Why Republicans Are Winning & We're All Losing

I’ve had a life-long love of politics.  I love debating, I love learning about law and policy and how it is made, how it is shaped.  I love talking about law and policy with people who disagree with me, and who can articulate their beliefs without screaming vitriol.  But now, I am thinking about breaking up with politics.  I just can’t take it anymore.

If you are a friend of mine—or have read some of my articles for The Busy Signal—you probably know I’m no fan of the Republican Party or of social conservatives.  So, most people assume I’m a Democrat.  I’m not.  I remember looking at my voter registration card  when I was 18 and deciding what party I should register with.  I registered as an Independent, because while the Republican Party’s politics disgust and disturb me, I find the anemic responses of the Democrats equally repulsive.

While I despise the tactics used by the Republican Party to manipulate voters and their emotions, the Republicans have something the Democrats lack completely: chutzpah.  Guts, balls, moxie.  The Democrats act like wet rags while the Republican apparatus effectively runs national policy.  There’s this line from the T.V. series The West Wing which addresses this point: “The American people like guts… and Republicans have got ’em.”  Those of us on the left of the political spectrum thought a new day had dawned with the ascent of Barack Obama to the national political stage, and the groundswell of his election to the presidency.  But that momentum seems to have quickly deflated under the weight of two wars, a shitty economy, the BP oil spill, unrelenting attacks by conservatives, and the tendency of Democrats to eat their own young with constant in-fighting.

Worst Hundredth Birthday Present Ever!

100 years ago at 29 Washington Place, New York, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory went up in flames and down in history as the largest man-made disaster in New York until 9/11. The fire forced New York to see its most invisible population: young immigrant women. These women had yelled to the world that their conditions weren’t safe, but they were just too expendable to matter. Their deaths forced New York, under raining ash and falling bodies, to open its eyes.

Japan's Food Future

Much is currently being written about the risk of radioactive contamination in the food and water supplies in Japan.  What began as a paranoid prediction last week has come true, with officials discovering low levels of radioactive Iodine, I-131, in milk and spinach, and low levels of Caesium in Tokyo’s tap water.  Although radiation levels are elevated, they pose little or no threat to humans by most estimates.

Some have expressed concern that Japanese food exports have been tainted by radiation as well.  In fact, Taiwan’s Atomic Energy Council discovered radiation in fava beans imported from Japan, though this radiation was said to be harmless to humans.  In 2009, Japan exported $3.3 billion worth of food products (less than 0.5% of their total exports) while the value of their food imports was near $53 billion.   This is not a widespread concern, especially in the US, where Japanese food exports account for about .12% of our total agricultural imports, the majority of that number consisting of seafood.

The nuclear disaster in the Fukushima prefecture seems to be having little to no effect on Japan’s food supply, except to touch off anxiety that there may be a more serious problem down the road.  But this is not to say that the recent chaos in Japan will not affect the country’s food supply.  In fact, food is causing a number of problems in the Japanese economy, and food shortages are not out of the question for the world’s third largest economy.

Felipe on the Bottom Rung

The building where "Felipe" lived

I try not to get personal in these blog posts, but sometimes…

I am a teaching artist who is currently in the first of a four-year research project to determine the efficacy of arts education in improving fluency in English language learners. My students are middle school-ers in two different immigrant-heavy parts of Brooklyn, NY. The schools they attend are classified as Title I, meaning that mine are among the most impoverished children in New York City. The patriotic sentiment is hard-won in me, but watching students who speak Bangla, Uzbek and Spanish coming together to do theater projects in English, enjoying one another’s company and encouraging their classmates to become more generous, talented and smart occasionally inspires the thought, “This country really is a special place.”

Because We Like Our Hamburgers Raw

Yesterday, the UN Security Council voted unanimously, apart from Russian, Chinese, German, Indian and Brazilian abstentions, to authorize the imposition of a no-fly zone and military action to protect Libyan civilians. Hours later, Libyan officials declared a cease-fire which they promptly violated as British warplanes took to the Mediterranean.

Perhaps this is an obvious point, but it is no country’s job to ensure that revolutions elsewhere succeed. (Is the drive to intervene in Libya born to some extent of a collective American guilt over having so often intervened to ensure that they fail?) Sometimes, people fail to liberate themselves from oppressive conditions or capricious regimes, and the result tends to be bloodshed, lamentably, but “protecting against bloodshed everywhere on Earth” is simply not a viable foreign policy. Revolutions fail and fail and fail and fail and then, eventually, they succeed. If we believe as enthusiastically as we say we do in the perpetuity of the human drive toward freedom, justice and equality, we have to concede the inevitability of this victory, whatever shocking amounts of death plague the effort. As Che wrote in his farewell letter to Fidel, “In a revolution one triumphs or dies (if it be a true one). Many comrades were left along the road to victory.”

