Ten days ago, bowing to the demands of a frantic Administration, the pleadings of desperate Wall Street moguls, and the weight of a plunging stock market, Congress passed a bill (which the President signed into law almost before the final "aye" vote was cast) authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to purchase $700 billion worth of toxic (translation: almost worthless) securities from undercapitalized commercial and investment banks -- but only after larding it up with $150 billion in pork-barrel spending and corporate tax breaks -- all this on top of the $1 trillion obligation already assumed by the federal government in nationalizing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and in throwing lifelines to Bear Stearns and AIG.
But, not to worry. Our schizophrenic Secretary, after selling his bailout plan to a wary Congress and a skeptical public as a matter of utmost urgency, has abruptly changed course. He now proposes to buy commercial paper from credit-starved corporations and invest taxpayer money in struggling banks. No wonder the financial markets are spooked.
Meanwhile, like crazed fiddlers in a burning city, our esteemed Presidential aspirants, Messers. McCain and Obama, dance along the campaign trial, blithely promising their weary audiences a panacea of tax cuts, universal health insurance, regulatory reform, and comprehensive energy strategies -- all of which are estimated to cost anywhere from three to five trillion dollars over the next five years. Do I detect a disconnect here?
Maybe not.
Because, while much has been made of the crushing tax burden being imposed on the irate taxpayer because of the Treasury's extraordinary measures, nowhere have I read or heard of any one actually being required to pay more. In fact, after the anticipatory discomfort dissipates and a proper anesthetic is applied, these copious dollar hemorrhages feel as harmless as a root canal.
Perhaps a little suffering would be instructive. I have a suggestion which, I believe, would either end bailouts forever or launch a second American Revolution. With total federal tax revenues -- from personal and corporate income taxes, social security taxes, and excise taxes -- in the $2 trillion range (a number I derive from subtracting a $4oo billion deficit from a $2.4 trillion budget), a new $1 trillion federal obligation represents a fifty per cent increase in required income; to pay for that, the IRS should simply apply a surcharge to each taxpayer equal to fifty per cent of his current tax bill. Or, since annual U.S. gasoline consumption is about 150 billion gallons, how about a $6.50 per gallon assessment? Yes, my friends, as John McCain would say, the masses would storm the barricades. And they would hardly be pacified by spreading the payments over five years; a twenty per cent surcharge, or $1.30 bump at the pump, would be no more palatable.
But, instead of entertaining such a foolish (but, in my view, quite reasonable) proposal, because it would shake the very foundations of American civilization, low taxes and cheap gasoline, our gritless politicians will no doubt turn a blind eye to any semblance of fiscal responsibility and resort to their perennial method of financing deficits -- the sum total of which is now $10 trillion. They will borrow the money, and keep borrowing until either our credit runs out or the escalating digits overwhelm even them, at which point they will inflate the currency by printing more, and usher in an insidious hidden tax by the back door.
It's the American Way. The taxpayer complains without feeling any pain. The government gets the money at minimal interest rates. And the banks get to dump their worthless paper in return for an infusion of capital, costing them nothing more than a little "lipstick": a handful of warrants and some cosmetic restrictions on CEO compensation. It's like getting something for nothing, which seems appropriate, since that's how all the players earned their roles in this tragicomedy to start with.
It was a combustible combination: government pressure to make home ownership more accessible and more affordable to low-income (minority) citizens mixed with the profits inherent in financing such ownership, profits produced by loan origination, by higher interest rates, by the packaging of these loans with others of better quality into less risky marketable securities, and by the buying and selling of these securities in huge quantities at tiny spreads. The match to ignite the firestorm was readily at hand: lowered underwriting standards for home mortgages to subprime (less credit worthy) and prime (more credit worthy) borrowers.
As a result, former renters got a home, and current homeowners got roomfuls of cash via refinancing or home equity lines of credit, for almost nothing: no down payment and low introductory teaser rates scheduled to reset in the distant future, when their homes would have increased in value (and were thus solid bank collateral) and their rising incomes would easily enable them to make their higher monthly payments. After all, this was America, where prosperity knew no boundaries.
It amuses me how eager so many sanctimonious sophisticates are to cast aspersion upon these folks for merely accepting what some ambitious loan officer handed to them on a silver platter, even if it turned out to be a turkey they couldn't afford. There are many people in this world (or should I say America) who know how to live within their means, but there are just as many who don't, and quite a few who do know how but prefer not to. In our stores, we sell home furnishings, appliances, and electronics on credit. Can we blame the customer if we compromise our criteria and allow him to take home a brand new fifty-inch plasma television with no down payment and a credit history that indicates that he is unlikely to pay for it? Of course, a lender who is looking at collateral he knows will depreciate rather than at collateral he expects will appreciate tends to be more rational.
No less magical than the crystallization of homes out of thin air were the bountiful profits generated by the trade in mortgage-backed securities. Borrowing at interest rates kept artificially low by our own monetary policy makers, Fed Chairmen Greenspan and Bernanke, operating under a dangerously unbalanced ratio of one dollar of capital for every thirty dollars of debt, the institutions engaged in this financial sleight of hand were making money in the literal sense of the word, manufacturing it out of the most ethereal of raw materials.
And when they had extracted every last dollar of profit from the mortgage game, they invented a new one, based on derivatives. These credit default swaps had no intrinsic value in and of themselves, but, when layered on top of the mortgages and other debt instruments they were written to insure, possessed the power to multiply profits exponentially. By calling them swaps instead of insurance, their purveyors cleverly avoided any reserve requirements or regulatory oversight, grounding them in a nothingness even a layman can appreciate. While the actual number remains as elusive as it is incomprehensible, a reported $30 trillion worth of these "nuclear weapons of financial mass destruction," to quote Warren Buffett, is floating around in cyberspace.
Eventually, as Reverend Jeremiah Wright would say, "The chickens came home to roost." Homeowners -- occupants would be a more accurate term -- and securities traders were rudely awakened to what they surely knew but had just forgotten. Their pyramid of wealth did indeed have a foundation. Its name was leverage, and suddenly it turned on them, from an indispensable ally into an implacable foe.
According to Niall Ferguson, writing in Time Online, October 2, 2008, over the past thirty years households and financial institutions have accumulated tremendous levels of debt, now unsustainable due to a frightening reversal of fortune: the assets they bought with the money they borrowed have declined in value.
In the case of households, debt rose from about 50 per cent of GDP in 1980 to a peak of 100 per cent in 2006. Much of the increase was used to invest in residential real estate, the price of which has been falling since the housing bubble burst in 2007. In June home prices in twenty cities were down 16 per cent compared to last year.
"Banks and other financial institutions are in an even worse position . . . By 2007 the financial sector's debt was equivalent to 116 per cent of GDP, compared with a mere 21 per cent in 1980. And the assets the banks loaded up on have fallen even further in value than the average home -- by as much as 55 per cent in the case of BBB-rated mortgage-backed securities."
For a person whose business loans and borrows money, I've never understood leverage.
My customers probably don't understand it either. After they purchase their home furnishings, appliances, or electronics at one of Schewel Furniture Company's fifty stores and finance it by making monthly payments for up to twenty-four months at an APR of 24.9 per cent, I suspect that nine out of ten have no idea that they are borrowing money. Because SFC carries the account itself rather than a bank or finance company, they believe that they are simply paying for their sofa, bedroom suite, or refrigerator over a period of time -- and are happy to enjoy the use of it along the way. Applying a type of leverage they do understand, when service is necessary, they find it quite useful to be making those payments to the same entity that sold them the product.
Accounts receivable, the money owed to the company by its customers, is a two-edged sword. Increased non-cash sales and extended contract terms will drive up accounts receivable -- and yield higher interest income. On the other hand, these same factors will reduce cash flow and require the company to borrow money to finance its operations. Wall Streeters would find this a laughable non-choice, since the cost of the money will be considerably less than the 24.9 per cent interest rate charged to customers.
Which is one reason why a venture capitalist firm was willing to fork over an ungodly amount of borrowed money twenty-two years ago to purchase 51 per cent of Schewel Furniture Company -- an amount equal to twice its book value and almost seven times its earnings before interest (of which there was none), depreciation, and taxes. While its owners -- my father, brother, sister, and I, who owned fifty per cent, and our cousins, who owned the other fifty per cent -- would experience instant wealth creation, become cash-rich overnight, and retain the opportunity to participate in its future growth, the company would be saddled with an unwieldy burden of debt that could endanger its survival if economic conditions should deteriorate.
The company's owners had always been debt-averse. In fact, during their eighty-year history of financing customer purchases, they had borrowed money only once: to buy out a third partner in the late 1950's. Now a lucrative offer was on the table, and a decision had to be made. Debt financing was the American Way, but was it our way?
Actually, the issue was not whether to borrow; it was how much to borrow. No member of our cousin's family was interested in the business, and the only one who had ever worked there had semi-retired from it eight years earlier when he had been elected to the Virginia State Senate. With dollar signs dancing in their heads, they were ready to cash out.
For my father, my brother, and myself, the story was different. Schewel Furniture Company was our identity, our lifelong career, and a labor of love. We were as invested in its continued viability as we were enamored of all that liquidity, and we were reluctant to surrender control of the company to an outsider, no matter how deep his pockets. (Or maybe we were just too noble for our own good.) What began as an auction to the highest bidder degenerated into a bitter negotiation process, fraught with emotional turmoil; my father had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I was in the throes of a divorce.
Our former partners became our adversaries, and filled the air with vague threats if this deal were not consummated by the end of the year, three weeks away, when capital gains rates were set to increase. Finally, the active owners, my father, my brother, and I, agreed to puchase our cousins' stock for an amount equal to fifty per cent of the outsider's offer, plus a twenty per cent premium for some future earnings, a concession they flushed out of us in the heat of the moment, attributable, I believe, to my clumsy naivete, my lack of financial expertise, and my stubborn fixation on forcing them out. As a result, they received almost two-and-a-half times the book value of their stock and eight times pre-tax earnings, exorbitant multiples even in that high-flying era.
Nevertheless, my father proudly maintained that the day he owned all of Schewel Furniture Company was the happiest of his life. Of course, since he knew he had only two years to live, he had no qualms about bequeathing his children a mountain of debt.
A local banker made the loan, declaring ominously: "Now, Marc, you do know that one day you will have to pay this back."
Since I was as debt-averse as my forbears and had never been initiated in the wily machinations of Wall Street, I had every good intention of doing so.
I guess one's tolerance for debt is a function of his temperament. For the optimist, the glass is always half-full, and the asset which he has purchased with borrowed money -- a house, a business, a mortgage-backed security -- is an opportunity to enjoy the fruits of its appreciation. For the pessimist, the glass is always half-empty, and that asset is an encumbrance bearing a huge cost.
To counteract my own innate pessimism, I recalled the sage advice of an old friend: "The man who has no faith in the future of America -- or in the future of his investments -- will never be successful." Fine words, to be sure, and undeniable, yet hard to stomach during a twenty-five per cent bear market.
Those outside investors with the big check were willing to leverage Schewel Furniture Company up to its eyeballs not only because they had confidence in its continued growth and profitability, but also because their goal in five to ten years was to resell the company for considerably more than they had borrowed. But if it's the American Way to use other people's money as much and as often as possible, it's also the American Way to live the dream of owning your own business and to preserve it for the next generation. Which is why my father, my siblings, and I shunned our ardent suitors and put our names -- and our futures -- on the dotted line.
While the company's newly-acquired debt was a necessary means to an end, your pessimistic chronicler struggled daily to look beyond the added interest cost, the uncomfortable bank covenants, and the prickly notion that the owners did not have complete control of their destiny. I learned a hard lesson about the installment credit business.
The investment banker who had brought us that outlandish offer, and then skillfully run interference between the two warring families, had painted for me a rosy picture. While profits would no doubt be reduced by interest costs, the company would still be generating enough cash every year to pay down some of its bank debt. What he conveniently failed to explain was that if the business experienced any growth, which it did, those profits would be reinvested internally to fund increased accounts receivable and inventory. The company ended up borrowing even more, much to my chagrin.
My steady comptroller reassured me that debt service was just another cost of doing business. My high-rolling director of credit operations reminded me that we were arbitraging our interest rates. A keen observer of the human condition philosophized: "A man's wealth is measured by how much he owes." But I never fully accepted the transformative power of leverage until I realized that the bankers standing at my door one sunny day were there not to padlock it but to loan me more money.
Emulating millions of fellow citizens, thousands of other businessmen, and an engorged federal government, I enlisted as a willing foot soldier in this army of borrowers, or at least adopted their devil-may-care attitude. Like the freckle-faced juvenile adorning the front page of my generation's favorite magazine, my internal refrain became, "What, me worry?" It's only money -- and not even that. It's merely a long-term liability entry on a financial statement.
Ironically enough, about the time I reconciled myself to the American Way of finance, about ten years ago, Schewel Furniture Company began to pay off its debt -- thanks to good collection practices, a slight uptick in the number of customers paying by cash or credit card, and a generous fire insurance settlement. Today it owes only about twenty per cent of the amount it borrowed in its 1986 recapitalization and is weathering the current economic malaise with a strong balance sheet.
Other businesses, financial institutions, and households have not been so fortunate. Under pressure from a decline in the value of their assets, principally residential real estate and mortgage-backed securities, they have been forced into a massive deleveraging.
It's a vicious downward spiral that feeds on itself, writes Mr. Ferguson. "When families and banks tip into bankruptcy, more assets get dumped on the market, driving prices down further and necessitating more deleveraging." A pessimist might say that, "This process has so much momentum that even $700 billion in taxpayers' money may not suffice to stop it."
Then again, a pessimist -- who knows he can't get something for nothing -- would never have allowed himself to get into such a predicament in the first place.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Undecided
Like a state senator voting "Present" rather than "Aye" or "Nay," I am in the "undecided" category.
In defense of Mr. Obama, because it takes affirmative votes to pass legislation in the Illinois Senate, a "present" vote is tantamount to a "no" vote and is an easy way for lawmakers to express disapproval of a measure they oppose without going on record as against it. (Gonzalez, WSJ Online, Feb. 14, 2007)
Mr. Obama says he cast votes 4000 times in the Illinois Senate, and used "present" votes 130 times to protest bills he believed had been drafted unconstitutionally or as part of a broader legislative strategy. (The Left Coaster, Dec. 20, 2007)
"Present" is not an option on the public ballot; I can register my indecision on November 4th only by my absence, and thus join ranks with 78 million lethargic fellow citizens who, though eligible, will fail to vote for President in 2008.
Labeling myself "undecided," today, forty-five days before the election, will undoubtedly surprise, shock, and sadden many of my friends, family members, and faithful readers, who would be justified in assuming my staunch support of the Democratic ticket -- although it will certainly delight my wayward brother, now a fanatic McCain acolyte. After all, I have one cousin who was a Democratic state senator for sixteen years and another who served as Governor Mark Warner's Secretary of Commerce. I have regularly contributed to Democratic candidates at all levels of government. Except for a couple of protest votes for third-party candidates (Ross Perot is a household name, but does anyone remember John Anderson?) and in cases where a Republican was running unopposed, I have always voted blue. And although I am not a card-carrying (nor dues-paying) member of the Democratic Party, most of my acquaintances would surmise that relationship, based on my liberal views on constitutional, economic, and social issues.
But this has been an unprecedented and historic election year, now featuring a bizarre collection of finalists: the first African-American Presidential nominee, whose explosive rise from relative obscurity to "pseudo-messianism," which enabled him to snatch the prize from its heavily-favored heiress, the first presumptive female nominee, still strains credibility; a scarred seventy-two-year-old political and POW survivor, who, in a few short months, was miraculously transformed from his party's rebellious outcast into the object of its affection when the dubious "surge" strategy he staked his Presidential aspirations on proved to be a surprising success; the first female Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, the eye-pleasing, gun-slinging, moose-hunting, hockey mom turned Governor of Alaska, who, when lightning struck, ignited the Party's social conservative base, captured the attention of millions of celebrity watchers hungry for a new star, and became almost too hot for her opponents to handle; and a loquacious, tiresome, Senatorial journeyman, whose own Oval Office ambitions were suddenly resurrected when his youthful compatriot shunned his former rival and her eighteen million disciples and rescued him from the dustbin of primary also-rans.
And, even more strange, this year my lonesome vote might mean something. The see-sawing Virginia polls now show McCain holding a slim two-point lead (with six percent, including me, undecided), this in a state Democratic Presidential candidates have all but conceded -- and lost -- since LBJ carried it in 1964. But with Democrats now controlling the State Senate, the Governor's Mansion, and one U.S. Senate seat, and with Mark Warner poised to seize the second, the Old Dominion, proud possessor of thirteen crucial electoral votes, has a new moniker: swing state.
While it's nice to be courted and to bask in the glow of an Obamian visitation to one's fair city, there is a drawback to finding oneself in the electoral crosshairs. Television viewers will be inundated by a cacophonous barrage of political commercials, replete with savage accusations, gross misrepresentations, and shameless self-righteousness -- all of which usurp valuable air time from regular advertisers like me, fuel a growing disenchantment with a perverse system, and lead one to the depressing conclusion that "undecided" is most rational choice of all.
Hurdling these obstacles and dragging myself to the voting booth demand a daunting leap of faith. On both sides of the aisle, in the corridors of Congress and state legislatures, I see officeholders (and seekers) corrupted by a lust for power and the bucketfuls of cash tossed their way by influence peddlers. I see them appealing to the basest instincts of their constituencies by simplifying complex issues into flatulent sound bites, demonizing their opponents, and distorting facts to conform to their version of the truth. I see them pandering to voters of every ilk by making vacuous promises they have little intention -- and less chance -- of fulfilling. In the face of such sound and fury signifying nothing, who would not retire to the sidelines?
Yet vote we must, lest we forfeit our right to complain.
The rising tide of dissatisfaction with the Bush Administration -- whose approval rating has fallen to the lowest level in the history of this statistic -- has burst through the Democratic retaining wall and swamped many Independents and some Republicans. The laundry list of indictments is by now familiar: a seven-year war, the longest in U.S. history, the unintended consequence of a personal vendetta, misguided ideology, or oil imperialism (or some combination of the three), sold to the American public on bogus intelligence and mismanaged to the tune of one trillion dollars and four thousand lives; myopic tax cuts, which, while they may have generated economic growth and created new jobs (mostly in the health care sector), have deepened the divide between rich and poor, lined the pockets of Bush's crony capitalists, stagnated the real income of the middle class, doubled the national debt, and crushed the value of the dollar; a ruthless implementation of reactionary internal security measures, often by government fiat, resulting in an infringement of civil liberties and an invasion of privacy rights; and a collapsing housing market and soaring gas prices, which, while they are free market phenomena, occurred on Bush's watch and reflect a failure to regulate aggressive mortgage lending and securitization practices and to initiate a strategic energy policy.
Like a determined parent dressing up a recalcitrant child, Obama persists in draping this weighty cloak of incumbency over McCain's cockeyed shoulders, only to have the latter protest the fit, shrug it off, and introduce his own more fashionable -- and original -- trousseau, sporting high heels, rimless glasses, makeup, and lipstick. In fact, the odd couple's convention lovefest bounced them into a slight (and short-lived) lead over their opponents, who, by all rights should be winning this race going away.
