and another thing . . .

If I hear one more person refer to marriage as an institution, I think I'll throw up.

This marriage I'm in is not an institution; it's a relationship.

Anyone who's paying attention knows institutions are waning while relationships are rising. I don't think we can't have it both ways.

beyond ridiculous

Ann Coulter was absolutely lost in the woods on the Today Show this morning. It is disheartening to know that this person has ever been taken seriously. Find the video where you can — it's at Salon's VideoDog today and I imagine it will be everywhere tomorrow.

Someone on her side should try to wise Ms. Coulter up. Or not.

come November

It is painful to look at your father and realize the old man should not be allowed to manage his own money anymore. This is the discovery the country has made about the party in power. They are inept. The checkbook needs to be taken away. They will rant, they will screech, they will wave their canes at you and call you all sorts of names, but you have to do what you have to do.
— Garrison Keillor, Salon, 06.06.06

strange bedfellows

This is the proposed copy for a full page ad in the New York Times. View the pdf here. Join MoveOn and/or the Christian Coalition in calling on Congress to preserve Internet Neutrality. Or don't. But don't complain after the fact.

a day in the life

My friend Jay texted to say he expected I would post on immigration and the May 1 boycott this morning. Instead, I posted on the May 1, 2003 declaration of the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

On that day 139 Americans and an undisclosed number of Iraqis were dead in that conflict. As of May 1, 2006, 2,401 Americans and a still undisclosed number of Iraqis are dead in the fighting.

This morning I texted Jay to say I didn't know what I wanted to say about the boycott...not yet.

As the day ended, I had a better idea, posted at InsideWork. It's not everything...but it's something.

01 May

...my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. (Applause.) And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

— United States President George W. Bush, May 01, 2003

which part don't they understand?

[As the US Congress returns to work this week, i offer this, posted April 11 at InsideWork.net. This is a good week to be in touch with our US Representatives and Senators, all of whom have easily accessible email addresses at senate.gov and house.gov]

Let's acknowledge that the U.S. immigration dilemma is complicated and multi-layered. And loud. The din of voices speaking — even shouting — about immigration emanates from every ideology and economic viewpoint. One of the most interesting takes we've heard lately, by the way, is from Tobin Smith at ChangeWave.

The debate so far, though overly emotional at many points, is certainly broad on the macroeconomic side. But there's something on the microeconomic side that none of us at InsideWork has heard anyone talk about. So, without trying to address everything about everything, we want to hold a magnifying glass over this one thing.

Where I live, we're in the final days of a special congressional election to fill the seat vacated when Duke Cunningham pled guilty to accepting bribes from defense contractors. One of the candidates is asking the rhetorical question, "Which part of illegal don't they understand? We need to tell the people who are here illegally to go back home and get in line..."

With due respect for the technical accuracy of his argument, here's what I think he doesn't understand: I believe most of the people working the meanest jobs in this country without the benefit of legal status have no intention of immigrating to the U.S.

They are in the United States to make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible and go home. The handful of undocumented working poor people I've spent much time with — almost every one of them — possess a strong sense of oikos. It's Greek. Oikos is a social contract all-but-forgotten in mainstream North American cultures — but not in the rest of the Americas from which most of the workers come. Oikos is more than an extended family; it's a social economy in which everyone in an extended household looks out for everyone else. At its worst, that turns clannish and insular and bad behavior multiplies.

At it's best, being part of such a communion means doing whatever it takes to support the household — including dangerous border-crossing to find work if things get too bad at home.

What we refer to these days as Christian faith first spread in a world primarily organized by the economy of the oikos. That sentence, in fact, is redundant since oikos is the root word from which we get economics (and ecology by the way). For many —probably most — North American Christians, the notion of the oikos is as dead as the prohibition against touching pigs. What can that possibly have to do with life in this time and place?

Not to worry: what you do with bacon in the privacy of your own home is of little interest to us. But oikos as a core value in human interactions is another thing entirely, about which we have much to say. The shift in modern Christian faith from organic households to corporate structures is almost certainly a mistake, if not a hijacking. It denatures the relational ecology where people know how each other is doing because they live and work in proximity with each other. One unfortunate byproduct of that shift is the disconnect that makes way for extreme poverty:

There is a class of people for whom God is especially concerned. They are the poor and needy. These need to be distinguished from the foolish poor who are impoverished as a result of their senselessness and the wrong moral choices they make.

The truly needy are impoverished because of calamity, injustice, oppression or inheriting the indebtedness of their families. God told Israel in the Book of Leviticus that “you shall have no poor among you.” He made extensive provisions to enable the restoration of the poor to their full and productive stature as those carrying the image of God so that they can fruitfully execute the purposes of God. Again, note that God deals with people, the poor and needy, and not abstractions such as “poverty and welfare.”

Many of the causes, as well as the solutions, of poverty centered around the household. There were no “employers” that provided “jobs.” To be a part of an oikos or household meant to have access to livelihood. Compassion and justice meant creating access back to the resources that would enable a person to accomplish God’s purposes.

