Yes, We Have No Bananas

I've always eaten lots of bananas.  Call it an atativistic sentimentality about our simian ancestors, call it what you will, but I like bananas.  Loaded with potassium, which is essential for muscle contraction.  I just ate one, a diminutive yellow number with a somewhat tasteless core.  Not much like the bananas of my youth, which were big yellow jobs with creamy, sweet centers.  Made the whole lunch bag smell like banana.

Those bananas were of the Gros Michel ("Big Mike") variety.  Big Mike's gone now, felled by fusarium oxysporum or Panama Disease, a fungal infection which attacks the banana tree's roots and starves it of water.  There is no cure and it spreads like wildfire.  The big plantantion growers, like the United Fruit Co., substituted the Cavendish variety for Big Mike, and it's a Cavendish I just ate.  Smaller, not as sweet, derived from a Vietnamese strain.  Panama Disease has now hit the Cavendish and it's only a matter of time before it too goes extinct.  There is no successor in waiting.  We have to come up with something because bananas are just too important.  For example, when Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, hit on the idea in the early 1950s that Guatemalan peasants ought to own some of Guatemala's land, Eisenhower went along with Allen Dulles's idea (head of the CIA and also on the board of directors of United Fruit Co.) that Jacobo had to go. Arbenz was clearly a Commie sympathizer; what could be more Commie than the idea that poor people ought to own land? So the United Fruit Co., with the assistance of the CIA, overthrew Arbenz and installed a more banana-friendly dictator, thus giving rise to the term "Banana Republic."  I wonder if the company selling all those khaki pants and oversized cotton shirts ever reflects on the origin of the name?  Probably not - this is America!

I'm concerned that as America itself sinks into the economic status of a banana republic that we won't have any bananas to eat.  There are areas of the United States where we can grow okay bananas, like Florida and the Gulf Coast, but it's just a matter of time before Panama Disease shows up.  Naturally, big growers favor monocultured bananas (which is how we got into this problem in the first place), so they're looking for ways to modify the Cavendish genetically so it can resist fusarium, such as splicing in some fish genes or something. What if the bananas then get ich?  (That's a joke for tropical fish people.)  Or what if for some strange reason bananas start tasting good with a wedge of lemon and tartar sauce?  So much for the lunch bag memories.

I watched Barack yesterday give his "economic" speech.  To call his various nostrums "generalized" is probably too specific a word.  I wonder if he's having second thoughts.  Maybe this would have been the year for Hillary to become President.  The general plan of reducing interest rates to zero and pumping vast amounts of government money into the economy has already been tried, in Japan beginning in the early 1990's.  Fellow citizens of the American Banana Republic (Mackerel variety), I ask you: in all humility, and allowing for a perhaps understandable tendency toward feelings of Exceptionalism, between the two cultures, Japan & the U.S., which would you say is the harder working, better educated and more technologically advanced?  So would I.  Nevertheless, Japan has been in a deflationary slump since about 1991.  The problem was brought on by a real estate bubble, bank insolvencies and a credit freeze due to distrust among lending institutions.  Let me know if any of that sounds familiar.  Also, its manufacturing base had gotten hollowed out because of Asian competition where the cost of living was much lower.

Barack's general plan is reminiscent of a man standing on a ladder a few feet shy of the roof attempting to reach the roof by lifting the ladder on which he's standing.  (I know, I used that before, but doesn't it just get it?)  There's a Catch, and it's Catch-22, which says that the United States can borrow the money it needs to get the economy moving if the economy is moving so that Americans can buy stuff from countries like China who need our money in order to lend it back to us; but if the economy is not moving, then we can't buy stuff to give our money to China so they can give it back to us so we can get the economy moving.

That's some Catch, whistled Yossarian.  Indeed.  So perhaps, as the esteemed Nouriel Roubini prognosticates, the recession will end somewhere around mid-2010, meaning the economy will stop moving backwards.  At that point about 40% of the net worth of the United States will have been lost, and we will come into equilibrium.  But that's it.  We're there, just where Japan has been.  It's essential to recognize that the Congressional Clown Troupe is doing this Final Act, the one where they stack up four chairs on top of a unicycle and Bozo does a handstand on the top chair while holding three pool cues topped with spinning plates, not because they necessarily believe this can possibly work. They're doing it because Congress must always appear to be doing something.  Barack can't come out and say, hey, we just took a 40% hit.  Better learn to deal with it.  How do you start your Presidency with that?  And then follow it up by telling us the really bad news:  no bananas for you.

