To Nixon, And Beyond

Paul Newman, the actor who turned America’s love of salad dressing and popcorn into $250 million for charity, died this Friday. I’d forgotten Newman’s quotable take on being #19 on Richard Nixon’s enemies list: “The highest single honor I've ever received,” he’d said.

But when a Watergate felon convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping makes commercials touting gold as an investment, I think we can safely say that I’m not the only one with a foggy memory of the Nixon years. About the time I was born, the White House was a bunker, far more obsessed with preserving its own power and destroying its enemies than with governing the nation. Nixon showed Americans that Presidents will lie to their faces, and then try to get away with it.

For the next twenty years, garden-variety Presidential lying came and went (e.g., Reagan claiming he “can’t recall” anything about Iran-Contra, that loving gaze Bill casts on Hillary), but nothing was genuinely Nixonian. Until George W. Bush attacked another country on the basis of a lie. We were told that we’d greeted as liberators…blah, blah, blah. Or as Chief of Staff Andy Card explained: “From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.” And so “this government does not torture people” shot right past “I am not a crook” as the new benchmark for Presidential hypocrisy.

Fast forward to the present, where bankers are moving from TriBeCa to Jersey City, and ordinary Americans who spent like drunken sailors are waking up on a pier, hung over and broke. The bill? At least $700 billion, every dime of which will be paid by issuing Treasury notes (printing money, for those of you that didn’t attend Wharton). Bush’s demeanor at the White House summit of Congressional leaders and Presidential candidates reminded me of Queen Elizabeth opening Parliament—a head of state in title alone. Like the boy who cried wolf, Bush most likely can’t fathom why nobody believes him that sheep are dying. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” said Bush, speaking to reporters after a Nixonian trouncing of his opponent to win a second term. Too bad America can’t call the Chinese and Saudis for a refund.

Nixon’s rehabilitation began in his farewell speech to the White House staff: “Always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself,” he said. At least the man knew who he was, and what he had done. It looks like the understudy still has one more lesson to learn.

Fool Me Once...

Idly flipping channels a few years ago, I eased my way up the dial to C-SPAN, and a debate between Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia. For over an hour, I listened to them argue how the Constitution should be interpreted. The depth and persuasiveness of their arguments entranced me: when Scalia spoke, I became an originalist. When Breyer spoke, I was transformed into a pragmatist. The whole thing runs for 90 minutes, but if you're interested, here it is.

Now, President Bush is a man after my own heart. We both unwind on hot summer afternoons by clearing brush. We both love Texas. I’m a Mets fan, he owned the Rangers. No doubt that I could have a beer with the guy—hell, I’d probably insist on two. But let’s face it: the guy has no business being our President. I want my President—Republican or Democrat—to be capable of doing what Breyer and Scalia did so well that night: use facts to construct a persuasive and thoughtful argument that demonstrates a solid grasp of both sides of an issue. It’s not too much to ask from the leader of 300 million people, don’t you think?

Don’t get me wrong: I love a good sound bite. But the world’s problems are incredibly complex: sign a global warming treaty in Kyoto, and you might throw a steelworker out of work in Ohio. Lower taxes to stimulate the economy, and the resulting budget deficit could raise interest rates on a couple buying their first home. You can’t run the country by winging it. If we could, Brownie would still be doing a heckuva job.

And you’d think that the last eight years would’ve boldfaced, underlined and highlighted for America the danger of putting shallow thinkers in the White House. The examples just keep piling up: from this week’s Washington Post:

In response to a question [by Bob Woodward] about how the White House settled on a troop surge of five brigades after the military leadership in Washington had reluctantly said it could provide two, Bush said: "Okay, I don't know this. I'm not in these meetings, you'll be happy to hear, because I got other things to do."

But we’re still sold politicians as moose hunters, working class sons of Scranton, war heroes and change agents. The media loves it, because talking about hockey moms and Amtrak rides more neatly fits the three-minute attention spans that they assume we have. The more simplistic the answer, the more we lap it up. Writing in the New York Times, Bill Kristol compares how the two candidates recently defined “evil:”

--Obama: “We see evil in Darfur. We see evil, sadly, on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children.”

--McCain: “Of course, evil must be defeated. My friends, we are facing the transcended challenge of the 21st century — radical Islamic extremism.”

“So while Obama talked of confronting evil,” Kristol complains, “McCain spoke of defeating it.” Never mind how exactly an abstract concept like “evil” could ever be “defeated.”

A Turkish friend once told me that American politics is obsessed with trivialities because “Americans never need to ask whether their water’s safe to drink.” And he’s right: we’ve been able to get away with governing on soundbites for the last few decades on the strength of the America that our forefathers built. But from New Orleans’ levees to Minneapolis’ bridges, running the country on a wing and a prayer has caught up to us.

So will we get fooled into voting on trivialities, irrelevancies and personalities again? I hope not. As a wise man once said, fool me once…

The Architect

Something’s afoot when Karl Rove is hired by a news network and reverently referred to as “The Architect” by its anchors. Never mind that the man he got elected President set a new standard for incompetence. Or when a Presidential candidate can say “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations” with a straight face and with a camera rolling. Do we suffer from collective short-term memory loss, are we not paying attention, or (worst of all) have we lost our ability to tolerate details?

Whatever the case, with ten weeks to go before the Presidential election the same tactics are being used by both sides simplify complex policy discussions into vapid arguments about who would better “stand up to Big Oil” or “pursue Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell.” But could the real issues be presented as if David Hasselhoff was judging the contestants and the viewers at home were texting in their favorites? Here’s my attempt at it:

Gas Prices: Why isn’t the rest of the rich world complaining as loudly about the skyrocketing prices of gas and airfares? Because they’ve spent the last forty years building reliable and fast ways of getting around that aren’t based on the premise of cheap oil. We chose to sprawl, and now we pay. Text $4.00 if you’d like to join the 4.7% of Americans that read a paper or took a nap as they took mass transit to work, while you enjoyed the freedom of sitting in traffic.