The MESSENGER to Mercury

I spend several hours a week babysitting for an almost-three-year-old boy who knows more about the solar system than you do unless you’re an astronomer yourself. No joke: several months ago he caught me off guard by rattling off the Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, in case you didn’t remember) and recently corrected me when I confused the moons of Neptune and Uranus. Hence, my babysitting afternoons are often spent drawing various planets and watching space shuttle launches on my phone, and wondering how to explain matter and light years in toddler terms. To stay one step ahead of my charge, I try to pay attention to major events in our solar system. For example, scientists posit the existence of a planet in our solar system larger than Jupiter! That’s pretty neat, I’ll agree, but we’re a few years away from proving its existence, since Tyche—named for the good sister of Nemesis in Greek mythology—dwells in the outer Oort Cloud. Closer to home, Thursday, March 18, NASA received confirmation that the MESSENGER probe attained orbit around Mercury, becoming the first spacecraft to do so. We know so little about the smallest, densest planet in the solar system, and new measurements acquired by MESSENGER could tell us more about how the terrestrial planets were formed.

The Cost of a Balanced Budget

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Much of the political debate in this country adheres to a predictable pattern of rhetoric. While the content of many of these discussions is unsurprising, they are well worth having, as the rights of many people are dependent upon them. Frustrating though these conversations may be, their persistence is of course vitally important to the preservation of free democracy and the maintenance of civil political dialogue. The ability to engage in this essential discourse with such frequency and diligence is indeed a true sign of a healthy republic. Consequently, with partisan banter so robustly routine, it takes quite a bit to surprise me. Regrettably, I must say, the discussions that have erupted recently over the country’s budget deficit have been wholly, discouragingly surprising.

The need for a country to maintain its accounts is clear. The need for our particular country to take immediate steps toward reducing and eliminating its various debts is also clear. On this point there can be no argument. However, the methods of debt eradication which have been proposed (and in some cases enacted) in the previous weeks have been astonishing not only in their mindlessness, but in their heartlessness.

Radicalization and the Semantics of Peter King

When asked by CNN reporter Dana Bash if he was “obsessed” with Muslim radicalization, Peter King responded: “I’m very focused.”  The profile piece Bash was writing, called “Peter King—What makes him tick?” (published last week) was an opportunity for the Republican Representative from Long Island to set the record straight and defend himself from accusations by the New York Times last Tuesday that King’s “obsession” with 9/11 and Islam was a manifestation of bigotry and fear mongering.  But instead of putting out fires, King steadfastly played up his fixations.  In the interview, he describes grief as a driving force in his life, and offered the following as a statement of purpose:

If you ask me what I think about going to work every day, it’s 9/11 and preventing another 9/11.

With this impetus, King, the Chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has gone ahead with plans to hold a series of hearings entitled: “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.”  These hearings began last week.

Much has already been made of the threat these hearings pose to civil liberties, the throwback to McCarthyism they engender, and the blatant Islamaphobia that their existence institutionalizes. (For a cursory account of arguments for and against, see Thursday’s article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg).  However, King’s claim to investigate radicalization is the most problematic element of the equation.  By defiantly continuing his investigation and pitting himself and his supporters against the political mainstream, King has become a radical element in his own right.  What’s more, King actually wants to be seen as a radical, but by radicalizing the other, he is able to maintain his that his stance serves justice and protects all Americans while in truth he is merely serving his own vindictive agenda.

Cotton Comes to Brooklyn: The Prime 6 Petition

If you’re not from Brooklyn then you probably haven’t heard, but this past week —one in which we observed the anniversary of the death of rapper Biggie Smalls—the big hubbub has been all about the proposed new bar/club in Park Slope to be called Prime 6. Apparently the thought of a new bar that caters to a young crowd of sport enthusiasts and hip hop fans has thrown Park Slope into an autocannibalistic tizzy. Now, to be fair, that general area around the Atlantic Yards stadium that is being built has been a battleground for some years now. The developers had to wrest the properties away from owners and shut down long-time neighborhood establishments, and it’s turning Brooklyn into a little sliver of midtown Manhattan. Yes, there are a lot of reasons many Brooklynites might take issue with the whole Atlantic Yards development, but I should hardly think that a new club being opened up on Flatbush Avenue would cause such a fracas.

Why “Glee” Matters: Let’s Talk about SEX

Most  kids don’t want to talk to their parents about sex, and most parents aren’t thrilled about it either.  It can be uncomfortable, awkward, and just plain weird.  The conversation means parents accepting that their children are sexual creatures, and children accepting that their parents have had sex.  A lot of parents don’t talk about it at all, leaving kids to figure it out on their own.  A lot of them push abstinence.  And a lot of them are completely open, fostering honest dialogue, answering questions, and handing out condoms.  There isn’t just one way to talk to kids about sex, but Tuesday night’s episode of “Glee” featured one of the most honest, frank, and poignant conversations I’ve ever seen on television or in movies.  And most importantly, it was a conversation between a straight father and his gay son.