Instead, it's a dead heat. Because, while I reject the ripples of anti-Obama rhetoric coursing through the airwaves and blogosphere as patently false (his Muslim religion), irrelevant (his shadowy Chicago connections), or racially tinged ("community organizer" slurs), like others hungry for change, I harbor doubts about an Obama Presidency.
Despite his two-year quest for the White House and intense (and adoring) media attention, Obama darts along the campaign trail from stump to stage like an elusive butterfly, hard to pin down, an unknown quantity. Boasting a resume as insubstantial and evanescent as a vapor stream, he rocketed into prominence on the wings of oratory, prayers for change, and the audacity of hope, garnering eighteen million votes and vanquishing not only Hillary Clinton, but also the burden of inexperience; he staked his claim to legitimacy on superior judgment and a fresh approach to governing.
After securing the nomination, however, Obama has struggled to project himself as a strong leader. Surprised and distracted by the Palin nomination, nonplused by the success of the McCain "surge" and the decline of violence in Iraq, flummoxed by his opponents' crafty appropriation of his reformist message, backtracking on issues like campaign financing, wiretapping, immigration, and taxation, and missing his teleprompter, he has sounded more tongue-tied than confident. His natural demeanor -- composed, deliberate, refined, professional, the antithesis of the stereotypical black politician -- has exposed him to charges of intellectualism and elitism -- in spite of his self-documented humble beginnings -- which he is at pains to refute as he courts the white, middle class votes he needs for victory.
The body politic yearns for a President with the superhuman powers each contender purports to possess -- the wisdom and strength to keep it safe from internal danger and external attack, to monitor and resolve volatile international situations, to manage a 2.4 trillion dollar budget and an economy five times greater, to balance competing political, economic, and social interests for the general good, and to keep the American dream of prosperity, success, and upward mobility alive for every citizen -- yet with feet of clay, grounded in the soil of the common man. The enduring genius of Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and, yes, Bill Clinton was their unique ability to project themselves as captains firmly in control in every perfect storm, while exuding the warmth and charm of a friend we would like to invite over for a fireside chat.
If Obama's meteoric ascent was, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, based not on issues but on "narrative, eloquence, and charisma," he and his handlers realized, during the summer doldrums, that his celebrity-ness -- deprived of oxygen, lampooned by some clever McCain commercials, superseded by the new girl on the block --was not sustainable. Their charge became to bring him down to earth, to tear away his masque of otherworldliness, to reach out to all the brown-baggers whose taxes he is proposing to cut. Krauthammer describes his acceptance speech as "deliberately pedestrian, state-of-the-unionish, programmatic," and a stark contrast to the lavish Invesco Field setting where he delivered it -- and probably wishes he hadn't. Obama's feisty makeover was in full bloom in his "lipstick on a pig" remark and in his lively interview with Bill O'Reilly.
Although McCain has lamely followed in his footsteps, Obama rode his own surge to the nomination by branding himself as a new breed of politician, who could implement meaningful reform, change the culture of Washington, take on special interest groups, and prevail over destructive partisanship -- to employ the platitudes now spewing from the mouths of both candidates. In truth, Obama resonated as a mythical symbol of the promise of America: a black man legitimately contending for the nation's highest office, proof that it had finally come to terms with its racial identity.
But even if one could reject the premise that any Chief Executive -- no matter how transcendent, now matter how committed to the task, no matter how great his mandate from the people -- is powerless to crack the impenetrable, monolithic, self-serving, self-perpetuating apparatus that dominates and permeates the Washington, D.C., landscape, Obama is a problematic agent. I hate to be bearer of bad tidings, but here is a man who vaulted into the U.S. Senate on the springboard of, by many accounts, a corrupt Chicago machine, a man who has "never challenged his party's base on any matter of substance," a man whose lone act of bipartisanship was backed by every legislator on both sides of the aisle. (Butler, Financial Times Online)
An Obama victory will establish a Democratic hegemony on Capitol Hill and in the White House -- a harrowing prospect for that segment of the electorate who, like me, prefer -- either consciously or instinctively -- a divided government as least harmful to the citizenry. Our Founding Fathers' Grand Design was a system of checks and balances in which the excesses of each branch of government would be restrained by the other two; what they failed to forsee was how the rise of political parties would foil their brilliant conception. The ill-advised, poorly-crafted, politically motivated Prescription Drug Law passed by Congress in 2003, which created a new, massive, unfunded entitlement and granted lucrative favors to drug companies, is the most recent egregious example of unleashed partisanship.
John McCain's emergence as the darling of the Republican Party is no less mystifying than Obama's coup against Hillary Clinton. Eight years ago, the Bush-Rovian smear machine, jarred into action by McCain's stunning victory in the New Hampshire Primary, let loose its social conservative dogs of war, dragged him through the South Carolina mud, and effectively ended his Presidential hopes -- for a time. The red meat was the accusation that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black baby and the insinuation that his pow experience had rendered him too mentally unstable to serve as President. Now, his heroic service, his unwavering support of the surge strategy, and his rugged individualism are stoking the fires of his campaign redux.
The McCain phenomenon is curious to behold. Although one could argue that a crowded primary field splintered the vote, the fact is that when the GOP voters spoke, they were repudiating the tough anti-terrorist (Guliani), the Christian evangelist (Huckabee), the traditional Republican (Thompson), and the capitalist wizard (Romney) -- and the elements of Party dogma each one represented: secure borders, the right to life without exception, offshore drilling, and tax cuts for the wealthy -- in favor of the candidate who was "none of the above." And now, McCain, the embodiment of all those principles he was once so proud to declare his independence from, can best be characterized as "all of the above."
Whereas most Presidential candidates move to the vital center after securing their party's nomination, McCain has moved to the right -- and into territory that makes me uncomfortable.
I have no desire to see the deleterious policies of the Bush Administration perpetuated. I loathe the thought of neocons and supply-side economists repopulating the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet. I am suspicious of the judges and administrators McCain and his advisors will appoint upon his assuming office. For thirty-five years McCain in Congress has been his own man; the question now is whether he has abdicated the rights to that title.
His detractors are convinced he has. They point first to the mean-spirited tone of his campaign, his embrace of the same vicious, inflammatory tactics which victimized him and which he so sanctimoniously denounced and forswore.
I am not one to bemoan negative political television and radio commercials. Both sides use them. They must work, although I like to believe that there are intelligent, informed voters in the audience who, like me, are dismayed and disgusted by these mind-numbing attacks and who question the credibility of presumptive leaders who stoop to conquer, who wade through the swamp and throw mud in order to earn our trust and respect. My view is that the Republicans were first out of the gate in this race to the gutter -- although the Democrats were close upon their heels -- and that McCain, champion of decency, honor, and reform, is being disingenuous, if not hypocritical, when he approves their messages.
While McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate was smart politics (at least for the past month), it also signals McCain's final capitulation: to the hard-right ideologues who want to retain control of the Republican party and his Presidential agenda. Apparently, they convinced him that, without her, his bridge to the White House would end up nowhere, and, indeed, the plucky ingenue may the first Vice-Presidential candidate to swing an election since LBJ in 1960. The pertinent question is, when this shotgun wedding is consummated, how much will McCain owe the the bridal party if he rides her skirt-tails to victory?
Eight years ago, when John McCain was sixty-four -- and before he walked in the shadow of George W. Bush -- I would have voted for him. I hate to be guilty of age discrimination, but is it not just a little unsettling that a man well past the accepted retirement age in this country, a man who has had four bouts with skin cancer, should take on the most demanding job in the world--although, admittedly, some recent deciders have slumbered through their terms in suspended animation, delegating most of the heavy lifting to surrogates and never allowing the exigencies of government to interfere with their vacation schedules.
Am I the only pundit brazen enough to mention the unmentionable: the nightmarish scenarios of illness, incapacitation, death? I realize that many people enjoy vigorous and productive activity well into their eighties, that hereditary monarchs and dictators have no term limits, that ageless leadership cliques have governed Israel and ruled China for years. I advocate raising the retirement age to seventy, not only because it would restore solvency to Social Security and Medicare, but also because the workplace needs our senior citizens' skills and experience. With that said, no public corporation in this country would think of hiring a seventy-two-year-old CEO -- and giving him a four-year contract. It's just too risky.
Like siblings arguing over a new toy, our two contenders are locked in conflict over who shall claim rightful ownership of the ineluctable force bearing down on Washington (or so they say): change. Although a twenty-year veteran of the Senate, McCain makes a plausible case. On occasion, he bolted his Party caucus, staked out a path of independence, and reached across the aisle to work with Democrats. His vote against the Bush tax cuts and his co-sponsorship of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act of 2002 are prime examples.
On the other hand, his ties to lobbyists -- including dozens working on his campaign staff -- and their bottomless pocketbooks have not escaped the attention of Obama or the media. As for those devilish earmarks, for which he has never sold his soul, mastering the federal budget by vetoing them is like calling the fire department to extinguish a match; while $18 billion in earmarks is no small number, it makes up a mere three-quarters of one percent of the $2.4 trillion in total expenditures and less than twenty-five percent of the amount ponied up by the Treasury to bail out one faltering insurance company, AIG. Granted, any fiscal responsibility demonstrated by President McCain will be an improvement over the profligacy of George Bush, who learned to spell "veto" only after the Democrats took control of Congress -- further evidence that "gridlock" has its benefits.
While studies show that voters are most influenced by their perceptions of a candidate's values, authenticity, and trustworthiness, chipping away each one's shiny veneer and exposing his raw imperfections have only reinforced my indecision; I am now compelled to resort to what all the players in this ongoing drama so assiduously avoid: a serious examination of the issues.
Fear is a great motivator of human behavior, and the Republican/Conservative propaganda generator has seized upon the public's overwrought fear of high -- and higher -- gas prices to manufacture its newest incendiary wedge issue, brilliantly dumbed-down to the oily epigram: "Drill here, drill now, pay less." Anyone opposed to this slick formula for rescuing our American way of life from our OPEC tormentors is immediately stigmatized as an animal-loving, tree-hugging, obstructionist radical wacko. In the face of this onslaught, McCain has changed his position on off-shore drilling, and even Obama, in lockstep with his own Party's tentative concessions, has thrown out the white flag.
I am not convinced that this country will ever be able economically to extract enough oil from its supposed reserves to impact the world market price. I believe that domestic drilling will further strengthen the hand of the avaricious oil companies and inflate their already obscene profits, and that the only way to break their -- and OPEC's -- stranglehold on our thirst for fossil fuel is for us to pursue alternative sources of energy. Although Obama continues to spurn the nuclear option, I believe he would be more aggressive in promoting a progressive, strategic, multi-faceted energy policy.
Both candidates' web sites address the twin issues of rising health care costs and the forty-seven million persons who lack health insurance -- with page after page of promises which, in my humble opinion, they have no reasonable chance of fulfilling, or only at an astronomical unfunded cost. Reducing health care costs is a noble objective, and very appealing to employers like me who spend almost twelve percent of our payrolls on our employees' health insurance. While both pieces of boilerplate identify opportunities for improving efficiency and eliminating waste, I doubt that meaningful savings can be wrung out of a system bloated by Medicare and Medicaid cost-shifting and by the public's insatiable appetite for medical services and sophisticated technology, which hospitals and physicians are only too happy to indulge.
I see no way of funding many aspects of Obama's plan -- including the subsidies he will remit to low-income families and individuals to enroll in his national health program. For those not eligible for a subsidy, I see no incentive for them to enroll. McCain offers a refundable tax credit of up to $5000 to enable uninsured families to purchase insurance, which makes sense to me, as long as it is available to low and middle income families who pay no income taxes, who are most likely to be uninsured, and who otherwise would lack the incentive and wherewithal to enroll in a plan.
Neither agenda demonstrates the bold, innovative, collaborative thinking that will be required to solve our country's health care crisis. I give McCain's the edge as being more fiscally responsible.
The whole discussion may be moot, however, shoved off the table by the government's one trillion dollar bailout of sinking financial institutions.
I have always been skeptical of supply-siders' contention that changes in marginal tax rates materially affect people's behavior. What ambitious (greedy) entrepreneur is going to work less because he has to pay three percent more in taxes? Whether or not the boom was attributable to the dot-com proliferation, the economy thrived when Bill Clinton raised taxes and reduced the deficit. Whether or not the current bust should be blamed on the excesses of unrestrained capitalism, the Bush tax cuts have not inoculated the economy against cyclical downturns.
In a former life, McCain objected to those tax cuts as favoring the wealthy; he now sees them through a different lens, and proposes to make them permanent, increase the personal exemption for individual filers, and unfetter the job (and) profit producing power of corporate America by reducing its tax rate by ten percentage points. Obama wants to raise the tax rates on dividends, capital gains, and individuals earning $250,000, and the threshold on payroll taxes, none of which I am opposed to, if these increases were to be used to reduce the federal deficit, last clocked at $400 billion, and rising rapidly. By most calculations, however, Obama's ambitious new spending programs, which include refunds or credits for millions of low and middle income earners, will consume far more than his additional tax revenue.
In just one week, the economic and financial situation in this country has altered dramatically. The federal government (or the taxpayer) has assumed tremendous obligations. Tax cuts and refunds may earn applause on the campaign trail, but sooner or later, when the cheering stops, Presidents and Congressmen will have to face the reality that they don't have enough money to buy all the votes they want, and that someone is going to have to make some hard decisions. From what I have heard so far, and, as Peggy Noonan wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, I have deep reservations if either McCain or Obama is up to the task.
Which leaves me still undecided.
In defense of Mr. Obama, because it takes affirmative votes to pass legislation in the Illinois Senate, a "present" vote is tantamount to a "no" vote and is an easy way for lawmakers to express disapproval of a measure they oppose without going on record as against it. (Gonzalez, WSJ Online, Feb. 14, 2007)
Mr. Obama says he cast votes 4000 times in the Illinois Senate, and used "present" votes 130 times to protest bills he believed had been drafted unconstitutionally or as part of a broader legislative strategy. (The Left Coaster, Dec. 20, 2007)
"Present" is not an option on the public ballot; I can register my indecision on November 4th only by my absence, and thus join ranks with 78 million lethargic fellow citizens who, though eligible, will fail to vote for President in 2008.
Labeling myself "undecided," today, forty-five days before the election, will undoubtedly surprise, shock, and sadden many of my friends, family members, and faithful readers, who would be justified in assuming my staunch support of the Democratic ticket -- although it will certainly delight my wayward brother, now a fanatic McCain acolyte. After all, I have one cousin who was a Democratic state senator for sixteen years and another who served as Governor Mark Warner's Secretary of Commerce. I have regularly contributed to Democratic candidates at all levels of government. Except for a couple of protest votes for third-party candidates (Ross Perot is a household name, but does anyone remember John Anderson?) and in cases where a Republican was running unopposed, I have always voted blue. And although I am not a card-carrying (nor dues-paying) member of the Democratic Party, most of my acquaintances would surmise that relationship, based on my liberal views on constitutional, economic, and social issues.
But this has been an unprecedented and historic election year, now featuring a bizarre collection of finalists: the first African-American Presidential nominee, whose explosive rise from relative obscurity to "pseudo-messianism," which enabled him to snatch the prize from its heavily-favored heiress, the first presumptive female nominee, still strains credibility; a scarred seventy-two-year-old political and POW survivor, who, in a few short months, was miraculously transformed from his party's rebellious outcast into the object of its affection when the dubious "surge" strategy he staked his Presidential aspirations on proved to be a surprising success; the first female Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, the eye-pleasing, gun-slinging, moose-hunting, hockey mom turned Governor of Alaska, who, when lightning struck, ignited the Party's social conservative base, captured the attention of millions of celebrity watchers hungry for a new star, and became almost too hot for her opponents to handle; and a loquacious, tiresome, Senatorial journeyman, whose own Oval Office ambitions were suddenly resurrected when his youthful compatriot shunned his former rival and her eighteen million disciples and rescued him from the dustbin of primary also-rans.
And, even more strange, this year my lonesome vote might mean something. The see-sawing Virginia polls now show McCain holding a slim two-point lead (with six percent, including me, undecided), this in a state Democratic Presidential candidates have all but conceded -- and lost -- since LBJ carried it in 1964. But with Democrats now controlling the State Senate, the Governor's Mansion, and one U.S. Senate seat, and with Mark Warner poised to seize the second, the Old Dominion, proud possessor of thirteen crucial electoral votes, has a new moniker: swing state.
While it's nice to be courted and to bask in the glow of an Obamian visitation to one's fair city, there is a drawback to finding oneself in the electoral crosshairs. Television viewers will be inundated by a cacophonous barrage of political commercials, replete with savage accusations, gross misrepresentations, and shameless self-righteousness -- all of which usurp valuable air time from regular advertisers like me, fuel a growing disenchantment with a perverse system, and lead one to the depressing conclusion that "undecided" is most rational choice of all.
Hurdling these obstacles and dragging myself to the voting booth demand a daunting leap of faith. On both sides of the aisle, in the corridors of Congress and state legislatures, I see officeholders (and seekers) corrupted by a lust for power and the bucketfuls of cash tossed their way by influence peddlers. I see them appealing to the basest instincts of their constituencies by simplifying complex issues into flatulent sound bites, demonizing their opponents, and distorting facts to conform to their version of the truth. I see them pandering to voters of every ilk by making vacuous promises they have little intention -- and less chance -- of fulfilling. In the face of such sound and fury signifying nothing, who would not retire to the sidelines?
Yet vote we must, lest we forfeit our right to complain.
The rising tide of dissatisfaction with the Bush Administration -- whose approval rating has fallen to the lowest level in the history of this statistic -- has burst through the Democratic retaining wall and swamped many Independents and some Republicans. The laundry list of indictments is by now familiar: a seven-year war, the longest in U.S. history, the unintended consequence of a personal vendetta, misguided ideology, or oil imperialism (or some combination of the three), sold to the American public on bogus intelligence and mismanaged to the tune of one trillion dollars and four thousand lives; myopic tax cuts, which, while they may have generated economic growth and created new jobs (mostly in the health care sector), have deepened the divide between rich and poor, lined the pockets of Bush's crony capitalists, stagnated the real income of the middle class, doubled the national debt, and crushed the value of the dollar; a ruthless implementation of reactionary internal security measures, often by government fiat, resulting in an infringement of civil liberties and an invasion of privacy rights; and a collapsing housing market and soaring gas prices, which, while they are free market phenomena, occurred on Bush's watch and reflect a failure to regulate aggressive mortgage lending and securitization practices and to initiate a strategic energy policy.
Like a determined parent dressing up a recalcitrant child, Obama persists in draping this weighty cloak of incumbency over McCain's cockeyed shoulders, only to have the latter protest the fit, shrug it off, and introduce his own more fashionable -- and original -- trousseau, sporting high heels, rimless glasses, makeup, and lipstick. In fact, the odd couple's convention lovefest bounced them into a slight (and short-lived) lead over their opponents, who, by all rights should be winning this race going away.
Instead, it's a dead heat. Because, while I reject the ripples of anti-Obama rhetoric coursing through the airwaves and blogosphere as patently false (his Muslim religion), irrelevant (his shadowy Chicago connections), or racially tinged ("community organizer" slurs), like others hungry for change, I harbor doubts about an Obama Presidency.
Despite his two-year quest for the White House and intense (and adoring) media attention, Obama darts along the campaign trail from stump to stage like an elusive butterfly, hard to pin down, an unknown quantity. Boasting a resume as insubstantial and evanescent as a vapor stream, he rocketed into prominence on the wings of oratory, prayers for change, and the audacity of hope, garnering eighteen million votes and vanquishing not only Hillary Clinton, but also the burden of inexperience; he staked his claim to legitimacy on superior judgment and a fresh approach to governing.
