receive free trips and hotel stays.
![[Cards]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uQT-0JDG65r9xXtrCuUPpLNca4OZ74M0kKmSDjlorgncxrmU62Af9AcfvR68j-FVGH4UdKak3bnZAWCMiDTc2AEGpEgtVZjOpaQ289sDM1JBhsmGK15aVUPwE407xMSuDK3qFIFzKa09b70V5JOCVG=s0-d)
Last fall, Citigroup dropped a three-year-old Home Depot Inc. co-branded card called Home Depot Rewards that could be used anywhere. The card "didn't resonate with customers as we had hoped," said Bill Johnson, who runs the bank's card-partnership programs. Instead, the bank is continuing to promote its private-label Home Depot card, which can be used only in Home Depot stores.
Citigroup also is wrestling with jeweler Zale Corp. over the terms of its credit-card contract. The bank has threatened to terminate the contract early unless the chain, hit hard by sluggish sales, pays Citigroup a $6 million penalty. The contract is set to expire next year.
For retailers, the loss of card partnerships means they must now find new ways to retain customers. In addition to Chase, Royal Bank of Canada also is breaking off its relationship with Starbucks for its Canadian loyalty card. A Starbucks spokeswoman said the company is planning to introduce a new loyalty program soon.
Write to Robin Sidel at robin.sidel@wsj.com
A Way Out of Soviet-Style Health Care
Editor's note: The following is excerpted from an article with the same headline by Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman that was published in the Wall Street Journal on April 17, 1996. Friedman died in 2006. A related editorial appears nearby:
In a chapter in his novel "The Cancer Ward" titled "The Old Doctor," Alexander Solzhenitsyn compares "private medical practice" with "universal, free, public health service" through the words of an elderly physician whose practice predated 1918. . .
Mr. Solzhenitsyn himself had no personal experience on which to base his account and yet, in what I have long regarded as a striking example of creative imagination, his character presents an accurate and moving vision. The essence of that vision is the consensual relation between the patient and the physician. The patient was free to choose his physician, and the physician free to accept or reject the patient.
In Mr. Solzhenitsyn's words, "among all these persecutions [of the old doctor] the most persistent and stringent had been directed against the fact that Doctor Oreschenkov clung stubbornly to his right to conduct a private medical practice, although this was forbidden."
In the words of Dr. Oreschenkov in conversation with Lyudmila Afanasyevna, a longtime patient and herself a physician in the cancer ward: "In general, the family doctor is the most comforting figure in our lives. But he has been cut down and foreshortened. . . . Sometimes it's easier to find a wife than to find a doctor nowadays who is prepared to give you as much time as you need and understands you completely, all of you."
Lyudmila Afanasyevna: "All right, but how many of these family doctors would be needed? They just can't be fitted into our system of universal, free, public health services."
Dr. Oreschenkov: "Universal and public—yes, they could. Free, no."
Lyudmila Afanasyevna: "But the fact that it is free is our greatest achievement."
Dr. Oreschenkov: "Is it such a great achievement? What do you mean by 'free'? The doctors don't work without pay. It's just that the patient doesn't pay them, they're paid out of the public budget. The public budget comes from these same patients. Treatment isn't free, it's just depersonalized. If the cost of it were left with the patient, he'd turn the ten rubles over and over in his hands. But when he really needed help he'd come to the doctor five times over. . . .
"Is it better the way it is now? You'd pay anything for careful and sympathetic attention from the doctor, but everywhere there's a schedule, a quota the doctors have to meet; next! . . . And what do patients come for? For a certificate to be absent from work, for sick leave, for certification for invalids' pensions: and the doctor's job is to catch the frauds. Doctor and patient as enemies—is that medicine?"
"Depersonalized," "doctor and patient as enemies"—those are the key phrases in the growing body of complaints about health maintenance organizations and other forms of managed care. In many managed care situations, the patient no longer regards the physician who serves him as "his" or "her" physician responsible primarily to the patient; and the physician no longer regards himself as primarily responsible to the patient. His first responsibility is to the managed care entity that hires him. He is not engaged in the kind of private medical practice that Dr. Oreschenkov valued so highly.
For the first 30 years of my life, until World War II, that kind of practice was the norm. Individuals were responsible for their own medical care. They could pay for it out-of-pocket or they could buy insurance. "Sliding scale" fees plus professional ethics assured that the poor got care. On entry to a hospital, the first question was "What's wrong?" not "What is your insurance?" It may be that some firms provided health care as a benefit to their workers, but if so it was the exception not the rule.
