A Bucket of Warm Spit

    The government scandals in Illinois led pundits to draw parallels with the colorful history of political corruption in my home state of Louisiana.
    The comparisons are facile, but shallow.
    A more striking parallel, which those pundits have failed to draw, is between the Louisiana Legislature in the Huey Long era.
    Louisiana had a constitution that like the U.S. Constitution created three branches of government. Huey Long was elected governor under that constitution and proceeded to shred it, establishing what is likely the closest thing we have seen to a dictatorship in America.
    He seized control of the legislature. Those who didn’t succumb to persuasion were bullied and blackmailed. One legislator is said to have a waved a copy of the constitution in front of Long only to be met with the response that “I’m the constitution now.”
    Soon the courts and the supposedly independent state agencies were under his thumb, too. He even instituted a Bureau of Criminal Identification, a separate organization responsible only to the governor, which could arrest and detain anybody without warrant.
    Of course, Adolph Hitler became chancellor of Germany under the Weimar Constitution and then shredded it.
    We can look back and shake our heads and wonder why no one was brave enough or principled enough or cared to defend the constitutions.
    One day perhaps we will look at our national government and wonder why no one was brave enough or principled enough or cared to defend the Constitution.
    Power flows to the executive branch during times of military or financial crisis. People seem to be more willing to accept authoritarian government when they are afraid.
    Congress long ago gave up its constitutional authority to declare war. Its authority “to make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.”
    After 9/11, when the Land of the Brave became the Land of the Afraid, instead of providing leadership to defend the constitution, the Congress rolled over to the executive branch. The same people who once called for reading the Constitution literally suddenly found that some of the provisions that spell out the most fundamental rights – the right to a Writ of Habeas Corpus, the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to a speedy trial and to be confronted with witnesses – didn’t mean exactly what the words say. The executive branch could decide what they meant.
    The Congress’s most immediate priorities seem to be securing partisan advantage and winning re-election.
    The founding fathers weren’t gods, or even demigods, although I think we can make the case that they were visionaries. They had had recent experiences with the abuses of power, and they framed a constitution that was designed to prevent the government they were creating from subjecting its citizens to those same abuses.
    They provided a framework, but no written constitution can protect our freedom unless we – and those we elect to lead – believe in it enough to defend it.
    John Nance Garner famously said that the vice presidency wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.
    Which may put it one notch above the Congress.

Contract the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Do Overs Are For Kids' Games

The slate looks clean, but underneath, the chalk remembers the soul beneath.

--Lyric from “Blink of an Eye” by Ann and Roger McNamee

    We were not sorry to tear the last leaf off the 2008 calendar.
Although there were times of joy and blessing, it is not a year that we expect to recall with nostalgia. What we will recall is Adelaide’s fall down the stairs, resulting in severe injuries, followed by my summer of weaknesses from blood loss after surgery and bypass surgery for three clogged arteries. (And we, along with millions of Americans, saw the value of our life savings erode dramatically.)
    So, we are ready to move on.
    There are no do overs except in kids’ games. We all know intellectually that our lives don’t have chapters that coincide neatly with the months and volumes that correspond to the year.
    We awoke on the morning of Jan. 1 the same people who went to bed on Dec. 31, carried along on the current of everything that has gone before. Adelaide is still recovering the injuries suffered in her fall, and I am still recovering from the bypass surgery. And who knows what the new year will bring.
    Let’s face it, though. That brand new calendar inevitably invites us to evaluate where we are and to make new plans.
    I learned long ago that New Year’s resolutions tend have a larger element of wish than resolve.
    But there is one resolution that I happily will renew: I will try to recognize that each day is a gift to be appreciated and savored.