After securing the nomination, however, Obama has struggled to project himself as a strong leader. Surprised and distracted by the Palin nomination, nonplused by the success of the McCain "surge" and the decline of violence in Iraq, flummoxed by his opponents' crafty appropriation of his reformist message, backtracking on issues like campaign financing, wiretapping, immigration, and taxation, and missing his teleprompter, he has sounded more tongue-tied than confident. His natural demeanor -- composed, deliberate, refined, professional, the antithesis of the stereotypical black politician -- has exposed him to charges of intellectualism and elitism -- in spite of his self-documented humble beginnings -- which he is at pains to refute as he courts the white, middle class votes he needs for victory.
The body politic yearns for a President with the superhuman powers each contender purports to possess -- the wisdom and strength to keep it safe from internal danger and external attack, to monitor and resolve volatile international situations, to manage a 2.4 trillion dollar budget and an economy five times greater, to balance competing political, economic, and social interests for the general good, and to keep the American dream of prosperity, success, and upward mobility alive for every citizen -- yet with feet of clay, grounded in the soil of the common man. The enduring genius of Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and, yes, Bill Clinton was their unique ability to project themselves as captains firmly in control in every perfect storm, while exuding the warmth and charm of a friend we would like to invite over for a fireside chat.
If Obama's meteoric ascent was, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, based not on issues but on "narrative, eloquence, and charisma," he and his handlers realized, during the summer doldrums, that his celebrity-ness -- deprived of oxygen, lampooned by some clever McCain commercials, superseded by the new girl on the block --was not sustainable. Their charge became to bring him down to earth, to tear away his masque of otherworldliness, to reach out to all the brown-baggers whose taxes he is proposing to cut. Krauthammer describes his acceptance speech as "deliberately pedestrian, state-of-the-unionish, programmatic," and a stark contrast to the lavish Invesco Field setting where he delivered it -- and probably wishes he hadn't. Obama's feisty makeover was in full bloom in his "lipstick on a pig" remark and in his lively interview with Bill O'Reilly.
Although McCain has lamely followed in his footsteps, Obama rode his own surge to the nomination by branding himself as a new breed of politician, who could implement meaningful reform, change the culture of Washington, take on special interest groups, and prevail over destructive partisanship -- to employ the platitudes now spewing from the mouths of both candidates. In truth, Obama resonated as a mythical symbol of the promise of America: a black man legitimately contending for the nation's highest office, proof that it had finally come to terms with its racial identity.
But even if one could reject the premise that any Chief Executive -- no matter how transcendent, now matter how committed to the task, no matter how great his mandate from the people -- is powerless to crack the impenetrable, monolithic, self-serving, self-perpetuating apparatus that dominates and permeates the Washington, D.C., landscape, Obama is a problematic agent. I hate to be bearer of bad tidings, but here is a man who vaulted into the U.S. Senate on the springboard of, by many accounts, a corrupt Chicago machine, a man who has "never challenged his party's base on any matter of substance," a man whose lone act of bipartisanship was backed by every legislator on both sides of the aisle. (Butler, Financial Times Online)
An Obama victory will establish a Democratic hegemony on Capitol Hill and in the White House -- a harrowing prospect for that segment of the electorate who, like me, prefer -- either consciously or instinctively -- a divided government as least harmful to the citizenry. Our Founding Fathers' Grand Design was a system of checks and balances in which the excesses of each branch of government would be restrained by the other two; what they failed to forsee was how the rise of political parties would foil their brilliant conception. The ill-advised, poorly-crafted, politically motivated Prescription Drug Law passed by Congress in 2003, which created a new, massive, unfunded entitlement and granted lucrative favors to drug companies, is the most recent egregious example of unleashed partisanship.
John McCain's emergence as the darling of the Republican Party is no less mystifying than Obama's coup against Hillary Clinton. Eight years ago, the Bush-Rovian smear machine, jarred into action by McCain's stunning victory in the New Hampshire Primary, let loose its social conservative dogs of war, dragged him through the South Carolina mud, and effectively ended his Presidential hopes -- for a time. The red meat was the accusation that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black baby and the insinuation that his pow experience had rendered him too mentally unstable to serve as President. Now, his heroic service, his unwavering support of the surge strategy, and his rugged individualism are stoking the fires of his campaign redux.
The McCain phenomenon is curious to behold. Although one could argue that a crowded primary field splintered the vote, the fact is that when the GOP voters spoke, they were repudiating the tough anti-terrorist (Guliani), the Christian evangelist (Huckabee), the traditional Republican (Thompson), and the capitalist wizard (Romney) -- and the elements of Party dogma each one represented: secure borders, the right to life without exception, offshore drilling, and tax cuts for the wealthy -- in favor of the candidate who was "none of the above." And now, McCain, the embodiment of all those principles he was once so proud to declare his independence from, can best be characterized as "all of the above."
Whereas most Presidential candidates move to the vital center after securing their party's nomination, McCain has moved to the right -- and into territory that makes me uncomfortable.
I have no desire to see the deleterious policies of the Bush Administration perpetuated. I loathe the thought of neocons and supply-side economists repopulating the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet. I am suspicious of the judges and administrators McCain and his advisors will appoint upon his assuming office. For thirty-five years McCain in Congress has been his own man; the question now is whether he has abdicated the rights to that title.
His detractors are convinced he has. They point first to the mean-spirited tone of his campaign, his embrace of the same vicious, inflammatory tactics which victimized him and which he so sanctimoniously denounced and forswore.
I am not one to bemoan negative political television and radio commercials. Both sides use them. They must work, although I like to believe that there are intelligent, informed voters in the audience who, like me, are dismayed and disgusted by these mind-numbing attacks and who question the credibility of presumptive leaders who stoop to conquer, who wade through the swamp and throw mud in order to earn our trust and respect. My view is that the Republicans were first out of the gate in this race to the gutter -- although the Democrats were close upon their heels -- and that McCain, champion of decency, honor, and reform, is being disingenuous, if not hypocritical, when he approves their messages.
While McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate was smart politics (at least for the past month), it also signals McCain's final capitulation: to the hard-right ideologues who want to retain control of the Republican party and his Presidential agenda. Apparently, they convinced him that, without her, his bridge to the White House would end up nowhere, and, indeed, the plucky ingenue may the first Vice-Presidential candidate to swing an election since LBJ in 1960. The pertinent question is, when this shotgun wedding is consummated, how much will McCain owe the the bridal party if he rides her skirt-tails to victory?
Eight years ago, when John McCain was sixty-four -- and before he walked in the shadow of George W. Bush -- I would have voted for him. I hate to be guilty of age discrimination, but is it not just a little unsettling that a man well past the accepted retirement age in this country, a man who has had four bouts with skin cancer, should take on the most demanding job in the world--although, admittedly, some recent deciders have slumbered through their terms in suspended animation, delegating most of the heavy lifting to surrogates and never allowing the exigencies of government to interfere with their vacation schedules.
Am I the only pundit brazen enough to mention the unmentionable: the nightmarish scenarios of illness, incapacitation, death? I realize that many people enjoy vigorous and productive activity well into their eighties, that hereditary monarchs and dictators have no term limits, that ageless leadership cliques have governed Israel and ruled China for years. I advocate raising the retirement age to seventy, not only because it would restore solvency to Social Security and Medicare, but also because the workplace needs our senior citizens' skills and experience. With that said, no public corporation in this country would think of hiring a seventy-two-year-old CEO -- and giving him a four-year contract. It's just too risky.
Like siblings arguing over a new toy, our two contenders are locked in conflict over who shall claim rightful ownership of the ineluctable force bearing down on Washington (or so they say): change. Although a twenty-year veteran of the Senate, McCain makes a plausible case. On occasion, he bolted his Party caucus, staked out a path of independence, and reached across the aisle to work with Democrats. His vote against the Bush tax cuts and his co-sponsorship of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act of 2002 are prime examples.
On the other hand, his ties to lobbyists -- including dozens working on his campaign staff -- and their bottomless pocketbooks have not escaped the attention of Obama or the media. As for those devilish earmarks, for which he has never sold his soul, mastering the federal budget by vetoing them is like calling the fire department to extinguish a match; while $18 billion in earmarks is no small number, it makes up a mere three-quarters of one percent of the $2.4 trillion in total expenditures and less than twenty-five percent of the amount ponied up by the Treasury to bail out one faltering insurance company, AIG. Granted, any fiscal responsibility demonstrated by President McCain will be an improvement over the profligacy of George Bush, who learned to spell "veto" only after the Democrats took control of Congress -- further evidence that "gridlock" has its benefits.
While studies show that voters are most influenced by their perceptions of a candidate's values, authenticity, and trustworthiness, chipping away each one's shiny veneer and exposing his raw imperfections have only reinforced my indecision; I am now compelled to resort to what all the players in this ongoing drama so assiduously avoid: a serious examination of the issues.
Fear is a great motivator of human behavior, and the Republican/Conservative propaganda generator has seized upon the public's overwrought fear of high -- and higher -- gas prices to manufacture its newest incendiary wedge issue, brilliantly dumbed-down to the oily epigram: "Drill here, drill now, pay less." Anyone opposed to this slick formula for rescuing our American way of life from our OPEC tormentors is immediately stigmatized as an animal-loving, tree-hugging, obstructionist radical wacko. In the face of this onslaught, McCain has changed his position on off-shore drilling, and even Obama, in lockstep with his own Party's tentative concessions, has thrown out the white flag.
I am not convinced that this country will ever be able economically to extract enough oil from its supposed reserves to impact the world market price. I believe that domestic drilling will further strengthen the hand of the avaricious oil companies and inflate their already obscene profits, and that the only way to break their -- and OPEC's -- stranglehold on our thirst for fossil fuel is for us to pursue alternative sources of energy. Although Obama continues to spurn the nuclear option, I believe he would be more aggressive in promoting a progressive, strategic, multi-faceted energy policy.
Both candidates' web sites address the twin issues of rising health care costs and the forty-seven million persons who lack health insurance -- with page after page of promises which, in my humble opinion, they have no reasonable chance of fulfilling, or only at an astronomical unfunded cost. Reducing health care costs is a noble objective, and very appealing to employers like me who spend almost twelve percent of our payrolls on our employees' health insurance. While both pieces of boilerplate identify opportunities for improving efficiency and eliminating waste, I doubt that meaningful savings can be wrung out of a system bloated by Medicare and Medicaid cost-shifting and by the public's insatiable appetite for medical services and sophisticated technology, which hospitals and physicians are only too happy to indulge.
I see no way of funding many aspects of Obama's plan -- including the subsidies he will remit to low-income families and individuals to enroll in his national health program. For those not eligible for a subsidy, I see no incentive for them to enroll. McCain offers a refundable tax credit of up to $5000 to enable uninsured families to purchase insurance, which makes sense to me, as long as it is available to low and middle income families who pay no income taxes, who are most likely to be uninsured, and who otherwise would lack the incentive and wherewithal to enroll in a plan.
Neither agenda demonstrates the bold, innovative, collaborative thinking that will be required to solve our country's health care crisis. I give McCain's the edge as being more fiscally responsible.
The whole discussion may be moot, however, shoved off the table by the government's one trillion dollar bailout of sinking financial institutions.
I have always been skeptical of supply-siders' contention that changes in marginal tax rates materially affect people's behavior. What ambitious (greedy) entrepreneur is going to work less because he has to pay three percent more in taxes? Whether or not the boom was attributable to the dot-com proliferation, the economy thrived when Bill Clinton raised taxes and reduced the deficit. Whether or not the current bust should be blamed on the excesses of unrestrained capitalism, the Bush tax cuts have not inoculated the economy against cyclical downturns.
In a former life, McCain objected to those tax cuts as favoring the wealthy; he now sees them through a different lens, and proposes to make them permanent, increase the personal exemption for individual filers, and unfetter the job (and) profit producing power of corporate America by reducing its tax rate by ten percentage points. Obama wants to raise the tax rates on dividends, capital gains, and individuals earning $250,000, and the threshold on payroll taxes, none of which I am opposed to, if these increases were to be used to reduce the federal deficit, last clocked at $400 billion, and rising rapidly. By most calculations, however, Obama's ambitious new spending programs, which include refunds or credits for millions of low and middle income earners, will consume far more than his additional tax revenue.
In just one week, the economic and financial situation in this country has altered dramatically. The federal government (or the taxpayer) has assumed tremendous obligations. Tax cuts and refunds may earn applause on the campaign trail, but sooner or later, when the cheering stops, Presidents and Congressmen will have to face the reality that they don't have enough money to buy all the votes they want, and that someone is going to have to make some hard decisions. From what I have heard so far, and, as Peggy Noonan wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, I have deep reservations if either McCain or Obama is up to the task.
Which leaves me still undecided.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Fear of Flying
Last week Joan Lowy, writing for the Associated Press, reported that some airlines are pressuring pilots to fly their planes at uncomfortably low fuel levels.
In March a pilot told NASA he landed his regional jet with less fuel than required by FAA regulations. He also complained that his airline was "ranking" captains according to their ability to complete their flights with the least amount.
In February a Boeing 747 captain, running low on fuel after meeting strong headwinds crossing the Atlantic en route to JFK International Airport in New York, was denied permission to stop for refueling by his airline operations manager who told him there was an adequate supply on board the jet. He arrived at JFK with so little that, had there been any delay, he said he would have had to declare a fuel emergency -- a term which informs air traffic controllers that a plane needs immediate priority to land.
How distressing it is that I should read this article just when I had overcome my fear of flying.
Actually, it's not planes I fear now; to echo the aforementioned whistle blowers, it's the companies that fly them.
There was, however, an awkward fifteen-year period in my life, originating -- to the best of my recollection -- in 1982, coincidentally the year of my youngest child's birth (is there any significance to that?), and extending to 1997, during which I exhibited an irrational, puerile, and eccentric fear of flying.
Fortunately, this wasn't the John Madden strain of air phobia, which renders the victim incapable of setting foot on an airplane and requires daunting drive-time in luxuriously-appointed motor carriages (or prosaic Ford Tauruses). But it was toxic enough to infect my brain with all manner of horrific fantasies as my flight days drew inexorably closer; to compel me to forgo more than a few pleasurable excursions which, if I were to get to my destination and return within a reasonable time frame, required air transport; and, during the course of my flights, to torment myself and my traveling companions with any number of egregious displays of mental and physical discomfort including, but not limited to, gritting and grinding my teeth, squeezing the armrests of my seat in a patriotic swell (red palms, white knuckles, blue veins), and repeatedly studying the hands of my watch in a desperate attempt to increase their painfully slow pace, which only confirmed my oft-tested hypothesis that if there is any place time does not fly, it is on board an airplane.
I believe my fate was sealed by two harrowing incidents I experienced in the late seventies or early eighties -- life-changing for me though hardly more than routine for less sensitive flyers. Landing at Newark Airport on board a long, skinny, (and ancient) cigar-shaped prop jet -- every model of which, I have no doubt, was retired not long after this flight -- the plane was caught in a vicious crosswind and began to roll so precariously that I felt certain one of the wings was going to scrape the pavement and send us into a deadly cartwheel -- an aeronautical improbability, I was later informed, which I didn't believe then and and don't believe now. And on a flight to Atlanta, the fog was so thick the pilot had to make two passes before he could bring the plane down onto a runway I never saw until the wheels hit the ground.
From that day forward, when I could muster enough courage to climb aboard, it was in lockstep with an imagination soaring beyond the 30,000 feet to which this elaborate steel cylinder -- itself a miraculous triumph of human ingenuity and modern technology -- was effortlessly transporting me, an imagination feverishly conjuring up every conceivable disaster that could befall me.
As I accelerate down the runway, conflicting thoughts swirl through my brain. How is this two-hundred-ton behemoth ever going to defy the forces of gravity? And isn't the moment of take-off the most dangerous? Then I tell myself that this whole exercise is merely a matter of physics. When this complex machine attains its critical speed, which it will in just a few seconds, reduced air pressure above the wingspan will generate enough lift to suck it off the ground as if into a vacuum, at which point the pilot will apply increased power to thrust it faster and higher -- assuming, of course, all turbines are firing away. Engineers will protest that this is a gross simplification; nevertheless, it comforts me.
My sense of hearing is sharpened to a frightening acuity; any change in the monotonous droning of the engines or any discordant clank, whistle or groan, signals to me the onset of a massive equipment failure. And these sinister sounds recur with unrelenting frequency.
For one who requires four-hundred power correctional lenses, objects seen at a distance come into focus with remarkable clarity. As I gaze out the window, I see one, two, three other planes in our neighborhood, each approaching rapidly, one surely destined to cross our path in a calamitous midair collision.
I realize planes change direction by rolling and banking. But, really, why is it necessary for these airborne cowboys to make such steep turns, throwing me into paroxysms of anxiety with the notion that they just might roll over a little too far and send us all to oblivion and causing me to lean slightly in the opposite direction in a futile effort to counterbalance two hundred tons with my one-hundred-fifty pound frame?
And then, of course, there is turbulence. Like an invisible blanket, it descends -- or ascends -- upon us without warning. While I marvel at a glorious blue canopy hanging over the world with not a nasty gray cloud in sight, suddenly the plane starts to shake and shudder. "Uh oh," I mutter to myself, trying to remain calm and composed. "That must be something very powerful if it can make the wings on this heavyweight flap like a bird's." Because I read somewhere that reducing speed moderates the effects of turbulence, I whisper to the captain to ease off the throttle, entreaties, of course, which are never heeded. "These are just bumps in the road, bumps in the road, annoying reminders that we are in the air," I reassure myself, as we bounce across the Mississippi River. "Besides, it couldn't possibly be this rough all the way to San Francisco." And, perish the thought, could one of these downdrafts mutate into a lethal wind shear strong enough to mash this winged intruder into the dust?
Possessed by this phobia, I dreaded putting my two younger children on the planes they were flying every two or three months from their mother's home in Charleston, S.C., to mine in Lynchburg, particularly on the small commuter that took off one Sunday evening into a violent thunderstorm.
And I would read about the latest plane crash (granted, they were few and far between) with sadness and sympathy, but also with a perverse sense of suppressed satisfaction, secure in the knowledge that the odds of another one occurring any time soon (with me or mine aboard) had just gotten longer.
My distaste for flying made it all the more surprising that I would approach my wife some ten years ago with the proposition that we go on a safari to Kenya -- shooting pictures, of course, not animals. After all, getting there (and back) consists of two demanding transcontinental flights: eight hours from Dulles to Amsterdam and then, after a two-day interlude for sightseeing and decompression, eight more to Nairobi.
It isn't exactly those sixteen hours in the air that ultimately dispatches the thunderclouds of apprehension that darken my every take-off -- especially since I remember a foggy landing in Amsterdam eerily reminiscent of the one I have described above -- but they do lay the groundwork, so to speak, for a transition from a state of denying that I can be anything but miserable on board an airplane to accepting that, since I can't change the conditions of air travel, a certain degree of tolerance is in order.
That epiphany comes to me the morning of our third day in Nairobi -- the previous two of which we spent feeding domesticated giraffes at a nearby farm, touring the stately home of the African writer Isak Dinesen, lunching on the veranda of the famous Norfolk Hotel, and navigating the pedestrian-lined, bicycle-clogged streets of the city -- when we are bused to the local airport. Looking out on the airfield, I am amazed to see a relic of aviation history, a bulbous DC-3, dominating a congregation of smaller private planes. "It must be some sort of museum piece," I comment to my wife. "I want to take a closer look."
