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Saturday, August 31, 2013

Yeats: Old Man and Young




“An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless / soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / for every tatter in its mortal dress.” 
W.B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"

***

As a young man, Yeats wrote:

The Second Coming (1919)

First published in The Dial (November 1920) and The Nation (6 November 1920), later publisehed in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) - Online text with some notes on variant editions - online text and notes

  • Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
    ***
    Photo of William Butler Yeats. This is a press photograph from the George Grantham Bain collection, which was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1948. According to the library, there are no known restrictions on the use of these photos. Sourced from the Wikimedia Commons.


The End Is Near! Republicans See A War They Don't Like!

Yep.
Still assholes.

***
History takes its time.

Bush and Cheney's colossal debacle in Iraq cost so much blood and treasure -- and for so little return -- they insured Americans would not mess with Islamists again. 

At least, not any time soon. 

And even if they wanted to, Smirk and Snarl broke the national bank (not to mention the national will) by swashbuckling into a stupid Whimsy War - a war they never declared, never paid for, and never defined.

An endless swamp of "mission creep."

I wish Obama had not painted himself into a corner marked off by a crystal clear "red line."

Near-pacifist that I am, I far prefer Obama's determination to toast Assad's tush than a dollar spent on Iraq.

In a recent email to my brother, Kevin, I speculated: 


"If cruise missiles could be used to kill Bashir himself, or at least target him (and his generals) persistently enough to make the Syrian military less offensive (and more defensive), I would not oppose the move.

Uncle Sam has been very effective droning al Qaeda leadership.

I don't see why drones wouldn't work with Assad and his pals. 

Hell, you can conduct operations from Denver!

Or perhaps position an aircraft carrier off the Mediterranean coast just sixty miles from Damascus and pummel shit out of the bastard every time he acts up.

If "we" "spread the word" that any Syrian official who makes it possible to jam a drone up Bashir's ass gets $10 million, I think it'll be easier to toast the sonofabitch than it was to get Osama.

In the end, I think all weapons are chiefly used for obscene ends - including chemical weapons.

But, rightly or wrongly, it "feels" worse when every man, woman and child dies indiscriminately just for breathing.




Poems By Seamus Heaney (From The Poetry Foundation)


Seamus Heaney
"The Soil and Soul of Seamus Heaney"

***


Seamus' Washington Post Obituary: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/irish-nobel-laureate-seamus-heaney-author-of-digging-mid-term-break-dies-at-74/2013/08/30/a0c4485e-1176-11e3-bdf6-e4fc677d94a1_story.html

***
Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and...
POEM
Singing School
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
1. The Ministry of Fear

       for Seamus Deane . . . 
POEM
Casualty
BY SEAMUS HEANEY


He would drink by himself    . . . 
POEM
Glanmore Sonnets
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
I
Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground. 
The mildest February for twenty years    . . . 
POEM
North
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay, 
and found only the secular . . . 
POEM
Digging
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
Between my finger and my thumb 
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
. . . 
AUDIO: POETRY LECTURES
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney in conversation with Michael Laskey, fellow poet and co-founder of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. This is an edited version of an interview recorded live at the Poetry Prom 2010 organised by The Poetry Trust. Enjoy more podcasts on...
POEM GUIDE
Seamus Heaney: “Casualty”
BY JOSHUA WEINER
Seamus Heaney is likely the best-selling English-language poet alive. Famous, at this point, for being famous (he received the Nobel Prize in 1995), Heaney began earning acclaim with his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966). Critical interest...
The Totality for Kids, by Joshua Clover. University of California Press. $45.00 cloth; $16.95 paper. . . .
PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Beyond Heaney?
BY CARMINE STARNINO
New Collected Poems, by Eavan Boland.W.W. Norton. $27.95. We open on a tiny flat in Dublin. A young poet sits by a window, writing. But something is wrong. The poem—eloquent, sonorous, carefully crafted—feels off. Studying the page, she...
POEM
The Bush
BY CHRIS WALLACE-CRABBE
Overture:                   violins:
it is all scraggy,
wideawake, . . . 
by Seamus Heaney (read by Melissa Severin)
AUDIO: THE POETRY MAGAZINE PODCAST
Her Victorian Roots are Showing
The editors pick highlights from an interview with Seamus Heaney and Fanny Howe's notebooks; and listen and comment on poems by Joan Houlihan, Roddy Lumsden, and Fred D'Aguiar.
AUDIO: POETRY OFF THE SHELF
Bloody Sunday & the Fisherman's Ghost
How Seamus Heaney defines Ireland's 1972 troubles with a portrait of a drunken seaman blown up in a pub.
Thursday, October 18, 2012 @ 6:00PM
Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney will give the 2012 Poetry Day reading. Born in 1939 at his family’s farm in Northern Ireland, Heaney published his first collection of poetry, Death of a Naturalist, in...
In his native Ireland, he's known as "Famous Seamus," and indeed, Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1995, is that rare bird: a world-famous poet. Now 72, his newest collection, Human Chain, is, as always for Heaney, grounded in the...