The first major change in those arrangements was a byproduct of wage and price controls during World War II. Employers, pressed to find more workers under wartime boom conditions but forbidden to offer higher money wages, started adding benefits in kind to the money wage. Employer-provided medical care proved particularly popular. As something new, it was not covered by existing tax regulations, so employers treated it as exempt from withholding tax.
It took a few years before the Internal Revenue Service got around to issuing regulations requiring the cost of employer-provided medical care to be included in taxable wages. That aroused a howl of protest from employees who had come to take tax exemption for granted, and Congress responded by exempting employer- provided medical care from both the personal and the corporate income tax.
Because private expenditures on health care are not exempt from income tax, almost all employees now receive health care coverage from their employers, leading to problems of portability, third party payment and rising costs that have become increasingly serious. Of course, the cost of medical care comes out of wages, but out of before-tax rather than after-tax wages, so that the employee receives what he or she regards as a higher real wage for the same cost to the employer.
A second major change was the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. These added another large slice of the population to those for whom medical care, though not completely "free," thanks to deductibles and co-payments, was mostly paid by a third party, providing little incentive to economize on medical care. The resulting dramatic rise in expenditures on medical care led to the imposition of controls on both patients and suppliers of medical care in a futile attempt to hold down costs, further undermining the kind of private practice that Dr. Oreschenkov "cherished most in his work."
The best way to restore freedom of choice to both patient and physician and to control costs would be to eliminate the tax exemption of employer-provided medical care. However, that is clearly not feasible politically. The best alternative available is to extend the tax exemption to all expenditures on medical care, whether made by the patient directly or by employers, to establish a level playing field, in terms of the currently popular cliche.
Many individuals would then find it attractive to negotiate with their employer for a higher cash wage in place of employer-financed medical care. With part or all of the higher cash wage, they could purchase an insurance policy with a very high deductible, i.e., a policy for medical catastrophes, which would be decidedly cheaper than the low-deductible policy their employer had been providing to them, and deposit all or part of the difference in a special "medical savings account" that could be drawn on only for medical purposes. Any amounts unused in a particular year could be allowed to accumulate without being subject to tax, or could be withdrawn with a tax penalty or for special purposes, as with current Individual Retirement Accounts—in effect, a medical IRA. Many employers would find it attractive to offer such an arrangement to their employees as an option. . . .
The Iran Problem with Hanson & Baer
The Iran Problem with Hanson & Baer: Chapter 5 of 5
How should Obama deal with both Iran and Israel? Victor Davis Hanson and Robert Baer summarize the options.
PERMALINK
| THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2009 The Iran Problem with Hanson & Baer: Chapter 4 of 5 Will Israel strike first against Iran? Victor Davis Hanson and Robert Baer discuss the politics and ramifications of this prospect. PERMALINK |
| WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2009 The Iran Problem with Hanson & Baer: Chapter 3 of 5 What can the U.S. do about Iran? Victor Davis Hanson and Robert Baer offer their prescriptions. PERMALINK |
| TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2009 The Iran Problem with Hanson & Baer: Chapter 2 of 5 Victor Davis Hanson and Robert Baer describe the motivations and goals of the regime in Tehran. PERMALINK |
The Iran Problem with Hanson & Baer: Chapter 1 of 5
Is the Iranian nuclear threat real? Victor Davis Hanson and Robert Baer say yes.
PERMALINK
War & History with Victor Davis Hanson
War & History with Victor Davis Hanson: Chapter 5 of 5
Victor Davis Hanson offers some insight into his life as a war historian — and more.
PERMALINK
| THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 2010 War & History with Victor Davis Hanson: Chapter 4 of 5 Victor Davis Hanson talks about the study of war. PERMALINK |
| WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 2010 War & History with Victor Davis Hanson: Chapter 3 of 5 Victor Davis Hanson discusses error and war, including the errors made in the War in Iraq. PERMALINK |
| TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 2010 War & History with Victor Davis Hanson: Chapter 2 of 5 Victor Davis Hanson describes the several ways in which the American way of war is distinctive. PERMALINK |
War & History with Victor Davis Hanson: Chapter 1 of 5
Victor Davis Hanson explains why war is inseparable from the human condition.
PERMALINK
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Meet U2’s ‘War’ child
To millions of U2 fans, Peter Rowen is the child whose mournful face stares out from the covers of “Boy” and “War.” Now, 30 years since he modeled for the iconic images, he still attracts attention.
