The Worst Thing You Can Call Someone

Since the end of World War II, even though the world since then has seen massacres by Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin, and others, there is still no worse judgment to be made than comparing a leader anywhere to Hitler and his party to Nazis. Name-calling in general has been on the rise in the past decade in the United States, and Hitler name-calling is increasing at an alarming rate, notes Edna Friedberg of the William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who finds the trend “disturbing.” She writes,

 

This oversimplified approach to complex history is dangerous. When conducted with integrity and rigor, the study of history raises more questions than answers. And as the most extensively documented crime the world has ever seen, the Holocaust offers an unmatched case study in how societies fall apart, in the immutability of human nature, in the dangers of unchecked state power. It is more than European or Jewish history. It is human history. Almost 40 years ago, the United States Congress chartered a Holocaust memorial on the National Mall for precisely this reason: The questions raised by the Holocaust transcend all divides.

 

Neither the political right nor left has a monopoly on exploiting the six million Jews murdered in a state-sponsored, systematic campaign of genocide to demonize or intimidate their political opponents.

 

Both right and left, she points out, have made use of these dangerous analogies.

 

Recently someone I know slightly posted on Facebook about Nazis in relation to American politics. He listed a few oddly chosen political sins of the Nazis (leaving out depriving people of basic citizenship rights, plus the whole Holocaust death machine!!!) as follows: They “tore down statues; banned free speech; blamed economic hardships on one group of people; instituted gun control; put the state before God; nationalized health care; and placed strict government regulations on industry.” He then posed the question (though it looks as if he copied the whole post from someone else; I don't really know), “Does this sound like the policies of a current political party in the U.S.?”

 

Well, let’s see. Let’s look at those “sins” one at a time. Here's what he says the Nazis did, which he thinks sounds like one of the American political parties:

 

Removed statues. Statues of Confederate leaders have been removed in more than one American city and state—are we talking about any statues other than those of Confederates? —and we can probably thank the primarily Democrats for that. Please note that the statues removed were leaders of an armed insurrection against the U.S. government, leaders of an opposing army in a war that cost over 600,000 American deaths, a war that took place over a century and a half ago; that most of those statues went up much later, during the 1890s, the Jim Crow era, i.e., when Reconstruction ended and Southern states began enforcing strict segregation laws; and that the current Republican president, in sympathy with the old Confederacy, has ordered a couple of those statues put back up. (He has never wanted to be the president of “all Americans” and has made that clear time and time again.) 

 

On the other hand, it has been the present Republican administration that removed online memorials to Black and Native Americans, and the Republican president himself had portraits of President Obama and both presidents Bush moved out of a highly visible area of the White House to a place where they are hidden from public view. 

 

Banned free speech. Sounds like the current Republican administration to me, where any criticism of the president is seen as treason, radio stations are threatened with loss of their licenses, newspapers are sued for printing true stories that show the administration in a bad light, etc. I suspect, however, given his general sympathies, that the questioner has in mind bans against “hate speech,” particularly on college and university campuses, so here’s the way the United Nations explains that idea. Did you follow the link for the definition? If “free speech” is an absolute, then “hate speech” must be permitted, and if this is where you come down on it, both parties are guilty restricting speech. The line between acceptable and unacceptable speech under the line has always shifted with shifts in political climate, in every country of the world, under all manner of political power. One absolutist on the matter wrote that he would not even ban yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. Can you go that far? I can’t, although I tend in general to lean towards freedom. 

 

Blamed economic hardships on one group of people. Yes, Nazis blamed economic hardships on one group, the Jews, though they also scapegoated gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people, dark-skinned people, etc., etc. Republicans blame economic hardships on immigrants and Democrats, two different groups. They also love to call Democrats "socialists," because that's a hot button that short-circuits thought for many of their listeners. Democrats blame Republicans for their policies that favor the wealthiest Americans at the expense of everyone else. Not sure how to score this one.

