The Purely Preposterous Plight of the Present

“Preposterous” is a satisfying word. It of course comes from the Latin “prae,” meaning “before,” and “posterus,” meaning “later” or “next.” In other words, it means “putting first what should come later” or, literally, “disordered” (think: the cart before the horse).

When the New Testament says, “So the last shall be first, and the first last,” it is making a statement that is, in its original, literal sense, preposterous. The New Testament Jesus issued quite a few preposterous propositions. Even for us nonbelievers, it is one of his charms.

Other religions, too, seem to find enlightenment in the preposterous. Zen koans are often preposterous. Here is a favorite of mine:

A monk asked Tozan when he was weighing some flax, "What is Buddha?"

Tozan said: "This flax weighs three pounds."

That’s the whole koan. The (apparent?) non sequitur here is delightful. In fact, “non sequitur,” which means “does not follow,” is a nice variation on the idea of the “posterus” not properly following the “prae.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “preposterous” first appeared in English in 1533, in a translation of a work by the Dutch Renaissance theologian Erasmus (portrait below), who wrote, “Is not thy relygyon preposterous & out of ordre?”

Since Erasmus, the word “preposterous” has come to have a more general meaning: irrational, absurd, or contrary to common sense.

Ours is a preposterous time in history. Well, to be accurate, that could be said about any time in history. In any case, one finds oneself today shouting at the tv set, about every three minutes during the evening news, “Is not thy ___________________ preposterous and out of order?!” You can fill in the blank with your favorite arena of preposterousness: politics, religion, economic theory, the NCAA bowl system. . . .

Here, for example, are some of the current events that have recently had me yelling “Preposterous!” at the television:

• Conservatives’ claiming that to save the poor and middle class, the rich should be allowed to keep more money.
• Liberals' claiming that the first black president, who championed the most extensive health-care reform in history, who made Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State, and whose middle name is Hussein, for heaven's sake, is too Republican.
• The State Department’s telling its workers—even those who haven’t even yet applied for jobs there—that they, whose mission and careers are being most affected by the classified cables recently released by WikiLeaks, must not read them, even though everyone else in the world can.
• The Chinese government’s claiming that the Nobel Peace Prize is a bad thing.
• Marine generals’ claiming that putting an end to “Don’t ask, don’t tell” will hurt recruiting efforts and damage the morale of marines who have proven themselves willing to sacrifice everything (but not their homophobia?) to defend their country.
• Some people’s claiming that my living with a woman without being married to her, or that my gay friend being allowed to marry his boyfriend, somehow endangers their heterosexual marriage.
• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s claiming that adding consumer protections, so that people actually know what they are buying, will hurt business.

I could go on. Please add your own favorite preposterousness in a comment box below.

The Poetry of Economics

This blog site has promised you occasional bad poetry. There isn't a lot of poetry about economics, probably for good reason. I have written two poems on the subject. In honor of the current dustup in Washington about tax cuts and the deficit, here you go:

                                                        Economics

The wealth of the world

wants to flow downhill.

Dammed in high places,

it puddles into great pools

of things—ponds of

necklaces, reservoirs

of the big-engined

and the indigo,

manmade lakes

of fashionable

commodities.

But wealth beats hard

against the dams,

wears them away,

looks for cracks in

the great masses of concrete.

Gravity favors the poor.

 The Bottom Line

 

“Enough,” he said, “is enough.”

And all the receipts fell from the trees

And a billion billion bills came due

And what we wore grew dingy on our knees

And our buttons dropped to the floor

Among the toys

Among the cracked temporary necessities

Among the miserably high-priced shoes—

And yes, stupidly, the socks—

And the shocking electronic boxes of lights

And the noise

And the music music music that was almost noise.

And he didn’t need to say it again

But he did: “Enough!

It’s enough.”

And he tore out his tubes

Because

From mountains of things

To oceans of things

To prairies of anything,

Nothing grew—it only

Accumulated.

And your hands

Were in my family’s pockets

Taking more than our dirty little change

(But what was that?),

Leaving leafless our accounts

And our few hours empty

Of anything approaching an eleemosynary twinkle.

And so our smiles, like yours, became just teeth,

And we all bit:

On the red want,

On the white wish,

And on the wild blue greed.

