Back to the Republic of Equity

Where I was when things derailed.

For centuries there was a huge societal bias against debt. Good Christians were not allowed to be moneylenders. Debtors went to prison, not Chapter 7. The attitude seems punitive, archaic, vaguely antisemitic.

But maybe there was some ancient truth at play, one we could rediscover and reapply.

Debt means you use property you don't own. You borrow land, or a lawnmower, or most frequently - money. And you take this property you don't own and you use it now, because otherwise you'd have to wait and use it later (if you acquire it at all). Otherwise, and in the meantime, you have to go without.

The alternative, the going without, interests me. Many times I've found not having things meant finding substitutes that turned out just fine. When you go somewhere where's no Internet, no power, no telephone: you go to candles, and reading by lamplight, and talking.

What would happen if all the non-emergency debt were liquidated? Would we go to candles and conversation around campfires? I don't think so. But we might go to no 3-D TV, no 5000 square-foot houses, no $200 lunches.

That may be nothing to fear. But it also could be more painful than that, much more, what we really do fear, and so we kick the can down the road.

Coincidence

For some reason, today I am settling for a client the biggest insurance claim of my career, on Monday we close one of the biggest divestitures of my career, and on Tuesday Valerie the Westie and I drive East, starting the longest vacation I have taken in 30 years.

What else can I say but

God is great.

Beetles

At mid-afternoon it's 95 degrees here in St. Louis, muggy, dreadful. The peak of the annual Japanese Beetle invasion. Every morning before the heat is up, while they are still groggy, I parade the grounds with a cup of gasoline, sweeping the little buggers in. Better for the birds than spraying them with poison, but it's major Zen activity. Beetle by beetle. Except that many are couples coupling and there are even a few three-ways.

Their favorite victims, way more than the roses, are the leaves of a big pussy willow and a Harry Lauder's Walking Stick. Which is nice of them, in a way - the best thing about the pussy willow is the catkins in the spring and the best thing about the HLWS is its branches in the winter. Still, the leaves are like catnip - or sushi? - to the little bronze and green samurai, and I drown them in BP's finest by the dozen.

Sliding Left?

I've always been a libertarian, small "l", for domestic things like drugs and incarceration, but otherwise pretty firmly in the hawkish/curmudgeon/South Park conservative camp. Until lately - maybe it's been my close encounter with the hereafter, but for some reason I seem to be more sympathetic to some leftie stuff. Today's example: maybe we should get out of Afghanistan.

I have to say I am mystified by Obama's designation of this as a war of necessity. Maybe his statement is just cant - he has to say it, in order to support his I'm-Not-George-W meme. (We know! We know!) Maybe he believes it; I don't. In fact I can make an argument that the war in Iraq was more necessary than one in Afghanistan. But that whole choice-necessity thing is facile, and by now pretty tedious.

I think what we are trying to do is neutralize people who want to, and have a realistic chance of, killing us (again) on a massive scale. 9/11 must never happen again. I happen to think we've done a reasonably good job of keeping it from happening again, and with our improved intelligence and technologies - especially our ability to kill individual enemies remotely - I think we will continue get better at it.

Killing Taliban in Afghanistan, on the other hand, because they are Taliban, is probably a fine thing to do. Especially for the women and children of Afghanistan. I just can't see how it has a direct bearing, however, on how we neutralize our real enemy or prevent another 9/11. So, if this is right, the war doesn't fit the objective very well, and it certainly doesn't justify the cost and time of a successful prosecution.

I would focus on how to climb down from this war and make a graceful exit. Just as we can tolerate no new 9/11, we cannot ever be in a position of evacuating our embassy on short notice and leaving supporters behind to be slaughtered, as we did in Saigon in 1975. Avoidance of that should be the objective in Afghanistan.

How? We find a reason to declare Al-Qaeda crushed and declare victory. How that? Well, finally killing Bin Laden or finding his remains would be nice. And if not that, I bet there is something else the Pashtuns and/or the Pakis could serve up if they were offered the right mixture of money and guns (in their hands, at their heads, or both). Whatever it is, we follow it up with a nice parade through Kabul, us and our allies, and we're gone. With visas and a great evacuation plan for our local friends, who I'm sure will make fine Americans.

So am I now a leftie? Who knows. Maybe just a guy who is very unwilling to see young people die except for a very, very good reason.

Stepping Around

So how do you step from a parochial blog about a guy with cancer to what it used to be - stuff I was interested in, and didn't care who read it. I guess you can go in baby steps - write about other people's medical issues - health care - or doctors as an endangered profession. Or about life changes, and aging, and backwards aging - or the current distinctions between generations that seem so slight compared to the generational gap that was the crucible of the '60's...

Nah.