Peter grew up in Dublin, where his older brother Guggi befriended Bono, when he was still known as Paul Hewson.
“Bono [came] over to our house quite a bit,” Rowen says. “My eldest brother, Clive, says Bono used to eat us out of jam sandwiches! I remember Bono and [his wife] Ali coming, much later, for Sunday dinner.”
U2 first had Rowen photographed in 1979 for the EP “Three.” He later appeared on the European version of “Boy” and the breakthrough third album, 1983’s “War.”
“For the ‘War’ shoot, I went to photographer Ian Finlay’s house in Dun Laoghaire [a seaside suburb of Dublin], where his wife made soup, which I didn’t like. When we returned to town, Bono was driving and came close to running into the back of another car!
“One of my older brothers who lived in London at the time said he thought it was cool to see posters of me everywhere. I’d get phone calls from girls in America. How they got my family’s number, I don’t know.”
When he was 21, Rowen became a photographer. In 2001, a newspaper asked him to cover a U2 concert at Slane Castle.
“I was in the pit with all the press photographers. The band wouldn’t have known I was there. At one point, Bono was lying on the stage right in front of me, which was kinda funny. Not long later, I bumped into The Edge at a nightclub and told him about that assignment. He asked to see some of the pictures and, after doing so, sent me a note saying they were really good.
“The [band is] well aware I was the child in their photos, but it’s [never] cropped up in conversation. The connection I had with them was when I was a child. I know them to say hi and they are always nice to me. They’re older than me, so I would never have hung around with them.
“Some of my brothers and friends have got more mileage out of it than I ever have. The biggest buzz I get out of it is having my 10-year-old daughter thinking it’s cool.
“The funny thing is, I never used it for pulling the birds. I would have felt an idiot trying to use it as a chat-up line. It’s a bit cringey, you know: ‘I was on the U2 album covers.’ ‘Were you? So what!’
“Technically, they’re very simple pictures, but they’re powerful. What’s important about a picture is atmosphere and feeling. I gather the whole idea of “Boy” was the innocence of youth. “War” shows a much more disturbed-looking child, and I guess shows what the world can do to a child — a loss of innocence.”
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Admirals Adventure @ Papa Forty Navy; Retired Navy Pals Run The Bands And Pile Ups From Aruba
By Jamie Dupree NS3T radio-sport.net
Posted March 15, 2010
It didn't matter that conditions in the 2010 ARRL DX SSB Contest weren't as good as two weeks earlier in the CW leg. It didn't matter that one of the operators hadn't contested in years. But it still added up to a winning formula for K0DQ and N4OC at "Papa Forty Navy".
(Retired U.S. Navy colleagues K0DQ and N4OC)
For Scott Redd K0DQ and Ed Giambastiani N4OC, the story of the 2010 ARRL DX SSB Contest is a combination of contesting and military service, two colleagues who are more than enjoying their retirement with a dose of ham radio.
The Admirals Adventure - 2010 ARRL DX SSB
The plan was for an "easy, laid back M/S" at the QTH of Carl Cook P49V in Aruba, said Redd before ARRL SSB.
"I think we're the top seed in the "Old Admirals" class, but not much more," he joked.
In fact, Redd and Giambastiani were both Admirals in the U.S. Navy, both rising very high in the ranks.
Redd retired in 2007 as the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, capping a career that included 36 years of active duty in the U.S. Navy.
Giambastiani retired in 2007 as well, his last post as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the highest ranking U.S. military jobs.
Both had a love for the Navy and both had a love for ham radio contesting as well.
Redd said Giambastiani came to him about a year ago to talk about getting back into the game.
"He had operated from W1ZM 30+ years ago," Redd said. "We decided a Caribbean vacation combined with a low key phone operation would be just trick."
It also worked out well that the Admirals could take their wives along too for a warm, wintertime vacation.
The Goal Was to "Have Fun"
While K0DQ had managed to squeeze in some major contests during his Navy career, N4OC for the most part had only been keeping his license active."Ed had made maybe a few dozen contacts in the last decade and none from a DX location," Redd said. "He'd never used a computer in a contest."
The contest started on Friday night local time with K0DQ at the mic for the first four hours. Then it was time for a change of command on the bridge.
"Ed took the chair about 04Z and I went to bed," Redd recounted. "He went from zero to 60 in short order."