Healthcare: There’s a hidden tax of 15% on your paycheck that pays to treat everyone in America who’s sick (whether they have insurance or walked into an ER after being shot in a gang war). The Europeans and the Japanese spend far less than we do, and live longer to boot. Text 911 if you’d like to deliver a swift kick in the ass to the corporate interests who pay politicians to pretend there isn’t a problem.

“Family Values”: What can the government do to prevent two men or two women from spending their lives living together? Prevent divorce? Make parents love their kids? The answer: nothing. But that doesn’t stop politicians and the media from their endless wallowing on issues that have precious little impact on how government can improve (or worsen) everyday life. Text 001 if you’d rather the government focus on making sure our drinking water’s clean and school roofs don’t leak. Or if you’d prefer that the national discourse be dominated by the issues that are custom designed to divide and distract us, sit back and relax.

The Architect will take it from here.

Nihal on the Move

Apologies for neglecting the blog, but I've been traveling across Western Europe and America for the past month. I’ve been able to savor the cultural dissonance of sharing a second class sleeper compartment with 5 teenagers on the way from Paris to Venice, and being schooled by my cousin on the finer points of traditional Gujarati dancing in a Dallas hotel ballroom exactly a week later. A few observations along the way:

--US airline security’s right back to where it was on September 11th, when was horrifically proven to be more show than substance. TSA officers minutely examine my driver’s license, eyes and ultraviolet penlight jumping from boarding pass to ID multiple times. But when a pilot or maintenance worker gets to the same checkpoint, they simply flash a badge at the officer without stopping. My shaving cream container could hold at least 300ml by volume, but it meets the 100ml threshold because the label (which could be forged by an adept fifth grader with his laptop) reads 75ml. I learnt that shoes and laptops remain on feet and in bags at German checkpoints—and I think we can all agree that the Germans know how to do security. But most importantly, the Europeans and Americans baggage screeners wear markedly different expressions. In Europe, the screener’s visage radiates the concentration that you expect from a security professional. In America, the prevailing expression is boredom, confusion, and usually both. But when you’re being paid a mean wage of $35,000, your mind would probably be elsewhere, too.

--My night train pulled into Venice on a cloudless, sticky Saturday morning, giving me a day and night to wander without a map through a perfectly preserved medieval city of canals. But the numerous vacant houses gave the city’s non-touristy quarters a melancholy feel—not surprising, since the city’s population has shrunk by 2/3rds since 1966. But this city-state was the most powerful economy in Europe for 250 years, leveraging its location on the Mediterranean into a near-monopoly on the goods that passed between Asia and Europe. Today, tourism’s the only game in town, making the city a dying Disneyland. It’s a history lesson for consumption economies that begin to party more than they produce. After a summer that saw America’s leadership borrow $150 billion to write $600 “economic stimulus” checks to its citizens, the Venice moonlight reflecting off the dark canals somehow felt less romantic, and more foreboding.

--The stereotypes are true: Parisians and New Yorkers do compete on who can be more unfriendly to tourists. Perhaps it’s because both cities are inundated with befuddled tourists, or that both cities are two of humanity’s finest attempts at the urban ideal (and its residents know it). Whatever the case, I can report that I ate the best sushi I’ve ever eaten in Paris, but only wish that the waiter didn’t react to my request for tap water as if I was asking to urinate behind their dumpster. And I’m convinced that the Parisian public bike system would be embraced by New Yorkers—stations are everywhere, bikes are flawlessly maintained, pricing is set to encourage trips of an hour or less, and best of all, calories (rather than hydrocarbons) provide the fuel.

--Want to topple Barack as the world’s favorite citizen? Try throwing in a y’all as you casually chat about terrorism with a German desk clerk, forget that a rental car agent in Dallas won’t necessarily know how to respond to an accidental danke as she hands you the keys, and bring it all home when by asking a Taco Cabana worker to add jalapeños to your quesadilla, por favor. Somewhere, Lou Dobbs is fuming.

Bias, Indian Style

Years ago, a Chinese-American friend mentioned that an African family had moved into our New Jersey neighborhood. “There go our property values,” he concluded. Hardly original thinking, but at the time I was amused at how quickly a recent immigrant was ready to pick and choose which Americans should be permitted to live next door to him.

I was reminded of this exchange last week, when my outraged dad sent me the latest anti-Obama email that had landed in his inbox. The arguments are invariably weak and inaccurate: the latest insisted (incorrectly) that Senator Obama’s first job was as a "civil rights activist," dismissing it as hardly "a productive job." Others seek to “expose” the senator’s Kenyan and Muslim heritage, usually by attaching pictures of his paternal relatives without comment. And to a particular audience, the images of dark-skinned men and women in native garb certainly speak for themselves.

But it’s not this clunky racism that troubles me. It’s that these emails are being circulated by fellow Indian-Americans. Why would these Indians choose to distribute (and thus implicitly endorse) xenophobic sentiments which could easily be turned against them? Don’t they realize that to many Americans, names like “Amol” or “Rahul” sound just as alien as “Osama”? That Governor Bobby Jindal’s relatives back in Punjab look just as foreign as Senator Obama’s Luo brethren? Perhaps they need to be reminded that if it wasn't for the "civil rights activists," we'd still be drinking from separate water fountains and attending separate-but-equal schools. Make no mistake which would be assigned to us.