 

Pass the Buck: A Cure for the Federal Budget Blues

What follows is a vision of how Washington may someday handle the federal budget:

      It is April 15, 2020, a new federal holiday known as "Budget Day." In Grand Maw, Wisconsin, one Warren D. Peoria, having enjoyed an extra-long night's sleep and breakfasted to surfeit, retires to the den to prepare his income taxes. He settles in front of his 1.105 petaflop Apple iSheet XVI ("It's as easy as Apple pi!" said the ad), and there prepares to join in the greatest exercise in participatory democracy the world has ever seen.

     After plugging in the Form 1040 program, Peoria proceeds to punch, fiddle, fuss, shuffle, hedge, stretch, guess, and finagle his way through the exemptions, deductions, extensions, and pretensions, line by line and lie by lie, just as he has always done on April 15. Twenty seconds after he's finished, the computer blinks out a figure: $22,750. This is his tax bill.

     So far, so good, thinks Peoria. So far, no different from the year before this or the year before that. But this year is different. This year there's one more step:

    Peoria punches in a new program labeled "Pers-String Budget, Mr. Warren D. and Mrs. Mauve M. Peoria, SSN 927-306-0001 . . . etc." Warren Peoria is about to tell the United States Government how to spend his money.

     Consulting a handwritten sheet prepared after discussions with Mauve, Mr. Peoria punches in the following:  

NATIONAL DEFENSE .....................................$3,000

Unmanned drones, military............................. $300

(Peoria has a special fondness for drones)

POTHOLE REPAIR, U.S. HIGHWAYS, 
WISCONSIN..................................................$1,200

Road repair and Construction 
(U.S., general).................................................$250

FOREIGN AID, GENERAL...............................$1,200

Aid to Italy .....................................................$500

(Peoria's late father, Wingo, was a Sicilian immigrant)

Microsoft bailout ............................................$500

("As Microsoft goes. . . " thinks Peoria.)

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, 
GENERAL......................................................$2,400

(Cultural allocations are Mauve's department)

Grants to poets...............................................$250

Grants to sculptors.........................................$240

Grants to painters.......................................... $100

Grant to Ann Patchett (novelist).....................$500

("Ann who?" wonders Warren.)

Grants to baby-boom bloggers .......................$600

Aid to the sick, hungry, and unemployed.........$998.62

     And so on . . . until Peoria has accounted for all 22,750 of his little green orphans.

     That done, he connects to the federal Budget Day computer (housed in an erstwhile nuclear bunker in West Virginia), punches an icon on his iSheet, and, before the 9:00 p.m. CDT deadline, transmits his tax total and his Pers-String (for "Personalized, Strings Attached") budget to the federal government, which then must obey his wishes, to the dime.

      At 10:00 p.m. CDT, Peoria and Mauve repair to their holographic tv, which announces with a fanfare of synthesizers: "MSNBC FOX PRESENTS * * * * BUDGET DAY 2020 * * * * with Budget Day anchor Rachel Maddow in New York and her partner Bristol Palin in Los Angeles. . . ." By midnight, the numbers will be in. The United States will have its next budget. The people will have spoken. And not once will the politicians--happy, happy politicians!--have had to dirty their hands, not to mention their records, with the whole business.

     It is a system simple, irresistible, and inevitable.

     Sooner or later--who knows, maybe in 2012--the election year attrition rate among congressional incumbents will reach, say, 85%. That may be a good thing for the rest of us, but the pinstripe crowd in Washington will sulk. And while some congressmen may be shady, they're not dim: they know that

what does them in, year after year, is the budget. How they have writhed at the stake of fiscal responsibility, especially lately. True, the recent tax-cut and deficit-spending pyrotechnics on Capitol Hill have, like an auto-da-fe, been fun to watch, but the pols don't seem to enjoy them the way the rest of us do. Someday they're going to think of a way out, and the way out is simple: Pass the buck.

     Soon, thanks to the digital revolution, expediency will marry technology, and the Washington pols will say to Warren and Mauve Peoria, "Okay, you want to complain? Then you decide how you want your taxes spent." Warren and Mauve will leap at the chance. The politicians will heave a vast, bipartisan sigh of relief.