Well, we do get a closer look -- close enough to see the words "Kenya Airlines" plastered all over the hull. Indeed, the plane is in service, and will be our carrier for a ninety-minute flight to our first tented campsite in the Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve.
Even to a reluctant flier like me, the DC-3 is a beautiful bird. With the grace of an exquisite sculpture, its long, wide wings sweep rearward and upward from its undercarriage, each supporting a large engine cowl with oversized propeller blades. Its fuselage perches proudly on two sturdy struts, its tail dragging the ground, its nose pointing skyward, ready to leap into the air, a triangular configuration of aerodynamic perfection, now obsolete.
We enter from the rear and trudge steadily uphill until we locate our assigned seats among the twenty-eight available. In the jacket of the seat in front of us is a placard -- not a diagram of the plane's emergency exits, but its biography: birthed during World War II, it served our country well under another name, C-47, and later some long-forgotten airline (perhaps Piedmont?) until it was mothballed and stripped for parts. Ten years ago it was rescued by Kenya Air, resurrected and reassembled, and charged with the task of transporting eager tourists into the African bush.
Frankly I feel quite safe aboard this scarred veteran. After all, because of its revolutionary impact on passenger air travel, some have been so bold to call it the greatest plane in history. Like a ship at sea, it floats through the air, sensitive to every undercurrent and change in air pressure. One senses that even with a sudden loss of power its disproportionate wing span would facilitate a buoyant glide to a safe landing -- even on the short, narrow, primitive asphalt strip which awaits us and pulls us down like a magnet, one of many that dot the grassy landscape.
Four or five days later my wife and I clamber aboard a single-engine commuter plane which has barely enough cabin space to accommodate the six other passengers destined, like us, for Lake Victoria, a one-hour flight. I am shoehorned in directly behind the pilot, a ruddy, fifty-something Minnesotan, whose friendly demeanor quickly becalms my worrisome fantasies. What tragic misjudgment, errant behavior, or physical infirmity ( like blindness) has banished him from the lucrative career track of commercial captaincy to this god-forsaken place? Perhaps, I hope, it's merely his love of adventure -- or his bizarre escape from some doomed love affair.
Aside from some pockets of turbulence that funnel up from the Rift Valley, the flight is uneventful, that is, until we reach the shore of Lake Victoria and the gravelly strip upon which we are supposed to touch down. As we make our approach, I can plainly see a beehive of colorfully-attired natives swarming about the landing area -- anticipating the arrival of this week's strange flying machine. Suddenly, the pilot levels off his descent, crosses over the runway, pulls back on the throttle, and lifts the plane skyward.
"What's wrong?" I gulp, as my heart leaps into my throat. "It's nothing to worry about," replies the pilot. "I have to buzz the runway before I land in order to scare off all the animals and children." "Sure," I say, painting a false smile of confidence across my bleached visage. "Perfectly understandable."
And thus it transpires that, after these two airborne African adventures, my fear of flying magically evaporates into the purple Kenyan sunset. I board my two long flights home with an absence of trepidation and a surfeit of nonchalance, attitudes I have been able to sustain to this day -- with regard to the actual act of flying, that is.
My fears, it seems, have been transferred to the incorrigible corporations that fly those planes.
My love-hate relationship with the airlines is heavily weighted towards the latter side of the equation. Who could fail to be irritated, if not outraged, by their arcane pricing policies, their schizophrenic conception of customer service -- one minute cloyingly accommodating, the next, totally obtuse -- and by their general cavalier disposition which like a politician's reeks of a disconnect between promise and execution?
Some of my ire is no doubt aggravated by the sad truth that flying out of a small city like Lynchburg poses significant problems for them and me. How many times have I read or been told how unprofitable it is for commuter airlines to fly the routes between Lynchburg and Charlotte and Lynchburg and Atlanta? Yet their solutions only exacerbate the problem: unconscionably high fares and fewer flights, which only compel travelers to drive to and fly from places like Richmond and Raleigh.
On the other hand, I acknowledge that both commuter and trunk carriers must make money to survive -- which most of them seem to have had a difficult time doing in recent years, even before the onslaught of soaring fuel prices. Competition to major airlines like Delta and U.S. Airways from budget carriers like Southwest and Jet Blue and the necessity of filling their seats, have kept fares relatively low -- a boon to consumers -- yet continued lack of profitability is a precursor to an insolvency which would be hugely disruptive and require government intervention. These airlines must lower their costs where they face competition, and, where they do not, price themselves to be profitable, regardless of customer outcry.
Sympathy for the airlines' predicament does not make the travails of air travel any more palatable. Any person who has flown with any regularity has undoubtedly suffered through any number of frustrating, blood-boiling, stomach-turning misadventures, all of which make for entertaining cocktail conversation, yet like a masochist seeking more pain he keeps going back, simply because he has no other choice.
Readers of this blog may remember a trip my wife and I took to Egypt two and a half years ago, some details of which were related in the piece "The Solar Boat" and need not be repeated here. The February morn of our departure is a carbon copy of the six others we have awakened to: the sky pale blue, streaked with yellow patches; the air a cool crisp sixty degrees; the sun, distant and indistinct, a welcome warming influence. Watching CNN International in our room at the Mena House Hotel -- from which we have a grand view of the Great Pyramids -- I happen to catch the stateside weather report, and it's not pretty. A potent low-pressure system (that is, snowstorm) has already dumped six to twelve inches of snow on areas of the East Coast extending from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., and has set its sights on New York City and JFK International Airport, where our Egypt Air flight is scheduled to land that same afternoon. "This plane should never take off," I warn my wife, in a burst of pessimistic prescience.
Ten tedious hours later -- during which I consume about three hundred pages of Trollope's Barchester Towers -- I am distracted from my reading by the small overhead screen at the front of the cabin, upon which has been intermittently displayed for its passengers' edification the plane's route, speed, and time of flight, all marking its steady progress towards its destination -- until that pregnant moment, when, with great dismay, I see it suddenly veer off to the northwest. For the next two hours I am mesmerized by a series of course corrections, as our plane, like a homeless itinerant, desperately seeks a place of refuge, each maneuver accompanied by a brief desultory announcement emanating from the cockpit in the Egypt Air captain's clipped British accent.
First: "JFK Airport is closed due to a snowstorm, and we are diverting to Montreal, Canada." Twenty minutes later: "JFK has reopened, so we are reversing our course to land there." Twenty minutes later: total silence as we watch the plane circle aimlessly in the vicinity of New York City. Twenty minutes later: continued silence as the plane appears to change direction and head south. Finally, twenty minutes later the captain speaks: "JFK is closed again, and we have been rerouted to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C."
After a passing reflection that by now we are surely running low on fuel, I am struck by the glorious inspiration that Dulles is only three hours from home. Obviously every JFK flight, including mine, has been canceled, and we would have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting on one tomorrow. Hence a graceful exit here at Dulles presents a fortuitous opportunity to avoid an inauspicious return to JFK. But as we taxi to a halt on the runway the preparatory sounds of evacuation are ominously absent.
After twelve hours, the last two of which have been spent in limbo, every other passenger is as anxious as I am to get off that airplane. But, alas, it is not to be. Egypt Air has no terminal at Dulles, and is either not permitted or has refused to pay whatever fees may be incurred to disembark its passengers. Indeed, peering out the window into the dead of night, what do I espy but half a dozen more dimly-lit aircraft, bound for JFK or some other shuttered airport but parked like this one in an indefinite holding pattern.
So tantalizingly close are we to the sweet taste of freedom -- and yet so far away. While some forbearing passengers -- like my wife -- remain remarkably self-possessed, I join an agitated cadre of vociferous mutineers, who like stubborn children who won't take "no" for an answer are determined to impose their will on their resolute parents. We warn the flight attendants standing in our way of legal repercussions if they do not permit us to exit. We castigate them for grossly inhumane treatment. We pose as bogus NSTB experts, informing them that these pilots cannot fly this plane without a rest period. We insist on our rights as United States citizens. We try to contact our Congressmen. We argue, cajole, and threaten, resorting to every conceivable tactic except outright violence--but all to no avail. The crew stands firm.
After two hours of verbal sparring, we are instructed to return to our seats and strap ourselves in, for the inevitable is upon us: return to JFK. This one-hour flight consumes two, when a plane landing ahead of us nearly skids off the slippery runway, information we do not need to know nor want to know until we are safely on the ground -- sixteen exasperating hours after we departed Cairo. I feel like an Egyptian mummy.
As weary and disgusted as we are at this point, more heartbreak lies ahead: one hour to clear customs, another hour to wait for our luggage which has been delayed by weather-related personnel and/or equipment problems. My wife's bag is one of the first to emerge from the depths of an underground beltway while I pace about with bated breath, my anxiety level rising with each passing bag, convinced now that mine must have been tossed overboard to save some of the precious fuel our protracted peregrinations had been burning away, until, finally, one hour later, when I had almost given up hope, it surfaces, the last one.
We look around; then we look at each other because there is no one else in sight. Our traveling companions have all deserted us, having been foresighted or lucky enough to secure overnight accommodations, which for us to attempt at 1:00 AM on this cold, damp, wintry night of canceled flights and stranded fliers seems an exercise in futility. And to what end? I have already calculated the odds of our getting out of here on a plane tomorrow.
Faced with the gloomy prospect of sleeping in an airport chair or on the floor, we locate a twenty-four hour car rental agency, flag a cab to take us there, bless the agent for his car and one-way rental, get directions to New Jersey, and start driving. While my wife drifts off to sleep, my adrenaline kicks in, propelling me forward like a mountain climber determined to reach his goal for no other reason than the simple satisfaction of having bested the nasty obstacles nature has strewn in his path. When we behold our native seven hills at 10:00 AM the next morning, I have been awake for thirty-two straight hours.
It wasn't the first all nighter I ever pulled -- nor the last. Eighteen months later, my wife and I -- gluttons for punishment -- roll the dice on another international flight, this one to Italy.
Of course, our itinerary involves a transfer in Charlotte, where we touch down at 9:00 AM, leaving us plenty of time to make our two-hour 11:00 AM flight to Newark, from which our Rome departure is scheduled for 3:00 PM. Our frequent-flying traveling companions -- who are hosting us at their charming villa in the picturesque town of Civitas, not far from Orvieto -- must know something we do not, and have wisely chosen to route themselves through Philadelphia. As we head off to our separate gates, a tiny needle of doubt pricks my consciousness. "Give me your phone number," I say to my friend, "in case one of us has a problem." After all, we are to rendezvous in Rome ten hours later, rent a car, and drive together to his home. "Don't worry, Marc. You have plenty of time to make your connection," he calls, his voice fading away as he disappears into the bowels of the airport.
Yes, we have time -- provided our Charlotte flight leaves within the margin of error: ninety minutes. As my wife and I sit nervously at the gate and watch the merciless ticking of the clocks that seem to bewitch us from every wall and stanchion, we are subjected to a litany of alarming and repetitive updates: another delay on the flight to Newark, due to high winds, which are reeking havoc up and down the East Coast. I nudge my wife and point to a blinking overhead screen: in spite of all that atmospheric disturbance, every flight but ours is operating nearly on schedule.
As a formerly fearful flier who religiously monitors weather reports at least seven days prior to take-off, I appreciate the necessity of grounding a plane in bad weather. But this excuse of "high winds" sounds as puffed-up as a cumulus cloud. How is it that some aberrant tornado has settled in over Newark and nowhere else, since our friends' flight into nearby Philadelphia, one of extreme interest to us, does not seem to have been affected by these deleterious conditions? Don't planes land every day in 30 to 40 mph winds? Just how high are these winds that are battering our patience to smithereens and blowing our vacation way off course?
Is it possible someone is lying to us?
When we finally depart Charlotte at 1:00 PM, having braced myself for a rough two hours in the air, why am I not surprised that this is the smoothest flight I have ever been on, and that, when we touch down, no hint of cloud nor whiff of breeze mars the crystal-clear friendly sky?
We have no hope of making our Rome connection. To add insult to injury, as we scurry along an elevated glass-enclosed corridor chasing a miracle, my attention is drawn to a panoramic view of the busy airfield. And there, right below us, taxiing out on the runway, is a majestic 767, its bold insignia, Alitalia, silently shouting a mocking farewell to its two castaways who, in a trance-like paralysis, can only stand, watch, and wave: bye-bye, baby.
Alitalia rebooks us on an overnight British Airways flight to London Heathrow -- the British version of Purgatory, where we endure an inter-terminal bus transfer and an agonizing wait to re-pass through security -- and from there onto Rome, where we will eventually arrive twelve hours later than originally scheduled. But first I must locate our bags.
Trying to get a straight answer, I feel like a distraught credit card customer, spinning on the merry-go-round of technology, bouncing from one electronic gatekeeper to another in search of that elusive human voice. British Airways directs me to U.S. Airways, our carrier from Charlotte, whose officials, pleading ignorance, direct me back to Alitalia. As classically attractive as they are, the two female Alitalia agents might as well have been speaking Italian when they attempt to sell me on the second most incomprehensible whopper of the day: our bags made it on the flight to Rome.
"What!" I exclaim in utter disbelief, outraged not only at the absurdity of such a statement but also in its sheer audacity. "If those bags got on that plane," I reply, struggling for temperance, "someone threw them on board from ten thousand feet while we were landing." And, by the way, aren't there regulations that prevent bags from traveling without ticketed passengers?
After thirty more excruciating minutes of whispered telephone conversations, mysterious disappearances and reappearances, and high-level conferences, we are officiously informed that our bags have been located -- twenty yards away down a flight of stairs behind the counter where we have been entrenched all this time. I feel like a piece of "transit baggage" myself as I sort through fifty other pieces, reclaim our own, and manhandle them through Newark Airport back to British Airways.
Looking back on these dreadful experiences, I am driven to a grievous conclusion. My wife and I dutifully followed all the rules. We purchased our tickets well in advance, essentially loaning our money interest-free to Egypt and Alitalia. We arrived at our points of departure in plenty of time to be processed and clear security. We kept our carry-on baggage with us at all times lest a stranger snatch it for some dastardly deed. We boarded in an orderly fashion when our zone was called. We placed our carry-ons in an overhead compartment or under the seat in front of us as objects can shift in flight. We identified the emergency exits. We securely fastened our seat belts. We made sure our seat backs were in an upright and locked position and our tray tables stored in the seat in front of us. We turned off all personal electronic devices until the captain advised us they were safe to use. We stayed in our seats until the plane came to a complete stop at the gate and the captain turned off the seat belt signs.
Yet when something went terribly wrong, we were abandoned and left adrift in the impersonal, labyrinthine hallways of the sprawling, contemporary airport. We were reduced in the final analysis to nothing more than minor inconveniences to those in whom we had placed our trust; perhaps that is all we had ever been or ever will be.
Nowadays getting off the ground is quite a relief.
In March a pilot told NASA he landed his regional jet with less fuel than required by FAA regulations. He also complained that his airline was "ranking" captains according to their ability to complete their flights with the least amount.
In February a Boeing 747 captain, running low on fuel after meeting strong headwinds crossing the Atlantic en route to JFK International Airport in New York, was denied permission to stop for refueling by his airline operations manager who told him there was an adequate supply on board the jet. He arrived at JFK with so little that, had there been any delay, he said he would have had to declare a fuel emergency -- a term which informs air traffic controllers that a plane needs immediate priority to land.
How distressing it is that I should read this article just when I had overcome my fear of flying.
Actually, it's not planes I fear now; to echo the aforementioned whistle blowers, it's the companies that fly them.
There was, however, an awkward fifteen-year period in my life, originating -- to the best of my recollection -- in 1982, coincidentally the year of my youngest child's birth (is there any significance to that?), and extending to 1997, during which I exhibited an irrational, puerile, and eccentric fear of flying.
Fortunately, this wasn't the John Madden strain of air phobia, which renders the victim incapable of setting foot on an airplane and requires daunting drive-time in luxuriously-appointed motor carriages (or prosaic Ford Tauruses). But it was toxic enough to infect my brain with all manner of horrific fantasies as my flight days drew inexorably closer; to compel me to forgo more than a few pleasurable excursions which, if I were to get to my destination and return within a reasonable time frame, required air transport; and, during the course of my flights, to torment myself and my traveling companions with any number of egregious displays of mental and physical discomfort including, but not limited to, gritting and grinding my teeth, squeezing the armrests of my seat in a patriotic swell (red palms, white knuckles, blue veins), and repeatedly studying the hands of my watch in a desperate attempt to increase their painfully slow pace, which only confirmed my oft-tested hypothesis that if there is any place time does not fly, it is on board an airplane.
I believe my fate was sealed by two harrowing incidents I experienced in the late seventies or early eighties -- life-changing for me though hardly more than routine for less sensitive flyers. Landing at Newark Airport on board a long, skinny, (and ancient) cigar-shaped prop jet -- every model of which, I have no doubt, was retired not long after this flight -- the plane was caught in a vicious crosswind and began to roll so precariously that I felt certain one of the wings was going to scrape the pavement and send us into a deadly cartwheel -- an aeronautical improbability, I was later informed, which I didn't believe then and and don't believe now. And on a flight to Atlanta, the fog was so thick the pilot had to make two passes before he could bring the plane down onto a runway I never saw until the wheels hit the ground.
From that day forward, when I could muster enough courage to climb aboard, it was in lockstep with an imagination soaring beyond the 30,000 feet to which this elaborate steel cylinder -- itself a miraculous triumph of human ingenuity and modern technology -- was effortlessly transporting me, an imagination feverishly conjuring up every conceivable disaster that could befall me.
As I accelerate down the runway, conflicting thoughts swirl through my brain. How is this two-hundred-ton behemoth ever going to defy the forces of gravity? And isn't the moment of take-off the most dangerous? Then I tell myself that this whole exercise is merely a matter of physics. When this complex machine attains its critical speed, which it will in just a few seconds, reduced air pressure above the wingspan will generate enough lift to suck it off the ground as if into a vacuum, at which point the pilot will apply increased power to thrust it faster and higher -- assuming, of course, all turbines are firing away. Engineers will protest that this is a gross simplification; nevertheless, it comforts me.
My sense of hearing is sharpened to a frightening acuity; any change in the monotonous droning of the engines or any discordant clank, whistle or groan, signals to me the onset of a massive equipment failure. And these sinister sounds recur with unrelenting frequency.
For one who requires four-hundred power correctional lenses, objects seen at a distance come into focus with remarkable clarity. As I gaze out the window, I see one, two, three other planes in our neighborhood, each approaching rapidly, one surely destined to cross our path in a calamitous midair collision.
I realize planes change direction by rolling and banking. But, really, why is it necessary for these airborne cowboys to make such steep turns, throwing me into paroxysms of anxiety with the notion that they just might roll over a little too far and send us all to oblivion and causing me to lean slightly in the opposite direction in a futile effort to counterbalance two hundred tons with my one-hundred-fifty pound frame?