After eight years of ineptitude and arrogance from a man who knew little about the world and lacked the curiosity to learn about it, President Bush’s successor will assume office with America’s global relationships and image in tatters. If elected, Obama’s childhood in Indonesia will help him put a human face to people that American foreign policy too often treats as “collateral damage.” To most politicians, “liberty” and “freedom” are just words in a teleprompter, but Obama’s extended stays in Kenya would’ve ingrained their value through exposure to a society that lacks both. Consider how much harder it would be for cave-dwelling fanatics to cast America as Satan if it chooses a man from African and Muslim stock as its leader. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to try a new kind of leader, especially after a President—the son of an ambassador, CIA director, Vice President and President— who only visited four countries before his inauguration. I’d been to four countries by the time I was four, and my dad didn’t even have access to Air Force One.

Rather than take issue with Obama on substance, these Indians are unintentionally revealing their own closely-held biases. “We might be a minority, but we’re better than those other minorities,” they say to themselves. In doing so, they turn their back on the inclusive ethos that welcomed them to America and enabled them to so quickly achieve success in a foreign country. I’d suggest that we avoid judging our neighbors by the color of their skin, and instead by the content of their character—lest others begin to do the same to us.

Neither Left Nor Right

The political talk shows have it down to a science. Find one person who calls himself a “Republican strategist,” another that smiles when introduced as a “Democratic strategist,” and pit them against each other, each competing to cram as many meaningless (but focus-group tested) buzzwords as possible into the three minute segment. But who’s not “pro-family?” Why do only some people that work qualify as “working class?” And how can a President turn a $13 trillion economy on a dime by implementing his “economic plan?” Never mind. The host is only too happy to enable the silliness, devoting endless hours to issues like gay marriage and abortion that are easy for the public to understand. Ratings go up, everyone gets a paycheck, and no harm done.

Well, not quite. Consider these two inconvenient truths:

1) If we tally all the benefits due to everyone that will be eligible for federal entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and subtract all the taxes that will be collected to fund these programs, the government will still need to find $57 trillion to make up the difference. That’s about $200,000 for each American alive today. That figure leapt by $2.5 trillion last year alone, dwarfing 2007’s “official” $162 billion operating deficit. To pay out all of these benefits, the government has but two choices: it can either slash benefits or raise taxes through the roof.

2) Universal health care is already here. Anyone—it doesn’t matter whether they lack health insurance or entered the country illegally—must be given care when they walk into a hospital’s emergency room. Providing healthcare this way is unconscionably expensive: we spend 15% of our GDP ($2.3 trillion in 2007, or $7,400 per person) caring for ourselves, and the percentage is growing (we only spent about 5% of GDP on healthcare in the mid-1960s). We can keep doing this until our entire GDP is consumed by healthcare, or we can make the tough choices required to control costs by providing preventative and catastrophic health services to everyone through the most cost-effective channel. And to control costs, we must come to grips with the fact that the supply of care is not unlimited: the funds for a 90 year-old’s quadruple bypass surgery may be deemed better spent on providing pre-natal care to hundreds of moms, for example. But the patient would always be free to pay for it on his own. And if you’re still convinced that we’re getting our money’s worth from the current “system,” why do Americans’ life expectancies rate 29th (Source: CIA) and 38th (Source: UN) in the world? And perhaps you’re wondering how much Japan, the UK, Germany and Switzerland are spending to live longer than us?

So are “conservatives” ready to turn away sick people from hospitals? And are “liberals” willing to call for limitless taxation to maintain entitlements at current levels? Debating terrorism might be sexier, but these are the real issues that fundamentally threaten our way of life. Yet a serious discussion of how to address them are deftly ignored by the politicians and their enablers in the press.

We report, you decide? Not exactly.


Editor's Note: Hat tip to loyal reader N(2) for the PBS link.

Of Pins and Patriotism, Part 2

I’m writing from 31,000 feet, on my way home from a week in Rome and Madrid. One of the niceties of traveling abroad is a break from the endless American-centric news cycle at home. But yesterday I happened to catch some footage of Barack Obama in Florida, and I couldn’t help but note that he was wearing a flag pin on his suit jacket lapel.

My initial reaction was disappointment. Obama’s principled disdain for a symbol he characterized as “a substitute for true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to national security” particularly resonated with what I had written on this page in September 2006: “The lapel pin is emblematic of how this administration has chosen to govern: relying on symbolism, slogans and ideology, rather than analysis and reason.”

But the realist in me understands that a candidate can’t win the Presidency on principle alone. And if a shallow and ill-informed electorate wants to judge a candidate based on what he wears, rather than what he thinks and says, then the path of least resistance is to conform. There are more important battles to be fought.

But other than repeat the whispered charges that Obama is somehow not fully American, our media isn’t doing much to uncover the latent nativism behind them. Why is the one Presidential candidate with a non-European surname being questioned about patriotism, when his non-flag pin wearing rivals get a free pass? Why do reporters simply correct the record on his religion, rather than ask why many Americans see the faith of a Presidential candidate’s dad to be a disqualifier? Especially in a country whose founding legend rests on immigrants seeking religious freedom?

Perhaps it’s because not many of the doubters are first-generation native-born Americans themselves. And we’re not a group whose patriotism the rest of America should doubt. We’ve spent quite a bit of time in our ancestral countries, seeing first-hand how the rest of the world lives on a fraction of the material comfort we enjoy at home. Our parents are living examples of the boundless opportunity available to anyone willing to study and work hard. For us, the “American Dream” is hardly a nebulous phrase that the rest of America learns about in sixth grade social studies class.

America could benefit from a healthy dose of this perspective after eight years of a man whose pre-Presidential travels only included visits to London and Mexico. While John McCain and Hillary Clinton might threaten to bomb Iran (to appear funny and tough, respectively), I see some of the damage we’ve wrought in Baghdad and can’t help but think that the buildings look not unlike that my grandparents’ Bombay apartment complex. Filled with real people that are just trying to make a living, but whose home just happened to be in the wrong place in a smart bomb’s targeting processor.