 

Gun control. I don’t know what the specific German laws about gun ownership were under the Nazis, but neither major party in the U.S. has ever advocated making gun ownership unlawful. Democrats do, however, favor the kind of laws that most Americans also find reasonable, 

while Republicans kow-tow to the gun lobby and see any law about ownership of any weapons as an infringement of individual rights. It's strange that while they oppose even the “morning-after pill” as “murder of a child,” they are willing to sacrifice the lives of actual living schoolchildren so that anyone who wants to own a military-style assault weapon can get his hands on one. So yes, if “gun control” is a sin, Democrats are guilty. 

 

Put the state before God. That, like the foregoing, would be in the eye of the beholder. The separation of church and state does not elevate the state above the church and certainly does not elevate it above God. It’s a huge topic, what any individual might mean by this claim. 

 

Nationalized health care. There is only one country in the world, as far as I know, that has national health care, and that is the United Kingdom. Other countries have national health insurance, and the U.S. made a move in that direction with the Affordable Care Act, stopping short of having the government as a single payer. So American health insurance is still the business of for-profit corporations. Hospitals and clinics, too, which used to be owned and operated by cities and religious groups when I was young, are now for-profit businesses. Bottom line: We do not have nationalized health care. Neither major party has pushed for it. There is no country in the world that puts a greater burden on its people to pay exorbitant fees to private companies for health insurance and health care. 

 

Put strict government regulations on industry. This is certainly a sin of the Democratic party. Republicans would prefer that business be completely unregulated, with no safeguards for workers or for public health and no concern for the national resources of the country, on which all of us depend, including the industries.

 

Here's how I see these points, one by one, in summary: 

 

Every country chooses its heroes, and most adults recognize that we must choose our heroes carefully. 

 

Free speech would be less controversial if public, commonly accepted standards of civility and decency were still in place and respected and adhered to by our country’s leaders. 

 

Purposeful attributions of blame are unfortunately common in politics, but anyone following the news can see that it is much more common coming from Republicans, starting with the current president, the Blamer-in-Chief. 

 

I don’t know that this country will ever have sensible, reasonable discussion of gun ownership and gun control. 

 

Putting one religion above all others (often in a very perverted, materialistic form), rather than “putting the state before God,” is what I see Republicans doing these days, whereas Democrats would be content to maintain the traditional separation of church and state as laid out by the Founders. 

 

Nationalized health care is a straw man: We don’t have it, and neither party advocates for it. 

Government regulations on industry are nothing but common sense; the absence of regulations would be nothing but the raping and pillaging our own land and our own people for the short-term gain of the wealthiest segment of the population. I should say, for the short-term gain of the segment of that segment who recognize only one value: money and the power it gives.

 

A more important question relating to the list, however, is—what, if anything, does this list say about either major American political party? Would anyone want to say that a country with gun regulations or regulations on industry is, because of those regulations, led by Nazi-like politicians? The idea is ludicrous. 

As for my own view (which would not be the view of the person who posted the list), I believe that analogies between the present Republican administration and its leader to Nazis and Hitler are unnecessary and beside the point. We don't need analogies. All we need to do is listen to what is said by the Blamer-in-Chief and his diehard supporters and watch what they are doing and ordering done. It's all plenty bad enough without comparing it to other people and times and places. So let's not undermine our testimony with a reductio ad Hitlerum.

 

But I will let Edna Friedberg have the last word today: 

 

Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize, demean, and intimidate their targets. But there is a cost for all of us because they distract from the real issues challenging our society, because they shut down productive, thoughtful discourse. At a time when our country needs dialogue more than ever, it is especially dangerous to exploit the memory of the Holocaust as a rhetorical cudgel. We owe the survivors more than that. And we owe ourselves more than that. 

“No More New Clothes!”

Somewhere recently on Facebook I saw a post urging women to stop buying new clothes. Since I almost never do, having chosen a path in life that does not facilitate that kind of spending, I might have scrolled on by without a second thought. Ah, but the curse of a philosopher is to be never far from second thoughts on any subject whatsoever! And so the idea stuck in my mind. 

I don’t remember now the reasons given for the plea, though it seemed to have something to do with changing the world, rather as Lysistrata urged the women of Athens (it was Athens, wasn’t it?) to refuse sex to their husbands until the men agreed to put an end to war.  Perhaps the idea in buying no more new clothes was for women to show their independence from the fashion industry and to punish clothing designers for the narrow range of acceptable images of women in their advertising.