And then, of course, there is turbulence. Like an invisible blanket, it descends -- or ascends -- upon us without warning. While I marvel at a glorious blue canopy hanging over the world with not a nasty gray cloud in sight, suddenly the plane starts to shake and shudder. "Uh oh," I mutter to myself, trying to remain calm and composed. "That must be something very powerful if it can make the wings on this heavyweight flap like a bird's." Because I read somewhere that reducing speed moderates the effects of turbulence, I whisper to the captain to ease off the throttle, entreaties, of course, which are never heeded. "These are just bumps in the road, bumps in the road, annoying reminders that we are in the air," I reassure myself, as we bounce across the Mississippi River. "Besides, it couldn't possibly be this rough all the way to San Francisco." And, perish the thought, could one of these downdrafts mutate into a lethal wind shear strong enough to mash this winged intruder into the dust?
Possessed by this phobia, I dreaded putting my two younger children on the planes they were flying every two or three months from their mother's home in Charleston, S.C., to mine in Lynchburg, particularly on the small commuter that took off one Sunday evening into a violent thunderstorm.
And I would read about the latest plane crash (granted, they were few and far between) with sadness and sympathy, but also with a perverse sense of suppressed satisfaction, secure in the knowledge that the odds of another one occurring any time soon (with me or mine aboard) had just gotten longer.
My distaste for flying made it all the more surprising that I would approach my wife some ten years ago with the proposition that we go on a safari to Kenya -- shooting pictures, of course, not animals. After all, getting there (and back) consists of two demanding transcontinental flights: eight hours from Dulles to Amsterdam and then, after a two-day interlude for sightseeing and decompression, eight more to Nairobi.
It isn't exactly those sixteen hours in the air that ultimately dispatches the thunderclouds of apprehension that darken my every take-off -- especially since I remember a foggy landing in Amsterdam eerily reminiscent of the one I have described above -- but they do lay the groundwork, so to speak, for a transition from a state of denying that I can be anything but miserable on board an airplane to accepting that, since I can't change the conditions of air travel, a certain degree of tolerance is in order.
That epiphany comes to me the morning of our third day in Nairobi -- the previous two of which we spent feeding domesticated giraffes at a nearby farm, touring the stately home of the African writer Isak Dinesen, lunching on the veranda of the famous Norfolk Hotel, and navigating the pedestrian-lined, bicycle-clogged streets of the city -- when we are bused to the local airport. Looking out on the airfield, I am amazed to see a relic of aviation history, a bulbous DC-3, dominating a congregation of smaller private planes. "It must be some sort of museum piece," I comment to my wife. "I want to take a closer look."
Well, we do get a closer look -- close enough to see the words "Kenya Airlines" plastered all over the hull. Indeed, the plane is in service, and will be our carrier for a ninety-minute flight to our first tented campsite in the Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve.
Even to a reluctant flier like me, the DC-3 is a beautiful bird. With the grace of an exquisite sculpture, its long, wide wings sweep rearward and upward from its undercarriage, each supporting a large engine cowl with oversized propeller blades. Its fuselage perches proudly on two sturdy struts, its tail dragging the ground, its nose pointing skyward, ready to leap into the air, a triangular configuration of aerodynamic perfection, now obsolete.
We enter from the rear and trudge steadily uphill until we locate our assigned seats among the twenty-eight available. In the jacket of the seat in front of us is a placard -- not a diagram of the plane's emergency exits, but its biography: birthed during World War II, it served our country well under another name, C-47, and later some long-forgotten airline (perhaps Piedmont?) until it was mothballed and stripped for parts. Ten years ago it was rescued by Kenya Air, resurrected and reassembled, and charged with the task of transporting eager tourists into the African bush.
Frankly I feel quite safe aboard this scarred veteran. After all, because of its revolutionary impact on passenger air travel, some have been so bold to call it the greatest plane in history. Like a ship at sea, it floats through the air, sensitive to every undercurrent and change in air pressure. One senses that even with a sudden loss of power its disproportionate wing span would facilitate a buoyant glide to a safe landing -- even on the short, narrow, primitive asphalt strip which awaits us and pulls us down like a magnet, one of many that dot the grassy landscape.
Four or five days later my wife and I clamber aboard a single-engine commuter plane which has barely enough cabin space to accommodate the six other passengers destined, like us, for Lake Victoria, a one-hour flight. I am shoehorned in directly behind the pilot, a ruddy, fifty-something Minnesotan, whose friendly demeanor quickly becalms my worrisome fantasies. What tragic misjudgment, errant behavior, or physical infirmity ( like blindness) has banished him from the lucrative career track of commercial captaincy to this god-forsaken place? Perhaps, I hope, it's merely his love of adventure -- or his bizarre escape from some doomed love affair.
Aside from some pockets of turbulence that funnel up from the Rift Valley, the flight is uneventful, that is, until we reach the shore of Lake Victoria and the gravelly strip upon which we are supposed to touch down. As we make our approach, I can plainly see a beehive of colorfully-attired natives swarming about the landing area -- anticipating the arrival of this week's strange flying machine. Suddenly, the pilot levels off his descent, crosses over the runway, pulls back on the throttle, and lifts the plane skyward.
"What's wrong?" I gulp, as my heart leaps into my throat. "It's nothing to worry about," replies the pilot. "I have to buzz the runway before I land in order to scare off all the animals and children." "Sure," I say, painting a false smile of confidence across my bleached visage. "Perfectly understandable."
And thus it transpires that, after these two airborne African adventures, my fear of flying magically evaporates into the purple Kenyan sunset. I board my two long flights home with an absence of trepidation and a surfeit of nonchalance, attitudes I have been able to sustain to this day -- with regard to the actual act of flying, that is.
My fears, it seems, have been transferred to the incorrigible corporations that fly those planes.
My love-hate relationship with the airlines is heavily weighted towards the latter side of the equation. Who could fail to be irritated, if not outraged, by their arcane pricing policies, their schizophrenic conception of customer service -- one minute cloyingly accommodating, the next, totally obtuse -- and by their general cavalier disposition which like a politician's reeks of a disconnect between promise and execution?
Some of my ire is no doubt aggravated by the sad truth that flying out of a small city like Lynchburg poses significant problems for them and me. How many times have I read or been told how unprofitable it is for commuter airlines to fly the routes between Lynchburg and Charlotte and Lynchburg and Atlanta? Yet their solutions only exacerbate the problem: unconscionably high fares and fewer flights, which only compel travelers to drive to and fly from places like Richmond and Raleigh.
On the other hand, I acknowledge that both commuter and trunk carriers must make money to survive -- which most of them seem to have had a difficult time doing in recent years, even before the onslaught of soaring fuel prices. Competition to major airlines like Delta and U.S. Airways from budget carriers like Southwest and Jet Blue and the necessity of filling their seats, have kept fares relatively low -- a boon to consumers -- yet continued lack of profitability is a precursor to an insolvency which would be hugely disruptive and require government intervention. These airlines must lower their costs where they face competition, and, where they do not, price themselves to be profitable, regardless of customer outcry.
Sympathy for the airlines' predicament does not make the travails of air travel any more palatable. Any person who has flown with any regularity has undoubtedly suffered through any number of frustrating, blood-boiling, stomach-turning misadventures, all of which make for entertaining cocktail conversation, yet like a masochist seeking more pain he keeps going back, simply because he has no other choice.
Readers of this blog may remember a trip my wife and I took to Egypt two and a half years ago, some details of which were related in the piece "The Solar Boat" and need not be repeated here. The February morn of our departure is a carbon copy of the six others we have awakened to: the sky pale blue, streaked with yellow patches; the air a cool crisp sixty degrees; the sun, distant and indistinct, a welcome warming influence. Watching CNN International in our room at the Mena House Hotel -- from which we have a grand view of the Great Pyramids -- I happen to catch the stateside weather report, and it's not pretty. A potent low-pressure system (that is, snowstorm) has already dumped six to twelve inches of snow on areas of the East Coast extending from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., and has set its sights on New York City and JFK International Airport, where our Egypt Air flight is scheduled to land that same afternoon. "This plane should never take off," I warn my wife, in a burst of pessimistic prescience.
Ten tedious hours later -- during which I consume about three hundred pages of Trollope's Barchester Towers -- I am distracted from my reading by the small overhead screen at the front of the cabin, upon which has been intermittently displayed for its passengers' edification the plane's route, speed, and time of flight, all marking its steady progress towards its destination -- until that pregnant moment, when, with great dismay, I see it suddenly veer off to the northwest. For the next two hours I am mesmerized by a series of course corrections, as our plane, like a homeless itinerant, desperately seeks a place of refuge, each maneuver accompanied by a brief desultory announcement emanating from the cockpit in the Egypt Air captain's clipped British accent.
First: "JFK Airport is closed due to a snowstorm, and we are diverting to Montreal, Canada." Twenty minutes later: "JFK has reopened, so we are reversing our course to land there." Twenty minutes later: total silence as we watch the plane circle aimlessly in the vicinity of New York City. Twenty minutes later: continued silence as the plane appears to change direction and head south. Finally, twenty minutes later the captain speaks: "JFK is closed again, and we have been rerouted to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C."
After a passing reflection that by now we are surely running low on fuel, I am struck by the glorious inspiration that Dulles is only three hours from home. Obviously every JFK flight, including mine, has been canceled, and we would have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting on one tomorrow. Hence a graceful exit here at Dulles presents a fortuitous opportunity to avoid an inauspicious return to JFK. But as we taxi to a halt on the runway the preparatory sounds of evacuation are ominously absent.
After twelve hours, the last two of which have been spent in limbo, every other passenger is as anxious as I am to get off that airplane. But, alas, it is not to be. Egypt Air has no terminal at Dulles, and is either not permitted or has refused to pay whatever fees may be incurred to disembark its passengers. Indeed, peering out the window into the dead of night, what do I espy but half a dozen more dimly-lit aircraft, bound for JFK or some other shuttered airport but parked like this one in an indefinite holding pattern.
So tantalizingly close are we to the sweet taste of freedom -- and yet so far away. While some forbearing passengers -- like my wife -- remain remarkably self-possessed, I join an agitated cadre of vociferous mutineers, who like stubborn children who won't take "no" for an answer are determined to impose their will on their resolute parents. We warn the flight attendants standing in our way of legal repercussions if they do not permit us to exit. We castigate them for grossly inhumane treatment. We pose as bogus NSTB experts, informing them that these pilots cannot fly this plane without a rest period. We insist on our rights as United States citizens. We try to contact our Congressmen. We argue, cajole, and threaten, resorting to every conceivable tactic except outright violence--but all to no avail. The crew stands firm.
After two hours of verbal sparring, we are instructed to return to our seats and strap ourselves in, for the inevitable is upon us: return to JFK. This one-hour flight consumes two, when a plane landing ahead of us nearly skids off the slippery runway, information we do not need to know nor want to know until we are safely on the ground -- sixteen exasperating hours after we departed Cairo. I feel like an Egyptian mummy.
As weary and disgusted as we are at this point, more heartbreak lies ahead: one hour to clear customs, another hour to wait for our luggage which has been delayed by weather-related personnel and/or equipment problems. My wife's bag is one of the first to emerge from the depths of an underground beltway while I pace about with bated breath, my anxiety level rising with each passing bag, convinced now that mine must have been tossed overboard to save some of the precious fuel our protracted peregrinations had been burning away, until, finally, one hour later, when I had almost given up hope, it surfaces, the last one.
We look around; then we look at each other because there is no one else in sight. Our traveling companions have all deserted us, having been foresighted or lucky enough to secure overnight accommodations, which for us to attempt at 1:00 AM on this cold, damp, wintry night of canceled flights and stranded fliers seems an exercise in futility. And to what end? I have already calculated the odds of our getting out of here on a plane tomorrow.
Faced with the gloomy prospect of sleeping in an airport chair or on the floor, we locate a twenty-four hour car rental agency, flag a cab to take us there, bless the agent for his car and one-way rental, get directions to New Jersey, and start driving. While my wife drifts off to sleep, my adrenaline kicks in, propelling me forward like a mountain climber determined to reach his goal for no other reason than the simple satisfaction of having bested the nasty obstacles nature has strewn in his path. When we behold our native seven hills at 10:00 AM the next morning, I have been awake for thirty-two straight hours.
It wasn't the first all nighter I ever pulled -- nor the last. Eighteen months later, my wife and I -- gluttons for punishment -- roll the dice on another international flight, this one to Italy.
Of course, our itinerary involves a transfer in Charlotte, where we touch down at 9:00 AM, leaving us plenty of time to make our two-hour 11:00 AM flight to Newark, from which our Rome departure is scheduled for 3:00 PM. Our frequent-flying traveling companions -- who are hosting us at their charming villa in the picturesque town of Civitas, not far from Orvieto -- must know something we do not, and have wisely chosen to route themselves through Philadelphia. As we head off to our separate gates, a tiny needle of doubt pricks my consciousness. "Give me your phone number," I say to my friend, "in case one of us has a problem." After all, we are to rendezvous in Rome ten hours later, rent a car, and drive together to his home. "Don't worry, Marc. You have plenty of time to make your connection," he calls, his voice fading away as he disappears into the bowels of the airport.
Yes, we have time -- provided our Charlotte flight leaves within the margin of error: ninety minutes. As my wife and I sit nervously at the gate and watch the merciless ticking of the clocks that seem to bewitch us from every wall and stanchion, we are subjected to a litany of alarming and repetitive updates: another delay on the flight to Newark, due to high winds, which are reeking havoc up and down the East Coast. I nudge my wife and point to a blinking overhead screen: in spite of all that atmospheric disturbance, every flight but ours is operating nearly on schedule.
As a formerly fearful flier who religiously monitors weather reports at least seven days prior to take-off, I appreciate the necessity of grounding a plane in bad weather. But this excuse of "high winds" sounds as puffed-up as a cumulus cloud. How is it that some aberrant tornado has settled in over Newark and nowhere else, since our friends' flight into nearby Philadelphia, one of extreme interest to us, does not seem to have been affected by these deleterious conditions? Don't planes land every day in 30 to 40 mph winds? Just how high are these winds that are battering our patience to smithereens and blowing our vacation way off course?
Is it possible someone is lying to us?
When we finally depart Charlotte at 1:00 PM, having braced myself for a rough two hours in the air, why am I not surprised that this is the smoothest flight I have ever been on, and that, when we touch down, no hint of cloud nor whiff of breeze mars the crystal-clear friendly sky?
We have no hope of making our Rome connection. To add insult to injury, as we scurry along an elevated glass-enclosed corridor chasing a miracle, my attention is drawn to a panoramic view of the busy airfield. And there, right below us, taxiing out on the runway, is a majestic 767, its bold insignia, Alitalia, silently shouting a mocking farewell to its two castaways who, in a trance-like paralysis, can only stand, watch, and wave: bye-bye, baby.
Alitalia rebooks us on an overnight British Airways flight to London Heathrow -- the British version of Purgatory, where we endure an inter-terminal bus transfer and an agonizing wait to re-pass through security -- and from there onto Rome, where we will eventually arrive twelve hours later than originally scheduled. But first I must locate our bags.
Trying to get a straight answer, I feel like a distraught credit card customer, spinning on the merry-go-round of technology, bouncing from one electronic gatekeeper to another in search of that elusive human voice. British Airways directs me to U.S. Airways, our carrier from Charlotte, whose officials, pleading ignorance, direct me back to Alitalia. As classically attractive as they are, the two female Alitalia agents might as well have been speaking Italian when they attempt to sell me on the second most incomprehensible whopper of the day: our bags made it on the flight to Rome.
"What!" I exclaim in utter disbelief, outraged not only at the absurdity of such a statement but also in its sheer audacity. "If those bags got on that plane," I reply, struggling for temperance, "someone threw them on board from ten thousand feet while we were landing." And, by the way, aren't there regulations that prevent bags from traveling without ticketed passengers?
After thirty more excruciating minutes of whispered telephone conversations, mysterious disappearances and reappearances, and high-level conferences, we are officiously informed that our bags have been located -- twenty yards away down a flight of stairs behind the counter where we have been entrenched all this time. I feel like a piece of "transit baggage" myself as I sort through fifty other pieces, reclaim our own, and manhandle them through Newark Airport back to British Airways.
Looking back on these dreadful experiences, I am driven to a grievous conclusion. My wife and I dutifully followed all the rules. We purchased our tickets well in advance, essentially loaning our money interest-free to Egypt and Alitalia. We arrived at our points of departure in plenty of time to be processed and clear security. We kept our carry-on baggage with us at all times lest a stranger snatch it for some dastardly deed. We boarded in an orderly fashion when our zone was called. We placed our carry-ons in an overhead compartment or under the seat in front of us as objects can shift in flight. We identified the emergency exits. We securely fastened our seat belts. We made sure our seat backs were in an upright and locked position and our tray tables stored in the seat in front of us. We turned off all personal electronic devices until the captain advised us they were safe to use. We stayed in our seats until the plane came to a complete stop at the gate and the captain turned off the seat belt signs.
Yet when something went terribly wrong, we were abandoned and left adrift in the impersonal, labyrinthine hallways of the sprawling, contemporary airport. We were reduced in the final analysis to nothing more than minor inconveniences to those in whom we had placed our trust; perhaps that is all we had ever been or ever will be.
Nowadays getting off the ground is quite a relief.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Humanitarians
Like an offspring's college graduation, it is an event tinged in deja vu, at which my attendance is motivated more by a sense of duty than by any lively interest, particularly since I am identified in the program as a member of the Dinner Committee and have made a modest effort at soliciting table sponsorships, most notably my own of $1000. But then, as the evening progresses, a journey which at the outset seemed so routine begins to twist and turn in unique and unpredictable ways, and I depart, once again, inspired and exhilarated by the extraordinary deeds and sublime words of unassuming heroes.
I am speaking of the VCIC (Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities) Annual Humanitarian Awards Dinner, which was held on Thursday, May 29th, at Lynchburg College. Readers unfamiliar with the VCIC may recognize its former designation, NCCJ, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, later changed to the National Conference for Community and Justice -- an ill-advised attempt to sound less sectarian (it succeeded mainly in jeopardizing a well-known and well-respected franchise) and a name which the Virginia Region was compelled to relinquish when it broke with its parent on matters of policy and finance and declared its independence.
The VCIC is a human relations organization whose mission is to promote prejudice reduction, respect for diversity, and better understanding among differing races, religions, and cultures. It conducts a wide variety of instructional and interactive programs for young people, educators, non-profit administrators, and business leaders in schools, in churches and synagogues, and in the workplace.
Legend has it that the NCCJ's first meeting in 1935 was held near the site of tonight's dinner, the Burton Student Center at Lynchburg College.
Tonight's dinner is one of several the VCIC conducts annually throughout the state of Virginia -- the others are in Richmond, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach -- and while its purpose is ostensibly to proclaim the humanitarianism of five deserving citizens, it is hardly a secret that the organization funds its activities and overhead from the proceeds of these events. Thus, our honorees are to be commended not only for their achievements and contributions to the betterment of their fellow men but also for bowing to a little crass commercialism, for it is in tribute to them that their friends, families, and associates will tender the $125 ticket price. As a friend astutely cautioned his father after he was inducted into a Business Hall of Fame, "Before you accept another award, find out how much it's going to cost me."
Actually, most of the revenue is generated from corporate donors, rather than from single ticket sales. Several years ago the VCIC abandoned its Citizens Committee -- composed of volunteers who would contact individual prospects -- in favor of an Executive Dinner Committee, which solicits corporate sponsorships that range from $1000 to $5000 and entitle each sponsor to a table of eight.