     It will work as described above. The amount the IRS demands will initially be determined by the last balanced budget (which occurred sometime before the Barbary Wars) plus a percentage based on inflation since then. And initially, the Peorias will not be allowed to spend their taxes on themselves, their family, or corporations in which they have an investment. Initially, kickbacks ("You put me in your taxes, and I'll give you most of it back") will be outlawed. Initially. But sooner or later, the impossibility of enforcing the new tax laws will become clear, as it has for the old. The legislators will finally say, "Whatever. Go ahead and give your taxes back to yourselves. We wash our hands of it." Most Americans will continue to pay taxes, if only to have someone protect their shores and fix their potholes.

     The consequences will be wonderful. The Pentagon will have to lobby directly to the people, launching huge ad campaigns, with an ageless Johnny Depp doing their tv pitches. (Madison Avenue will grow rich beyond its own most extravagant promises.) An obscure poet named Merriwether Edwards, from Southwest Virginia, will take out a full-page ad on the New York Times website with a sample of his work and a request that each taxpayer allot him $1 to fund his calling. He will get $1.43 million, far less than the woman from Chicago who, in a National Enquirer ad, promises to build a theme park called Oprah World. Poor people will starve one year, thrive the next, according to the whim of national largesse; they will now and then get restless. A congressman, once elected, will have a lifetime job, his campaigns freed from budget issues. Other federal employees will live with their bags packed. It will be more exciting than the stock market, with more pulling, polling, and puling than a presidential race.

     This is what Americans want. It is what they'll end up with. Best of all, it will be what they deserve.

[Ed's note: An amazingly prescient version of this vision first appeared in Memphis magazine in October, 1982.)

Read the President's Press Conference Transcript

Again, I plead with my fellow ultra-liberals--especially those who have been quick to condemn Obama for "caving" to the Republicans on the Bush tax cuts--either to watch the President's press conference or read the transcript. If you don't, you won't have a fully informed opinion on these matters. In the press conference, you'll see a man who speaks for me--and, I think, for all of us who care about the unemployed, the underemployed, the economically disadvantaged and exploited. He has not given up. He is not afraid to call out the Republicans. He is still that rarest of politicians: smart, articulate, persuasive, frank, and strong of mind and principle. Please don't give up on him. Interesting to note that according to the Pew Research polls, Obama has more Democratic support than Bill Clinton had after the 1994 midterm elections and more of his own party's support than Reagan had in 1982. But the Pew poll was taken before the November elections and before the tax-cut compromise. It will be interesting to see what the next poll says, and whether Obama has indeed lost the support of his left-wing base. I hope not.

To My Progressive Friends: End the Obama-Bashing, Please

Uh, oh. My progressive friends--I'm talking about my personal friends--are starting to bail on Obama because he compromised on the Bush tax cuts. I read their comments on Facebook; I hear them in the halls. It's not just criticism; it's outright insurrection. Several have mentioned supporting Hillary in a primary battle.

But, my progressive friends, are you really ready to see Obama out the door? Do you think a primary challenge from the left would help the Dems win in 2012 and further their agenda in the long run? If not, are you willing to lay off the man? Or do you just want him to abdicate?

Here's another way of looking at Obama's compromise (or "surrender," if you insist) on the Bush tax cuts:

He almost certainly wasn't going to "win" a game of chicken anyway, given the divided, cowardly Dems in the Senate. As several analysts have pointed out, if the Democrats had really wanted to end the tax cuts, they would have campaigned on the issue before the November election; instead, they looked at the polls and, cowards all (save the admirable Russ Feingold and a handful of others), slinked about in silence on the issue. The Democrats in the Senate were never going to give the President the support he needed to stand up to a vicious, monolithic, monomaniacal GOP.

But here's the bright side: Now the Democrats can run loudly on the issue in 2012; that is, they can attack the GOP's "donate to a millionaire" platform then, when the millionaire cuts* are about to expire again and the electorate is actually paying attention. If the President had pressed the issue now, no one except us political fanatics would have been listening, and it would have seemed as if he were ignoring the results of the recent election. I know, I know, some of you will say that it will be too late in 2012-- that Obama, and the other establishment Dems, will have lost their base for good by then. Perhaps you're right. That's up to you, my progressive friends.