At first, "typing and talking simultaneously were a challenge" for Giambastiani, known as "Admiral G" by many in the Navy during his later years.
"Within a few hours he was hitting 150/hour rates," said Redd, who said his fellow operator ended up operating "probably over 60 percent of the time."
How well did the pair of Retired Admirals do? Right now, P40N is in first place on the DX side for Multi-Single claimed scores, with 7.52 million, almost a million points up on Team PJ4G.
"Did a lot better than I thought we would," Redd told radio-sport.net after returning to the U.S.
"Lots of fun running the big piles while Ed kept the steady rate going."
"As for Ed, he's hooked," said Redd.
"What's the next contest?" was the response from Admiral G.
So if you hear "Papa Forty Navy" again in the future, you might just be chatting with a pair of pretty happy Navy buddies.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Forbidden Fruit: Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
REDMOND, Wash.—Microsoft Corp. employees are passionate users of the latest tech toys. But there is one gadget love that many at the company dare not name: the iPhone.
The iPhone is made, of course, by Microsoft's longtime rival, Apple Inc. The device's success is a nagging reminder for Microsoft executives of how the company's own efforts to compete in the mobile business have fallen short in recent years. What is especially painful is that many of Microsoft's own employees are nuts for the device.
In a discussion about employee iPhone use, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once told executives that when his father worked at Ford, his family drove Fords. Mr. Ballmer is pictured at an industry conference in February.
The perils of being an iPhone user at Microsoft were on display last September. At an all- company meeting in a Seattle sports stadium, one hapless employee used his iPhone to snap photos of Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. Mr. Ballmer snatched the iPhone out of the employee's hands, placed it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it in front of thousands of Microsoft workers, according to people present. Mr. Ballmer uses phones from different manufacturers that run on Microsoft's mobile phone software.
A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment and declined to make executives available for this story.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs referred an email asking about iPhone use at Microsoft to a spokeswoman, who declined to comment.
Despite Mr. Ballmer's theatrics, iPhone users are in plain sight at Microsoft. At the sprawling campus here in a Seattle suburb, workers peck away on their iPhone touch-screens in conference rooms, cafeterias and lobbies. Among the top Microsoft executives who use the iPhone is J Allard, who helped create the Xbox game console and is chief experience officer for the entertainment and devices division.
Nearly 10,000 iPhone users were accessing the Microsoft employee email system last year, say two people who heard the estimates from senior Microsoft executives. That figure equals about 10% of the company's global work force.
Employees at Apple, in contrast, appear to be more devoted to the company's own mobile phone. Several people who work at the company or deal regularly with employees there say they can't recall seeing Apple workers with mobile phones other than the iPhone in recent memory.
IPhone usage at Microsoft is the latest twist in the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft, tech-industry titans that have mixed it up in everything from computer operating systems to digital music players.
For many top Microsoft executives, seeing so many iPhones around the office is a bit like how a Coca-Cola Co. manager might feel seeing underlings drink Pepsi—especially since Microsoft makes its own operating system, Windows Phone, that powers handsets.
Employee iPhone use has led to some spirited discussions among Microsoft executives. At a retreat last March for dozens of senior Microsoft executives at its corporate campus, someone asked about employee use of iPhones in a question-and-answer period.
According to several people present, Andy Lees, a Microsoft senior vice president who oversees development of the mobile-phone software business, and his boss, Robbie Bach, explained that Microsoft workers often use rival products to better understand the competition.
Kevin Turner, chief operating officer, scoffed at that explanation, these people said. Mr. Turner said he discouraged Microsoft's sales force from using the iPhone, they added. "What's good for the field is good for Redmond," Mr. Turner said, recalls one of the people who heard his comments.
Mr. Ballmer took a similar stance at the meeting.
He told executives that he grew up in Detroit, where his father worked for Ford Motor Co., and that his family always drove Fords, according to several people at the meeting.
In what some employees interpreted as a sign that Microsoft was clamping down on the iPhone, the company in early 2009 modified its corporate cellphone policy to only reimburse service fees for employees using phones that run on Windows Phone software.
Microsoft has said it made the change as part of a broader cost-cutting plan.
Some Microsoft workers take pains to hide their iPhones. While rank-and-file workers tend to use the iPhone openly around peers, some conceal them within sight of more senior executives. One Microsoft worker said he knows several colleagues who try to disguise their iPhones with cases that make them look more like generic handsets.