Our current leadership demonstrates how easy it is to put America’s unique combination of boundless resources, entrepreneurial culture, and rule of law to work toward disastrous ends. Perhaps it’s time for someone who is grateful for being able to pin a flag to his breast, rather than someone who does it because he’s known nothing else.

Flag Pin Reporting

My all-time favorite cable news segment is Jon Stewart’s October 2004 appearance on Crossfire:




During the segment, Stewart admonishes hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for “hurting America” with their predictable, partisan perspectives. “See, the thing is, we need your help,” Stewart pleads. “Right now, you're helping the politicians and the corporations…You're not too rough on them. You're part of their strategies.”

Fast forward four years. The Iraq War saps a billion dollars from the Treasury every three days, a sixth of the nation doesn’t have health insurance, energy prices are soaring, the economy is troubled and the dollar has tanked. If I was a reporter, I wouldn’t know what to investigate first.

But the television news media’s focus on the irrelevant only continues to sharpen. Since 1996, Bill O’Reilly has demonstrated how to blur the line between news and commentary for a cable news audience. The secret of O’Reilly’s success is his knack for overstating the importance of those topics that get his viewers’ blood boiling. There’s no war on Christmas, nor are kids being kidnapped from bus stops each morning, but watching O’Reilly’s show, you wouldn’t know it. O’Reilly plays his part perfectly: David Letterman once asked him: “You’re doing it because you know it will be entertaining, right?” For a split second, O’Reilly couldn’t help but crack a smile.

While I do find lectures on Christian values from a married man who settled a sexual harassment suit entertaining, what troubles me is that O’Reilly’s show (and his offspring on other news channels) is increasingly being passed off as reporting. O’Reilly calls himself a journalist. But reporting that the greeter at the Paramus Best Buy says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” isn’t reporting. It’s repeating. More specifically, repeating the irrelevant.

And the slide towards stupid hardly began with O’Reilly: In 1958, Edward R. Murrow told a gathering of news directors that:

“Television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: Look now, pay later.”

But rather than let O’Reilly make his money and have his fun, the rest of the media is also playing to the lowest common denominator. Flag Pin Reporting, to coin a phrase. In this world, the trivial is elevated to the central, simply because it’s easiest to report. Is Obama an elitist? Is McCain too old? Was Hillary under sniper fire? Meanwhile, in the richest country in the world, millions of citizens continue to toil under a system that would instantly bankrupt them if were unlucky enough to fall seriously ill.

So to Bill, Keith, Wolf and the rest of the gang: while you’ve focused on the irrelevant, we’ve elected a comically incompetent President (twice!), suffer under a spineless Congress, and have no idea how to escape a war we were misled into. Don’t think for a moment that politicians don’t see a golden opportunity to sell their wares through you as you gladhandle them to maintain access. Recall the memo written by a former Cheney communications director that answered why her boss loved to visit with Tim Russert on Meet the Press: to “control [the] message,” she coldly and candidly typed.

So by all means, milk the Reverends Wright and Robertson outrage machine for all it’s worth. But occasionally, take the time to ask the tough questions, those questions that don’t neatly fit into the two-minute, left vs. right paradigm. How do we guarantee a basic level of healthcare for all Americans at a reasonable cost? How do we address the root causes that drive Arabs to kill themselves to kill us? How do we reduce our dependence on foreign oil? Reinforce the value of education in our kids? Pay to maintain and upgrade the tracks and bridges that our grandparents built for us?

Now that would be looking out for us.

Target: Iran

Chomping on some corn flakes this morning, I turned on Good Morning America, where anchor Chris Cuomo conducted a four-minute interview of Senator Hillary Clinton. This exchange caught my attention:

Cuomo: "If Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, what would our response be?"

Clinton: “"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran. That's what we will do. There is no safe haven…we would be able to totally obliterate them.”


America’s ill-conceived intervention in Vietnam cost 50,000 American lives, millions of civilian deaths, and $700 billion in 2007 dollars. In 2003, we attacked Iraq, which proved to be a toothless tiger that posed no real threat to the United States or our allies. Billions of dollars and thousands of lives later, the drumbeats grow louder to turn our guns on Iran. You’d think by now, our leadership, media and citizenry would’ve learned their lesson, and stopped threatening military force against countries that pose no imminent threat to America. But they haven’t. So here’s my attempt to cut through the groupthink:

Senator Clinton: Your use of such forceful language suggests that Iran is on the verge of doing exactly as Cuomo suggests. Where is your hard evidence that Iran has the ability to threaten its neighbors and/or the United States with a nuclear attack? And that it would suicidally choose to exercise it? Why isn’t Israel’s nuclear arsenal enough of a deterrent that the United States need offer its own? Why do you verbalize the almost comical imbalance between our respective militaries in the crudest of terms? And if the goal is to persuade Iran that they don’t need nuclear weapons, is the use of such bellicose language by a Presidential candidate the most optimal way to do so?

Chris Cuomo: Senator Clinton had already answered multiple questions on Iran in the same vein. Given the limited time that Good Morning America allocates for interviews of Presidential candidates, why not take the opportunity to ask her for evidence that a threat is realistic and imminent? Her estimates of possible lives lost, dollars spent, allies alienated and energy supplies disrupted if the United States chose to “totally obliterate” an ancient civilization of 70 million people?