In the middle of the night, though, wide awake from a dream, I found myself musing on the radically changed world we might expect if, by a snap of her fingers, that one woman on Facebook could enact her scenario. Imagine that all American women (to simplify the story, only American women) were suddenly to stop buying any new clothes at all, either for themselves or for their families. What might we expect to see?

Clothing stores are empty, sales staff laid off, shopping malls dark. All those enticing jobs for teen girls and young women gone! (Your friends' children? Your grandchildren?) Well, those jobs are vanishing, anyway, you might say, with everyone shopping online, but the online businesses would go dark, too, remember, if selling new clothes is what they’re all about. Warehouses, factories, shipping facilities all close, and those jobs too vanish overnight. 

(Who are the people whose jobs have gone up in smoke? Can you see them in your mind’s eye?)

Now picture the scene at thrift shops and consignment businesses across the country. As secondhand shoppers, the wealthy and leisured still have a big advantage, for they don't need to fit shopping around a work schedule, as do the women who have always depended on secondhand clothing to make themselves presentable. So now we have consumers competing against each other for the most desirable used items, and those with the most time and money will come off best. Yet again. No big change there. 

But how about the supply of those desirable secondhand clothing items? Where will they come from? To see the problem, we need to look further down the road. 

When women with comfortable incomes no longer buy new clothes (while competing with women of lower incomes for the “nicer” used items), they won’t have as much used clothing to send out into the world. We can expect donations to thrift shops to decline rapidly in quality. In fact, it’s pretty easy to imagine the wealthy and leisured forming their own little clubs of privilege and circulating the best used clothing items among themselves, circumventing any need to mix with the hoi polloi at all.

A look beyond our own fortunate borders is in order here, too. Jobs for garment workers around the world — largely women at or close to the lower rungs of the economic ladder — disappear in large numbers, as do other jobs depending on the clothing industry. American women are no longer fashion’s slaves, but the real price of their freedom, as usual, is born elsewhere.

Let me step back at this point from my thought experiment to say that I have never been one to urge Americans to “Buy, buy, buy!” (One of my customers told me recently, “You’re a better friend than you are a business person.” I’d really like to be good in both roles, but I certainly don’t want to excel in the latter by sacrificing the former.) In general, Americans buy too much, much more than they need or can reasonably use. Shopping, whether online or in stores, and whether the shopper is buying new or buying used, can be an addiction, a way to self-medicate and avoid dealing with more difficult issues in personal and/or political life. 

I’ll go further and say that I do not regard unlimited economic growth as a cure for the ills of our soul-sick country, let alone the ills of a imperiled world. What’s touted as a solution is, as I see it, really part of the problem. Environmental degradation is a cost not usually figured into “growth,” but how can that make sense, when we live on a finite planet with finite resources?

No, no, I am not arguing for consumer spending as a cure for anything. Are we clear on that?

All I’m saying is that before we call for a movement — nationwide, let alone a worldwide — it’s a good idea to think through the consequences of what we’re asking people to do. Who stands to benefit, and who will be harmed? Are the probable consequences ones we really want?

There’s no shopping necessary to conduct a thought experiment. You’ve already got everything you need.

Two Different Worlds

These thoughts were inspired by reading as much as by memory but are not focused on a book, so I'm putting them here, rather than on my main books blog. Also, they follow, at least partially, in some fashion, the previous post on this blog.

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Again and again, reading Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, I re-experienced scenes from childhood as memories surged forth. When Isenberg noted that gardening as recreation was an acceptable part of postwar middle-class life, but growing food on one’s small plot of land was not -- right there, in a single sentence, I saw again the contrast between my two sets of grandparents—my father’s father and stepmother in Columbus, Ohio, and my mother’s mother and stepfather on the edge of Springfield, Ohio.

Springfield grandparents and baby me

The Columbus grandparents led an urban life, the Springfield people rural. Well, kind of. In truth, both were in-between but in different ways. The Columbus neighborhood had probably been a suburb in the city’s early days, and the Springfield neighborhood was more a hodge-podge of poor folks outside the city limits. Lots in both places may have been forty feet wide, but the Springfield lots stretched back a long way from the road, and livestock and poultry were abundant.