The Milky Way’s Black Hole, Like Cookie Monster, Loses More Than It Eats

Multiwavelength view of the central region of the Milky Way, including the black hole (also known as Sagittarius A*). The inset is a new X-ray observation, which shows the details of the accretion disk around the black hole. The purple and yellow are infrared emission, while the blue is X-ray light.
X-ray: NASA/UMass/Q.D. Wang et al.; IR: NASA/STScI

X-ray observations show why Sagittarius A* is fainter than many galactic nuclei

by  - Aug 29 2013
Despite the common conception that they suck down everything that passes nearby, black holes are messy eaters. Gas swirls around them due to the strong gravitational field, but much of the material is blasted back into the surrounding galaxy. In many galaxies, that messiness makes the black hole extremely bright, but the Milky Way's supermassive black hole devours material so inefficiently that it's actually one of the quieter galactic nuclei around.
A high-resolution measurement of X-ray emissions near the galactic center shows the structure and feeding of the Milky Way's monster in new detail. Q. D. Wang and colleagues determined the light it does produce comes from a very compact region right near the galactic center. That supports the hypothesis that X-ray emissions are due to black hole accretion—mass falling into orbit around it. They also determined that no more than one percent of all the accreted matter ever crosses the black hole's event horizon.
The existence of the Milky Way's black hole is uncontroversial. The motion of nearby stars and the behavior of the local gas reveal the presence of a compact, massive object. Its mass is roughly four million times that of the Sun and its radius is smaller than the Solar System, which rules out nearly every alternative explanation.
However, some aspects of the black hole's behavior were harder to determine. The radio source at the Milky Way's center, known as Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A*, with the "*" pronounced as "star"), is much fainter than many galactic nuclei. Even assuming the black hole is feeding slowly compared to the maximum possible rate, theoretical models predict it should be brighter by a factor of 100 million. The general consensus is that Sgr A* is feeding in a particularly inefficient way, spewing more matter back into space than falls in.
There's a big challenge to testing this hypothesis: the region between Earth and the galactic center contains a lot of dust, which blocks visible light. Infrared and radio waves both pierce that dust, but their long wavelengths require correspondingly large telescopes to achieve high resolution. That places fundamental limits on how closely the light emissions can be pinpointed relative to the black hole. After all, astronomers are trying to study a region smaller than the Solar System at a distance of 26,000 light years.
The new observations used the orbiting Chandra telescope, which captures small-wavelength X-ray light. The researchers were able to resolve the region sufficiently close to the so-called Bondi radius, where material is more likely to fall into the black hole. They found the X-ray emissions were extended in an elongated structure on either side of the black hole, consistent with an accretion disk: matter rapidly orbiting around Sgr A*.
The astronomers could also rule out the hypothesis that the X-ray and radio emissions from this area came from stars since it lacked the expected spectral lines from iron and potassium. Additionally, they determined the emission had no appreciable fluctuations, as would be expected from flares or other stellar phenomena.
Everything they observed was completely consistent with extremely inefficient light emission from matter swirling around Sgr A*. Based on their observations, the researchers concluded that no more than one percent of the matter in the accretion region actually passed the black hole's event horizon. The rest is ejected back into the galaxy, where it contributes to the diffuse light emission in infrared and radio. That's a Cookie Monster approach to eating, but it ends up explaining why the Milky Way's black hole is so faint.
Science, 2013. 


