ParisTampaBlog

I take the questions from an op ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, regarding the present controversy over Park51, the mosque and community center that would be built two blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.

In all the talk going on between mosque opponents and proponents, and from the Imam himself, we hear little or nothing about just how the new community center is going to reflect and support American civil liberty values. For in the world-wide battle currently waging between a form of Islam and the West that’s really what is most at stake.

Manji rightly asks the Imam “questions born of the highest American ideals, [those of] individual dignity and the pluralism of ideas,” while not yet rushing to judgment himself on the merits of building a mosque in the neighborhood of the now fallen Twin Towers.

• Will the swimming pool at Park51 be segregated between men and women at any time of the day or night?

• May women lead congregational prayers any day of the week?

• Will Jews and Christians, fellow People of the Book, be able to use the prayer sanctuary for their services just as Muslims share prayer space with Christians and Jews in the Pentagon? (Spare me the technocratic argument that the Pentagon is a governmental, not private, building. Park51 may be private in the legal sense but is a public symbol par excellence.)

• What will be taught about homosexuals? About agnostics? About atheists? About apostasy?

• Where does one sign up for advance tickets to Salman Rushdie’s lecture at Park51?

Those who have led our country since the time of its founding in 1776 have never seriously questioned the Declaration that says all men are created equal. Although there were perhaps those at the time, who, looking at the slave owners including Thomas Jefferson himself as well as other signers of the Declaration, questioned the obvious hypocrisy of the founding fathers.

Things have changed and much improved since then. Slave owners are no more, and Jefferson’s Declaration along with Lincoln’s nearly identical follow-up statement at Gettysburg go down more easily, given that in the intervening 200 years or more the Blacks, native Americans, and other minorities, as well as women, have all achieved a kind of equality under the law.

But the statement that all men are created equal is just not true. Men, and women, are not created equal (nor do they become equal). And we might have been better off if the Founders had never taken Jefferson’s words and set them down as in stone.

At that time, and still even today the very best we can achieve is a kind of equality under the law. Rather than all men are created equal we ought to have said all men would be treated equally, and then set about doing it.

And in fact it’s probably true that since our country’s founding our leaders have really only been preoccupied with “equal treatment,” never with the phrase “created equal,” whatever that may mean.

And in fact has anyone ever met his equal, more than in just one or two respects? One of the principal characteristics of our species, of any species, is that the individuals, while sharing species markers such as in our case erect posture, brain size, and opposable thumbs, are all different.

You might walk into the woods and say to yourself that the surrounding trees were created equal. But then try to find two equal trees. You won’t, no more than you will find two equal first graders, or even two equal graduates of Harvard.

If anything the phase has hurt more than it’s helped. It has pushed us to overlook the real differences between individuals, the inequalities if you will, the individual traits that make us what we are, more than our erect posture, large frontal lobe, and opposable thumbs.

For individual humans in regard to whatever attribute you might choose, —size, quickness, strength, artistic, musical or other ability, temperament, intelligence (although I probably should avoid that word entirely given the bad repute now surrounding IQ and other so-called measures of intelligence), and much else —individual humans, members of one species, are not alike.

And most of all we were not created equal. A better starting point would be accept that all men are not equal, maybe somehow the same, but different and unequal. Then the real challenge would become to learn to live together in spite of our differences.

Yachts are in the news. Usually to show how office holders or candidates for office, are often the proud owners of luxury yachts, it being implied that they are not often enough the responsible representatives of the people.

I take much of the following information regarding yachts in the news from Gail Collin’s recent op ed piece in the Times, Campaigns in Troubled Waters.

We see Senator John Kerry trying to avoid Massachusetts taxes on his new $7 million yacht by docking it in neighboring Rhode Island.

We learn that Connecticut gubernatorial candidate, Tom Foley has his 100 foot yacht registered in the Marshall Islands (to avoid Connecticut taxes?).

And we learn that Linda McMahon, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut has named her yacht, the  Sexy Bitch.

The Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Florida, Jeff Greene, is the owner of the 145 foot yacht, Summerwind, that which seems to float around the world by itself, hosting wild parties, while Jeff is touring historic monuments or visiting Jewish houses of worship.

Finally, Rick Scott, candidate for governor of Florida and himself the owner of only a 28 footer, while speaking to a Republican dinner crowd at the Sarasota Yacht Club tries to whip up his audience by saying that he has lived the American dream, which in this audience probably means being the proud owner of a yacht.

So what are we to conclude, that candidates and office holders are interested first of all in yachts, and only secondarily in the people whom they would represent? Perhaps.

But we could turn this around and ask what’s wrong with yacht ownership, or even seeking to pay fewer taxes and registering our boat there where taxes are less?