In Springfield, the neighborhood had obviously grown up higgledy-piggledy, and the streets – roads? -- were still unpaved in the 1950s. Clay dust squished like talcum powder, deliciously, between bare toes. All up and down the road, in white families and black, the children went barefoot. Some may not have had shoes. I shed mine eagerly to be like the rest.

My grandparents’ street in Columbus was paved, and there were concrete sidewalks, too. Children did not go barefoot in public.

The house in Columbus was solid and, to my child’s eyes, stately, a two-story brick house with a painted concrete front porch the width of the house. The porch featured a rolled bamboo shade for privacy and was always cool in summer. Elements of the backyard were a luxurious lawn, a swing hung from another large shade tree, a hammock, my grandmother’s riotously colorful flowerbeds, and my grandfather’s prize tomatoes, of which he was inordinately proud. In the bathroom, tile gleamed and sparkled. Bedrooms upstairs on the second floor were filled with massive, dark, polished furniture, the beds so high we children had to mount them with footstools. Everything in the house bespoke solidity and respectability.

The frame house in Springfield was a single story and very plain. Originally only a large kitchen, small parlor, and two bedrooms, it had been expanded with a newer, smaller kitchen built around the water pump (thus bringing water into the house), but there was no bathroom at all. We washed at (or were washed in, when small) the kitchen sink, and an outhouse reached by a brick path, laid herringbone style under a long grape arbor, served other needs. The side yard was given over to chickens, the back to fruit trees, raspberry patch, and Grandpa’s large garden. Once the iceman came with his horse-drawn wagon and stopped in front of the house. Slivers of ice for all the children!

My Columbus grandfather was a high school graduate and a union member, engineer first on a steam train and later driver of a diesel engine. His job paid well. I remember my mother remarking once that my father’s family had had meat for dinner every night through the Depression. My father’s sister never had to go to school dressed in a flour sack. Sometimes cousins visited while we were at the Columbus house, but no one ever dropped in unannounced. Visits were arranged.

 My Springfield grandpa worked in a factory, and Grandma trekked to the farmers’ market in downtown Springfield to sell what food (eggs, fruit, vegetables) the family did not need or put up for winter. Their house had no bedroom doors, only sheets hung in the doorways, but their big dining table always had room to accommodate neighbors who dropped in around dinnertime, and my grandmother always found an extra plate and food to fill it.

I loved all four of my grandparents, blood and “step” relations, and did not, when small, differentiate between them on that basis. The differences in the way they lived, on the other hand, were obvious from the start. Both households had enough to eat and to share with grandchildren. Both grandfathers had jobs, and both grandmothers kept house. Still, even as a child I realized they occupied two very different worlds, and experiencing different ways of life from childhood is something I value in the way I grew up. 

Question Re Bank Bailout

Okay, time goes by, and the country is still struggling to recover, and as review of the bank bailout continues, I have a question. I understand that it could have been disastrous (could have been--who knows if it would have been?) to fire all the experienced top people in the biz, but what would have been wrong with putting them on probation? Maybe for the remainder of their working lives but at least for 5-10 years? Instead of giving them bonuses, at taxpayer expense, rewarding them for lining their pockets while losing investors' money. Anyone have an explanation?

Why Is American Medicine So Costly?

I read with interest the other day praise by a fellow bookman for libertarian politics. I became a big Ayn Rand fan at the age of 17 and clung to Objectivist certainties until my late 20s, when life experience, broader reading, deeper critical thinking, and subsequent gradual disillusionment intervened. The main charge made in the short piece that got me thinking about this stuff again was the writer’s contention that it is government interference in health care that has sent medical costs soaring. I want to examine that claim.

Certainly a statistical correlation can be found between programs such as Medicare and rising costs since World War II, but other, equally available correlations are left out of such a narrow focus. Three come instantly to my mind.

