THE SIGN OF THE CROSS

Meseret Defar of Ethiopia gives thanks after winning gold
in the women's 5000 meter race in the 2012 Olympics in London.

I take a certain pride in watching great Olympic athletes like Usain Bolt and David Rudisha make the sign of the cross before they compete. Even more satisfying perhaps was watching Meseret Defar take a picture of the Blessed Mother and Christ Child out from beneath her jersey and hold it up to the sky in celebration of and thanksgiving for her victory in the women's 5000 meter final in London. It makes me feel good to have something in common with them, even though, while they represent the pinnacle of athleticism, I have trouble getting up out of a chair.

The same is not true for other notable Catholics, especially the ones in politics. For example, I get no pride, take no pleasure, and feel no commonality with Nancy Pelosi or Paul Ryan. That either of them is Catholic is a source of embarrassment for me. Not so embarrassing as pedophile priests and cover-up bishops, but troubling nonetheless. They too are at the pinnacle of their game, while I, thankfully, am not capable of the Machiavellian twists of moral rectitude required to ever excel at politics.

I don't think Pelosi and Ryan are whole Catholics. I don't think they 'get it' in the sense of being in full communion with the Church and her teachings. I think Pelosi slept right through everything having to do with the sanctity of life, and Ryan was somewhere else when they covered social justice.

Both of them apparently think of themselves as devout. Meanwhile 50 million dead babies churn in Pelosi's wake, sacrificed on the altar of Choice, and Ryan would have millions of the impoverished and disenfranchised lift themselves up by their own mostly non-existent bootstraps while he strips away the programs that might actually give them a leg up.

I can't see either one of them making the sign of the cross before a session of congress, or even asking God to bless their deliberations and sanctify their thinking. If they do, I'm pretty sure that He hasn't answered.

TEN BITS OF WISDOM THAT NEED TO BE RETIRED

I spent 14 years in public accounting practice, 20 years in manufacturing management, and 2 years operating my own business. I learned a few things along the way. I learned some things that can't be put into textbooks, and some others that shouldn't be discussed in polite company.

Since I learned a great deal of it at the hands of fools, charlatans, thieves and pirates, not very much of it is stuff that I can mention in an interview—not that I'm ever likely to score another interview. You're not supposed to say negative things about your former employers in an interview. Sounds like sour grapes. Brands you for a bad attitude.

Be that as it may, it's all still useful information. It's part of a body of experience that enhances my acumen and gives me a basis of reference in which to frame sound decisions. It makes me valuable, even if my value is, by force of circumstance, lusterless. My worth is not readily apparent, nor even much in demand. It is real.

Too bad, really. I think a lot of organizations could profit from my experience. Knowing what not to do, how not to proceed, is more than a little useful when some young whippersnapper MBA sets out to shake things up based on what he learned in school...or even worse, when some overwrought executive tries to manage a unique organization in a unique situation using platitudes he read in Business Week.

Platitudes are the death of creative thought. Platitudes become rules that govern behavior that ought to be governed by circumstances. Platitudes are buzzwords of the mind. Platitudes are conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom begets conventional results.

Some platitudes spill over into life outside of work. They take on a broader, more pervasive, and more dangerous life. They end up fueling the kind of mind-numbing mediocrity that makes reality TV possible, the kind of wholesale disregard for accuracy and truthfulness that characterize the current presidential election cycle where candidates can say virtually anything that they think will advance their cause and a good 98% of voters will either believe or not believe based solely on what makes them feel better.

Here are some bits of conventional wisdom that need to be retired because they've either lost their meaning or didn't have much to start with:

1. It is what it is. Really? This is the business equivalent of Que sera sera. Usually uttered as a kind of lament that things have come to this sorry pass, and it's time to deal with it, what is left unsaid is that, most often, things should never have got to this point. It's because somebody didn't do their job early on that hard choices have to be made now. If you do actual productive, value-added work, you understand that hard choices mean somebody is going to lose their job, and it's not going to be the fool that screwed up in the first place. Stop saying 'it is what it is' because what it is is something it didn't have to be.
2. Think outside the box. This is never a good place to start thinking. Stuff is inside the box for a reason. Somebody else has already given it a lot of thought. The stuff inside the box usually works quite well. Sometimes it's been working so well for so long that people have forgotten the reason for it. This does not in any way diminish its usefulness. It's okay to think outside the box, but you shouldn't start there. You shouldn't think outside the box until you have exhausted what's inside the box.
3. Bring a sense of urgency. Managers who say this want you to treat everything you do as if your job depended on it. Sadly, if you work for one of these managers, it just might. Urgency ought to be reserved for urgent matters. Bringing a sense of urgency to the mundane just increases the likelihood that you will screw up. Slow and methodical wins the race because you don't have to do anything twice...or thrice. The problem with urgency is that the more you expend, the more is required. The faster you go, the more undone and incorrectly done things pile up on your plate. Urgency is like a fuse. When it's burned to the end, something blows up.
4. The higher the risk the greater the reward. This probably used to be true, but the Wall Street compensation model has turned it on it's head. Wall street has insulated itself from risk. Speculators can take spectacular risks, reap spectacular rewards, and when they screw up they are backstopped by the government. This means the taxpayers. That's bad enough, but the risks they take on Wall Street are often taken with investor money. This also means taxpayers. The taxpayers are at risk twice, and all the money—both times—goes to pay big Wall Street bonuses. Just last week, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate got burned to the tune of $700 Million in it's derivatives portfolio. Buffett is thought to be the savviest investor on the planet by many. Buffett doesn't even like derivatives, so his exposure was on the light side. Still, somebody got Warren's money because in every derivative contract there is a winner and a loser. Except of course when the loser can't pay. (Remember AIG?) Then the taxpayers have to make up the difference so that the winners don't suffer. After all, they won, didn't they.
5. Sometimes you are the windshield. Sometimes you are the bug. This little ditty is so completely meaningless that it begins to sound like wisdom. 'Sometimes you are the driver, and sometimes you are the bug,' makes much more sense. The windshield is just there. Sometimes it gets bugs on it. This is especially true in May and September in Florida when the love bugs are out in force doing what they do. As a way to die, this one is as good as any—in flight and getting your freak on. In terms of platitudes, this one is like a pair of bugs splattered on you windshield. If you're the driver, you're going to have to clean up the mess. The problem is there's no real upside. Bug, windshield, or driver, it doesn't matter. You're screwed.
6. 
   There's no such thing as a free lunch. Oh yes there is. Just ask Mitt Romney. He gets a lot of free lunches. He's trying to arrange it so he gets even more. Rich people get away without having to pay their own freight. This has been true forever. Mark Twain's delightful little short story, “The £1,000,000 Bank-Note,” is proof enough. If people think you're rich, they cut you slack they would never cut for regular folks. They give you free stuff. They curry favor. They suck up. After a while the rich begin to feel like they have done something to merit all the deferential treatment. They begin to believe that they are somehow better than the rest of us. They let their sense of entitlement grow unchecked. Sooner or later they get the idea they would make a good president, or, as I like to call it, Oligarch-in-Chief. Better yet, they get the idea, not unlike the Koch Brothers, that they can buy a president and as many legislators as it takes to permanently rig the game in their favor. There is this much truth in the platitude, though. Somebody still has to pay for the lunch. It's just not the guys who eat it.
7. You make your own luck. Not so much. You can be more or less attuned to your fortune according to the dictates of your personality. You can even change the number of bars in your 'good fortune' signal with forethought and focus. What you can't change is the fortune that actually comes your way. Some of it is completely arbitrary—capricious even. Some of it is sponsored by the guys above who are eating free lunch at your expense. If you are having a run of good luck, recognize it for what it is. Do not nurture the notion that you probably had it coming to you because if you do that, when you then consider the plight of those who have not been so fortunate, you will likely have become a dick.
8. There's no I in TEAM. Well, there's no TEAM in innovation either. Just try to think of one really great idea that came out of a committee.
9. Time is money. This has been crap since its inception. Time is way more valuable than money. It always has been. It always will be. You can earn money with time, but you can't buy time with money.
10. Give 110%. Can't be done. Everybody know this, so why say something this stupid? Maybe it's just the precise nature of my accountant's dark heart that finds this so objectionable. I prefer to think it's because even in the purely metaphorical sense, this is just bad advice. The best you can hope to give to anything on a consistent basis is about 70%. The rest of your systemic capacity is taken up with staying alive and working out your next meal. If you are still single, you lose another chunk of fundamental effort, both voluntary and involuntary, to the search for a satisfying relationship...however you choose to define it. So,  realistically, you've got somewhere between 40 and 70% of usable productive capacity left over to devote to the dumb ass who's asking for 110%. If you give everything you've got left, you're going to burn out, and sooner rather than later. Then you'll have even less juice than you've got now. You need to hold something in reserve for when you really need it. Whoever is asking for 110% will not know when that is. They have let their sense of urgency overwhelm their faculties so they are useless to the rest of us. This is why they are in management...or consulting...or politics...instead of doing anything productive. Chances are pretty good that whoever first came up with this 110% idea did it in a committee.