White House for Sale

I don't really know if there's an individual American citizen eliglible for the office of President who is actually capable, from the standpoint of education, experience and personal attributes, of leading the nation out of the economic morass into which it has sunk.  The big problem for Barack Obama is the two four-year terms of George W. Bush may have been way too much for the country to survive.  I realize that there are those Bush apologists who will insist, along with Bush himself, that the President was simply an innocent bystander with respect to the various disasters that occurred during his tenure.  For example, Ann Coulter recently attacked those who attack Bush for suggesting that the famous August 2001 PDB actually warned Bush that "Bin Laden was determined to attack within the U.S.," the way the PDB is titled. The leggy political satirist, blond hair flying, argued on her website that the PDB was the sort of thing a grade schooler would pull together from Google cites in a last minute effort to meet a term paper deadline.  

I mentioned recently that conservatives often do a better job of researching original source documents in their arguments as opposed to their liberal counterparts in the commentariat, who often tend to recite simply from memory Bush's Greatest Hits (on the country) without doing the same sort of fact-checking.  Here, however, I think Ms. Coulter's usually fine scholarship betrays her nonetheless, for the PDB does say:

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

Now if you stop right there, as Ms. Coulter, flashing exotic lengths of thigh from her little black dress, urges us to do on W's behalf, you must grant her main point, her main point being that she's a bimbo who's figured out how to parlay a cachectic body into many talk show appearances while writing very silly books.  And another point is that, in fact, W did stop right there and did not find out what those FBI reports of "suspicious activity" were, which included field reports about young Arab men learning to fly commercial airliners at American flight schools without bothering with the usual full curriculum, to wit, how to take off and land the damn things.  Now if George W. Bush was a serious man taking a serious job seriously, he would have raised holy hell about those reports.  Where's the follow up?  What's going on?  Who are these guys, and why are they doing this?  Instead, he read the report and then went out on the "ranch" and cut some more brush and went fishing with Barney.

Ann Coulter doesn't mention any of that, and she relies on our laziness in not cross-checking the PDB with the 9/11 Commission Report which reproduces the actual FBI field reports in full, all of which would have been available to our incurious President if he had been, you know, competent.

Anyway, the past is prologue and it's all kind of scary now.  I hate to see these pictures of Barack hanging out with Bush at these friendly lunches, just as I cringed when Nancy Pelosi went for tea at the White House after the Dems took over majority control of the House in 2006.  It's very collegial and all, but it tends to perpetuate business as usual and a reluctance to rock the boat, and rocking the boat till it capsizes is more what we need than "continuity of government," because our government has sucked.

And then Barack starts talking about "reforming" Social Security as part of his grand strategy for dealing with our many financial nightmares.  I understand that "everything must be on the table" when you're facing disaster, but Social Security is fully funded at the present level of benefits through about 2040 if the government grants full faith and credit to the trillions of dollars socked away in its "special issue" Treasury bonds purchased with excess FICA payments over the last 25 years.  So what Barry is actually hinting at is that maybe, just maybe, the government needs to default on its obligations to itself.  If Obama really believes that it's necessary to "reform" Social Security, meaning, of course, to cut benefits rather than to honor these IOUs, then his vaunted desire for "transparency" should also motivate him to announce to foreign creditors holding essentially identical debt instruments, such as China, Saudi Arabia and "Caribbean Island banking centers," that default is now the order of the day.

It's unlikely that Obama will take this second step, especially in light of the report in yesterday's New York Times that China is already pulling back on Treasury purchases in light of its own serious economic problems.  Without a funding source for America's huge deficits, there is simply no way that Obama or the Congressional Clown Troupe can possibly finance a "recovery program" or even the day-to-day operations of the federal government.  And at that point you can pound a For Sale sign in front of Obama's new home.