"Maybe once a year I'm in a meeting with Steve Ballmer," said this employee. "It doesn't matter who's calling, I'm not answering my phone."
Some executives have openly renounced their iPhones. Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, used Apple products before Mr. Ballmer lured him to Microsoft in early 2008. But at a meeting of Microsoft sales representatives after joining, Mr. Elop placed his personal iPhone into an industrial-strength blender and destroyed it in a reenactment of a popular Internet video, says one witness.
Others remain less shy about their iPhones. Microsoft software engineer Eugene Lin recently gave a public talk in Seattle about developing software for the iPhone in his spare time. One of his creations: a racy application called Peekaboo that lets people ogle scantily clad cartoon women. A YouTube video of the Seattle talk by Mr. Lin, who didn't respond to messages seeking comment, has been viewed more than 73,000 times.
Microsoft isn't uniformly opposed to employees using Apple products, in part because it makes some software and services for them. Apple's Macintosh computers are common in the Microsoft group that makes the Mac version of its Office software.
Still, Apple's ascendancy in mobile phones has been tough to stomach.
The iPhone accounted for 25.1% of the U.S. smartphone market during the three months ending Jan. 31, compared with 15.7% for phones running Windows Phone software, according to comScore Inc.
Windows mobile phones have lagged some of the innovations of the iPhone, including Apple's slick Web browser and the App Store for downloading software onto the device.
But there's positive buzz among Microsoft employees and others in the technology industry about an overhauled version of its software, Windows Phone 7 Series, expected to be on handsets in time for the holidays.
One person who isn't jumping on the iPhone bandwagon is co-founder and chairman Bill Gates. In an appearance on "The Daily Show" in January, host Jon Stewart asked Mr. Gates if he can have an iPhone since leaving full-time duties at Microsoft in 2008 to focus on philanthropy.
"I'm a very loyal Microsoft user," Mr. Gates replied.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
CMOs, Go Beyond a PR Plan to Prepare for an Inevitable Product Crisis
If You Haven't Already Convened Some Serious Internal Firepower, You're Borderline Negligent
I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that product crises aren't communications crises. Suggesting otherwise is like giving the play-by-play announcer credit for a sports score, or holding a translator responsible for presenting an untenable negotiating position. Our selective vision makes us focus on how issues are communicated at risk of losing sight of the business reality it narrates. Bad news doesn't influence or have an impact on brands as much as reveal them for what they are. CMOs need to see someone else's misfortune as the opportunity to review and perhaps change how you see your function before the inevitable spotlight finds you.The first step is to stop seeing crises as somehow "outside" the purview of normal behavior: Customers are surprised; employees chagrined; whatever occurred was an affliction, something that happens to businesses, even if the culpability rests firmly within. Lead paint, wing fasteners that don't fit, or gas pedals that stick are exceptions to policies and perceptions that otherwise remain irresponsibly pure, only they're not and they don't. Crises don't as much violate the status quo as they're an integral part of the outsourced, networked way most big businesses are run. I say they're likely to become the new normal (notice how many major vehicle recalls have happened since Toyota's woes first surfaced). You can depend on facing a major product crisis. The only question is when.
So if you haven't already convened some serious internal firepower to consider your preparation, you're borderline negligent in your CMO-ly duties. Revisiting the PR plan isn't enough, however. I'm talking about analyzing how your business is operationally configured to identify emerging crises and gather resources to respond to them meaningfully and quickly. Again, this is not a PR discussion, it is an executive-level business conversation, so stop carping about being included at the C-suite table and bring something worthy to the meeting. It's probably one of the most important marketing-relevant (and job-keeping) things you could do.
Here's my three-step action plan to help you prepare for your upcoming crisis:
Identify the risks
You and your fellow corporate mucky-mucks could already name the top 10 crises you'd most likely face, and a simple research project on your competitors could confirm it. You know, things you tolerate with one eye closed, like your offshore factories that pay their employees in minutes spent out of their shackles, or the chance that one of the gazillion transistors involved in keeping Part A and Part B of your leading product attached will disconnect unexpectedly. Your auditing programs, philanthropy and other marketing blather won't excuse you when the inevitable occurs (and your risk-assessment studies that inanely tag some failure percentage as "acceptable" seem quaintly hollow), and the pain your brand suffers will be appropriate and deserved. Get real and lead the internal program to name these events, understand in excruciatingly vivid detail how they might impact your business, and analyze what operational changes might be warranted before something fails or explodes. Talk about business, not marketing.