The VCIC has been remarkably successful in penetrating the business community; the program lists thirty companies, including one $5000 Humanitarian Sponsor, Lynchburg College, whose president, Dr. Kenneth G., is chairing tonight's dinner.
This success can be attributed to several factors: universal acceptance of and appreciation for VCIC's mission; aggressive recruitment of executives to serve on the Dinner Committee and to chair these events; and the relationship-building skills of perennial VCIC president, Jeff S., who from his office in Richmond has made himself a formidable presence in the Lynchburg community, substantiated the credibility and effectiveness of the organization, and earned the esteem, friendship, and support of many local businessmen, no small feat when one considers its replication throughout the state.
Not only is Jeff S. an accomplished ordained minister, an expert on human relations, a talented educator, and an inexhaustible mine of religious, political, and economic information (and opinions), he is also a superb salesman.
Of course, a spate of other non-profits raise money from similar events -- roasts, balls, celebrations, and raffles -- but, quite frankly, the VCIC seems most adept at obscuring this one's pecuniary purpose. There are two reasons for this.
The first lies in the very nature -- and composition -- of tonight's gathering, which sets it apart from those aforementioned. Here, to echo the words of another observer of social phenomena, the medium is the message, the medium in this case being simply the fact that four hundred persons of varying racial, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds dine together in both a real and symbolic demolishing of those impenetrable barriers which -- as much as we like to believe otherwise -- persist in our society.
If the VCIC is the only organization in our community which visibly, vocally, and continually promotes prejudice reduction, tolerance, and mutual understanding and respect, it is the only one capable of assembling so large and diverse a group in awareness, acceptance, and fulfillment of such a mission. Those in the audience are not just observers; they are participants as well, and by their presence they are making a forceful statement: they realize what is at stake and -- if only for a brief, fleeting moment -- are prepared to act.
Two analogies come to mind. Just as at a wedding one internally renews his own vows, or at a funeral one contemplates his own mortality and resolves to treasure his remaining days, so tonight every person in attendance is charged to recommit himself to the ideals of the VCIC.
The second reason relates to the special meaning of the award being presented. Our five honorees embody those ideals -- both in their own diverse backgrounds and in the breadth of their achievements -- and are certainly deserving of the title "Humanitarian." But, as this crowd is about to learn, there are many ways to be a humanitarian.
Several years ago a recipient of this award grabbed his listeners' attention with the witty remark that he knew what a vegetarian ate but he wondered what a humanitarian ate. While laughing out loud, I would submit two subtle truths underlying his flippancy: what really is a humanitarian, and, at least in this venue, does it really matter. Because whether or not the persons being honored technically satisfy the dictionary definition -- "one who is concerned with the needs of mankind and the alleviation of human suffering" -- they have certainly worked to assist individuals less fortunate than themselves and have made their community a better place.
And therein lies the sticking point. As Neil Armstrong so famously misspoke when he first set foot on the moon -- "There's one small step for (a) man (he should have said); one giant leap for mankind" -- is it a man, or is it mankind, whose interests a humanitarian has at heart?
The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides, teaches that the highest level of philanthropy is to endow a person in need with a gift or loan, enter into a partnership with him, or find him employment, all in order to strengthen his hand so he is no longer dependent on another; the second highest level is to give to the poor without knowing to whom one has given and without the recipient knowing from whom he has received. Thus -- if one considers the terms "humanitarian" and "philanthropist" interchangeable -- he whose works benefit the interests of mankind is a greater humanitarian than he whose works benefit a handful of individuals.
With all due respect to Maimonides, I have always believed that the aid and care one person provides to another requires greater sacrifice, commitment, and energy than faceless philanthropy -- a sentiment I expressed at the time I received this same Humanitarian Award in 1999. After all, the effort expended in writing a check or attending a non-profit board or committtee meeting seems negligible when compared to delivering hot meals every day to an elderly shut-in, mentoring, counseling, or tutoring a parentless child, caring for a terminally-ill family member or friend, or volunteering at one of the myriad social service organizations which assist the homeless, hungry, and incapacitated -- like the Gateway, the Free Clinic, the Salvation Army, or Daily Bread. In my remarks, I called those who perform these deeds "unsung heroes," because they do their work silently and selflessly and seldom receive the accolades they deserve.
In recent years, I am delighted to report, the VCIC has recognized several of these altruistic individuals. In fact, one of the joys of tonight's celebration is learning about the quiet benevolence of persons largely unknown to us.
Anonymity is hardly descriptive of our first honorees, George and Rosemary D., who, in accordance with their wishes, are receiving their awards as a silver-haired couple. George D., CEO of Central Virginia's sprawling regional health system, Centra Health, is one of the area's most visible and influential citizens. Possessed of unusual vision, genius, intensity, and leadership skills, Mr. D. has been instrumental in building one of the most respected and quality-oriented health-care institutions in the Southeast. As a member of his Board, I am repeatedly amazed at his ability to articulate, master, and manage the challenges of the most complex organism ever devised by the human brain, the modern hospital -- all the while maintaining remarkable composure and a refreshing sense of humor. His passion and vigor never falter; in fact, they overflow, and his non-professional pursuits have reaped the rewards: Lynchburg College; CVCC; and the United Way.
His statuesque companion, Rosemary -- friend for fifty-five years, sweetheart for forty-five, and spouse for thirty-nine -- is, if more reserved, equally engaged in a variety of activities. A master swimmer, she has been a relentless -- and usually victorious -- competitor on many athletic fields. Her enduring love for children is evidenced in her lifelong career as a teacher, coach, and Bridges volunteer.
Speaking as the inseparable pair they have been for half a century, George and Rosemary share some lessons and values they have learned from important people in their lives -- lessons and values which underlay their individual and collective successes. From their mothers, they learned that there is no such word as "can't," and that every person is responsible for his actions. From the many children who have crossed their paths, they learned that every child deserves a chance. From their colleagues at work, play, and volunteering, they learned that teamwork wins more games than superstars. From their friends and associates, they learned that friendship can never be replaced. From their Methodist faith, they learned that the Golden Rule is a directive, not a suggestion. And from each other, they learned that the power of two is exponentially greater than the power of one.
A paricularly entertaining aspect of this evening's program is a video biography of each honoree -- scripted, produced, and narrated by local television personality, Ms. Noreen T. Noreen is a striking black-haired beauty who brings her natural congeniality, broadcast presence, baritonal inflection, and glorious smile to the podium as Mistress of Ceremonies.
Thus it is with expectant trepidation that I turn to the closer of the two large screens that flank the stage to view the backstory of the next honoree, retired bank executive and a long-time friend Stuart F., for whom Ms. T. craftily recruited me to give an unrehearsed testimonial.
Noreen and her studio editor have a marvelous talent for making even the most non-photogenic person look respectable on camera. Apparently, while being filmed, I managed to suppress enough of my innate anxiety to speak intelligently about Mr. F., wisely omitting the corny jokes I had told about him at his retirement dinner some months ago -- although Noreen would have snipped them out anyway.
Stuart, I said, is the rare person who, when he makes a commitment, always follows through. I recalled working with him on the Centra Health capital campaign, during which he rigorously insisted that the Business Development Committee seek out additional prospects and make more calls, this at a time when I was, frankly, ready for a break. Stuart's confidence, tenacity, and encouragement were key to the campaign's success.
In addition to his full-time banking career, which ultimately propelled him to the local SunTrust presidency, Stuart is a thirty-three year veteran of the Naval Reserve. Along the way, he found time to serve on the boards of the Chamber of Commerce (rising to the chairmanship), Lynchburg College, CVCC, Centra Health, and NCCJ.
Stuart's sly sense of humor -- after all, he roasted me after I roasted him, much to my surprise, and dismay -- surfaces in the brief remarks he makes. He acknowledges three of his former SunTrust bosses in the audience -- Al K. (former president); Stuart T. (former commercial vice-president), and Sandra R. (not his boss, of course, but his secretarial assistant). He thanks his two brothers for being role models who set an example for him in his youth -- generally a bad example. They were often sent to their rooms for misbehavior, from which he learned that actions do have consequences, and it would behoove him not to emulate them.
Stuart F. and I have stronger ties than many people know. Twenty years ago, as a commercial loan officer with SunTrust's predecessor, United Virginia Bank, he loaned my father, brother, and me an ungodly sum of money to buy out our partners. He looked me in the eye and said, "Now Marc, one day you'll have to pay this back." And we have paid it back, at least eighty per cent of it, which is more than I can say for a lot of other loans banks have made in recent years.
Some months ago, my mother introduced me to the next honoree, Laura M., at a luncheon we attended at the Virginia University of Lynchburg, from which I inferred her interest in the Black community. My mother later hired Laura to tend to some plantings at my father's grave site in the Jewish cemetery in Madison Heights, from which I deduced her horticultural proficiency. Little did I know -- until tonight -- that these two avocations would be married in a stunning labor of love for this seventy-five-year-old woman.
Ten years ago, Laura took up a daunting task -- restoring and preserving White Rock Cemetery. "I didn't see a burning bush or hear the voice of God, but I knew this is what He wanted me to do for the rest of my life," she says.
White Rock Cemetery had not been cleared for thirty years, until Laura stumbled upon "this buried treasure" during a Habitat for Humanity Build. She started alone, "digging, weeding, thrashing, and tilling . . . day after day, week after week, month after month." In the words of her friend, Ann G., "She became intrigued by what was there, who was buried there. Her initial curiosity became a passion and an investment of her life, heart, and soul."
Laura committed herself to restoring the memory and honoring the lives of Blacks buried in the cemetery. She says, "The most exciting thing that happens is when I identify someone and know the name of one more person out there." And Ann echoes, "She has a connection and bond with these ancestors that she never met, that she'll never have any contact with. Yet she feels an obligation to them, a very loving obligation."
To embrace passionately a worthy cause is admirable enough; to bring along others is to approach saintliness. Laura secured grants for tools, equipment, supplies, and tree and brush removal. She solicited gifts for a Perpetual Care Fund. She established Historic White Rock Cemetery, Inc. And she recruited hundreds of volunteers, including many from Lynchburg College.
Says Ann, "Her enthusiasm and commitment were contagious. Those students went back over and over again. We couldn't get them to be involved in anything else, but they wanted to be side-by-side with Laura." Why? Because "she's a lot of fun--and just a joy to be around. She makes you want to work real hard, and get sweaty and dirty, but you also want to laugh. You enjoy just being in her presence and think how fortunate you are to call her your friend."
Tonight's last honoree is Sterling W., a man I know only as the Executive Director of the Jubilee Family Development Center, a community center for inner-city children and youth in the Florida Avenue neighborhood. I visited it once several years ago and, impressed by its facilities and programs, have made regular contributions ever since. But in the next few minutes I am to learn a lot more about the driving force behind Jubilee.
Sterling W. was an accountant for the FDIC in Washington, D.C., (where, incidentally, he received one of the corporation's most prestigious awards) when one of the boys whom he tutored on weekends ended up in jail. At that point, he decided to abandon his secure government career and to devote his life to preventing similar tragedies from befalling other troubled youth.
He returned to the site of his alma mater, Lynchburg College, and, along with volunteer Susan C., co-founded Jubilee -- originally a small after-school day care center designed to serve the children of the single-parent residents of a nearby Habitat Build. But under Sterling's vision and leadership, it exploded into a full-fledged campus providing social, educational, athletic, and recreational activities to 228 youngsters from all parts of the inner city. Says Susan,"No one dreamed that the Jubilee Center would become what it is today. No one except Sterling."
In Sterling's video biography, two Jubilee students give testimonials. "Because of Jubilee's tutorial program, I am now honor roll." "The moment when I was falling the hardest, he was there to pick me up, put me back on my feet."
But directing Jubilee, saving kids' lives, is not enough for Sterling W. He is Vice-Chairman of the Lynchburg School Board, having served for nine years. He is assistant pastor of Prayer of Faith Temple. He is a foster parent -- and says he is the one gleaning the benefits. "When a kid comes back and tells you how much he appreciates what you've done, how much he loves you, when he thanks you for taking time with him, that means a lot," says Sterling.
I have never watched the Oprah Winfrey Show, so it is no surprise that I missed it the day Sterling W. was introduced and received Oprah's Use Your Life Award.
Like Laura M., Sterling's commitment to his cause is infectious. Says Susan, "He's touched my life and motivated me to get involved. He serves as an example to all of us that we have something to give back to our community, that we shouldn't be timid or procrastinate, that we should use our talents."
As Sterling springs to the podium, his enthusiasm and exuberance reverberate throughout the auditorium. He breaks out into a broad smile that covers his whole face. He glows with happiness, gratitude. He speaks rapidly and extemporaneously, his only notes a few names he is fearful of overlooking as he thanks his supporters. I don't remember -- and didn't write down -- a word he said, having decided to write this blog many days afterwards. But it hardly matters. Like others in the audience, I am entranced by his unbridled passion, his soaring eloquence, his limitless love for his children and his calling. If he moves us to tears, they are tears of joy, as we exult in the revelation that, if we can't precisely define a humanitarian, at least we can recognize one when he walks among us. Here certainly is a person attending to the needs of mankind -- one child at a time.
Enlightened, invigorated, perhaps sworn to a higher standard of community service or self-improvement, we rise to congratulate the honorees and to thank them for their work and their message. For a brief time, in this surreal setting, we have escaped our domestic duties, our social comfort zones, our professional obligations, and the racial, religious, socio-economic, and cultural silos we inhabit. The words and deeds of five Lynchburg neighbors have awakened us to injustice, pain, and despair, the communal responsibilities we too often ignore, and the power each one of us possesses to repair our fractured world -- if only we would strive to be more humanitarian.
I am speaking of the VCIC (Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities) Annual Humanitarian Awards Dinner, which was held on Thursday, May 29th, at Lynchburg College. Readers unfamiliar with the VCIC may recognize its former designation, NCCJ, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, later changed to the National Conference for Community and Justice -- an ill-advised attempt to sound less sectarian (it succeeded mainly in jeopardizing a well-known and well-respected franchise) and a name which the Virginia Region was compelled to relinquish when it broke with its parent on matters of policy and finance and declared its independence.
The VCIC is a human relations organization whose mission is to promote prejudice reduction, respect for diversity, and better understanding among differing races, religions, and cultures. It conducts a wide variety of instructional and interactive programs for young people, educators, non-profit administrators, and business leaders in schools, in churches and synagogues, and in the workplace.
Legend has it that the NCCJ's first meeting in 1935 was held near the site of tonight's dinner, the Burton Student Center at Lynchburg College.
Tonight's dinner is one of several the VCIC conducts annually throughout the state of Virginia -- the others are in Richmond, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach -- and while its purpose is ostensibly to proclaim the humanitarianism of five deserving citizens, it is hardly a secret that the organization funds its activities and overhead from the proceeds of these events. Thus, our honorees are to be commended not only for their achievements and contributions to the betterment of their fellow men but also for bowing to a little crass commercialism, for it is in tribute to them that their friends, families, and associates will tender the $125 ticket price. As a friend astutely cautioned his father after he was inducted into a Business Hall of Fame, "Before you accept another award, find out how much it's going to cost me."
Actually, most of the revenue is generated from corporate donors, rather than from single ticket sales. Several years ago the VCIC abandoned its Citizens Committee -- composed of volunteers who would contact individual prospects -- in favor of an Executive Dinner Committee, which solicits corporate sponsorships that range from $1000 to $5000 and entitle each sponsor to a table of eight.
The VCIC has been remarkably successful in penetrating the business community; the program lists thirty companies, including one $5000 Humanitarian Sponsor, Lynchburg College, whose president, Dr. Kenneth G., is chairing tonight's dinner.
This success can be attributed to several factors: universal acceptance of and appreciation for VCIC's mission; aggressive recruitment of executives to serve on the Dinner Committee and to chair these events; and the relationship-building skills of perennial VCIC president, Jeff S., who from his office in Richmond has made himself a formidable presence in the Lynchburg community, substantiated the credibility and effectiveness of the organization, and earned the esteem, friendship, and support of many local businessmen, no small feat when one considers its replication throughout the state.
Not only is Jeff S. an accomplished ordained minister, an expert on human relations, a talented educator, and an inexhaustible mine of religious, political, and economic information (and opinions), he is also a superb salesman.
Of course, a spate of other non-profits raise money from similar events -- roasts, balls, celebrations, and raffles -- but, quite frankly, the VCIC seems most adept at obscuring this one's pecuniary purpose. There are two reasons for this.
The first lies in the very nature -- and composition -- of tonight's gathering, which sets it apart from those aforementioned. Here, to echo the words of another observer of social phenomena, the medium is the message, the medium in this case being simply the fact that four hundred persons of varying racial, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds dine together in both a real and symbolic demolishing of those impenetrable barriers which -- as much as we like to believe otherwise -- persist in our society.
If the VCIC is the only organization in our community which visibly, vocally, and continually promotes prejudice reduction, tolerance, and mutual understanding and respect, it is the only one capable of assembling so large and diverse a group in awareness, acceptance, and fulfillment of such a mission. Those in the audience are not just observers; they are participants as well, and by their presence they are making a forceful statement: they realize what is at stake and -- if only for a brief, fleeting moment -- are prepared to act.
Two analogies come to mind. Just as at a wedding one internally renews his own vows, or at a funeral one contemplates his own mortality and resolves to treasure his remaining days, so tonight every person in attendance is charged to recommit himself to the ideals of the VCIC.
The second reason relates to the special meaning of the award being presented. Our five honorees embody those ideals -- both in their own diverse backgrounds and in the breadth of their achievements -- and are certainly deserving of the title "Humanitarian." But, as this crowd is about to learn, there are many ways to be a humanitarian.
Several years ago a recipient of this award grabbed his listeners' attention with the witty remark that he knew what a vegetarian ate but he wondered what a humanitarian ate. While laughing out loud, I would submit two subtle truths underlying his flippancy: what really is a humanitarian, and, at least in this venue, does it really matter. Because whether or not the persons being honored technically satisfy the dictionary definition -- "one who is concerned with the needs of mankind and the alleviation of human suffering" -- they have certainly worked to assist individuals less fortunate than themselves and have made their community a better place.
And therein lies the sticking point. As Neil Armstrong so famously misspoke when he first set foot on the moon -- "There's one small step for (a) man (he should have said); one giant leap for mankind" -- is it a man, or is it mankind, whose interests a humanitarian has at heart?
The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides, teaches that the highest level of philanthropy is to endow a person in need with a gift or loan, enter into a partnership with him, or find him employment, all in order to strengthen his hand so he is no longer dependent on another; the second highest level is to give to the poor without knowing to whom one has given and without the recipient knowing from whom he has received. Thus -- if one considers the terms "humanitarian" and "philanthropist" interchangeable -- he whose works benefit the interests of mankind is a greater humanitarian than he whose works benefit a handful of individuals.
With all due respect to Maimonides, I have always believed that the aid and care one person provides to another requires greater sacrifice, commitment, and energy than faceless philanthropy -- a sentiment I expressed at the time I received this same Humanitarian Award in 1999. After all, the effort expended in writing a check or attending a non-profit board or committtee meeting seems negligible when compared to delivering hot meals every day to an elderly shut-in, mentoring, counseling, or tutoring a parentless child, caring for a terminally-ill family member or friend, or volunteering at one of the myriad social service organizations which assist the homeless, hungry, and incapacitated -- like the Gateway, the Free Clinic, the Salvation Army, or Daily Bread. In my remarks, I called those who perform these deeds "unsung heroes," because they do their work silently and selflessly and seldom receive the accolades they deserve.