Liz Cheney: I don’t support same sex marriage even though my sister is in one.

Liz Cheney announces her candidacy (Screenshot)

We are all hypocrites. 

I, for example -- after years away from the church because I couldn't stand the hypocrites there -- finally re-joined the flock after realizing: "Hey! There's always room for one more..." 

Even so, what distinguishes garden-variety hypocrites from modern-day Pharisees is that Pharisees consider hypocrisy - when brought to fever pitch - a virtue rather than a universal character flaw.

***

Liz, I hope your sister gives you hell. 

***

Liz Cheney, Wyoming Republican candidate for U.S. Senate and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, issued a statement on Friday saying that she is anti-choice and that she does not support same sex marriage, in spite of the fact that her own sister is married to a woman. According to Talking Points Memo, Cheney made no mention of her sister Mary or Mary’s partner Heather Poe, who were married in Washington, D.C. in 2012.
“I am strongly pro-life and I am not pro-gay marriage,” said Cheney in the statement. “I believe the issue of marriage must be decided by the states, and by the people in the states, not by judges and not even by legislators, but by the people themselves.”
The Cheney campaign was reacting to a “push-poll,” a campaign tactic in which telemarketers are paid to call masquerading as poll workers, but instead spread damaging information about an opposing candidate. The Wyoming push poll asked if voters were aware that Liz Cheney “supports abortion and aggressively promotes gay marriage.”
“The people of Wyoming deserve an honest campaign,” Cheney said in the statement. “They should not be subject to the kind of dirty tricks this push poll represents.”
Cheney is challenging popular and long-serving Republican Sen. Mike Enzi for the Wyoming Senate seat, a decision that has raised some hackles among the state’s Republican establishment. Recently, she was charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly lying about her residency status in order to obtain a Wyoming fishing license.
UPDATE: Mary Cheney responded on Facebook, according to the New York Times, by saying, “For the record, I love my sister, but she is dead wrong on the issue of marriage.”
“Freedom means freedom for everyone,” she wrote. “That means that all families — regardless of how they look or how they are made — all families are entitled to the same rights, privileges and protections as every other.”
[image of Liz Cheney via Cheney for Wyoming]

Author Reza Aslan Explores Uncomfortable Facts About Jesus

  1. In the video clip below, author Reza Aslan makes pointed discusses the pseudipigraha, a literary matrix in which early Christian writers wrote.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudepigrapha

      

    We now know that the four canonical gospels were composite compositions whose various authors believed that putting an apostle’s name on their own work was in no way an abuse of truth (as our current scientific mentality would argue) but rather an act of homage, alignment and even submission to the lineage and witness of the "named" apostle himself. 


    It is ironic that fundamentalist Christians use "literalism" to confine themselves to epistemological traps, needless contraptions that make scripture less meaningful, when the original non-literal approach to sacred scripture was -- and, for many, still is -- more meaningful. 

    Notably, modern passion for biblical "literalism" emerged in the late 1800s, mostly through the destructive work of The Niagara Bible Convention
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalism
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_Bible_Conference

    Recently, I posted about fundamentalism's conception of God-as-terrorist. Just as God is belittled and demeaned by representing "Him" as a deity who would create a Universe in which human beings might burn -- forever -- in a Lake of Neverending Fire," so too do they belittle and demean The Bible by shackling it to so-called (but intrinsically impossible) Literalism. 