GETTING BACK TO CIVILITY: 10 Easy Steps

There's no question that the world is a less civil place than it used to be. Rudeness and name calling are the new black. In the genteel South people used to preface compliments with 'Bless their hearts' to let the listener know that the niceties to follow were less than sincere. Those days are gone. Now it's okay to cut a bitch and leave the bloody entrails at the scene. When supposed society luminaries pepper their speech with profanity like drunken sailors, what are drunken sailors to do when they need to add some passion to their conversations?

9 mm punctuation. getting your point across without the need for any bothersome fact checking

I was discussing the idea for this blog entry with my wife this morning while she was trying to watch the Real Housewives of New York. One of the housewives was wearing a hideous low-cut knit top throughout the scene, and my wife remarked that when she saw the episode aired, the housewife was bound to regret her fashion choice. “She really needs a push-up bra to make that work,” my wife said. My reply: “Push up bra? She needs a floor jack.”

This is when I realized that my own civility could use a little tune-up, although I lay a lot of the blame for my failings in this regard squarely on the Real Housewives shows. They have so desensitized us to verbal sniping, insults, sarcasm, name-calling, character assassination, yelling, and even hair pulling that there is a danger that we will all begin to accept this stuff as normal behavior.

My neighbors are a case in point. They like to fight with one another in their driveway. They yell at the top of their lungs for interminable amounts of time, drawing fearful crowds. F-Bombs are just a stepping off point for them to truly horrific mutual vilification. My guess is that they somehow think this is normal behavior, and that they came by this notion from watching too much reality television.

I'm not about to dissuade them. Life is too short already. I've heard it said that you shouldn't bring a knife to a gun fight, but I have to think that taking an assault rifle to an argument with either of these two would leave you hopelessly outmatched.

Real Housewives' behaviors have infected politics, news analysis, scientific dialog, public policy discussions, religion, and sports. When I think of all the places where bad behavior seems to be the new norm, it occurs to me that all this may have actually started with sports. The rioting of soccer fans in assorted foreign venues is legend, but I'm actually thinking of something closer to home.

I'm think specifically of Vince McMahon's WWE professional wrestling franchise, where poor sportsmanship coupled with blatant vulgarity was pyramided into a viable ratings generator long before anyone thought of turning multiple cameras onto regular, albeit mostly immature, people in their native environs. I confess that I myself used to think of pro wrestling as just entertainment, but, in retrospect, I may have been seduced by the up-front and ubiquitous presence of pneumatic young blonds in skimpy costumes.

Fisticuffs: now a required skill for the debate team.
Can the chess club be far behind?

It's long past time to change course. These are my proposals for a return to civility:

1. Eliminate reality TV and talk radio. These seem to be the source of almost every wrong-headed opinion that infects our national consciousness and consicience.
   
   
2. Eliminate the internet...or unvetted commentary...or require all comments to include the real name, address, and phone number of the commenter. The anonymity afforded by the Internet has undone any requirement to be correct and replaced it with a requirement to be loud and repetitive. Eventually this will spell the end of civilization as we know it.
   
   
3. Eliminate caffeinated energy drinks. These just exacerbate an already dangerous situation. When people leap to conclusions without benefit of any forethought, the last thing we need to do is speed up the process.
   
   
4. Eliminate mobile communications devices. Where caffeine accelerates the germination of bad ideas, modern wireless communications speed their dissemination.
   
   
5. Move the national speed limit back to 55mph. Haste breeds anxiety, and anxiety breeds intolerance.
   
   
6. Limit in-car stereo systems to 10 watts per channel. It's not possible to listen thoughtfully to the opinions of others when your ears are bleeding.
   
   
7. Criminalize the habit TV news commentators have developed of talking over one another during panel discussions and talking over their guests when they disagree with them. Some of us actually want to hear both sides of an issue.
   
   
8. Eliminate super PACs and their political attack ads. Somewhere along the line campaign managers as a group got the idea that you can't win an election by being a nice guy. Now everybody running for office has to sponsor drivel meant to demonize the opposition rather than explain to us why their own solutions have merit. Seems to me all that campaign money would be better spent lifting us all out of the mire instead of trying to hold the opposition's collective head under it.
   