The writer can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com

The Dangers of Certainty

    I have been giving a good deal of thought lately to patriotism and to Christianity. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the number of people who are not the least bit reluctant to make judgments about a person’s patriotism or religious commitment or both.
    Although the phenomenon is not new, it reached a fever pitch during the interminable presidential campaign. The political campaigns, aided and abetted by the Internet and the media (especially cable television), gave legitimacy to this judgmental mood.
    A few snapshots: A congressional candidate said she thought Barrack Obama was “very anti-American” and that the media should investigate members of Congress who she thought were not “pro America.” A senate candidate tried to pin a Godless label on her opponent, who happened to have been a Presbyterian Sunday School teacher. A vice presidential candidate said she was happy to be campaigning in a part of the country that was “pro America.”
    People who count themselves as Christians, many of whom I know and like, happily circulated the most scurrilous items about Obama, cleverly posed in the form of questions, as if that absolved them of responsibility for what they were doing. They implied that he was a secret agent of Islam (perhaps they’ve seen too many reruns of The Manchurian Candidate) and they argued that even if he went to a Christian church, he couldn’t possibly be a patriotic American if he heard the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and didn’t walk out (I’m sure they carefully read through Rev. Wright’s sermons and weighed the context of those brief video clips that we all saw.)
    No matter how acceptable it might have become, I think judging another’s religion or patriotism is a dangerous game.
   In both cases, the people doing the judging are demanding conformity to their ideas of how Christians and patriots should behave.
   But patriotism often demands nonconformity.
   James Bryce, a British jurist, historian and statesman, observed, “Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.”
   Mark Twain once wryly observed, “The nation is divided, half patriots and half traitors, and no man can tell which from which.”
   On a more serious note, he wrote, “Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.”
    Christians probably have a longer history of nonconformity than patriots do.
    Thomas Jefferson counted the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom along with the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia as the only accomplishments worthy of noting in his epitaph.
    The preamble to the statute is a sentence long enough to give an English teacher heart failure, but Jefferson’s points are worth considering:
    “God has created the mind free, so that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion … the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, has established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world …. .”
    Jefferson’s correspondence indicated that he was equally concerned with the interference of the church in affairs of state.
    Too bad he isn’t around to offer his insights on the present role of politics in religion and vice versa.
    If that’s not enough, the Bible itself has a warning for Christians in Matthew 7:1-2: Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make, you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.
    Wearing a flag lapel pin doesn’t make one a patriot. Quoting the Bible doesn’t make one a Christian.
    Sinclair Lewis had a grim vision of the danger of mixing religious certainty with patriotic certainty: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”


Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Lessons to Be Learned -- Again

    Many years ago, Martha Mitchell, the sharp-tongued wife of disgraced U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell observed, “Life is slippery, like a bar of soap. If you think you’ve got a grip on it, you’re wrong.”
    I have been seeing the truth of her observation play itself out in recent weeks.
    I had thought that this time of year would be a good one for enforced idleness. Time to catch up on some reading, watch some sports on television.
    Instead, I’ve sat hypnotized by the train wreck that is the stock market. Even when I have muted the shrill voices talking past each other on CNBC, it has been all too evident that a large hunk of our life savings has been evaporating like rain on hot pavement.
    I am like many Americans who played by the rules, as we understood them: live within your means, save for the future and invest those savings so that you can have a secure retirement. We thought that we were giving up immediate gratification for security.
    Now we wonder whether we have been played for fools.
    We have been let down – by just about everybody.
    The so-called leaders of finance have been too willing to abandon prudence in order rack up huge bonuses and pack golden parachutes.
    Now our so-called political leaders are trying to assess blame. They should look in the mirror. Some of them have been such doctrinaire free marketers that they have believed their own rhetoric that the marketplace could regulate itself.
    Sen. Phil Gramm provided the vehicle for the train wreck. Surely his philosophical blinders shut out skepticism. Even Alan Greenspan, who was regarded as at least a demigod during his reign at the fed, was an apostle of the libertarian gospel.
    Greek mythology is filled with tales of what happens when hubris mixes with avarice. Somehow, though, we have to keep learning that lesson.
    We have to keep re-learning, too, that the essential purpose for establishing government is the police function not just to protect us against violent crime but also against those who steal with a fountain pen.
    Folk singer Woody Guthrie talked about that kind of crime in the last two stanzas of The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd:

Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
Lyrics as reprinted in Woody Guthrie, American Folksong, New York, NY, 1961 (reprint of 1947 edition), p. 27. © 1958 Sanga Music Inc., New York, NY.

    My late father-in-law, who funded his own retirement through by saving money (fortunately before avarice overtook judgment on Wall Street), was something of a cynic.
    “If you want a good retirement,” he used to growl, “Work for the government.”
    He was talking about the security of having a check arrive every month regardless of how the economy was doing.
    Just like Social Security checks. We can breathe a sigh of relief that the effort to privatize Social Security went nowhere.
    My father-in-law was part of that generation that was marked by the Great Depression.
    It is difficult at this point to know how deep this meltdown will go, but I think that more than one generation
    But I think more than one generation has developed a deep distrust of our institutions.
    In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner said, "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail."
    At the moment, enduring might be enough.


Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com