Americans: Imagine for a moment that you are an ordinary Iranian. You toil under a suffocating regime that tries to mask its domestic economic failures by blustering against perceived enemies abroad. A government that you didn’t choose through a free election, and seems to be more concerned with enforcing dress codes than addressing unemployment. Many of your friends and family look to the United States as a model for liberty and economic vitality, even though America supported Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked war against your country. A war that cost the lives of at least 500,000 of your countrymen. Your country has never attacked anyone, yet a major Presidential candidate takes your leadership’s bait and promises to “obliterate” you if your dictatorial leaders attack Israel. Distasteful as they may be, your leaders promise to protect you with nuclear weapons of their own, while America threatens you with a nuclear attack.

Your government is not on your side, that’s for sure. But what would make you think any differently about America?

What I'd Rather Be Doing

Boston TV Weather Forecaster: I’d hone a faux-New England accent, drop obscure suburban town names with a hometown familiarity, and sarcastically put down newsbunny anchors that dare to direct nonsensical weather banter at me. Best of all, I would use perfectly ordinary weather events to out fear-monger Dick Cheney. Six to twelve inches of snow in January used to be ho-hum before television came to be. But in the capable hands of the local weatherman, it’s transformed into NOR’EASTER ATTACKS! 2008. Watch how the right mix of certainty, controlled panic, and a sufficiently scary backdrop (a live remote from Gloucester would do nicely) will have the masses tearing down the local Stop & Shop in search of canned goods. Terrorism comes in many forms, and some of it’s perfectly legal.

One-hit Presidential Interviewer: Give me an hour with the President, and I could effectively demonstrate the degree to which your favorite hard-hitting anchor transforms himself into the First Sycophant to maintain his access to power. “Why are you surprised when your clarion call for freedom rings hollow to those that observe our unwavering support of the dictatorial regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait?” I’d sweetly ask. I’d follow-up probingly. I wouldn’t let a single distortion of fact get by me. I’d conclusively demonstrate that respect for the Office doesn’t equate to respect for the Message. And I’m sure that I’d never be invited to the White House again.

Backup Vocals for a Multi-Platinum Hip-Hop Artist: I’d get to hang out with the Steve Jobs of American popular culture, my street cred would go through the roof and grunting two or three word refrains isn’t hard work. I’d choose a stage name that was deferential yet legit (12 Cent? The Hobby?). The risks are slight—how often do the late-night bullets fly, anyway? In any case, if the police ask, I never saw nuthin’.

New York Mets Starting Pitcher: I’d win the Cy Young with a 95 mph fastball and 80 mph change-up, sign a nine-figure extension, and hold the requisite press conference to declare that it’s all about “taking care of my family.” But rather than descend into the depths of drugs, alcohol, and ego, I’d build a nice house in the hills of North Jersey, start a charitable foundation, and give lectures at local high schools. I wouldn’t kill dogs, carry illegal weapons, or tearfully declare that I’m entering rehab. Doesn’t my way seem like the path of least resistance?

Delta 777 Captain: I’d command aircraft to and from exotic ports of call, not the least of which would be Atlanta. A slight southern drawl would infect my voice as I kept my passengers continually abreast of every nuance behind delays or as we passed over landmarks, to the point where they’d be begging for less information. I’d never forget to turn the seat belt sign off. I’d dismiss some particularly rough turbulence as “light chop,” calming hundreds of people instantly. I’d insist that my co-pilot call me Maverick, and ask for permission to buzz the JFK control tower. Permission denied, I’d chuckle to myself and execute a perfect landing on 22R accompanied by only the gentlest of bumps.

The Case of Murat Kurnaz

Yesterday, the state-run Chinese news agency announced that the police had a Tibetan monk in custody who’d confessed to inciting the recent separatist violence on direct orders from the Dalai Lama. The name of the monk wasn’t made public, nor were the charges made against him. Ho-hum. Sounds like business as usual in a totalitarian dictatorship. Right?

Now watch this 13-minute 60 Minutes piece.

Or read this summary: A 19-year old German-born Turk named Murat Kurnaz was pulled out of a bus by a Pakistani cop in the fall of 2001. He was handed over to the United States in return for a $3,000 bounty. He was held by the American military at prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, where he was made to inhale while his head was dunked into water. He was electrocuted. He was suspended by his arms for five straight days. He was attended to by doctors who were present not to minister to his wounds, but to certify that he could handle even more physical abuse.

Six months into his incarceration, a secret U.S. military memo confirmed that he was innocent. The German authorities concurred. But he was held and tortured for another 3 ½ years, and was released only after the German Chancellor made a personal appeal to the President. In total, an innocent man was held for almost 5 years by an American justice system that operates on the presumption of guilt, and is accountable to no one.

But who to blame? Not Pakistan, where $3,000 will trump justice every time. Not the American military, where volunteer personnel are trained to fight, not to moonlight as interrogators. And certainly not Mr. Kurnaz, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

No, the blame rests with two parties. First, President George W. Bush, whose sloppy command of history’s lessons, indifference to the value of a human life, and inability to admit mistakes translated into a callous disregard for the principles enshrined in our Constitution. His underlings simply took this indifference and ran with it. Little wonder that his speeches touting liberty and freedom just don’t seem to gain much traction amongst the masses that toil under evil dictators. Yet our President remains blind to the fact that his record stands in almost comedic contrast to the prepared text in his teleprompter.

And the blame rests with the American electorate. Fifty-one percent of us voted to return the President to office in 2004. That the horrific prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib (which was made public in April 2004) happened under his watch should’ve been reason enough to send him back to Crawford. Yet the majority chose a man who hides his incompetence through bluster, his intellectual laziness behind slogans and lapel pins. Shame on us for re-electing a leader who handed our morally bankrupt enemies the ability to claim cultural equivalence with America.

Now imagine you are the Chinese Foreign Minister, and you’re on the phone with the American Secretary of State, who’s calling to protest the treatment of the Tibetan people. How easily and succinctly could you shame her into silence?