   
9. Campaign finance reform...NOW! Too much money in politics has made it possible for a handful of really wealthy charlatans to subvert the democratic process. They have turned our electoral system into gladiatorial combat that has us all trooping down to the Colosseum for bread and circus while they help themselves to the spoils of the realm.
   
   
10. Resolve all major divisive issues with single unarmed combat. A little pugilistic blood-letting couldn't be any worse than what we have now. Two champions get in a ring, and the matter is settled in 12 rounds. The loser's supporters have to sit down and shut the hell up. Right or wrong, fact or fabrication, none of the intellectual arguments would carry any weight whatsoever. If you think about it, this is not significantly different from the situation we have right now. It would just be over a lot sooner, and we could all go back to blessing each other's hearts.

Five Things to Consider before You Click 'Like' on a Political Post

Hold a lamp to the truth
and
drive slowly.

1. If you get most of your political news and analysis from the Comedy Channel, you probably have a world view that is at least as skewed as it would be if you got most of your information from Fox News. Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Bill Maher may be smart guys, but they are first and foremost comics with a higher vested interest in laughs and ratings than in the truth. This is not to say that they are not often correct...just that being correct is not their primary aim...not unlike Fox.
2. If you agree with or, even worse, spout things like 'Republicans are waging war on women' or 'Democrats are waging war on religion' then you are guilty of exactly the same kind of fractious logic of which you are accusing the other side.
3. If you believe that the deficit mess is the result of welfare entitlements and paying people not to work, you need to turn off Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and read a book about economics. I can recommend several that give a thoughtful and balanced account of what's really going on in the economy.
   1. 13 Bankers – Johnson and Kwak
   2. Freefall – Stiglitz
   3. End this Depression Now – Krugman
4. If you sincerely believe that Mitt Romney is a misogynistic white wonk who is hell-bent on asserting control over the nation's vaginae, or that Barack Obama is a Nigerian, Muslim, communist traitor determined to destroy America, then you are a narrow-minded dolt, incapable of appreciating either nuance or irony. These fellows hold opinions that differ from yours. That is all. They came by their opinions honestly and with consideration (and in Romney's case several times) which is more than I can say about you if you believe all the crap you hear from their opposition.
5. If you have more than 20 friends, and they all agree with you on everything you think is important, you are in danger of losing the kind of perspective that leads to compromise and progress. If you have more than 200 friends, you are already lost.

Essential Rhythms: Dancing with the Stars

  the great big old clock o' the universe with jazz hands

There is a rhythm to the affairs of the universe. It has a beat. You can't really dance to it because it is very, very slow. One beat takes two lifetimes. This is why the closest anyone has gotten to the sound of the universe is 'om.' They could only register one lifetime's worth before they shuffled off this mortal coil, and one lifetime's worth is only half a beat. The sound of one complete beat, which takes two lifetimes, sounds more like 'boom'. Imagine!

All the other rhythms—the ones you can dance to—syncopate to this fundamental rhythm in wondrous, poetic ways. If you get out of step with these non-essential rhythms, you can assume that you are also out of step with the universe. It's important to hear the beats all around you, and dance to the ones that have meaning in your life.

There is a rhythm to writing. I'm feeling it right now. You should feel the same beat when you read what I have written. It is the rhythm that connects us—your senses, your heart, to mine. The better I am at keeping the narrative beat with my choice and arrangement of words, the more compelling what I say becomes for you as you read. This connection, this dance, is lifeblood pumping in time with the universe.

There is a rhythm to cooking as well. The cook who knows how to dance in the kitchen orchestrates all the various dishes of a meal to come together at the same time—each at the peak of its flavor, its warmth, its nose, and its visual appeal. This is the time to sit down and eat because this is the time when everything the cook has striven for is perfect. Anyone who is not ready to sit down when dinner is ready does not understand cooking, is not in tune with the universe, and doesn't deserve to get any supper.

No one in my family is ever ready to eat when dinner is ready to be eaten. I know this because I do most of the cooking. Even if they were all ready a few short moments before, by the time I lay the food out and announce dinner they will have found a million other, more pressing, things to do. There are sudden text messages that need to be sent off into the ether, e-mails that need to be answered, TV schedules that need to be checked, sunsets that need to be admired, and dogs that need to be walked. More frequently than you would guess, one of the things requiring attention is taking pictures of the food I have made—evidence at least that I have got the visual appeal part of the rhythm of cooking down.