Empower your networks
Do you actually believe that a behemoth of corporate everything like Toyota doesn't have a crisis-communications plan? They all do, and when they don't work, we're supposed to believe it's because they weren't implemented properly. Nope. Talking is pointless, however reassuring or photogenically you deliver it, so your plans need to skip presumptions about "managing" the conversation and instead map what you will ask your employees, vendors, suppliers, and friends and family to do. You can't narrate the problem to them; they're inexorably involved, so what's your strategy to get them taking action? When something bad happens you need spot checks, improvements, whatever. There are no audiences for your crisis, only varying levels of participants.
Commit to decisions
The hardest part about leadership is keeping a level head and trusting your judgment. Most PR crisis plans don't get executed as planned, as the human tendency (and most exhortations from legal counsel) default to inaction. It seems easier to duck, only it isn't. Sticking to a plan is how most stocks on Wall Street get traded, and it's built into the technology that keeps iPhones running and nuclear power plants from melting. As a leader, you need to step up and get your management team to commit to what the business will do when it discovers issues -- public or nascent -- and then help build the processes and systems to deliver those actions. Every little thing that doesn't happen as you've planned will be something you'll waste time publicly apologizing for afterward.
I hope you're not just tsk-tsking the product crisis du jour, but rather taking the substance of true preparedness to the executive boardroom. Identify problem areas. Plan for networked action. Commit to your decisions. You have the most to gain from doing so, and the most to lose if you don't.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR | |
| Jonathan Salem Baskin is a global brand strategist, author, and speaker. Read his blog at dimbulb.typepad.com and follow him on Twitter: @jonathansalem. | |
Monday, March 08, 2010
Friedman Aflame: The Times columnist’s mind melts fact and reason into nonsense
Now, in the hands of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, this scene could be a profound metaphor for the need to “green-size” housing in the developing world. Or it might be a perfect symbolic encapsulation of how the battle for the commanding heights of the economic future is really a branding competition between two theories of civilization. Or it might be a cautionary allegory imparted to him over a private dinner in Davos, Switzerland, by the Indian CEO of a Chinese company operating in over 70 nations, manufacturing solar-powered waterless toilets for hearing-impaired Muslims, in what amounts to a “soft power” victory in the war for the hearts and minds of the Islamic world. Then again it might illustrate the ease of communication in our “flattened” world. Or it might be a glimpse into the dangers of Sarah Palin’s “drill, baby, drill” myopia.
Really, it could represent anything, because for Friedman everything is connected to everything else, so everything is a metaphor for everything. “In the Friedman mind,” writes Ian Parker in a 2008 profile for The New Yorker, “things tend to be like something else. The new is like the old. The foreign is like the American. The scattered has a pattern.” Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Freud famously observed — but not for Tom the Magic 8 Ball of cliché generation, the maestro of mixed metaphors. A cigar could be the key to understanding why geothermal energy is the only way to save the panda. Like the China Syndrome that inexorably leads to the perfect storm that breaks the camel’s back, Tom Friedman encounters no obstacles — factual, logical, or literary — between himself and the points he wants to make.
Consider this classic line from his book The World Is Flat: “The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been — but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.” (Just for the record, the capitalized “Windows” is a reference to the operating system. That makes it crystal clear, right?) Or consider this sentence from his latest epic, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: “The demise of the Soviet Union and its iron curtain was like the elimination of a huge physical and political roadblock on the global economic playing field.”
Playing fields do not have roadblocks; windows in fallen walls, even when opened, do not reveal much. Of course, the reader understands what he is reading, just as the diner might grasp that he is eating possum scat — but that doesn’t really excuse the cook.
Attacking Friedman’s writing style is something of a bipartisan pastime. The gold standard of the genre is Matt Taibbi’s 2005 New York Press disembowelment, “Flathead.” Describing his mounting dread at the prospect of reading and reviewing The World Is Flat, Taibbi writes: “Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s.” According to The New Yorker, The World Is Flat contains roughly 600 variants of the word “flat”: “Age of Flatism,” “coefficient of flatness,” “compassionate flatism,” “half-flatness,” “flatburger.” There are “ten great flatteners,” each of which is the sort of thing you’d associate with the familiar argument that we live in an interconnected world.
All this reductio ad flatus stemmed from a conversation Friedman had with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys, in Bangalore, India. Nilekani said something that was intellectually, uh, flat about the effects of globalization on international competition: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.”