Defining What They're Not

1. “Our” Commander-In-Chief

You’ll often hear the President referred to as ‘our commander-in-chief’ by his supporters. But Gary Wills reminds us that “the president is not ‘our’ commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army.” If you’re wondering why the Constitution draws a bright line between military discipline and civic discourse, ask a Tibetan or Burmese how totalitarianism is working out for them.

As for a test, consider how a candidate might react to this real-life scenario: On the morning of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush’s chief of staff whispered into his ear that "a second plane [has] hit the second tower. America is under attack." Unsure or unable to act, the President sat frozen for almost seven minutes. With stunning clarity, we saw the weight of our nation instantly placed on the shoulders of our leader. But deprived of the opportunity to be prepped, handled and choreographed, the man we had elected President was revealed to be unequal to the task. Perhaps this time, the voters will pay a bit more heed to a candidate’s depth, composure, and thoughtfulness. And a bit less on how good he looks in a flight suit.

2. A Pundit

From the Sanskrit word pandita, meaning a learned man or teacher, the word’s English definition has evolved into a pejorative description of someone who is paid to opine through the mass media. But our modern definition does injustice to the word’s original meaning, so I suggest that anyone:

1) Whose statements are calculated to engage the passions of his audience, rather than their ability to reason;

2) Who continues to pontificate on that which his previous conclusions have been repeatedly and conclusively been proven wrong;

3) Who draws an imaginary line, places his opponents on the opposite side, and proceeds to find absolutely no common ground with them;

4) Whose views on any given topic can be predicted before he opens his mouth;

isn’t a pundit.

Leaving St. Louis

I’m back after a visit to St. Louis, and I can report to my fellow New Yorkers that the stereotype is true: we’re far more obnoxious and rude bunch than our Middle America cousins. Strangers smile and say hello and cashiers say thank you. “It’s a great city,” says my host. “But it’s just too far from anywhere else.”

According to Google Maps, St. Louis is 300 miles from Chicago. You could fly, but God forbid you’re carrying a 4oz bottle of shampoo. You’ll also need to tack on 2-3 hours for security and airport transfers, and then pray for good flying weather. The drive would take 5 hours in no traffic. So I guess my friend’s right—the hassle of traveling does make Chicago seem a world away.

Now consider Amtrak’s run between Chicago and St. Louis (284 miles), which is scheduled for 5 hours and 40 minutes. The train runs on delay-prone tracks owned by freight lines, with only four departures per day. Amtrak does run what they call a high speed service that trundles the 450 miles between DC and Boston in 6 hours and 30 minutes. Only in this heavily congested corridor does Amtrak offer a viable (but still mediocre) product. Everywhere else, it’s not just an impractical option—it’s a silly one.

Contrast this with:

- A Frenchman who boards a train in Paris, and finds himself on the German border at Strasbourg (300 miles away) in 2 hours and 20 minutes. That will drop to 1 hour 50 minutes when construction is complete in 2014.

-A Japanese who can travel from Tokyo to Osaka (320 miles) in 2 hours and 25 minutes.

-An Argentine, who will be able to travel the 441 miles between Buenos Aires and Cordoba (the same distance between Boston and DC) in just 3 hours when the Americas’ first high-speed link opens in 2011.

Building the Paris-Strasbourg link will cost €4 billion, which works out to about 3 weeks of spending on the Iraq War. A 2-track high speed rail line operates at an almost limitless scale—the Tokyo-Osaka link carries 375,000 passengers per day. Compare that to the busiest section of the New Jersey Turnpike: 14 lanes carrying 200,000 vehicles per day. Trains can be scheduled so reliably that the Madrid-Seville link offers a full refund if the train is more than 5 minutes late.

For those who still view an option that is cheaper, faster, more reliable and land-efficient suspiciously because the notion of traveling in style and comfort sounds vaguely French, consider how it might be tailored to fit America’s love of the car. Since many more of us live in the suburbs, we could build en-route suburban stations that would offer thousands of parking spaces. Or offer car-carrying overnight trains for families traveling longer distances. How about a train that takes an hour to travel the 200 miles from a secondary city like Illinois’ capital of Springfield directly to O’Hare?

Our Interstate highway system was state-of-the-art civil engineering in the 1950s. But now, there’s more than 300 million of us, our airports and roads are congested, and gas is nearing $4/gallon. Fact: we’ve fallen behind the rest of the world in transporting ourselves. And America’s not as big as we think—here’s a sample of four city pairs that fall within high-speed rail’s sweet spot of 200 to 500 mile trips:

- Boston-New York-Washington: 454 miles
- Los Angeles-San Francisco: 382 miles
- Dallas-Houston: 239 miles
- Chicago-Detroit: 283 miles

So here’s my advice to our Presidential candidates: stop talking about “fixing America’s infrastructure.” Boring, doesn’t mean a thing to John Q. Public. Instead, ask those swing voters in Missouri whether they’d like to park their car, walk onto a platform, and board a train that leaves exactly on time and gets them to get to Chicago in 90 minutes. On board, they can spend each second relaxing in a seat sized for an adult, sleeping or working. And they’ll step off the train in Chicago’s city center.

Or we can keep walking barefoot through security.

Hope's Got Nothing To Do With It

You know you’re getting older when the phrase “how great things used to be” starts creeping into your conversation. Remember when Saturday Night Live used to do political satire that didn’t look like it was written by a ten year-old? When SUV-idling neighborhood moms didn’t gather at the school bus stop like overprotective hens? When the pitcher who threw a complete game was just doing his job?

So went my confidence in the American voter, which hit its nadir in 2004. How could 51% re-elect a man who blundered us into war and was still incapable of speaking in complete sentences? American Idol and America blurred together, and I found myself flipping between Sanjaya and Dubya, unable to tell the difference. So last December, I asked a friend how he was planning to vote in the upcoming election. “I don’t give a shit about that stuff,” he laughed. Was America in an irrecoverable tailspin, caught in the jetwash of its own indifference?