There is a proper rhythm to TV and the movies as well. A 30 minute TV sitcom runs about 22 minutes of show time, and is punctuated by commercial messages. The writers know this when they script the show. The director paces the narrative accordingly. Strange as it may seem, without the commercials some of the intended rhythm is out of kilter.

My wife hates commercials. She records everything we watch so we can watch it later and speed through the commercials. When I watch the ad images speeding by in kinetic disarray, and images of Victoria's Secret lingerie models shoot past my consciousness like so many meteorites in flaming free-fall, I know we have upset the balance of nature. The collaborative art that is television suffers for the misstep.

When we have arrived at the climax of an on-demand movie, the instant when multiple plot threads are about to resolve themselves, my wife will suddenly pause the show to look up the complete filmography of one of the actors because we have an iPad now so we no longer have to wonder about such things. The cantilevered give and take of the dance with the stars that is a movie is undone. The quickstep of heart and mind comes crashing to the floor in a kaleidescope of limbs, sequins, and taffeta. Please pack up your pumps and go. You've been eliminated.

Bean works on his timing.

Animals have to step to the rhythm too. Fish have the tides. Wolves have the moon. Problems crop up though when the seasons of the beasts collide with the seasons of their masters.

Our dogs, for example, are finely attuned to the rhythms of our lives. The effect is the same as though they were not. They have aligned their downbeats to coincide with ours, but the lyrics don't match up, and harmony is largely absent. So, when we sit down to dinner, the dogs need to go out. The timing is bang on, but the requirements are completely different.

When I've got a burst of creative juice at the computer and words are flowing, Bean will think it's an excellent time to play catch. He will convey this happy thought to me by poking my elbow with his cold, wet nose, and barking. My flow is stopped dead in its tracks to accommodate his. Our rhythms are in sync, but I'm doing a box step and Bean's doing the tango. Somebody's going to trip. I'll bet it's me.

All these are just minor catches in the give and take of timing. We all experience them. The trick is not to let them throw you completely off the beat.

It's the larger currents of our affairs that are more problematic and, should one lose the beat, harder to recover. For instance I tend to buy stocks at their historical highs and give up on them just before they finally bottom out. I lost my job the week before Lehman Brothers hit the fan, confirming what all the major players already knew, and sending the economy into a tailspin from which it is still trying to recover. I decided to become a writer just at the moment when the Internet removed all barriers to entry into that noble fraternity, including it seems, any requirement to understand spelling, punctuation, grammar or even the subject about which one decides to write.

All these things have had a disastrous impact on life as I used to know it, but I am far from being the most ridiculously out-of-step wonk on the planet. I use to think that distinction belonged to Friedrich Riesfeldt of Paderborn, Germany, the zookeeper who gave an elephant an olive oil enema and was subsequently suffocated beneath several hundred pounds of its poop. Riesfeldt's story is wildly entertaining and clearly illustrates the most dire consequences possible for ill-timed choices, but it turns out to also be a fabrication. (You can read the complete original account as well as the facts that prove it to be false at Snopes.)

With Riesfeldt off the table, I'm left with several replacement candidates (pun fully intended):

• Republican presidential candidate, Rick Perry, in a nationally televised debate, decides to list the federal agencies that he would eliminate if elected. He can't remember them.
• Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain, decides to suspend his campaign, all the while maintaining that he had not had any inappropriate sexual liaisons, when the number of women coming forward to dispute this claim looked as if it were going to surpass Tiger Wood's record.
• Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, blasts Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for corruption and says any politician who deals with them should go to jail...just as it comes out that Fannie/Freddie paid him $1.6 million for providing them consulting services as a 'historian'.
• Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, claims America's new focus on income inequality is all about 'envy', interrupts his Florida Primary victory celebration to tell CNN's Soledad O'Brien that he's 'not concerned with the very poor [because] we have a safety net there', then releases his last two years tax returns showing $45 million in income and an effective tax rate of just 13.9%. Turns out he's got significant assets tucked in Swiss and Cayman Island accounts where, presumably, all us envious haters won't be able to see it. And the very poor? He probably thinks they can use their safety net to buy themselves a couple of Cadillacs to drive around like his wife.

By now you've probably noticed a recurring theme in my list of candidates for poster boy of failed timing. That's right—they're all middle aged men whose neckties have cut off circulation to their brains. It's fitting that the Republican mascot is an elephant because never has any one group of like-minded yahoos been so out of step with reality, nor so deserved to be buried under a steaming pile of pachyderm dung.