So man up, O.  Don't pull a Bush and start the shuck and jive crap of your predecessor.  On points like this, it's critical to spell out what the consequences of such "reforms" actually entail, and to describe in detail the embezzlement of FICA money that has been misdirected into the military establishment over the last quarter century.  Otherwise, you're going to slip inexorably into the Beltway conspiracy against the American people.  You promised, after all, to be our President.  We've had eight years of a guy working the other side and we need a change.

 

The Rotary Club & Other Espionage Agencies

I read through an interesting interview between conservative radio guy Hugh Hewitt (whose parents apparently lacked a certain felicity in choosing names) and Glenn Greenwald, whose column on Salon is linked to the right.  I admire Mr. Greenwald a lot; his analyses of media complacency in the face of the lawlessness of the Bush Administration are non pareil and frequently hilarious. It's hard to top his irony.  I assume that Mr. Greenwald is of Jewish lineage, though I don't want to jump to ethnic conclusions.  It's not essential anyway; Mr. Greenwald is a liberal and a civil libertarian (labels which can be applied to me as well, faut de mieux), and his attitudes about Israel represent the mainstream of the liberal position these days.  I'm not exactly sure what that position is, but it's definitely anti-Israel.

Mr. Greenwald begins the interview by affirming Israel's right to exist.  In my opinion, that would have been a good place to quit as well, because it's the essential question.  Mr. Greenwald, whose expertise is law and the Constitution, does not really need to join the cadres of Israel bashers with his own second-hand analysis of news reports from the battle zone.  But he can't help himself, because he's a Liberal and this is what Liberals do now, have opinions about Israel.  Negative opinions.  So he gives us this: 

HH: So what do you want, what do you think Israel ought to do?

GG: Well, I think that, for one thing, I think that real negotiations need to ensue, and I think those can only happen with a powerful and devoted mediator, which probably is a role that only the United States can play. So I think the Israelis need to be a lot more willing to make concessions than they’ve been in the past, and I also think that doing things like expanding settlements in the West Bank and blockading the Gazans to the point where they can’t even get nutrition and medical needs for their children are things that clearly harm their own interests, and make the conflict worse. I think stopping settlements, making concessions in the West Bank, and giving the Gazans more of a decent life so they don’t think it’s worthwhile to blow themselves up and shoot rockets at their oppressors is a really good first step.

I have to admit this sounds very nice: let's talk.  And what shall we talk about?  Well, one item that might be on the agenda would concern the 7,200 rockets that Hamas has fired at Ashkelon, Sderot and other southern Israeli cities during the last 5 years.  These rockets were fired at Israel with the intention of killing anyone near their point of landing; this sort of attack represents the most indiscriminate form of civilian targeting you can imagine.  That's inconvenient for Mr. Greenwald, and for the liberal view generally, but they have comebacks.  What about those illegal settlements in the West Bank?  Well, Hamas is not in power in the West Bank; they were elected in Gaza, and it is from Gaza that the rockets are launched.  So can we focus on that?  And why does Hamas fire rockets at Israel?  Because it denies Israel's right to exist. This is another inconvenient truth for the modern American liberal view of Israel.  One nasty habit of conservatives, including even the much-maligned Ann Coulter, is that they tend to read source documents.  This causes all kinds of havoc for the feel-good bromides of the liberal position.  The Hamas Charter of 1988, after menacingly warning the Freemasons, Lions Club and Rotary Club that they're on to their role as Zionist espionage agencies (some stuff you just can't make up), lays it out: 

[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad: “Allah is the all-powerful, but most people are not aware.” From time to time a clamoring is voiced, to hold an International Conference in search for a solution to the problem. Some accept the idea, others reject it, for one reason or another, demanding the implementation of this or that condition, as a prerequisite for agreeing to convene the Conference or for participating in it. But the Islamic Resistance Movement, which is aware of the [prospective] parties to this conference, and of their past and present positions towards the problems of the Muslims, does not believe that those conferences are capable of responding to demands, or of restoring rights or doing justice to the oppressed. Those conferences are no more than a means to appoint the nonbelievers as arbitrators in the lands of Islam. Since when did the Unbelievers do justice to the Believers? “And the Jews will not be pleased with thee, nor will the Christians, till thou follow their creed. Say: Lo! the guidance of Allah [himself] is the Guidance. And if you should follow their desires after the knowledge which has come unto thee, then you would have from Allah no protecting friend nor helper.” Sura 2 (the Cow), verse 120 There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. 