(1) First there has been the rise of the for-profit hospital. Hospitals used to be owned and run by communities and churches. They were not expected to “make” money but to provide care when needed. These hospitals were not free, but neither were their charges governed by the “free” market. Schools, libraries, hospitals—these were seen as necessary provisions of civilized communities for their members. For-profit hospitals have changed the landscape utterly. Younger people can be forgiven for not remembering a history they did not live through. My generation has no such excuse.

Along with for-profit came (2) more and more health and practice liability insurance "products." Insurance is not in itself a necessarily bad idea. In fact, the pooling of economic risk and sharing of economic benefits are (does this astonish you?) basically a socialist principle. But does anyone not realize that private insurance companies exist to make money? As much money as possible for shareholders and investors. The more you buy—and the less they have to pay out—the more money they make. As for liability insurance for physicians, can a doctor even without malpractice insurance in a for-profit hospital? (Any hospital?) Lawsuits would certainly put profits at risk, and reducing risk to the company is what actuarial calculations are all about.

Also in the postwar period came (3) advances in medical science. These have brought Americans more and more expensive testing and treatment options, and they have also made equipment more expensive to hospitals. Not only are more people kept alive longer (some of them only "alive"), but because more and more new tests and procedures and treatments and equipment all the time come to be regarded as “ordinary care,” the cost of ordinary health insurance continues to go up correspondingly. 

Put it all together and look at the expanded picture again. For every case of a Medicare patient costing big bucks, there is a corresponding case of a healthy person with private insurance whose physician has ordered a dozen expensive, often unnecessary tests, "just to be on the safe side”; a man or woman “suffering” from the usual effects of aging and taking prescription medication to hold those “symptoms” at bay; or a comatose patient in a hospital bed being kept “alive” as long as private insurance is footing the bills.

Americans want to live forever, they want to stay young forever, and those who can afford to pay top dollar in their futile search for the Fountain of Youth make it almost impossible for those of us who would be content with basic care to find no-frills providers and institutions. It’s like looking for simple, basic dental care, when the way dentists make money these days is with expensive cosmetic procedures. Who wants to serve the lower end of the market? That won’t pay off medical school debt or help meet malpractice insurance bills!

My point is that private insurance companies, for-profit hospitals, scientific advances, and the race to the top of the medical market all fit perfectly well into the free-market, libertarian model. Why is American medicine so expensive? Blaming government interference is simplistic, narrow thinking. But it’s got “sound bytes” working for it.

Unnatural Animals

Picture an animal with the body of a lion and the head of a rhinoceros. Grafting the business model onto higher education produces just such a strange animal. Students, paying tuition to attend classes, are considered “customers,” but what are they buying? While they can pay for the time and talents of their instructors, they cannot buy knowledge or expertise: these they must work to acquire for themselves, and for this reason they cannot buy degrees or certification. When things work out well and students achieve the desired certification, when they are granted the degrees they seek, they themselves become “products” of the institution.

Here it is, then: A successful student goes in one end of the processing plant as a “customer” and comes out the other end as a “product.” Economics aside, when one looks at it carefully, isn’t it obvious that education cannot be considered industry and should not be run along the same lines or judged by the same standards?

Health care regarded as business produces another such unnatural animal. What can “customers” of health care purchase? They cannot neither buy health nor an alternative to death, the eventual inevitable end of us all. They receive time, attention, advice, access to medications, the ministrations of technicians and specialists who poke them with needles, inject them with chemicals, cut away pieces of their flesh and often send them on to other technicians and specialists for more of the same. Sometimes the desired results are achieved, and the person paying for services is relieved of pain and other ill effects of disease or patched back together after great physical trauma; however, as with education, the “customer” often has as much responsibility for and input into the result as the health care provider.

In health care under the business model, we must ask again the question we asked of education. What is the “product”? How is successful delivery of the “product” measured? Financial benefits to providers are measurable, but at the other end--? Those enamored of the business model see no difficulty in allowing a “market” in health care to accommodate higher and higher prices. They do not see a widening gap in health care delivery, the gap between those who can afford it and those who cannot, as a problem. This is how the market operates. This is the law of the jungle, the law of natural selection.

I ask again: What is the “product” in a health care “industry”? I do not have an answer.