In recent years, I am delighted to report, the VCIC has recognized several of these altruistic individuals. In fact, one of the joys of tonight's celebration is learning about the quiet benevolence of persons largely unknown to us.
Anonymity is hardly descriptive of our first honorees, George and Rosemary D., who, in accordance with their wishes, are receiving their awards as a silver-haired couple. George D., CEO of Central Virginia's sprawling regional health system, Centra Health, is one of the area's most visible and influential citizens. Possessed of unusual vision, genius, intensity, and leadership skills, Mr. D. has been instrumental in building one of the most respected and quality-oriented health-care institutions in the Southeast. As a member of his Board, I am repeatedly amazed at his ability to articulate, master, and manage the challenges of the most complex organism ever devised by the human brain, the modern hospital -- all the while maintaining remarkable composure and a refreshing sense of humor. His passion and vigor never falter; in fact, they overflow, and his non-professional pursuits have reaped the rewards: Lynchburg College; CVCC; and the United Way.
His statuesque companion, Rosemary -- friend for fifty-five years, sweetheart for forty-five, and spouse for thirty-nine -- is, if more reserved, equally engaged in a variety of activities. A master swimmer, she has been a relentless -- and usually victorious -- competitor on many athletic fields. Her enduring love for children is evidenced in her lifelong career as a teacher, coach, and Bridges volunteer.
Speaking as the inseparable pair they have been for half a century, George and Rosemary share some lessons and values they have learned from important people in their lives -- lessons and values which underlay their individual and collective successes. From their mothers, they learned that there is no such word as "can't," and that every person is responsible for his actions. From the many children who have crossed their paths, they learned that every child deserves a chance. From their colleagues at work, play, and volunteering, they learned that teamwork wins more games than superstars. From their friends and associates, they learned that friendship can never be replaced. From their Methodist faith, they learned that the Golden Rule is a directive, not a suggestion. And from each other, they learned that the power of two is exponentially greater than the power of one.
A paricularly entertaining aspect of this evening's program is a video biography of each honoree -- scripted, produced, and narrated by local television personality, Ms. Noreen T. Noreen is a striking black-haired beauty who brings her natural congeniality, broadcast presence, baritonal inflection, and glorious smile to the podium as Mistress of Ceremonies.
Thus it is with expectant trepidation that I turn to the closer of the two large screens that flank the stage to view the backstory of the next honoree, retired bank executive and a long-time friend Stuart F., for whom Ms. T. craftily recruited me to give an unrehearsed testimonial.
Noreen and her studio editor have a marvelous talent for making even the most non-photogenic person look respectable on camera. Apparently, while being filmed, I managed to suppress enough of my innate anxiety to speak intelligently about Mr. F., wisely omitting the corny jokes I had told about him at his retirement dinner some months ago -- although Noreen would have snipped them out anyway.
Stuart, I said, is the rare person who, when he makes a commitment, always follows through. I recalled working with him on the Centra Health capital campaign, during which he rigorously insisted that the Business Development Committee seek out additional prospects and make more calls, this at a time when I was, frankly, ready for a break. Stuart's confidence, tenacity, and encouragement were key to the campaign's success.
In addition to his full-time banking career, which ultimately propelled him to the local SunTrust presidency, Stuart is a thirty-three year veteran of the Naval Reserve. Along the way, he found time to serve on the boards of the Chamber of Commerce (rising to the chairmanship), Lynchburg College, CVCC, Centra Health, and NCCJ.
Stuart's sly sense of humor -- after all, he roasted me after I roasted him, much to my surprise, and dismay -- surfaces in the brief remarks he makes. He acknowledges three of his former SunTrust bosses in the audience -- Al K. (former president); Stuart T. (former commercial vice-president), and Sandra R. (not his boss, of course, but his secretarial assistant). He thanks his two brothers for being role models who set an example for him in his youth -- generally a bad example. They were often sent to their rooms for misbehavior, from which he learned that actions do have consequences, and it would behoove him not to emulate them.
Stuart F. and I have stronger ties than many people know. Twenty years ago, as a commercial loan officer with SunTrust's predecessor, United Virginia Bank, he loaned my father, brother, and me an ungodly sum of money to buy out our partners. He looked me in the eye and said, "Now Marc, one day you'll have to pay this back." And we have paid it back, at least eighty per cent of it, which is more than I can say for a lot of other loans banks have made in recent years.
Some months ago, my mother introduced me to the next honoree, Laura M., at a luncheon we attended at the Virginia University of Lynchburg, from which I inferred her interest in the Black community. My mother later hired Laura to tend to some plantings at my father's grave site in the Jewish cemetery in Madison Heights, from which I deduced her horticultural proficiency. Little did I know -- until tonight -- that these two avocations would be married in a stunning labor of love for this seventy-five-year-old woman.
Ten years ago, Laura took up a daunting task -- restoring and preserving White Rock Cemetery. "I didn't see a burning bush or hear the voice of God, but I knew this is what He wanted me to do for the rest of my life," she says.
White Rock Cemetery had not been cleared for thirty years, until Laura stumbled upon "this buried treasure" during a Habitat for Humanity Build. She started alone, "digging, weeding, thrashing, and tilling . . . day after day, week after week, month after month." In the words of her friend, Ann G., "She became intrigued by what was there, who was buried there. Her initial curiosity became a passion and an investment of her life, heart, and soul."
Laura committed herself to restoring the memory and honoring the lives of Blacks buried in the cemetery. She says, "The most exciting thing that happens is when I identify someone and know the name of one more person out there." And Ann echoes, "She has a connection and bond with these ancestors that she never met, that she'll never have any contact with. Yet she feels an obligation to them, a very loving obligation."
To embrace passionately a worthy cause is admirable enough; to bring along others is to approach saintliness. Laura secured grants for tools, equipment, supplies, and tree and brush removal. She solicited gifts for a Perpetual Care Fund. She established Historic White Rock Cemetery, Inc. And she recruited hundreds of volunteers, including many from Lynchburg College.
Says Ann, "Her enthusiasm and commitment were contagious. Those students went back over and over again. We couldn't get them to be involved in anything else, but they wanted to be side-by-side with Laura." Why? Because "she's a lot of fun--and just a joy to be around. She makes you want to work real hard, and get sweaty and dirty, but you also want to laugh. You enjoy just being in her presence and think how fortunate you are to call her your friend."
Tonight's last honoree is Sterling W., a man I know only as the Executive Director of the Jubilee Family Development Center, a community center for inner-city children and youth in the Florida Avenue neighborhood. I visited it once several years ago and, impressed by its facilities and programs, have made regular contributions ever since. But in the next few minutes I am to learn a lot more about the driving force behind Jubilee.
Sterling W. was an accountant for the FDIC in Washington, D.C., (where, incidentally, he received one of the corporation's most prestigious awards) when one of the boys whom he tutored on weekends ended up in jail. At that point, he decided to abandon his secure government career and to devote his life to preventing similar tragedies from befalling other troubled youth.
He returned to the site of his alma mater, Lynchburg College, and, along with volunteer Susan C., co-founded Jubilee -- originally a small after-school day care center designed to serve the children of the single-parent residents of a nearby Habitat Build. But under Sterling's vision and leadership, it exploded into a full-fledged campus providing social, educational, athletic, and recreational activities to 228 youngsters from all parts of the inner city. Says Susan,"No one dreamed that the Jubilee Center would become what it is today. No one except Sterling."
In Sterling's video biography, two Jubilee students give testimonials. "Because of Jubilee's tutorial program, I am now honor roll." "The moment when I was falling the hardest, he was there to pick me up, put me back on my feet."
But directing Jubilee, saving kids' lives, is not enough for Sterling W. He is Vice-Chairman of the Lynchburg School Board, having served for nine years. He is assistant pastor of Prayer of Faith Temple. He is a foster parent -- and says he is the one gleaning the benefits. "When a kid comes back and tells you how much he appreciates what you've done, how much he loves you, when he thanks you for taking time with him, that means a lot," says Sterling.
I have never watched the Oprah Winfrey Show, so it is no surprise that I missed it the day Sterling W. was introduced and received Oprah's Use Your Life Award.
Like Laura M., Sterling's commitment to his cause is infectious. Says Susan, "He's touched my life and motivated me to get involved. He serves as an example to all of us that we have something to give back to our community, that we shouldn't be timid or procrastinate, that we should use our talents."
As Sterling springs to the podium, his enthusiasm and exuberance reverberate throughout the auditorium. He breaks out into a broad smile that covers his whole face. He glows with happiness, gratitude. He speaks rapidly and extemporaneously, his only notes a few names he is fearful of overlooking as he thanks his supporters. I don't remember -- and didn't write down -- a word he said, having decided to write this blog many days afterwards. But it hardly matters. Like others in the audience, I am entranced by his unbridled passion, his soaring eloquence, his limitless love for his children and his calling. If he moves us to tears, they are tears of joy, as we exult in the revelation that, if we can't precisely define a humanitarian, at least we can recognize one when he walks among us. Here certainly is a person attending to the needs of mankind -- one child at a time.
Enlightened, invigorated, perhaps sworn to a higher standard of community service or self-improvement, we rise to congratulate the honorees and to thank them for their work and their message. For a brief time, in this surreal setting, we have escaped our domestic duties, our social comfort zones, our professional obligations, and the racial, religious, socio-economic, and cultural silos we inhabit. The words and deeds of five Lynchburg neighbors have awakened us to injustice, pain, and despair, the communal responsibilities we too often ignore, and the power each one of us possesses to repair our fractured world -- if only we would strive to be more humanitarian.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
African-American
At the risk of offending any African-American readers of this blog, I am compelled to admit that I have always been discomfited by that term. Growing up in the sixties, during the gestation and maturation of the Civil Rights Movement, I came to understand that the accepted nomenclature for a member of the Negroid race had evolved from the rather shameful "colored person" to the more dignified "black," which neatly counterbalanced "white" with no inferior connotation.
Then, sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, an official cadre of social scientists and human relation experts (or whoever is invested with the authority to make these decisions) deemed it fashionable and politically correct to identify Americans of diverse ethnicity by their national or ancestral origins. Hence, Indians became Native-Americans; Mexicans became Hispanic-Americans; Japanese became Asian-Americans; and blacks became African-Americans. (Thankfully, this epidemic of hyphenation has passed over the synagogue and spared us Jewish-Americans, who remain Jews.)
This delicate subject surfaced in my consciousness after I finished reading Barack Obama's eloquent memoir, "Dreams from My Father." After all, Obama, the son of a white woman and the black Kenyan student whom she met and married while attending the University of Hawaii, is a bona fide African-American; raised by his mother and grandparents in Hawaii, he could just as easily, under slightly different circumstances, have grown up in Kenya, under the watchful eye of his father. In fact, Obama's exploration of race dynamics and his own racial identity is the underlying theme of his narrative.
Barack Obama's life experience is atypical of Blacks of his generation. Not only was he the offspring of a 1960's interracial couple -- one of whom was African and thus not a descendant of slaves -- his grandparents, who helped raise him, were uncommonly liberal in their racial attitudes. The family's migration to Hawaii was driven in part by his grandfather's natural wanderlust, but also by a nagging discomfort with racism, grounded in his own painful, neglected youth. Obama writes of his grandmother's being denounced by a co-worker at a Texas bank for calling a black janitor "Mister" and of his twelve-year-old mother being taunted for befriending a black girl.
When Obama's father leaves his wife and young son, first, to accept a scholarship at Harvard and, afterwards, to return to Kenya, his mother divorces him, remarries an Indonesian, and moves with her second husband and her son to Jakarta. Unable to afford the International School which most foreign children attend, she sends Obama to public school and supplements his education with a correspondence course, waking him at four every morning to teach him English lessons.
"Her message," writes Obama, "was to embrace black people generally. She would come home with books on civil rights movements, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King . . . To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to know."
Obama gets an inkling of those burdens -- and the hidden enemy, bigotry -- when he comes across the photograph of a horribly-disfigured man on the cover of a Life magazine. Like thousands of other black men and women, the man had undergone a chemical treatment to lighten his complexion and gain entrance into a much happier white world.
When the correspondence course runs out, Obama's mother sends him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, who enroll him in the famous Punahou prepatory school. In a white household, in the company of only three other black students, Obama sees himself in a quandary. He writes: "I was trying to raise myself as a black man in America, and, beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant" -- except for Ray, a senior transfer from Los Angeles, who tries to impress upon Obama the realities of black-white relationships, warning him that "we are always playing on the white man's court, by the white man's rules." While Obama studies Malcolm X, Ray exclaims, "I don't need no books to tell me how to be black."
Like Malcolm X, Obama pines for simple racial purity. He writes: "One line in his book stayed with me. He spoke of his own wish that the white blood that ran through him might be expunged . . . I knew that traveling down my own road to self-respect my own white blood would never recede into abstraction."
Enrolling at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama resists the temptation to assimilate into the majority white culture, to follow sheepishly other blacks who, unlike him, are eager to escape the urban malaise of Compton or Watts, or even suburban blacks, who crave an individualism not defined by their skin color. Instead, "to avoid being mistaken for a sellout," Obama chooses for friends the more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." When a friend describes her childhood growing up on the south side of Chicago -- "a vision of black life in all its possibility" -- which fills Obama with longing, and he expresses his envy, she ironically responds, "Isn't life something? All this time I was wishing I had grown up in Hawaii."
She also plants a seed -- that resolving his identity crisis means moving beyond having to choose between his black father and his white mother. He writes: "You might be locked into a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim in how it is shaped. You still have resposibilities." Obama reflects that his "identity might begin with the fact of his race, but it didn't, couldn't end there."
Seeking a place to put down roots and test his commitments, a place to anchor his self-image as a Black American, Obama transfers to Columbia. While he finds no more black students there than at Occidental, he is consoled by having landed "in the heart of a true city, with black neighborhoods in true proximity," although, in fact, he is disturbed by their instability, their faultlines, their race and class problems.
Obama graduates from Columbia, works for a Wall Street consulting firm for a year, resigns that job, and, after six months of unemployment and sending off resumes, becomes a community organizer. He writes: "Communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. They had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens . . . Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned . . . I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life."
Ultimately, Obama's organizing efforts produce frustration and disillusionment. Trying to put together a meeting of churches to discuss a gang shooting, he is told by one minister, "The last thing we need is to join up with a bunch of white money and Catholic churches and Jewish organizers to solve our problems." A $500,000 grant to a suburban university to set up a job bank in the Altgeld public housing project in Southside Chicago is squandered, leaving unemployment in this -- and many other -- black neighborhoods endemic, widespread, and persistent, and its citizens cynical and resigned.
In such an environment, Obama flirts with Black Nationalism; its twin strands of black affirmation are seductively attractive: on the one hand, solidarity, self-reliance, discipline, and communal responsibility; on the other, a blanket indictment of whites as responsible for the ills of the black community and the despair of its psyche. But both unravel when put to closer scrutiny.
The first founders on economic realities, which prevent blacks from withdrawing completely from the controlling business interests. Obama imagines a black worker saying, "The white folks I work with ain't so bad, and even if they were, I can't be quitting my job. Who's gonna pay my rent tomorrow or feed my children?" The second contradicts his mother's staunch belief in the morality of a white society populated by many individuals of good will. Obama concludes that, "Notions of purity -- of race or of culture -- could no more serve as the basis for the typical black American's self-esteem than it could for mine. Our sense of wholeness (and his) would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we inherited."
The politics of the day prove to be ineffective at improving the conditions of blacks or ameliorating racial polarization. Even the election of black Mayor Harold Washington raises expectations which turn out to be illusory. "Many blacks," writes Obama, "have given up the hope that politics could actually change their lives." The Mayor makes city services more equitable only at the margins. He appoints a few more blacks to important administrative positions, but upsets his base of support by making deals to consolidate his power, failing to tackle poverty in any meaningful way, and ultimately changing nothing as far as the despondent residents of Altgeld are concerned. Nevertheless, his sudden death while in office leaves Chicago blacks "dazed, confused, uncertain of direction, frightened of the future."
Obama's one great success is an emblematic Pyrrhic victory. When a handful of Altgeld residents unite for a bus trip to the Chicago Housing Authority Director's Office to protest the presence of asbestos in their apartments and the lack of basic services, Obama is encouraged by their growing empowerment. His enthusiasm collapses, however, when, at the meeting, the director is challenged to answer questions directly, refuses, and then angrily stalks off the stage in the ensuing pandemonium. Nothing is accomplished. A month later, when the same group meets with a HUD representative to lobby for the Housing Authority's one-billion dollar request to fund repairs on projects throughout the city, it is told, "The Chicago Housing Authority has no chance of getting even half the appropriation it has requested. You can get the asbestos removed. Or you can have new plumbing and roofing where it's needed. But you can't have both."
Determined to find a way to bring about real change, Obama applies to law school, "to learn power's currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised him before coming to Chicago but that he can now bring back to where it is needed." He is not embarrassed to leave; none of his clients begrudges him his success. Having immersed himself in the black community, his color sufficient criterion for membership, he knows now "that most black folks aren't like the father of his dreams, full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment" but "practical people who know life is too hard to judge each other's choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals."
Besides simple acceptance, there is another meaning to community. Obama writes, "You could be black and still not give a damn about what happened in Altgeld . . . But to be right with yourself, to do right by others, to lend meaning to a community's suffering and take part in its healing -- that required something more . . . It required faith." A faith beyond a faith in one's self. A Christian faith. A commitment to God and the Church and, with them as facilitators, to "the black family, education, the work ethic, discipline, and self-respect."
Although drawn to the Church, Obama remains a "reluctant skeptic . . . wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won." Before he can make this leap of faith, he decides he must learn more about his now-deceased father and his African heritage. He goes to Kenya.
Obama has lived in many places -- Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago -- but something happens to him thousands of miles from home that has never happened before; an airline official helping him locate a lost bag recognizes his name. He writes: "My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances, and grudges that I did not understand" -- the progeny, so to speak, of his father's polygamous marriages, the rival children and wives of which are engaged in a five-year-old lawsuit over the remains of a meager estate.
"His family seems to be everywhere: in stores, at the post office, on streets, and in the parks, all of them fussing and fretting over Obama Senior's long-lost son." But along with this joyful connection to his extended family comes tension and doubt--the same kind of "survivor's guilt" he might feel when his own financial success is set against black poverty and powerlessness, whether in Kenya or Southside Chicago.
Naively, Obama has envisioned Kenya as a single, harmonious whole -- in which his own complexities can be sorted out -- only to discover a discordant, divided society permeated with resentment against foreigners who own businesses, vestiges of colonialism (like the patronizing of white tourists), and ancient but fierce tribal prejudices and loyalties.
Narratives about his grandfather Onyango and his father Barack -- constructed by family members, particularly his "Granny" -- reveal personalities as conflicted as his own.
Onyango was a curious, restless young man who, hearing of the arrival of the white man at a nearby town, went off to see these strange people for himself. When he returned, he was shunned by his own father and other members of his village for wearing white man's clothes. He moved to Nairobi and went to work for the white man, learning his language, his system of paper records, his dining habits, his household organization. He respected the white man for his power, his machines, his weapons, and the way he was always improving himself -- although he never believed the white man superior to the African. For Onyango, knowledge and the ability to work together -- as opposed to the black man's tribalism -- were the sources of the white man's power; he wanted his son Barack Sr. to be as educated as any white man.