This is flowery, of course, but I don't think there's any great mystery about what Hamas is saying.  For one thing, Hamas uses an extremely broad definition of  "Palestine," including such areas as Tel Aviv, Haifa and all of Jerusalem, which we might otherwise think of as Israel.  They don't want "conferences," (none of that Camp David stuff) and they don't want to talk.  It's odd that liberals have such a hard time taking them at their word; they certainly demonstrate their disinterest in talking by firing 7,200 rockets at Israeli towns over the last five years.  The provocation of Israel is part of a plan for destroying Israel, not "retaliation" designed to bring Israel to the bargaining table.

One problem that Americans have in understanding Israel's response is that it's difficult for us to relate to a country that gives a damn about its own national security.  If you rain rockets down on Sderot and Ashkelon, then you're going to deal with the IDF. It's really that simple.  The United States was attacked on 9/11, and the most famous, the signature, response to that outrage was to use it as a propaganda tool for invading Iraq, which played no role in the terrorist strike.  When New Orleans drowned, most Americans saw the tragedy as a TV show; President Bush didn't even bother to watch it on TV.  He was playing air guitar in San Diego.  

These are important cultural differences.  Thinkers like Mr. Greenwald, so accomplished and effective in other areas, project American attitudes about crisis onto Israel and arrive at the dubious conclusion that Israel ought to be as sloppy, incoherent and soft about its safety as the United States is.  The point is that Israel can't.  Israel wants to get rid of Hamas because Hamas wants to get rid of Israel. If the liberal position is to favor Hamas, then stop the parsing of Israeli "tactics," stop the enumeration of schools hit by tank fire and the scenes of hospital corridors and the rest of it, and go to the jugular: simply state your concluding premise.  You agree with Hamas; Israel should not exist.  Then the liberal criticism of Israel has integrity and internal coherence. It's intellectually honest. If you are driven by anti-Semitism, that also has the ring of authenticity, because it's difficult to believe your real motivation is compassion for Arabs you've never visited and know nothing about. You have become a Hamas jihadist yourself, arriving at that position from whatever point on the compass brought you here.  You would like to see a "solution," as the Hamas Charter declares, take the form of a Second Holocaust.

My Peeps Come of Age

In that day and age at Berkeley there was, in truth, a kind of revulsion at the practical demands of everyday living.  Fraternities were in sharp decline because they were seen as institutions of outmoded values (connections, wealth, Old Boy networks), and the more free-form aspirations of the Information Age were taking root.  Not many of my contemporaries really aspired to make it as Organization Men.  Of course, the downside of such a conceit is that organizations have inherent power not generally available to the solo flyer.  I think this accounts, in some ways, for the ascendancy of such strange "leaders" as George W. Bush and Karl Rove: the field of "leadership" was to a large extent abandoned by what you might call the intellectual elite.

Many, if not nearly all, of my contemporaries moved into such fields as teaching, law, medicine and careers other than in Big Business and manufacturing (and I don't know anyone who went into politics).  The field of business was seen as somehow "co-opted."  One problem with this morally rarefied approach is that the things business does nevertheless remain absolutely essential--food, shelter, autos, furniture, energy--and whether my peeps wanted to get involved in the production end of such activities was not an answer to the necessity of participating in the consuming end.

The American Standard of Living, in terms of real earnings, peaked around 1974.  This coincides with the first Oil Shock, when America was held hostage by OPEC countries because of its support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War of the preceding year.  I doubt that it's coincidental that this was about the time my generation entered the Main Sequence of their careers.  It's always extremely difficult (as in impossible) to analyze a system as complex as American society in terms of rigorously controlled variables and equations.  Social science dabbles in such pursuits without any real hope of knowing anything; nevertheless, human curiosity always leads us toward a search for some understanding, however partial or notional, of the times we live in.  And whether we can really state as a series of provable propositions the factors that led America to its present state, we intuitively grasp that our condition must result from the aggregation, the Σ effect, of all the choices, lifestyles and belief systems of the people living in the society.  The "economy" is one powerful indicator of what's going on in a society; even Henry David Thoreau gave his longest chapter this very rubric in Walden.  And the economy flat-lined about the time my generation moved into positions of economic power.