“As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore,” Friedman explains, “I kept chewing on that phrase: The playing field is being leveled.” Indeed, he masticated it to the point where it was meaningless cud and then had his eureka moment: “What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened . . . Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”
The rational response to this is: “My God! That is so not what he’s saying!” As countless others have noted, saying that a playing field is level is not remotely the same thing as saying that the world is flat, even metaphorically. Playing fields are defined by rules, often highly complex, that the participants agree to in advance; “leveling the playing field” means making competition in a specified arena fair. “The world is flat,” on the other hand, suggests flat-earthism, which implies that the speaker is crazy, ignorant, or idiotic. Presumably, Nilekani is none of those things. And even in the days when rational people thought the world was flat, they never suggested it was easy to traverse, borderless, or characterized by level playing fields. Highwaymen lurked just over every hill, and cartographers labeled any unexplored realm with “Here be dragons.” That’s not exactly a celebration of a borderless world.
In the newer editions of The World Is Flat, Friedman addresses the “cottage industry” of critics who attack his reliance on “flatness” to describe the new world order and defends himself on the grounds that he is a popularizer. “Whenever you opt for a big metaphor like ‘The World Is Flat,’” he writes in The World Is Flat 3.0 (get it?), “you trade a certain degree of academic precision for a much larger degree of explanatory power. Of course the world is not flat. But it isn’t round anymore, either. I have found that using the simple notion of flatness to describe how more people can plug, play, compete, connect, and collaborate with more equal power than ever before — which is what is happening in the world — really helps people who are trying to understand the essential impact of all the technological changes coming together today.” “I don’t mind using rhetoric,” he told The New Yorker. “I get criticized for that a lot: it’s ‘too cute,’ too this or that. But I’ve never had a reader come up to me and say, ‘That book was too easy to read. That anecdote went down too easily.’ To simplify something accurately, you’ve got to understand it deeply.”
But there’s the rub. He claims to be simplifying complex ideas and making them more understandable. But what he is in fact doing is taking an already simple idea — say, that of a level playing field — and making it meaningless. You can boil something down to the essentials, but if you keep boiling it you’re just left with nonsense. The level playing field is already a boiled-down idea, comprehensible by high-school sophomores and Charlie Rose alike. Friedman’s alchemist’s brain transmutes the dross of the banal into the bullion of bull.
His reporting and opining on the Middle East was great and Pulitzer-worthy because he actually knew what he was talking about. He spent years reporting from the region, is a serious student of its history, and speaks Arabic. But when he applies his distilling powers to his other hobbyhorses, the result is an ungodly mess.
Which brings us to his jihad for a “green revolution” (a revolution he will watch from the comfort of his mammoth compound in Bethesda, Md.). Over and over again (dear reader, I’ll stop using the phrase “over and over again” if you’ll take it to heart that anything Friedman has said once he has said many, many times), he insists that all of our problems can, will, and must be fixed by accepting his vision for dealing with the climate/energy challenge.
His arguments by now are familiar, because the Democratic party and the Obama administration have adopted them, in toto, as talking points. Friedman’s case for a green revolution, like most such cases, involves jumping to a new argument every time the present one collapses. Like Indiana Jones leaping just in time from one cave-in beneath his feet to the next, whenever the case for “green jobs” falls apart, Friedman leaps to “energy security.” When that crumbles under him, it’s a quick hop to the seeming terra firma of global warming. And when that disintegrates, he falls back on “so what?” Here’s how he put it on Meet the Press: “What I say is if climate change is a hoax, it’s the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the United States of America. Because everything we would do to get ready for climate change, to build this new green industry, would make us more respected, more entrepreneurial, more competitive, more healthy as a country.”
Thus Plato’s noble lie is resuscitated in a pas de deux of flimflammery. The diagnosis might be fake, but the cure will still fix your lumbago, whiten your teeth, and give your horse a shiny coat.