Bottom line for me today: The long-term unemployed will now get their checks without the Dems having to gut the EPA or the IRS or the school lunch program. That's not the win I wanted, but it's a realistic result I'm willing to accept.


*"Millionaire cuts" sounds like a menu choice. Perhaps the Dems should call them what they are: "filet mignon for the rich."

My $20 Haiku Project

This month, I am the "Featured Artist" on the literary website ConnotationPress.com. Over a many-year period, I wrote haiku on the back of $20 bills and then spent them. I am offering $1,000 to anyone who returns one of those $20 bills to me. This is a kind of performance art. Here's a link to the essay I wrote about this project. To read the poems, you must click "full screen" at the end of the essay.
http://www.connotationpress.com/featured-artist/december-2010/647-ed-weathers-20-haiku-project-feature-artist-of-the-month

The Politics of a Flame-Thrower

I might as well let you readers know right up front what my politics are, so that, if I'm likely to make you angry, you can stop reading now and find other blogs that you'll be more likely to approve of. I don't care to make people angry; I'd rather you went off and enjoyed a peaceful nap. But I am often angry myself--at the cynical politicians, at the ignorant electorate, at the kneejerk pundits.

Perhaps I can best sum up my politics this way: I stand to the left of Barack Obama, to the left of Hillary Clinton, usually even to the left of Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, Barney Frank, and Bernie Sanders. If you don't know who the last four people are, you need to brush up on your current events. More on some of my positions in a bit.

I have little respect for conservative politicians; they have, forever, voted to keep the powerful powerful and the rich rich, and to help the powerful and the rich exploit the weak and the poor. Over the last century, conservatives have voted against right-to-unionize laws, against Social Security, against Medicare, against the Civil Rights Act, against the Environmental Protection Act, against occupational-safety laws, against consumer protection laws, against the American Disabilities Act, and against bank regulation. As my favorite economist, Paul Krugman, says, today's conservatives would like nothing better than to return to the Gilded Age, before unions, before the income tax, to the days of scrip and the company store. If you don't know what scrip and the company store are, you need to brush up on your history. (I do have some disagreements with Krugman about President Obama, whom I like a lot. More on that in future posts.)

So I don't care for conservatives, except for George Will and David Brooks, whom I like. I also liked William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater, both honorable men. I would enjoy having dinner with Will, Brooks, or Buckley. On the other hand, I would be tempted to spit in John Boehner's food and knock Jim DeMint's wine in his lap. I think the Tea Party is made up of ignorant shlubs being manipulated by behind-the-scenes millionaires like the Koch brothers.

Here are just three of the things I believe that put me on the burning left edge of left-wing opinion:

• that all gods, capitalized or otherwise, should be taken off our money and that our children should not be pressured to say a little nazi-like loyalty oath each morning in public schools--especially one that contains the words "under God."
• that the country would be better off with a constitutional amendment mandating a maximum wage: i.e., no one in the country would be allowed to make more than 100 times more money than a minimum-wage worker who works a 40-hour week. If a minimum-wage worker earns $15,000 per year, no one--not the bankers with their bonuses, not Bill Gates (whom I like)--would be permitted to earn more than $1.5 million. Watch how fast the minimum wage would go up if that were enacted!
• that no one in a courtroom should ever be required to stand when a judge enters; this is an infuriating vestige of European and British class rule, when commoners had to kneel (or stand) before lords and kings. The judge may represent the judicial system, but the defendant represents the public; as a "public servant," the judge, if anything, should be required to stand when the defendant and the spectators enter the courtroom.

Those are three of my more, shall we way, entertaining political positions. Having listed them, let me say that I have no hopes of them ever being made law in my lifetime. I am, after all, a realist.

Which is why I still like Barack Obama, whereas many of my left-wing friends have abandoned him. While he has not always pursued policies that I think would be best (national health care, withdrawal from Afghanistan, a rise in the tax rates of everyone who owns two tv sets), I think he has done the best he can, given that he's dealing with a cynical, monolithic Republican Party, a cowardly Democratic Party, anachronistic Senate rules, and an ignorant electorate. Oh, yes, I'm also a pointy-headed Ivy League elitist.