The Ironic and the Furious: What I Want for Christmas

the President's offending 'holiday' greeting. mostly the GOP yawned. 

Two days ago MoveOn.org put up a post about the Republican reaction to the 2011 White House Christmas card. The headline read, 'Republicans Are Furious About Obama's Christmas Card? Wait Till They See Reagan's'. Those who thought to comment were mostly incensed that conservative pundits, GOP luminaries, and Tea Party Hacks were so petty that they would actually be furious about something as innocuous as a greeting card. What seemed to escape many of those commenting is the irony of being themselves so petty that they would get incensed over something that didn't really happen.

According to the article the only Republican who expressed any reservations about the card was Sarah Palin. She made her comments on Fox Radio. What she said was that she found it 'odd' that the President's Christmas card would highlight the family dog rather than traditional Christmas values like 'family, faith, and freedom'. Palin was clearly not furious. She was not even very judgmental...at least not compared to her usual standards. MoveOn's headline, in other words, was inflammatory, divisive, and untrue—the very charges that so many leveled against the GOP leadership, who apparently remain blissfully unaware that they are embroiled in a flap.

Personally I don't think that Christmas is a very good time to be sowing the seeds of hate and recrimination. I know that both sides do it, but the fact is that there are a lot of Democrats who think that only Republicans are capable of this kind of duplicity. Clearly this is not the case, and clearly many liberal believers are ready to be seduced into making the same kinds of unthinking blanket indictments of which they accuse the conservatives. I'm not letting conservatives off the hook here. They are not only just as guilty of this kind of flimflammery, they practically invented it.

Wouldn't it be great if we could get back to actually discussing real issues with logic and civility? Wouldn't it be useful if politicians and hacks would lay out their positions so that we voters could make informed decisions from a substantive array of facts? Wouldn't it be interesting if the media would delve into the meat of differing political positions instead of focusing on who changed their mind about what or who had a bad hair day or who left Jesus off their Christmas card? Wouldn't it be a 'Wonderful Life', if politics could actually make a difference?

That's what I want from Santa—a great big bag of political relevance. We could all use a little. Even a little would be a sea change...but oh, so welcome. 

Dithering on Hard Choices

I've been putting off this post for a long time. I've never claimed to be other than a devout Roman Catholic and adamantly pro-life, but I haven't had a lot to say in this blog, or in any other forum for that matter, about abortion. It is a divisive, emotional, and controversial issue. It takes a certain amount of courage to speak out on it because doing so is sure to result in some heated disagreement if not outright vitriol.

I prefer to avoid confrontation as a rule, so when mommy bloggers that I follow post, for example, that they are sick to death of fat, middle-aged, white, Republican men trying to misappropriate moral choices that ought to be the sole purview of women, I hold my tongue. I do this because 1) I don't want to offend the sensibilities of otherwise smart and funny women on the basis of my disagreement with them on one issue, and 2) being a fat, middle-aged, white, Republican man I am already seen to lack any credible moral standing on, not just this, but many issues facing women.

Now that I'm changing my stripes, so to speak, by championing the Democrats' more 'touchy feely' approach to economic policy I find I have to confront the Democrats' decidedly non 'touchy feely' stand on abortion. I may not be a Republican any more, but neither am I a Democrat. Without the relative harmonic safety of one camp or the other, I find I need to 'nut up' and explain myself more fully. Likely this won't be any easier to read than it was to write.

Life in the Balance

I like to say that I used to be a Voldemort Republican. That's not strictly true. I've been a one-issue Republican voter for as long as I care to remember. That one issue is life. The other issues that constitute true ideological Republicanism are not so dear to me. I go back and forth on some of them. I'm just plain opposed to others. Lately I've abandoned supply side economic theory because I have come to believe that it has been a spectacular failure, even though it remains bedrock Republican economic policy. I used to buy it, but I don't any longer. This is why I call myself a former Voldemort Republican.

I've not changed my mind about abortion though. I still vote a pro-life ticket. It's not that I don't care about other issues. I do, but for me the issue of life takes precedence. For me it's been the most important issue when it comes to my vote. If you are wrong on the issue of life, nothing else really matters. It is the last purely moral issue on the table. Everything else is political or economic or both, but the issue of life is central to our humanity.