But it looks like I brought out the rocking chair and Country Time lemonade too soon, as voters have turned out in record numbers over the past two months. Europeans who reflexively sneer at our privately-financed, drawn-out election cycles can’t help but admire the populist mechanisms of how American political parties ask the grassroots to choose their leaders. And it must’ve been a blue-ink-finger moment for the liberal in Idaho, or the conservative in Massachusetts, who both got a chance to cast their first meaningful national vote in decades.

My friend’s words still troubled me—after all, how could someone who enjoyed access to a great public education and holds a lucrative Wall Street job not care about who led the country? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that his attitude was testament to the strength of a system that remains transparent while generating so much plenty. No doubt he’d care if there was no school or job in the first place.

After seven years of a President who probably blames his high dry-cleaning bills on 9/11, Americans have been treated to an object lesson as to what happens when too many of us choose apathy. And the stampede to the polls demonstrates that we still trust the system to spit out someone better this time around. Some might call it naïveté, but isn’t it nice to know that “Liberty” isn’t just a word stamped on our quarters?

Perhaps there’s hope for us yet.



Editor’s Note: “Jetwash of our own indifference.” That’s just great writing.

U.S. Offers “Unequivocal Surrender” to Al-Qaeda

SOUTH WAZIRISTAN DISTRICT, Pakistan, January 21, 2009 (AP): President Barack Obama has traveled to this mountainous region astride the Afghani frontier to offer Osama bin Laden America’s unequivocal surrender in the war on terror. “The voters chose last November to blame America first, raise taxes, and cripple the economy. We begin this journey by suing Al-Qaeda for peace. Together we can,” said a statement released by the White House this evening.

A Bleary-Eyed Reaction
In Washington, the startling about-face in American foreign policy eerily reverberated through a city of empty corridors as power is transferred to the incoming administration. Few high-level Bush administration officials were available for comment, with only former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice offering her perspective: “We also pursued an overly simplistic foreign policy that lent a deaf ear to history and the realities of geopolitics. And we reaped short term political dividends from an uninformed electorate, but at the cost of strengthening our adversaries and exposing the limits of American hard power. So good luck to them,” she said.

Conservative commentators, who have struggled with how to criticize a Presidential candidate that displayed a Teflon-like ability to shrug off their attacks during the election, appeared no closer to solving the riddle. “I’ve always found it so much easier to ridicule Democrats as traitorous and weak without a basis in fact,” Ann Coulter said on NBC’s Today Show. “This definitely makes it tougher to sell books. But I’m just glad that NBC still takes me seriously enough to ask me onto national television,” she said.

International reaction was more pointed. “We applaud America’s action,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “More importantly, we are pleased that the Obama-bin Laden summit continues America’s policy of putting a disorganized, fringe confederation of extremists on equal footing with itself. This makes it easier for us to crack down on dissent under the false banner of anti-terrorism. Of course, we’d prefer the American president demagogue and fearmonger, but we’ll take it,” he added. Chinese President Hu Jintao, speaking during a state visit to Sudan, had characteristically little to say: “We’d prefer to remain inscrutable, the better to fit the West’s stereotype of us, thanks,” he said in a press conference.


Under the Cover of Night
Air Force One landed at a Pakistani military base near Karachi at 1:30am local time, and the President was ferried by helicopter to this lawless part of Pakistan widely suspected to be bin Laden’s redoubt. The White House press release provided little detail on the meeting’s agenda, saying only that the President is ready to “engage bin Laden without precondition.”

Word of the trip had leaked to several prominent news organizations yesterday, but the administration asked stories be held until Air Force One was on the ground in Pakistan. Officials later admitted that they weren’t too concerned about gaining cooperation on the matter: “The media failed to scrutinize the previous administration’s blind rush into Iraq and breathtaking incompetence until both were obvious to a fifth grader,” said Press Secretary Alan Colmes. “Frankly, we’re counting on the same honeymoon. So thanks for take orders in exchange for access.”

A Night Spent on a Stool
Upon arriving at the district capital of Wana, the President changed into the traditional garb of a Waziri elder and spent the rest of the night in a stark room outfitted with only a table, stool and telephone, making and receiving calls from world leaders. “Their counsel strengthens the case America makes to the world,” Obama said in an interview with Al-Jazeera. “Our talks in the coming days must be grounded in Saudi human rights norms, be consistent with French labor laws, and respect Japanese notions of individualism. ‘Together’ doesn’t just mean Americans,” he said.

However, there is no indication that bin Laden is willing to meet with the President. A website with known links to extremists, OsamaTalkingPoints.com, posted a release from Al-Qaeda: “America’s offer is a problem for us. We’re good at killing civilians, playing to the economic disenchantment of the Arab world, and creating false divisions between Western powers. Our demands were never supposed to be a serious platform for governance, and we sort of hoped nobody would notice."

"Can we get back to you on this?”

Hating America, Nihal-Style

Try booking a window seat during your next daytime cross-country flight. Although astute frequent fliers angle for aisle seats, sitting next to the window never gets old to me. From New York, the terrain eases from greenery into farmland. A quick burst of mountains, some desert terrain, and you’re landing in the Californian airport of your choice.

What’s more striking than the evolution of the landscape or the sheer amount of space is how thoroughly, how completely, Americans have colonized the land below. If it’s arable, we’re growing, living or working on it. Even the forbidding desert houses such improbable cities as Phoenix and Las Vegas. You won’t find a better five hour display of the unparalleled bounty of resources we’ve been enjoying for the past 400 years. But this bounty has bred a flaw in the American psyche: blessed with plenty, we’ve never learned to make do within limits.