Kimberly Dennis in a Wall Street Journal piece, Gates and Buffett Take the Pledge, points out that buying a yacht creates jobs for yacht builders. Why if everyone were to purchase a yacht how many new jobs would that mean?

So these Senate and gubernatorial candidates may be onto something. When absolutely everyone in Washington is desperately looking for ways to lower the unemployment rate these people have done something about it.

Kimberly’s article is in response to Bill Gates’ and Warren Buffett’s call to their fellow billionaires to donate at least half of their wealth to charity. Forty have responded favorably.

This is seen as an admirable “giving back.” But Kimberly asks the question, why is it a giving back, let alone why is such “admirable?” In any case what did Bill Gates or Warren Buffett ever take from us that they now have to give it back?

Rather they never took anything from us, but gave to us — Bill Gates changing the way we, in fact the whole world, create and share knowledge, and Warren Buffett starting and growing innumerable profitable enterprises—and thus by their efforts enriching many others, besides Bill Gates and Warren Buffett themselves.

When we complain about how politicians protect and spend their money, about the luxury yachts that many of them seem to own, we ought to think again, and say, isn’t this America?

Earning and spending one’s money in whatever way one wants is what America is most about. And this way of doing things, not government programs funded by the people’s money, is how most American jobs are created.

Take away our civil and political rights, and where then would we be? Probably not in a place where we would want to live. Civil and political rights have been an integral, in fact probably the most essential part of what we are, those all precious individual rights that were set down for all time by the Framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Granted that immediately following our rejection of George III’s authority not all the inhabitants of the new country found themselves in possession of these rights. In fact, there were large numbers of our people—women, Blacks, native Americans, occasionally Asians and others — who saw little or nothing of these rights and had at the start little or no role to play in the early governance of the country.

But our then shameful mistake of excluding these groups was not the same as our not creating a polity where civil and political rights would be the bedrock on which everything else would be subsequently constructed.

For we did create and firmly establish the bedrock, and subsequently, through an at times highly painful series of civil rights movements, ranging from civil wars to uncivil sit-ins, we set about the business of including all those who had been previously and wrongfully excluded. And although we’re not yet there we have come a long way from where we began.

But, while we can say that we are a country that at least within its own boundaries is starting to live up to its ideals much of the rest of the world in regard to its respect for human rights is still entrenched in the past. The world is still home to too many authoritarian regimes and too much uncivil behavior.

The world in respect to the recognition of individual civil and political rights has not kept up with us, this accounting for most of our quarrel with that world. Not to mention the particular difficulty if not quarrel we have even with countries we struggle to keep as our friends. (See Milburn Line’s op ed piece in today’s Times, Counterpoint, A New Plan for Columbia,)

If we were still as isolated as at the time of our founding the differences between us and others of the world’s nations would be much less important, as was the case at that earlier time. But it is more and more just one world and more and more we are a part of that world, a world that by and large does not share our own firm commitment to protecting the civil and political rights of all.

In fact there are any number of countries in the world where civil rights— such as ensuring a people’s physical integrity and safety; such as protecting them from discrimination on grounds of physical or mental disability, gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, national origin, age; such as according them freedom of thought and conscience, speech and expression, religion, the press, and movement — are for the most part neglected or absent.

And there are any number of countries where political rights, such as natural justice (procedural fairness) in law, the rights of the accused, including the right to a fair trial; due process; the right to seek redress; the rights of participation in civil society and politics such as freedom to assemble, to petition, and to vote, are also no less neglected or absent.

Now much of our international diplomacy, probably most of it, has to be concerned with, deeply troubled by, the fact, that protecting human rights, perhaps that quality of our lives that most makes us what we are, or at least would want to be, is not widespread and established in many of the countries with which we trade and maintain other on-going relationships.

We must have asked ourselves on innumerable occasions in the past and we must be asking ourselves now in the present whether we should cultivate friendly relations with any country where rights that we believe are fundamental to man’s nature are not respected.

The answer we usually give is to say, yes, in many cases we should. For we say that we have to relate with these countries as they are with all their differences from us, and when at all possible (as in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan et al.) we have to do so in a helpful and a friendly manner.

We have somehow concluded that if we would change other countries, make them more like ourselves in regard to recognizing the civil and political rights of their peoples, we can’t begin to do so by isolating them. We do seem to believe, probably naively, perhaps incorrectly, that their contacts with us will eventually change them and move them in our direction.

Of course up until now we have no proof that this is the case yet still pursue this policy. We go on maintaining friendly relations, for example, with a whole group of Islamic countries, who have done little or nothing to stop the Islamic extremists and terrorists among their own peoples, let alone recognize and adopt our attitudes towards what we see are universal and individual and human rights, not just American or European.