If you want to vote pro-life, you pretty much have to vote Republican. I don't really understand why this is. It doesn't make sense to me that the Republicans are pro on life and Democrats are pro on choice. I would think it would be the opposite, especially when you consider that, on the other major life issue, capital punishment, the Republicans want to kill you and the Democrats want to rehabilitate you and turn you loose. It's as if, at least as far as the political parties are concerned, it was all a matter of timing. The Republicans want to kill you after you're born, and the Democrats want to kill you before. I don't get it.

You would think that the GOP, the party of individual rights and curtailing government involvement in matters of morality, would be pro-choice. When I hear the pro-choice argument that government shouldn't be telling women what to do with their bodies, and that the decision to have or not have a child is a matter to be decided by the family and not the state, I think that sounds just Republican as hell. And yet the Republicans are happy to interpose government in your moral choices when there is a baby involved, but only, it would seem, before the baby is able to make demands of its own on various entitlement programs.

After you're born, it's an entirely different matter for Republicans. After you're born, Republicans are not so much pro-life as they are pro-keeping-what's-theirs. Once you're weaned from mother's milk and start suckling at the public teat, your life is suddenly not worth so much. You fail the Republican cost benefit analysis. This is why Republicans love capital punishment so much. It puts an end to your state paid support. They want to cut the cost and get you in the ground before you bankrupt the system.

They feel the same way about a lot of entitlements that are meant to keep body and soul together. They don't want to pay for your social welfare or your health care or your food stamps. They don't want to pay unemployment benefits. They just want you to either get a job and pay your own way or go away quietly and die. And no, they're not going to spend any money to create jobs either. That's your lookout. If you want to work, work. It's just that simple. There's not a lot of logic or consistency at work in Republican principles, and for the GOP, what claims to be pro-life, isn't. Not really. I don't know what it is, but it's certainly not consistently about life.

On the other hand, you would think that Democrats, who have traditionally been associated with grand social engineering to lift the oppressed masses out of poverty and affliction and servitude would be in favor of protecting the most disenfranchised of humanity—the unborn. Democrats have always been about legislating the right thing to do, and so they are historically and philosophically associated with The New Deal, The War on Poverty, Affirmative Action, Medicare, Civil Rights, Head Start, The National Endowment for the Arts, Consumer Protection, The Clean Air Act, and others. This being the case, one has to wonder why they keep pushing to expand a woman's right to impose her choice over the rights of her own unborn child to life, liberty and the other guarantees of our Constitution.

Democrats love killing babies—so much so that they don't want people thinking about it much before they get abortions. They are against counseling, they are against educating young women about alternatives, they are against involving families in the decision, and they are against waiting.

They are not against waiting when you've already waited too long though. If you've been dithering about getting an abortion into the third trimester, when fetuses are viable and abortions are not for the squeamish, then they think you should be able to have something called a 'partial birth abortion', a procedure so draconian it can scarcely be discussed in polite company.

In a partial birth abortion, labor is induced, and the baby is allowed to start its trip toward the light at the end of the tunnel. It's not allowed to complete its journey though. Once the tike crowns, it's little skull is pierced with a surgical spike, and its brains are vacuumed into a jar. Then the rest of its now lifeless body is allowed to pass into the world where Democrats will applaud its mother's pluck, and, if she's poor enough, pay for the procedure.

Democrats are actually okay with this. It's the mother's body, they say, and so it's the mother's decision. I would argue that, at the very least, it ceased to be about the mother's body when the baby crowned. In fact I would argue that it ceased to be about the mother's body long before that. I know that, officially at least, the jury's still out on this, but I believe it stops being about the mother's body at the moment of conception. I don't think I'm alone in this. Even Democrats agree...sort of.

Here's where the Democrats are as inconsistent and illogical as Republicans. It's about the woman's body when they're talking about abortion, but if an expectant mother smokes crack, or snorts cocaine, or drinks, or smokes, or abuses prescription medications, then it becomes all about the baby. Democrats don't want you doing anything that might injure your unborn child, unless of course you want to have it killed. Then suddenly it's all about women's rights, and the baby be damned. Oh...and they want the Republicans to agree to pay for it too.

It seems to me that the political parties have got it backwards. If they would just switch positions on abortion, I would have a much easier time embracing the social justice championed by the Democrats over the inequities fostered by the Republicans' dogged insistence on supply side and trickle down economic policies. As it is I have to continue to vote a pro-life Republican ticket because babies can't vote for themselves. I have to continue doing this even though I am certain, way down deep in my analytical accountant's soul, that the Republicans are wrong on just about every other important social and economic issue. I'd certainly feel a lot better about my choices if the choice was clear and consistent on choice.