Make no mistake, this is fundamentally a good thing. America’s pursuit of better, faster, and stronger has given the world airplanes, the Internet, and Post-It Notes. All things considered, I’d rather be surrounded by people that usually ask “why not?” as a rhetorical question. But our instinct to push the envelope often makes prudence an afterthought. Examples abound: a war, funded to the last dime with borrowed money. Uncontrolled growth from Atlanta to the arid West, without a thought to husbanding the necessary water for newcomers. The average American saved just 0.5% of their income last year, which compares shamefully to the 8.9% recorded in 1978.

Well, it looks like our resources aren’t as unlimited as we thought. Texas barely has the funds to pay for the upkeep of its road network, let alone pay for new ones needed for a population that has grown 60% over the past 25 years. Healthcare premiums are the silent tax largely to blame for wage stagnation over the last two decades, but we still stubbornly insist that the profit motive of insurance and pharmaceutical companies is the most efficient way to deliver healthcare. Why don’t we have the money to keep our bridges from falling down or inspect Chinese toy imports, but our Defense Secretary can ask Congress for $170,000,000,000 to fund the war in 2009 with a straight face?

Don’t look to our elected officials for leadership on this front. When the costs of government rise faster than the tax base, lawmakers’ first instinct is to raise taxes, rather than question the effectiveness or efficiency of the bureaucracy. I saw this mentality on brilliant display at one of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s town halls, where he’s proposing to cut the state’s $32 billion debt in half by raising road tolls 800% over the next 14 years. Not one slide of the Governor’s PowerPoint presentation identified tangible cuts in government spending—that is, to do with less.

But a successful democracy’s lawmakers are a reflection of its citizenry. Exhibit A: our man-child of a President who wins two elections, and then advises Americans how they can do their part to fight the ‘war on terror’: “I encourage you all to go shopping more,” he smirks to a compliant press corps. So it’s not surprising how Mitt Romney speaks to an America that insists on driving SUVs and borrowing sub-prime dollars to build McMansions, but then frets about a trillion-dollar war in the Middle East and plummeting housing prices.

To simply chuckle at Romney’s ability to squeeze “God,” “Family,” and “Reagan” into a thirty second response is to misunderestimate the political system in which he operates, and the free-candy mentality of America that allows it to thrive. Human history is littered with examples of dominant nations that spent like drunken sailors, and what happens next. Turns out that the sun did eventually set on the British Empire. And the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Soviet, Roman, Ottoman, Mogul, Mongol and Japanese, for that matter. Patting our collective backs feels good, but it does nothing to ensure that the American standard of living remains the envy of the world for the next 100 years.

Everyone has an opinion about gay marriage, abortion, and Al Sharpton. But I suggest that we change the subject, and begin a serious discussion about how to update the 1950s-era radar that guided my cross-country flight. Or making sure that the food we eat is safe. We have so much. We should be doing more with it.

The New Code Words

Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In his remarks, he lauded “states’ rights” in the same county where three civil rights activists working to register voters had been murdered in 1964. Many saw Reagan’s words as backhanded praise of the post-Reconstruction tactics that had shut African-Americans out of the South’s political and economic mainstream for a hundred years after Reconstruction. Whether he was just tactless or meant to be patently insidious, his words certainly made Rosalynn Carter’s characterization ring particularly true: “He makes us comfortable with our prejudices,” she said.

As times change, so do the code words. For example, it’s become fashionable to attach the adjective “Judeo-Christian” to a variety of political nouns, such as “values” or “country.” But what are the specific Judeo-Christian values relevant to governing the United States that a non-Judeo-Christian would take issue with? For that matter, what are the specific values that are shared by Judeo-Christians that are not shared by other pious, law-abiding non-Christians or non-Jews?

Of course, there aren’t any serious answers to these questions. If you pressed, I’d bet that you’d hear “freedom,” “liberty” and “life” cited as examples. But aren’t these values more accurately characterized as “universal,” or perhaps “natural”? What we’re really witnessing is the emergence of a new set of code words coldly calculated to appeal to those Americans that are uncomfortable with the churn that continually redefines the nation’s demographics.

Those that choose to give these sentiments a stage are turning their back on a unique bargain. America’s refusal to differentiate between ethnicity and nationality has always attracted a special breed of immigrant. These men and women are driven by a fierce patriotism and entrepreneurial spirit that can only be bred by the lack of opportunity and liberty in the rest of the world. But rather than embrace and strengthen this compact, some politicians and cable news ratingsmongers divisively insist that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” Oddly, Thomas Jefferson didn’t seem to agree:

“…[A]n amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," [but] the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.”

To make use of these new code words is to also be at odds with the case that the Founding Fathers were trying to make for a radically new type of government: one empowered by the People to defend universal ideals of life, liberty and property, rather than one created to serve a King who believed himself to be divinely empowered to rule. They also purposelessly sow meaningless divisions at a time when the United States faces a laundry list of intractable challenges. Is the desire to control the spiraling costs of healthcare a uniquely Christian idea? Just imagine all those Hindus, who unlike Judeo-Christians must get a huge kick out of endlessly circling above a perpetually congested LaGuardia! And you know that Osama’s sitting in his cave, hating us not just for our freedom, but for our national parks as well.

I remember an argument with a kid on the school bus, who insisted that I wasn’t “really” American because my parents had immigrated from India. My third grade reasoning not yet of Jeffersonian caliber, I tried to explain that if someone is born in the United States, he or she is automatically granted American citizenship. But what I didn’t understand that he wasn’t arguing about the law—he was challenging the principle behind it. We went back and forth a bit, until the bus driver jumped in: “Nihal, you’re an American, and don’t let anyone tell you different.”

We drove on in silence, American exceptionalism neatly encapsulated into a single sentence.