But when that son married a white woman, he vehemently disapproved. "He didn't want Obama blood sullied by a white woman." Onyango threatened to have his son's visa revoked. Eventually, Barack Sr. returned to Kenya without his wife and son.
Barack Sr. was also a man of contradictions. He was rebellious, proud, impetuous, and independent -- qualities which estranged him from his father Onyango. When he returned to Kenya after getting his degree from Harvard, he entered government service and enjoyed a successful career -- until his idealism got the better of him. A member of the minority Luo tribe, he began to speak out against tribalism, the majority Kikuyu government, and its president, Jomo Kenyatta -- ignoring the warnings of his friends and associates. He was banished from the government and blacklisted; no ministries or foreign companies would give him work. He began to drink; he had to borrow money from relatives just for food. His friends stopped coming to visit him because it was dangerous to be seen with him -- but he refused to apologize or change his attitude.
Later, after Kenyatta died, Barack Sr. was restored to government favor, went back to work, and regained some of his money and influence.
In spite of his arrogance, Barack Sr. had a generous heart. He would give to anyone who asked; he couldn't say no. And he never held a grudge, even when his luck changed, he lost everything, and the people whom he had helped forgot him and laughed at him. When he was rehabilitated and doing well again, he went back to helping the same people who had betrayed him.
Standing at his father's grave, Obama weeps as he reflects on his father's tragic flaw. He was a man who, while embracing the instruments of modernity with "polish and panache," abandoned too much of the past: "The laughter in Granny's voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the market, the stories around the fire. The loyalties that could make up for a lack of airplanes or rifles. Words of encouragement. An embrace. A strong, true love. For all your gifts -- the quick mind, the power of concentration, the charm -- you could never forge yourself into a true man while leaving those things behind."
Africa is bound to disappoint Black Americans -- like Obama -- who come looking for the authentic, says historian Rukia Odero as the two of them enjoy an African meal -- fish cooked in Indonesian spices -- and drink British tea. They consider whether "there is anything left that is truly African. " Dr. Odero has, in fact, resigned herself to a daughter whose first language is English, with bits and pieces of others thrown in. She tells Obama, "I'm less interested in a daughter who's authentically African than one who is authentically herself."
Having already observed that his aunt's Nairobi home "was just like the apartments in Altgeld -- the same chain of mothers and daughters and children, the same absence of men," Obama somberly concludes that "on this earth one place is not so different from another."
From Hawaii to Chicago to Africa, Obama's journey has raised more questions about his place and purpose in the world than it has offered answers. Other readers have suggested two paths by which Obama ultimately resolves his inner conflicts and discovers his "authentic self."
First, he embraces Christianity. Before leaving on his African trip, he attends Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ and hears him preach a sermon entitled "The Audacity of Hope." Reverend Wright describes a painting, "Hope." Hope is embodied in a harpist bruised and battered sitting on a mountaintop towering above a world "groaning under the same strife and deprivation, rejection and despair" that members of his congregation face every day. But the harpist gazes upwards, and dares to hope, to praise God, to make music on the one string she has left. Faith in Jesus Christ gives even the most downtrodden the audacity to hope. Obama is deeply moved. At the end of his memoir, when he returns to Chicago after graduating from law school, he joins the church.
Secondly, he enters politics. Instead of repressing his bi-racial bloodlines, he will present himself symbolically and actively as a force for change and unity, breaching racial, socio-economic, and partisan barriers. And he will leverage his experience as an organizer to inspire and empower diverse communities to take control of their own destinies.
I would submit a third path, the act of artistic creation, and argue that it was the writing and publishing of this book -- during which he literally exorcised the racial demons which haunted his self-consciousness -- which enabled Barack Obama to assume a truly comfortable identity. In the introduction, he acknowledges that he intended to write a book about race relations, but found "his mind drawn to rockier shores," and what emerged was "a record of a personal interior journey -- a boy's search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a Black American." The fact that he struggled to finish and eventually retreated to Bali for several months with his wife Michelle suggests some degree of inner turmoil.
Obama has admitted his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue, and events out of chronological order. Some critics have been quick to point out factual errors: conversations about race that never happened; a Life magazine photograph that doesn't exist; intimations of perceived discrimination that are disputed. But these shouldn't detract from the sincere coming-of-age story of a biracial man growing up in a variety of venues, and grappling with issues of racism, prejudice, civil rights, self-esteem, poverty, and family relationships -- a work of self-discovery that by its very existence answers the troubling question it poses: Who am I.
Obama's memoir has become uniquely intertwined with his political career; each has enhanced the other in his meteoric rise to prominence. Both languished in obscurity until his electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, after which a re-released edition of the book started flying off the shelves. "Dreams from My Father" and its sequel "The Audacity of Hope" continue to rank high on best-seller lists and are as much a part of his persona as his admittedly thin resume. With three million copies in print, his life story has become an "incredibly lucrative franchise," (Scott, New York Times, May 18, 2008) and made him a wealthy man, a celebrity, and quite possibly the next President of the United States.
Then, sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, an official cadre of social scientists and human relation experts (or whoever is invested with the authority to make these decisions) deemed it fashionable and politically correct to identify Americans of diverse ethnicity by their national or ancestral origins. Hence, Indians became Native-Americans; Mexicans became Hispanic-Americans; Japanese became Asian-Americans; and blacks became African-Americans. (Thankfully, this epidemic of hyphenation has passed over the synagogue and spared us Jewish-Americans, who remain Jews.)
This delicate subject surfaced in my consciousness after I finished reading Barack Obama's eloquent memoir, "Dreams from My Father." After all, Obama, the son of a white woman and the black Kenyan student whom she met and married while attending the University of Hawaii, is a bona fide African-American; raised by his mother and grandparents in Hawaii, he could just as easily, under slightly different circumstances, have grown up in Kenya, under the watchful eye of his father. In fact, Obama's exploration of race dynamics and his own racial identity is the underlying theme of his narrative.
Barack Obama's life experience is atypical of Blacks of his generation. Not only was he the offspring of a 1960's interracial couple -- one of whom was African and thus not a descendant of slaves -- his grandparents, who helped raise him, were uncommonly liberal in their racial attitudes. The family's migration to Hawaii was driven in part by his grandfather's natural wanderlust, but also by a nagging discomfort with racism, grounded in his own painful, neglected youth. Obama writes of his grandmother's being denounced by a co-worker at a Texas bank for calling a black janitor "Mister" and of his twelve-year-old mother being taunted for befriending a black girl.
When Obama's father leaves his wife and young son, first, to accept a scholarship at Harvard and, afterwards, to return to Kenya, his mother divorces him, remarries an Indonesian, and moves with her second husband and her son to Jakarta. Unable to afford the International School which most foreign children attend, she sends Obama to public school and supplements his education with a correspondence course, waking him at four every morning to teach him English lessons.
"Her message," writes Obama, "was to embrace black people generally. She would come home with books on civil rights movements, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King . . . To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to know."
Obama gets an inkling of those burdens -- and the hidden enemy, bigotry -- when he comes across the photograph of a horribly-disfigured man on the cover of a Life magazine. Like thousands of other black men and women, the man had undergone a chemical treatment to lighten his complexion and gain entrance into a much happier white world.
When the correspondence course runs out, Obama's mother sends him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, who enroll him in the famous Punahou prepatory school. In a white household, in the company of only three other black students, Obama sees himself in a quandary. He writes: "I was trying to raise myself as a black man in America, and, beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant" -- except for Ray, a senior transfer from Los Angeles, who tries to impress upon Obama the realities of black-white relationships, warning him that "we are always playing on the white man's court, by the white man's rules." While Obama studies Malcolm X, Ray exclaims, "I don't need no books to tell me how to be black."
Like Malcolm X, Obama pines for simple racial purity. He writes: "One line in his book stayed with me. He spoke of his own wish that the white blood that ran through him might be expunged . . . I knew that traveling down my own road to self-respect my own white blood would never recede into abstraction."
Enrolling at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama resists the temptation to assimilate into the majority white culture, to follow sheepishly other blacks who, unlike him, are eager to escape the urban malaise of Compton or Watts, or even suburban blacks, who crave an individualism not defined by their skin color. Instead, "to avoid being mistaken for a sellout," Obama chooses for friends the more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." When a friend describes her childhood growing up on the south side of Chicago -- "a vision of black life in all its possibility" -- which fills Obama with longing, and he expresses his envy, she ironically responds, "Isn't life something? All this time I was wishing I had grown up in Hawaii."
She also plants a seed -- that resolving his identity crisis means moving beyond having to choose between his black father and his white mother. He writes: "You might be locked into a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim in how it is shaped. You still have resposibilities." Obama reflects that his "identity might begin with the fact of his race, but it didn't, couldn't end there."
Seeking a place to put down roots and test his commitments, a place to anchor his self-image as a Black American, Obama transfers to Columbia. While he finds no more black students there than at Occidental, he is consoled by having landed "in the heart of a true city, with black neighborhoods in true proximity," although, in fact, he is disturbed by their instability, their faultlines, their race and class problems.
Obama graduates from Columbia, works for a Wall Street consulting firm for a year, resigns that job, and, after six months of unemployment and sending off resumes, becomes a community organizer. He writes: "Communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. They had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens . . . Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned . . . I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life."
Ultimately, Obama's organizing efforts produce frustration and disillusionment. Trying to put together a meeting of churches to discuss a gang shooting, he is told by one minister, "The last thing we need is to join up with a bunch of white money and Catholic churches and Jewish organizers to solve our problems." A $500,000 grant to a suburban university to set up a job bank in the Altgeld public housing project in Southside Chicago is squandered, leaving unemployment in this -- and many other -- black neighborhoods endemic, widespread, and persistent, and its citizens cynical and resigned.
In such an environment, Obama flirts with Black Nationalism; its twin strands of black affirmation are seductively attractive: on the one hand, solidarity, self-reliance, discipline, and communal responsibility; on the other, a blanket indictment of whites as responsible for the ills of the black community and the despair of its psyche. But both unravel when put to closer scrutiny.
The first founders on economic realities, which prevent blacks from withdrawing completely from the controlling business interests. Obama imagines a black worker saying, "The white folks I work with ain't so bad, and even if they were, I can't be quitting my job. Who's gonna pay my rent tomorrow or feed my children?" The second contradicts his mother's staunch belief in the morality of a white society populated by many individuals of good will. Obama concludes that, "Notions of purity -- of race or of culture -- could no more serve as the basis for the typical black American's self-esteem than it could for mine. Our sense of wholeness (and his) would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we inherited."
The politics of the day prove to be ineffective at improving the conditions of blacks or ameliorating racial polarization. Even the election of black Mayor Harold Washington raises expectations which turn out to be illusory. "Many blacks," writes Obama, "have given up the hope that politics could actually change their lives." The Mayor makes city services more equitable only at the margins. He appoints a few more blacks to important administrative positions, but upsets his base of support by making deals to consolidate his power, failing to tackle poverty in any meaningful way, and ultimately changing nothing as far as the despondent residents of Altgeld are concerned. Nevertheless, his sudden death while in office leaves Chicago blacks "dazed, confused, uncertain of direction, frightened of the future."
Obama's one great success is an emblematic Pyrrhic victory. When a handful of Altgeld residents unite for a bus trip to the Chicago Housing Authority Director's Office to protest the presence of asbestos in their apartments and the lack of basic services, Obama is encouraged by their growing empowerment. His enthusiasm collapses, however, when, at the meeting, the director is challenged to answer questions directly, refuses, and then angrily stalks off the stage in the ensuing pandemonium. Nothing is accomplished. A month later, when the same group meets with a HUD representative to lobby for the Housing Authority's one-billion dollar request to fund repairs on projects throughout the city, it is told, "The Chicago Housing Authority has no chance of getting even half the appropriation it has requested. You can get the asbestos removed. Or you can have new plumbing and roofing where it's needed. But you can't have both."
Determined to find a way to bring about real change, Obama applies to law school, "to learn power's currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised him before coming to Chicago but that he can now bring back to where it is needed." He is not embarrassed to leave; none of his clients begrudges him his success. Having immersed himself in the black community, his color sufficient criterion for membership, he knows now "that most black folks aren't like the father of his dreams, full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment" but "practical people who know life is too hard to judge each other's choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals."
Besides simple acceptance, there is another meaning to community. Obama writes, "You could be black and still not give a damn about what happened in Altgeld . . . But to be right with yourself, to do right by others, to lend meaning to a community's suffering and take part in its healing -- that required something more . . . It required faith." A faith beyond a faith in one's self. A Christian faith. A commitment to God and the Church and, with them as facilitators, to "the black family, education, the work ethic, discipline, and self-respect."
Although drawn to the Church, Obama remains a "reluctant skeptic . . . wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won." Before he can make this leap of faith, he decides he must learn more about his now-deceased father and his African heritage. He goes to Kenya.
Obama has lived in many places -- Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago -- but something happens to him thousands of miles from home that has never happened before; an airline official helping him locate a lost bag recognizes his name. He writes: "My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances, and grudges that I did not understand" -- the progeny, so to speak, of his father's polygamous marriages, the rival children and wives of which are engaged in a five-year-old lawsuit over the remains of a meager estate.
"His family seems to be everywhere: in stores, at the post office, on streets, and in the parks, all of them fussing and fretting over Obama Senior's long-lost son." But along with this joyful connection to his extended family comes tension and doubt--the same kind of "survivor's guilt" he might feel when his own financial success is set against black poverty and powerlessness, whether in Kenya or Southside Chicago.
Naively, Obama has envisioned Kenya as a single, harmonious whole -- in which his own complexities can be sorted out -- only to discover a discordant, divided society permeated with resentment against foreigners who own businesses, vestiges of colonialism (like the patronizing of white tourists), and ancient but fierce tribal prejudices and loyalties.
Narratives about his grandfather Onyango and his father Barack -- constructed by family members, particularly his "Granny" -- reveal personalities as conflicted as his own.
Onyango was a curious, restless young man who, hearing of the arrival of the white man at a nearby town, went off to see these strange people for himself. When he returned, he was shunned by his own father and other members of his village for wearing white man's clothes. He moved to Nairobi and went to work for the white man, learning his language, his system of paper records, his dining habits, his household organization. He respected the white man for his power, his machines, his weapons, and the way he was always improving himself -- although he never believed the white man superior to the African. For Onyango, knowledge and the ability to work together -- as opposed to the black man's tribalism -- were the sources of the white man's power; he wanted his son Barack Sr. to be as educated as any white man.
But when that son married a white woman, he vehemently disapproved. "He didn't want Obama blood sullied by a white woman." Onyango threatened to have his son's visa revoked. Eventually, Barack Sr. returned to Kenya without his wife and son.
Barack Sr. was also a man of contradictions. He was rebellious, proud, impetuous, and independent -- qualities which estranged him from his father Onyango. When he returned to Kenya after getting his degree from Harvard, he entered government service and enjoyed a successful career -- until his idealism got the better of him. A member of the minority Luo tribe, he began to speak out against tribalism, the majority Kikuyu government, and its president, Jomo Kenyatta -- ignoring the warnings of his friends and associates. He was banished from the government and blacklisted; no ministries or foreign companies would give him work. He began to drink; he had to borrow money from relatives just for food. His friends stopped coming to visit him because it was dangerous to be seen with him -- but he refused to apologize or change his attitude.
Later, after Kenyatta died, Barack Sr. was restored to government favor, went back to work, and regained some of his money and influence.
In spite of his arrogance, Barack Sr. had a generous heart. He would give to anyone who asked; he couldn't say no. And he never held a grudge, even when his luck changed, he lost everything, and the people whom he had helped forgot him and laughed at him. When he was rehabilitated and doing well again, he went back to helping the same people who had betrayed him.
Standing at his father's grave, Obama weeps as he reflects on his father's tragic flaw. He was a man who, while embracing the instruments of modernity with "polish and panache," abandoned too much of the past: "The laughter in Granny's voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the market, the stories around the fire. The loyalties that could make up for a lack of airplanes or rifles. Words of encouragement. An embrace. A strong, true love. For all your gifts -- the quick mind, the power of concentration, the charm -- you could never forge yourself into a true man while leaving those things behind."
Africa is bound to disappoint Black Americans -- like Obama -- who come looking for the authentic, says historian Rukia Odero as the two of them enjoy an African meal -- fish cooked in Indonesian spices -- and drink British tea. They consider whether "there is anything left that is truly African. " Dr. Odero has, in fact, resigned herself to a daughter whose first language is English, with bits and pieces of others thrown in. She tells Obama, "I'm less interested in a daughter who's authentically African than one who is authentically herself."
Having already observed that his aunt's Nairobi home "was just like the apartments in Altgeld -- the same chain of mothers and daughters and children, the same absence of men," Obama somberly concludes that "on this earth one place is not so different from another."
From Hawaii to Chicago to Africa, Obama's journey has raised more questions about his place and purpose in the world than it has offered answers. Other readers have suggested two paths by which Obama ultimately resolves his inner conflicts and discovers his "authentic self."
First, he embraces Christianity. Before leaving on his African trip, he attends Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ and hears him preach a sermon entitled "The Audacity of Hope." Reverend Wright describes a painting, "Hope." Hope is embodied in a harpist bruised and battered sitting on a mountaintop towering above a world "groaning under the same strife and deprivation, rejection and despair" that members of his congregation face every day. But the harpist gazes upwards, and dares to hope, to praise God, to make music on the one string she has left. Faith in Jesus Christ gives even the most downtrodden the audacity to hope. Obama is deeply moved. At the end of his memoir, when he returns to Chicago after graduating from law school, he joins the church.
Secondly, he enters politics. Instead of repressing his bi-racial bloodlines, he will present himself symbolically and actively as a force for change and unity, breaching racial, socio-economic, and partisan barriers. And he will leverage his experience as an organizer to inspire and empower diverse communities to take control of their own destinies.
I would submit a third path, the act of artistic creation, and argue that it was the writing and publishing of this book -- during which he literally exorcised the racial demons which haunted his self-consciousness -- which enabled Barack Obama to assume a truly comfortable identity. In the introduction, he acknowledges that he intended to write a book about race relations, but found "his mind drawn to rockier shores," and what emerged was "a record of a personal interior journey -- a boy's search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a Black American." The fact that he struggled to finish and eventually retreated to Bali for several months with his wife Michelle suggests some degree of inner turmoil.
Obama has admitted his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue, and events out of chronological order. Some critics have been quick to point out factual errors: conversations about race that never happened; a Life magazine photograph that doesn't exist; intimations of perceived discrimination that are disputed. But these shouldn't detract from the sincere coming-of-age story of a biracial man growing up in a variety of venues, and grappling with issues of racism, prejudice, civil rights, self-esteem, poverty, and family relationships -- a work of self-discovery that by its very existence answers the troubling question it poses: Who am I.
Obama's memoir has become uniquely intertwined with his political career; each has enhanced the other in his meteoric rise to prominence. Both languished in obscurity until his electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, after which a re-released edition of the book started flying off the shelves. "Dreams from My Father" and its sequel "The Audacity of Hope" continue to rank high on best-seller lists and are as much a part of his persona as his admittedly thin resume. With three million copies in print, his life story has become an "incredibly lucrative franchise," (Scott, New York Times, May 18, 2008) and made him a wealthy man, a celebrity, and quite possibly the next President of the United States.
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