That by itself is fascinating.  I recall writing earlier about Christopher Lasch's work of pop social psychology, The Culture of Narcissism, which attempted to get a handle on the "therapeutic society" he thought America had become: one less concerned about actually doing things than with the appearance of having done so and the maintenance of high self-esteem based on such images.  Lasch had his own agenda, which was driven by a curious mix of Freudian anti-capitalism, and I think he could have seen more clearly than he did if he hadn't been constrained by the Procrustean limitations of his a priori beliefs.  Still, I think he was on to something.

My generation might have taken its professed "idealism" and worked out a new way of having an economy; specifically, our generation was the one ideally placed to put the world on a course toward real environmental sustainability.  To place humans in a balanced ecological framework is the last frontier of existence and purpose.  It is the real solution to the Age of Anxiety, scarcity and the bad conscience that comes from our "Dominionist" arrogance.  All during the youth and early middle age of my generation, there were voices that wrote powerfully about what it would take: Wendell Berry, Barry Commoner, Stewart Brand, Amory Lovins, many others.  Sustainable agriculture, solar power, desalination of seawater, efficient habitats, mass transporation, localization of markets.

Instead, driven by the consumer choices of my generation, we moved in exactly the opposite direction.  The flat-lined Seventies were followed by the go-go Eighties.  You may recall the abbreviation "A&M" from that era, from such shows as "L.A. Law" and movies such as "Wall Street."  Acquisitions and Mergers.  The consolidation of economic power in fewer and fewer hands.  It was solid work for the vast phalanxes of lawyers produced by My Peeps.  Thus, the rise of holding companies, big box chain stores, franchise food, agribusiness, crap jobs and the "service" economy. By the time the Nineties rolled around, it seemed inevitable that all these bad choices would be followed up with the creation of the most popular form of transportation in American history: the SUV.

I sometimes wonder how a generation which prided itself in such an ostentatious way on the purity of its idealism could wind up in such a wrecked, wasteful, increasingly backward economy presided over by a cretin like George W. Bush.  The answer, I suspect, lies somewhere in the ruminations of Christopher Lasch. Maybe what went on is that my generation substituted talking about the ideal society for the actual work of producing the real thing.  No one went into politics where policy might have been shaped.  We made choices reminiscent of our parents' choices in houses, cars, modes of living, except everything had to be much bigger, grander and more wasteful.  The money we didn't earn we borrowed, in increasing amounts.  In this we were only following the dubious example set by the federal government, which decided that nothing needed to be paid for now if the money to finance it (wars, a big defense budget, anything) could be borrowed, increasingly from foreign governments in nations where savings were not a thing of the past, as here.

And now we've hit the wall. The automatic assumption is that this "downturn" is cyclical, as all previous recessions have been. Here we return to the Analogy Axiom, which instructs us that apparently analogous situations are useful only if the facts are essentially the same in both cases.  And the really bad news can be stated in rather stark terms: they're not.

My Peeps, An Intro

As the aleatory processes of the Universe would have it, I attended the University of California, Berkeley campus, during the years 1966 through 1970.  I sometimes free-ride on the modern cachet of this credential; that is to say, modern American kids who want to do likewise, those frenetic and obsessive grinds, look upon Berkeley as some sort of Holy Grail, and so my membership among its multitudinous alumnae is looked upon as something of a singular achievement.  In truth, I do little to dissuade them from this delusion.  Way back when, when California was a far less populous state and comprised mainly of Anglo-Saxon liberal arts majors, it really wasn't all that big a deal.  Berkeley was certainly nothing special as far as a place to get an undergraduate degree.  A professor actually interested in pedagogy was immediately marked by his peers as a scholastic mediocrity.  An award for excellence in teaching was virtually certain to get a prof knocked off the tenure track.