The country Turkey, and still our friend, is a case in point. Just today in an op ed piece, How to Win the Clash of Civilizations in the Wall Street Journal AYAAN HIRSI ALI points out that:

“A year ago Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan congratulated Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election after he blatantly stole the presidency. Then Turkey joined forces with Brazil to try to dilute the American-led effort to tighten U.N. sanctions aimed at stopping Iran’s nuclear arms program. Most recently, Turkey sponsored the “aid flotilla” designed to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza and to hand Hamas a public relations victory.”

We overlook these actions by this “friendly Muslim state” and instead go on seeing Turkey as an “island of Muslim moderation in a sea of extremism” and even urge the EU to accept Turkey as a member of their Union.

What will it take for our country to place the civil and political rights of individuals, all individuals, high up on its own list of international priorities, and refuse to be friends, say, with countries that do not properly and sufficiently recognize these rights?

We are now acting, or rather not acting and ignoring what is really going on in the world at large, much as we failed to act in our own country during the nearly 100 years following our Civil War.

This was a time during which we excused the racism of the South and, perhaps in exchange for friendly relations with Southern leaders, allowed their Jim Crow policy, which included the segregation and lynching of the Blacks, to become established throughout the states of the former Confederacy.

The mobs in Afghanistan stoning the young woman adulteress are not too different from the lynching mobs in the Jim Crow South. What will it take to stop them? Probably something quite different from the wars that we are now waging to little effect.

Perhaps a clash of civilizations.

Many, ranging from the Harvard professors, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz (in their book, The Race Between Education and Technology) to the Times op ed writer, Bob Herbert, (in his column today, Putting Our Brains on Hold) have noted a growing income disparity between our peoples, beginning in the 1970s and continuing, and becoming even more pronounced, right up until today.

Most commonly the failure of our schools and colleges to “educate” a larger number of young people is blamed for the disparity. And in fact high school graduation rates are now stuck at about 70% and growing income disparities between college graduates and those who have only a high school education (or less) are well documented.

But it seems to me that the blame lies not with the schools, in stagnant high school and college graduation rates (every 20 seconds in the country someone drops out of high school!).

For, unless we lower the bar significantly not everyone will ever graduate from high school and go on to four years of college. If and when we make the school work challenging there is, and will always be a certain percentage (perhaps that 30% who don’t graduate from high school) who will not be up to the challenge.

And there’s nothing wrong with this, allowing kids to fail in school. The mistake we make is to act as if everyone were capable of higher ed, and to attribute income disparities to the failure of some to realize that imputed, I think wrongly, capability.

The blame would better be placed on any number of other culprits, all of which all together contribute to the growing income disparities that we see.

First of all we should note that this phenomenon is not peculiar to the United States. It is truly world wide, and with the greatest disparities in those countries with the largest number of poor people, such as China and India. A common mistake we make is to think of our country as being independent, an “exception,” and not an integral piece of the whole world. We are.

In China and India education is called for (too many still don’t know how to read) but it’s hardly a necessary or sufficient condition for eliminating income disparities. Does anyone believe that once the peoples of China and India even reach, say, our 70% high school graduation rate that income disparities in those countries will be less?

People’s lives will be improved, as they always are by further education, but they will still be far from the top in regard to earning power.

We should note that income disparity is not peculiar to us, but it is a given in today’s world, where there are, even more so than in the past, the few successful (and rich) entrepreneurs who support the rest of us by their extraordinary energy, inventiveness, and creativity, all attributes which more than all the efforts of all the governments of all the nations combined uniquely serve to grow the world’s wealth.

And of course their own wealth as well, and hence the stupendous wealth of the few. And this process while doing nothing to reduce the income gap but rather obviously increasing it, has also, as we’ve seen in China and other newly developing countries, raised hundreds of millions out of poverty.

In a sense the income gap or rather the great wealth at one end, while mostly created by a relatively few highly successful individuals and representing a lot of wealth in only a few hands, has enabled us to go to the moon, win the Cold War, and provided the funding for our schools, not to mention assuring the salaries of our hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats in Washington and elsewhere.

So while speaking out against the, for some, unconscionable gap between the income of the 1% at the top and the 25 to 50% at the bottom don’t forget that equality of income while it may lead to a successful termite mound won’t lead to greatness and all those things that make our lives better than the lives of termites. Because even at the bottom our lives are better, better in many respects than the lives of kings in the Middle Ages.

There are many causes of the income gap, only a few of which I will mention here. The failure of our schools to classically (math, language, history, science et al.) educate 100% of our young people (that which in any case is not possible) is the least of them.

For me one culprit is the fact that (again, for many reasons) many people, many young people in school, would rather play than work at something. Not unusual this. I’m still doing it myself.

Now there are those who play who do very well (and this is why most go on playing) but most don’t do very well. Most who play basketball don’t make it into the NBA.