— More Than Money, The Scriptural Roots of Commerce, InsideWork, page 80

The people I'm concerned about are not illegal immigrants; if you insist on employing that adjective, they are illegal workers doing what it takes to assure the survival of their oikos. They are always thinking of the people and place they love — always thinking of home.

What part of that do people not understand?

step on a crack...

This from Garrison Keillor's weekly column at Salon (no kidding, I'm really glad I scraped together thirty bucks for a premium subscription):

In time, one wearies of foolishness, but not soon enough. I look at crowded bars on Saturday night as a form of hell. I see the high school girls getting plastered at the prom and vomiting their little hearts out in the parking lot and think, "No more for me, thank you very much." But there is always some fresh foolishness to try.

Here in the Midwest, we're brought up to act older and to be solemn little children, and serious young people. Many of us don't indulge in extravagances (vacations, impractical cars, haircuts that cost more than $10) until our late 30s and early 40s. Having been middle-aged for most of the first half of our life, we start thinking about maybe sowing some of the wild oats we've kept in the granary. Of course, it's hard to be wholly foolish knowing as much Scripture as we do, but sometimes in a particularly warm spring, we achieve a breakthrough and trade in the van on a red MG convertible, have our hair bleached and our foreheads Botoxed, take dancing lessons, buy the powder-blue tuxedo, look at beachfront property on Antigua, and switch from beer to Campari. Our friends are embarrassed for us. We disappear for six months and return, chastened, and take a back pew in church.

The Christian religion, let me point out, is no guarantee against foolishness. In the church that I go to, which is one of those old-fashioned churches where we sing out of hymnals, not off PowerPoint screens, and the minister doesn't have much hair and we don't hold our arms up in the air (we could but it would make it harder to sing from the hymnal), people seem to have about as many problems as they have over at First Atheist. We set out to love our neighbor and the next thing we're running off with her in the red MG.

I have found the adage "Step on a crack and break your mother's back" very useful as a guide in life. It has helped generations of kids imagine that acts have consequences beyond what we can imagine. Without meaning to, you might cause the old lady to suddenly fall to the floor, writhing in pain. Who knows how it happens? It just does. So if you stay off the pavement and walk only on grass or bare dirt, you are likely to stay out of trouble. Try it for 30 days and see if I'm not right.

on this we agree

I don't share much philosophical ground with the one Garrison Keillor refers to as the Current Occupant. But, thought we may niggle about the details, I agree whole-heartedly with his call for guest-worker status for willing aliens.

I think there are several good reasons for this, but let's just follow Malcolm Gladwell in cutting to the bottom line:

...I also think it's time that business stood up and joined the immigration debate. I think it has been--with the exception of some high-tech firms--shamefully silent on this, which should be one of its top competitiveness issues. Congress should not be shutting down the borders at a time when we're 10 or 15 years away from some very serious workplace shortages, skilled-labor shortages. We've shut the spigot off, and we're keeping out the very people who would drive our economy 10 years out when our workforce retires en masse.

We talk about these as equity issues, as cost issues, as ideological issues, but more than anything else, they're about competitiveness.

civil war

"Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by the latter's ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain." (Errol A. Henderson and J. David Singer, "Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 3, May 2000.)

the long tail in action

Perhaps you're familiar with The Long Tail, Chris Anderson's treatise on why the new economy really is new.

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dream or nightmare

MoveOn.org circulated an email today that frames our choices this Fall about as clearly as I've seen.

"Taking just the House of Representatives, here is a small slice of who will be leading:

Nancy Pelosi—a progressive—becomes Speaker of the House of Representatives.

John Murtha—a veteran and anti-war champion—would become chair of the House subcommittee on defense appropriations. He would be in charge of the budget for the war in Iraq.

John Conyers—who forced a national debate on the Downing Street Memos—would be chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Henry Waxman would be chairman of the Government Reform committee—he has a bulls-eye on war profiteers like Halliburton.

Barney Frank—who has led efforts to rein in out-of-control CEO pay—would be in charge of the Financial Services Committee.

David Obey—who led opposition to the Republican budget—would be chair of the House Appropriations committee—protecting Medicaid, food stamps, veteran's benefits, student loans and more.

Charles Rangel—who predicted the Medicare debacle—would be chair of the House Ways and Means committee—protecting Social Security.

George Miller—a big advocate for working people—would be chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and could bring a vote to raise the minimum wage.

"Put aside for a minute any disappointment you might have in the Democrats overall—these leaders are what we'll get if we win in November. They are champions on issues we all care about."

I agree. I'm disheartened by what's happening (and what's not happening) in the Democratic National Committee, but these eight Members of Congress have gained my political trust. If a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives puts these people in leadership, let's get on with it.

Liberals and Progressives still have to figure out what to do about taking the White House in 2009. In the meantime, what we do this year can rein-in the current White House occupant in 2007 and 2008. When I consider the damage Mr. Bush has done, I shudder to think American's might let him go unchallenged in the final 24 months of his government.