Still, because of the Vietnam War, Nixon, Kissinger, Cambodia, Reagan as governor of the state (you see, kids, bad times are not confined to the historical present), and Berkeley's well-deserved rep as a center of protest, the extramural aspects of being there then were definitely memorable. It was a wild scene, man, I'll grant you that.  The immediacy of an unpopular, scary, bloody war in which you might be compelled to fight gave everything a vivid realness - these weren't abstract ideas, like whether we ought to remake the Middle East along the lines of Neocon wet dreams.

Everyone who graduated from high school around 1966 is now either older than sixty or pushing up against that Rubicon. So it's fair to say that the past 40+ years have actually been The Generation of Flower Children Ascendant.  Whatever's gone on has been the handiwork of that generation's exercise of control. To be intellectually honest, we have to count George W. Bush among our number, but I consider him an outlier in the cohort. He was just sort of a weird anomaly from a half-wit dynasty.  Far more typical of our generation was Bill Clinton, a man who rose high above stupidity only to be brought down by cupidity.

Clinton, in fact, is something of a perfect avatar for the Sixties generation.  Possessed of an IQ two or three standard deviations above the population mean, and a big conceptual thinker, he couldn't really think of anything to do with the power he acquired other than to use it to satisfy his prodigious personal appetites. When he left office, he devoted himself to a feverish capitalization on his celebrity.  When it was revealed he had made over $100 million since leaving office, no one bothered to compare his singularity of true purpose (greed) with his idealistic noises.  It wasn't even worth talking about, and it was nothing that would even occur to those of us in his generation.

Paradoxically, I think the generation of which I was a part is one of the least idealistic generations in American history.  I'm mindful always of the blind-men-and-the-elephant parable (one of the more lapidary of our folk tales), and the trap it implies, but when I think back on everyone I knew in those Berkeley days, the thing that strikes me is that no one I knew (and I include myself, of course) did much other than slump down into the Suburban Project that the Clusterf**k Man rails about on the linked site to your right.  Despite all the noises that we made about "materialism" and America's hoggish overuse of energy, its disproportionate contribution to environmental damage, it wasn't as if we ever let that get in the way of our own pursuit of comfort, American Style.  We simply built on the modest prosperity of our parents' generation to provide ourselves with a more fully elaborated form of affluence.

The older I get, the more I believe that the one core truth reached by Karl Marx is in his Manifesto was his insistence that "material" conditions in a society are formative of consciousness. There was no "trial by fire" of my generation, no privation, no Great Depression, no Good War.  There was a war to avoid (and our national leaders, by and large, all avoided it), and the rest of life was devoted to acquisition, pleasure, indulgence. 

As I sort of said in the last number, one of the reasons I think the plight of the Palestinians has become such a hot cause celebre for modern Liberals is that outgunned brown people provide a kind of Revolutionary Fantasy Camp for our "idealistic compassion," which is always looking for someplace to alight.  In point of fact, Hamas is dedicated to the principle that a Jewish state cannot exist in the heart of the Muslim Arab world.  This is the announced policy of its leader, and it is the (non-idealistic) reality that Israel deals with.  It is difficult for Americans to relate to the urgency of such a situation because the truth of the matter is that we have no similar existential enemies.  We think that Israel should counter-attack a rain of missiles on towns bordering Gaza by writing blogs and letters to the editor, or by arguing vociferously at dinner parties, the way we Americans do.  Or even through street demonstrations, which we consider really, really radical.

On the Berkeley campus now one is much more apt to find a pro-Palestinian demonstration than any expression of support for Israel.  Back in the day, we all walked around with our hearts in our mouths waiting for the latest news of the Six Day War, wondering whether Israel would survive.  Such are the winds of change.  Nothing much really changed in the United States to account for the difference in opinion.  We remained the same fickle intellectual dilettantes, with no true skin in the game, that we had always been.  Our life's work has been the avoidance of pain and want and the maximizing of pleasure and wealth; yet paradoxically this vocation has brought us to the edge of the economic abyss.  I think, in the effort to make life easy, we have guaranteed that it's going to be very, very hard.  I kind of shudder to think how my generation will deal with true hardship.

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal.

Phil Ochs, "Love Me I'm A Liberal"