And here's a final irony—as if choosing weren't difficult enough already. The current state of the economy is putting more and more pressure on women to have abortions. Sure, we're supposed to be in a recovery, but nobody is putting Americans back to work. There are 14 million jobless Americans on the unemployment rolls. There are probably another 11 to 12 million people who are off the official rolls or seriously underemployed. The Republicans don't want the Democrats to solve this problem. They want everyone to wait until 2013, when they hope we will have a Republican administration that can save us all from the Democrats' profligate spending.

Meanwhile, for the millions of jobless and uninsured, having a baby is a bankruptcy event. From a purely fiscal perspective - the favorite perspective of your quintessential pro-life Republican - abortion begins to look like a sensible choice. This may be an unintended result, but that doesn't make it any less real. Any policy that prolongs joblessness fosters abortion. Any policy that increases poverty increases the abortion rate. Any policy that denies basic subsistence and health service options to those who need them most denies life to the unborn. An increase in abortions may be against Republican principles, but it is at least consistent with Republican economic policy. The last thirty years of economic history proves this.

Republicans will argue that the key to economic recovery rests in unfettering the private sector from the burdens of regulation and taxation. Our problem, they say, is big government and runaway spending eating away at the incentives of business to succeed. If we would just reduce taxes on the wealthy and on corporations and loosen the regulatory noose we would see marked and immediate gains in productivity, employment, and prosperity, and these gains would benefit everybody. You've no doubt heard this mantra before. It is currently being touted by virtually every Republican candidate for the presidency. They only vary among themselves in how much they want to give to the wealthy in order to fuel this dramatic turn of fortune. I have to wonder how they can possible hold on to this supply side pipe dream that has been a virtual non-starter since the Reagan years.

If any of this stuff was going to work, it would have worked by now. It hasn't. We haven't had thirty years of unparalleled prosperity. We have had thirty years of consistently lowering taxes on the richest Americans. We have had thirty years of significant erosion of regulations that were originally put in place to protect us from boom, bust, and bailout cycles. We have had, in other words, pretty much full realization of the Republican supply side initiative without any realization of its promises.

Instead of prosperity we got ever more volatile bubbles, followed by ever steeper declines and ever more expensive public fixes. Instead of investment in innovation and jobs growth we got richer rich and poorer poor. The rich didn't invest in America as promised. They invested instead in a status quo designed to keep them at the top of the food chain. They did not risk their capital seeking gain. They used their gains to eliminate their risk. Whenever they made mistakes, which was often, they relied on poor and middle-class taxpayers to backstop their plays. In the words of Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, we got the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses.

Today the rich are richer than they've ever been. Corporations are booking record profits and are sitting on unprecedented amounts of cash. Even so they are not investing in new technologies and they are not hiring Americans. They are not doing any of the things that supply side theory tells us they are supposed to be doing with their money. And yet, almost unbelievably, the Republican solution is to lower taxes even more on the wealthy and on corporations, and to further emasculate the regulations that are meant to protect the vanishing wealth of the rest of us.

This doesn't make any sense to me at all. It defies logic, and yet you cannot turn on a television or radio or open a newspaper or log onto the Internet without hearing this trickle down claptrap trotted out as gospel. Even people who stand to lose the most believe it. People who will have their retirement funds looted by Wall Street pirates, people who will have their taxes increased to pay for yet another round of million dollar bonuses for a bunch of executives who missed the forest for the trees, people whose dreams are being snuffed out by the very people they look to for salvation, still believe with passion that supply side theory is the answer to all our prayers. Prosperity may not trickle down but irony certainly does, and that may be the great tragedy of American politics.

So this is my dilemma. I vote against abortion by voting for Republicans, but the result of Republicans winning elections is an economy that continues to spiral out of control, and the result of that is more abortions, not less. Of course the Republicans can always legislate against abortion, but then there would just be a lot more babies that those same Republicans are going to legislate against feeding, housing, medicating, and employing. It's a quandary.

The Republicans have done a pretty good job of killing the American dream. Even though they are philosophically pro-life, they are now almost as good as the Democrats at killing babies. The Democrats and Republicans need to switch sides on abortion. That way at least my vote can be consistent with my own beliefs. It may not accomplish anything in the grand scheme of things, but at least it will make sense to me.