    "Mistakes In Scripture: When The Bible Gets The Bible Wrong"

    ***


    Author Explores Uncomfortable Facts About Jesus - AOL On

    on.aol.com/.../author-explores-uncomfortable-facts-ab...
    Jul 16, 2013
    Reza Aslan joins Ahmed to explore some of the moreuncomfortable facts about Jesus.






Aquinas, St. Symeon The New Theologian and Their Spiritual Kin


Live your life so that water tastes like wine.
(Or, lacking the "miracle," be thankful for water as if it were wine.)

Aquinas observes that love infuses joy in the will.  “The soul’s joy, flowing over into the body, fills it with happiness in the form of health and incorruptible vigor.”[vii]  

He infuses love in us as a gift; and that gift, or grace, is a foretaste of glory. God’s love descends to us, and our created intellect, with all its limitations, rises toward God. We love God as the root of our happiness. Furthermore, we can love God wholeheartedly.  Love brings us toward union with God, a union that we can feel now, though the feeling is not a sign that we are God. 

Our response to God’s love is voluntary; it is an act of will, so we are not a mere channel for God’s self-expression.

Elsewhere Aquinas notes that The Only-begotten Son of God, wanting us to be partakers of his divinity, assumed our human nature so that, having become man, he might make men gods.

Kindred Views

Let us applaud and give thanks that we have become not only Christians but Christ himself. Do you understand, my brothers, the grace that God our head has given us? Be filled with wonder and joy—we have become veritable Christs!—St. Augustine of Hippo

He has given us all the things that we need for life and for true devotion, bringing us to know God himself... through them you will be able to share the divine nature.— II Peter 1:3-4a

In this way we are all to come to unity in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God, until we become the perfect Man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.—St. Paul, Ephesians 4:13

Souls wherein the Spirit dwells, illuminated by the Spirit, themselves become spiritual, and send forth their grace to others. Hence comes . . . abiding in God, the being made like to God, and, highest of all, the being made God.—St. Basil the Great, On the Spirit.

"the highest of all things desired is to become God."—St Basil the Great

Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up. We are to be remade. . . . we shall find underneath it all a thing we have never yet imagined: a real man, an ageless god, a son of God, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy.—C. S. Lewis, The Grand Miracle


***

At the other extreme of the Christian spectrum, we see the sectarian corruption of all that is good. 

Consider:

"I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! Don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. "Well, there's so much to live for!" "Like what?" "Well... are you religious?" He said yes. I said, "Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?" "Christian." "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant ? "Protestant." "Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?" "Baptist" "Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?" "Baptist Church of God!" "Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you reformed Baptist Church of God?" "Reformed Baptist Church of God!" "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off.”  Emo Phillips

***

St. Symeon the New Theologian 

(St. Symeon preferred the experience of divinity to faith.)

Christ’s Body


We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.
I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in His Godhood).
I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous? — Then
open your heart to Him
and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ’s body
where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real,
and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed
and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
he awakens as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.


 Symeon the New Theologian, (949-1022), published in The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, edited by Stephen Mitchell. 


St. Symeon's biography at "Orthodox Wiki": http://orthodoxwiki.org/Symeon_the_New_Theologian

***

"John Ford, John Wayne and Christian Theosis (Divinization)"  http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/more-on-theosis.html




Bradlee Dean, "Christian" Talk Show Host and Humankind's Reversion To Superstition

       

Bradlee Dean

***

When faith displaces intellectual rigor, "the faithful" believe it their duty to champion intellectual blindness and deliberately impugn any reasonable, rational finding that contradicts their faith. When faith is considered the most important divine directive, it is not only acceptable to trash scientific findings that threaten the faith of true believers: it is necessary to trash them. (See "sola fide" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_fideFidelity to preconceived beliefs (regardless the measured conclusions of reason, logic and Love itself) is the summum bonum for anyone whose faith is everything. The prime directive of "true believers" is to represent fact-as-fiction while confecting de novo fictions to bolster faith. Lacking formation in intellectual integrity, "the intellectually stunted" must preserve blind faith by the deliberate degradation (and ardently desired destruction) of Truth. Alongside St. Paul, blindly faithful Christians argue that the world's wisdom is foolishness and thus exempt themselves from any rational challenge even when rationality and The Law of Love are co-terminous, even when irrationality rejects The Law of Love.