And the result? Well, we may have the greatest income gap of all time, in that between LeBron James and the kids with whom he used to play street basketball years ago.

Another culprit we might cite is that there is no equality out there anywhere in the world anyway. And given widespread inequalities why would we expect to have income equality? For everywhere there are only  disparities. At best there might be equality of opportunity, and to achieve that is a worthwhile goal.

So, just as there are gaps of all kinds between individuals, unequal in respect to talents and achievements, so we encounter as a rule the corresponding gaps in the amount of money people earn. How could it be any different, except within the termite mound?

If as some say there was a time in our own country’s past when the income disparities between us were less it was perhaps because the natural wealth of the country, as well as the opportunities to take advantage of that wealth, were much more widespread, much more available for the taking  than they are now.

Now things are different. The frontier is no more, the frontier itself being, at that earlier time, a kind of equalizer.

So what to do, just accept that 1% of our citizens at the top of the income scale earn (or at least receive) as much as the 50% at the bottom? There are those who don’t accept this and who would tax away the excessive wealth of the few and distribute it to the many. But haven’t they overlooked if not forgotten that it’s the few, prominent among those whom they would tax, who created the wealth in the first place?

I’ve just finished reading two articles, one a brief piece in Vanity Fair (Topic of Cancer) by Christopher Hitchens who writes about his initial reactions to his own recently uncovered cancer, and the other a much longer piece in the New Yorker (Letting Go) by Atul Gawande, who writes about the final time in the lives of a number of his patients, but mostly Letting Go is an account of Sara Thomas Monopoli’s losing battle with lung cancer, containing many of the possible conclusions one might draw from this battle.

I wouldn’t defend the use of the word serendipity in regard to the chance and simultaneous appearance of these two very similar articles, but I do think when read, one after the other, that they point to useful, if not happy and beneficial, or serendipitous, conclusions for the rest of us.

The accounts do differ. Gawande’s is telling us the whole story, the days, weeks, and final months in the lives of his cancer patients, and in particular Sara Monopoli’s time from cancer diagnosis to death.

Hitchens’ account, so far anyway because it’s not over, is of his very first reaction to learning of his own cancer, the very same cancer of the esophagus that had killed his father.

Hitchens, of course, intends to go on writing about this, and other things if he can. For writing has always been his life, and it will be so as long as he is able.

We hope the cancer will do no more than slow him down, and that he will continue to write in that characteristically honest and no holds barred manner in which he writes about everything else.

But, and this is what interests me, these two writers about lives being attacked by deadly cancers, might have greatly profited from having read the account of the other. Prior to their own writing I don’t think they had.

What, for example, would Hitchens have done with the conclusions that Gawande draws from his experiences with these final moments in his patients’ lives? I would like to read a Hitchens review of Gawande’s New Yorker piece, now being himself in a position much like that of the very people Gawande writes about.

Gawande has much to say about his subject, and his conclusions are many, but most of all he stresses that cancer treatments, and the possibility of a seemingly endless series of these treatments, shouldn’t necessarily be allowed to trump the little time that dying people may still have to spend with their loved ones, not be allowed to displace a meaningful time with loved ones by one less meaningful with nurses, doctors, and attendants.

For all too often a succession of treatments right up until death will have monopolized the patient’s time, allowing no time for oneself or for family, or in Hitchens’ case, perhaps, allowing no time with his friends, with James Fenton, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan Martin Amis et al.

But Hitchens could benefit from reading Gawande who says, among an abundance of wise sayings and conclusions from his own experiences, such as the following:

“Everyone struggles with this uncertainty—with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost.”

“…you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.”

“That last month the family simply focussed on being together, and it proved to be the most meaningful time they’d ever spent.”

Hitchens seems to be almost at the point when he too will have to decide whether to accept that the battle is lost, that he will live longer only when he stops trying to live longer, and that a final time focussed on being together with family and friends would prove to me the most meaningful final time he could have.

Of course things are not that easy. The decision not to fight is not an easy one to make. Gawande knows that the “how” and the “when” of death are never certain, that uncertainly puts the how and when to give up the fight always in doubt.

Let me give the final words of this posting to Hitchens, himself. In what he writes in the Vanity Fair article he is clearly battling the enemy. He says he is not angry, but “oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste,” by his plans for the future coming to naught. But forever the no holds barred writer he answers the question, “Why me?” with “Why not?”

He is apparently going to continue the medical treatments, now chemotherapy, and later, perhaps, radiation, and surgery. In his own words, “… here’s the wager: you stick around for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head.” You make a bargain, he says, gaining more time for going through it all.

Hitchens, again in his own words:  “Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient…. I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice.”

And of course he hopes to go on writing and be spared.

Just as one would like to have Hitchens reply to Gawande, so one would like to have Gawande reply to Hitchens. Perhaps we yet will.