Friedman is of late very frustrated with America for its failure to do what he says it must. Last September, in one of many columns lamenting that China does things better than we do, he wrote: “Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.” He continues: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks, but when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”
Just to clarify, according to Friedman, America is a one-party democracy not because the Democrats control the White House, the House, and the Senate. No, no. The U.S. suffers under the yoke of one-party democracy because the Republicans refuse to be steamrolled by the Democrats. “Our one-party democracy is worse” than China’s one-party autocracy, he explains:
The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.So what are the advantages of China’s “enlightened” one-party autocracy? To borrow a phrase from Elvis, the autocrats take care of business, in a flash. In a chapter of The World Is Flat titled “China for a Day (But Not for Two)” Friedman rhapsodizes about the glories of China’s statism. And in 2005 he began a column with this avowedly tongue-in-cheek prayer:
Dear God in Heaven: Forgive me my sins, for I have been to China and I have had bad thoughts. Forgive me, Heavenly Father, for I have cast an envious eye on the authoritarian Chinese political system, where leaders can, and do, just order that problems be solved. . . . I cannot help but feel a tinge of jealousy at China’s ability to be serious about its problems and actually do things that are tough and require taking things away from people. Dear Lord, please accept my expression of remorse for harboring such feelings. Amen.Among the myriad problems with this cutesy-wutesy-ootseyness is the simple fact that Friedman should actually be offering a sincere prayer for forgiveness of his Durantyesque sycophancy in behalf of a totalitarian regime with the blood of 65 million people on its hands. If he’d written a chapter called “Nazis for a Day,” this point would be more obvious to more people. But instead of contrition we get scores more columns gushing about how great China is for being able to get all of the policies right.
For instance, Friedman particularly loves the fact that China’s State Council banned plastic bags. “Bam! Just like that — 1.3 billion people, theoretically, will stop using thin plastic bags,” he writes in Hot, Flat, and Crowded. “Millions of barrels of petroleum will be saved, and mountains of garbage avoided.” It’s as if Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson had been morons for not decreeing an annual Tyranny Day when all the work can get done. Regardless, as usual, “theoretically” means “not in reality.” China never did any such thing. It simply required that stores charge customers for bags. They do the same thing at my local Safeway, yet plastic bags continue to lurk, threatening all we hold dear. More to the point, it is either deranged or dishonest to suggest that China — with its ever-growing tally of coal factories, poisoned rivers, corrupt regulators, etc. — is some great steward of the environment. It may or may not be leading in the manufacture of green technologies — though don’t take Friedman’s word for it; he rarely sources his too-good-to-check claims — but it is also burning fossil fuels faster than any other country.
It’s telling that the beat Friedman covers most adroitly in his column is his own brain. The datelines are often from Shanghai or Cairo, but they should really be from his frontal lobe. As with the Nilekani story, Friedman thinks the real news is how he came up with his latest idea, his next burning insight on the world. These “eureka moments”¬ — as he likes to call them — usually come in conversations with rich CEOs and high-ranking international cookie-pushers in places like Davos. For instance, in his January 31 column, Friedman writes: “‘Political instability’ was a phrase normally reserved for countries like Russia or Iran or Honduras. But now, an American businessman here remarked to me, ‘people ask me about “political instability” in the U.S. We’ve become unpredictable to the world.’” And from there Friedman is back on autopilot, visiting the same argument he makes in just about every other column: China is beating America because China isn’t hobbled by a broken-down, outdated, inefficient political system known to its fans as “democracy.”
Friedman told The New Yorker that his analogizing instinct, which allows him to compare everything to anything and vice versa, is like a “pinball game going on in my head. Balls bouncing around.” The more apt metaphor would be a furnace. Every distinction, every objection to his vision for the world, every bit of countervailing evidence inconveniently popping up in reality simply melts away. He honestly believes that the year 2000 will be known as the first year of the Energy Climate Era: Jan. 1, 2000, really began 1 e.c.e. His panic that America can’t get important things done while the mandarins of Red China fiat utopia intensifies as Obama’s New Progressive Era retreats into a sad and strange historical parenthesis.
One doesn’t have to read Dostoevsky to know this sort of thing is hardly new — the envy for authoritarian regimes that can force the wheel of history in the right direction; the contempt for the messiness of democracy; the conviction that all good things go together and that certain enlightened and visionary revolutionaries can apply their intellects to any problem, can pick the lock of History and start over at Year Zero. This all-consuming passion for a unified theory of everything and the indomitable conviction that you are right has consumed many a brilliant mind.
Friedman doesn’t want America to become a totalitarian country — at least not for more than 24 hours. Whenever he goes too far in that rhetorical direction he pulls back a few paragraphs later, but his to-be-sures about how America is still better become less convincing every time, more pro-forma and cutesy. He is possessed by his own prophecy, consumed by his clairvoyance about the One Right Way. Half-measures succumb to the mental furnace; the case for democratic deliberation cannot withstand the heat. Everything fuels the fire in Tom’s mind.