The greatest threat to the human psyche is dissolution of identity so that those who identify themselves with rigid beliefs, must - above all -- preserve those rigid beliefs so that they not shatter or crack.

In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas "threw a life-vest to humanity" when he described the proper relationship between faith and reason: 

"Arguing against those who said that natural philosophy was contrary to the Christian faith, (Aquinas) writes in his treatise "Faith, Reason and Theology that "even though the natural light of the human mind is inadequate to make known what is revealed by faith, nevertheless what is divinely taught to us by faith cannot be contrary to what we are endowed with by nature. One or the other would have to be false, and since we have both of them from God, he would be the cause of our error, which is impossible." "Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World" by John Freely - http://www.amazon.com/Aladdins-Lamp-Science-Through-Islamic/dp/0307277836/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327882581&sr=8-1
***

Except for those who cultivate high order thinking skills, humankind is experiencing a groundswell of Aggressive Ignorance based on whole-cloth falsehood.

At ground zero in America's culture war, we are living through "The Death of Epistemology"

In effect, broad swathes of humankind - often seeing themselves as ordained agents of God -are reverting to The Sea of Superstition that has been humankind's enduring milieu.

***

Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" (1951) is the best available exploration of blind faith as human debacle. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer

***

Bradlee Dean: Gays Commit Half Of All Murders, Obama Is A 'Homo' And Maddow Is A 'Shim'

On this weekend’s edition of Sons of Liberty Radio, hosts Bradlee Dean and Jake McMillan claimed that gay people are responsible for half of all murders committed in large US cities, among other crimes.
After Dean said that homosexuality and abortion are the “last two stages that a country takes before God judges that country,” McMillan charged that “half of the murders in large cities were committed by homosexuals; thirty-three percent of child abuse cases were committed by homosexuals; half of the foster children molestations were done by homosexuals.”
McMillan explained, to Dean’s agreement, that gays are prone to criminality because “when a person’s mind has gone to that extent of committing an abominable act, it shows what else they are capable of.”
McMillan later recounted an interview with a gay reporter in which he charged that all people, including gays, are created equal, “but not when you make choices; if you break the law you’re no longer protected by the law.”
“God gives us strict orders to deal with people that commit such crimes in this life,” Dean said, “as a mercy to society.”
Dean wondered if gay people are “thinking to themselves, ‘These people are really falling for this.” But of course gay rights are gaining ground, Dean claimed, since “they got their homo in office,” and have “infiltrated” the White House.
The right-wing commentator also discussed his hugely unsuccessful lawsuit against Rachel Maddow for accurately quoting his claim that Muslims who want to execute gay people are “more moral” than Christians. Dean repeatedly referred to Maddow as “shim,” since he doesn’t know if the MSNBC host is a “he or she,” and said that he “started getting death threats” as a result of her program.
“Folks you need to understand what you’re dealing with, when you’re looking at the homosexual agenda, gay marriage, this administration, folks, by you tolerating their lawlessness, I want you to understand something, by you tolerating their lawlessness you are moving the seat of violence closer to your front door,” Dean stated. “Without you dealing with it, evil will prevail and rest assured evil is prevailing against you.”

FILED UNDER

- See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/bradlee-dean-gays-commit-half-all-murders-obama-homo-and-maddow-shim#sthash.BLzCdUiv.dpuf

Friday, August 30, 2013

If Martin Luther King Were With Us Now, Health-Care Would Be A Civil Right

Ah! But they love 'em in the womb!

***

"Universal healthcare and infrequent abortion are obviously linked." Catholic Cardinal, Basil Hume - http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/03/cardinal-basil-hume-on-obvious.html


***

Alan: It is a hard, garish truth that many Americans prefer the sort of austerity and pay-as-you-go "free market" capitalism that would rather see people dead (or at least suffer unnecessarily en route to an early grave) than to conceive cost-effective healthcare as a human right. 