I'd rather go off the road entirely.

Brooks has a column today that circles around what I have long thought was the most important political issue out there. I used to put it as a thought problem in Cold War terms: what if the Soviet system worked better than ours, economically. Would we opt for that, or would we accept a lesser standard of living in order to keep our personal freedom?

The Brooks piece puts it in the 21st century context because the question is fast becoming non-hypothetical. That is, there is now a working, competing model of capitalism, especially in China - what he calls state capitalism - which may well seem more attractive to some populations than ours.

The state version may be more attractive because it makes people more personally secure, or because it is more nationalistic. It may be more collective, or cooperative, or it may require more sublimation of personal desire to the greater good. But whatever its appeal to these other ideals (if that's what they are), the rubber really meets the road if the system wins economically. If it makes people richer faster.

An older version of this was the worry about democracy, and how it could last. Lots of Greeks wondered about democracy, and posited arguments why it was bound to fail. Like the idea that the demos would eventually take over the fisc and drive out the wealth-creators, leading to dictatorship. Variations on that.

And state capitalism certainly isn't new - I had friends at Princeton who thought that state-sponsored and -guided capitalism, plus antisemitism, was fascism. And therefore, the logic ran, remove the antisemitism and you might have an interesting system.

Nontheless the debate seems new, after the triumph of the American Century and the notions that democracy is good, peace is good, free enterprise is OK because it enables democracy, and even (the neoconservative premise that few still buy) democracy makes the world more peaceful. I'm still kind of stuck there. But my guess is that this state capitalism idea will be re-branded in America, trotted before us and championed by some element of the elite. And freedom will come to seem old-fashioned and - as Jon Stewart once said to Rolling Stone - overrated.

Back to the Desktop

I took a brief vacation from this enterprise, in part because I wanted to think of another approach to this stage of events. Last time, I said sayonara cancer but the bastard snuck back. I'm now tempted to say sayonara again - especially since I think the literal translation is something like, "if it be thus." Nicely ambiguous. None of the rest of the immediate candidates works - not good-bye, not farewell, not adios, and certainly not au revoir.

And hello... what. Again, lots of brave stuff last time, some of it now sounding hollow. Hello rest of my life, of course. But we all can (and probably should) say that every morning.

A few things have, in any event, changed.

• The music bands are disbanded. I am trying to work out my own style of piano, something St. Louis - a mix of New Orleans and ragtime, if I can. And if there is any way I can get the first phases of practicing the accordion behind me, it's theoretically perfect - a minstrel.
  
• I'm going to church, of all things, a relatively-high Episcopal place with the finest music you can imagine. A great place, I find, for my tribal connections. I went to an Episcopal church as I grew up, it was the place of my first paying job, and I went to an Episcopalian boarding school. I remember Mom and Dad so clearly while in the pew - ancestor worship, of a kind. So what if I'm an agnostic. If God makes any sense, God made me an agnostic. If God wants me to change, and if God makes any sense, God will. Inshallah, as we used to hear all the time in Saudi Arabia, with a shrug, an Arab version of whatever.
• And of course there's this new wardrobe. Only it's not really new. It's stuff I had in the basement, much from long ago. A double-breasted suit last night that I bought when we lived in London in 1985. Wait 'til I strap on my linen suit. Woo-woo.

So there's cause for celebration, and I look for ways. Today I'm thinking about splashing on some Obsession for Men, and going to the zoo.

Whistler

Been through the end of the process, the bad trough, but coming back up.

Reminding me of an episode from a much longer story:

It was the early '80's, I had gone home to Cleveland because my father had had a stroke. At the time he was separated but had a girlfriend (not the reason for the separation.) When I arrived at the hospital Dad was flat on his back, with the doctor, me, my stepmother, and the girlfriend standing around the bed. Three of the four at bedside were obviously wondering what their role in this drama was going to be.

Dad was down and aphasic, which means he couldn't talk. Over the many months that followed he never did regain his ability to speak in whole sentences, but it became clear that the brains were still there. I think he wanted us to know this right away - he certainly could see that there was a certain amount of, ah, tension among the onlookers, and he certainly hoped for support. He was bright-eyed and trying to buck us up but without words - this most verbal of men - he was struggling.

So he broke into a whistle. Not aimless - a tune - with his eyes moving to each of us to see if it connected. I'm OK, I'm here, don't give up. I thought I understood, and said yeah Dad, that's good.

As the months went by and the women bailed out, he continued to try to use music to communicate. He could sing better than he could talk. Once, as I explained again the lay of the land as to the ladies, he began to sing "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan." He was a tenor, really a fine tenor.

But the whistle is what sticks with me. Here now, from me, three years younger than he was then: a tune, whistled. I'm here, I'm OK.