***

By Matt Miller, Published: August 28 E-mail the writer

In 1963, when Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech, America spent 5.5 percent of gross domestic product on health care . Today we spend 18 percent, while most other wealthy nations spend 10 to 12 percent through systems that deliver equal or better health outcomes. In a $16 trillion economy, our excess health-care spending — that is, money we devote to health care that plainly isn’t needed for quality care — thus comes to a staggering $1 trillion a year.
Call this a trillion-dollar “diversion” or “opportunity cost.” Call it a “rip-off.” Or even “theft.” Whatever the label, the point is the same: No leader commemorating the March on Washington and urging the nation to pursue our unfinished progressive agenda will draw a link between our out-of-control medical-industrial complex and the price of justice. They should.
Matt Miller
A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the host of the new podcast “This...Is Interesting,” Miller writes a weekly column for The Post.
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In 1963, Dr. King said, “the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society.” Half a century later, if you want to know why too many Americans of every race and creed are still languishing, our outsized health-care costs, and the way they divert public and private resources from more urgent uses, are a big part of the explanation.
Can we summon the imagination to view our radically inefficient health-care systemas a moral challenge?
Twenty million Americans today want full-time work but can’t find it . We’re told there’s no room in the budget to put Americans to work rebuilding our run-down roads, bridges, airports, sewer systems and electrical grids. President Obama’s Jobs Act, ignored by the Republican-controlled House, only sought enough funding for 1 million to 2 million such jobs.
Why? Because there’s no money.
Millions of poor children lack access to the high-quality preschool that would give them a better chance in life. We can’t give them such access because “there’s no money.”
Millions of poor children are warehoused in schools across the United States today with unqualified teachers. Still, the United States won’t invest in making teaching an attractive career for our most talented young people, which is what nations with high-performing school systems, such as Finland, South Korea and Singapore, do.
Why not? Because, we’re told, we don’t have that kind of money.
Tuition at public colleges have soared to a stunning quarter of median family income. That’s largely because state spending on Medicaid has skyrocketed over the last 30 years, forcing deep cuts in support for state colleges.
Average wages have been stagnant for years, in part because in our employer-based health-care system, soaring health-care costs have devoured all the cash businesses might otherwise have had available to give workers a raise.
“America has given the Negro people a bad check,” King said in 1963, “a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.”
What would King have made of this needless overpayment of a trillion dollars a year? A trillion dollars not available for higher wages and better teachers. A trillion dollars we can’t use for gleaming new infrastructure and world-class preschools. A trillion dollars that could dramatically lower the cost of college for every young American working to build a better future.
If the mob told us to hand over a trillion a year in protection money, we’d call the police.
If a conquering foreign power tried to extract a trillion a year in tribute, we’d revolt.
But when respected doctors in white coats and local worthies on hospital boards essentially hold America up for the same aggregate sum, we say nothing. We do nothing.
It’s not as dramatic as Bull Connor and the hoses. The martyrs to excess health-care costs are less visible, and the links between cause and effect seem more attenuated. But in a world of scarce resources and trade-offs, every new merger lets hospitals hike prices helps deny poor children a fair start in life.
Our radically inefficient health-care system isn’t a matter of accounting for the budget. It’s a question of justice for the pulpit.
It will take creativity to frame these issues in ways that make the tumblers click and mobilizes voters to demand new answers. Advocates for young people, workers and the poor will have to give up their traditional unwillingness to meddle in other people’s sandboxes when it comes to public funds. You can’t play nice or “stay in your lane” when the stakes are this high.
Yes, I know, we’ll never get a thundering MLK refrain here, but even a wonky columnist can have a dream.
“Cost-effective at last, cost-effective at last, thank God almighty, our health-care system is cost-effective at last!”
Fifty years on, with King’s economic vision so far from being fulfilled, there’s no choice. Getting serious about justice means getting serious about health-care costs.
Read more from Matt Miller’s archive