Barbara's Blog

Happy Fascism Awareness Week!

I’ve never been able to explain Halloween to the kids, with its odd thematic confluence of pumpkins, candy, and death. But Halloween is a piece of pumpkin cake compared to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which commences today. In this special week, organized by conservative pundit David Horowitz, we have a veritable witches’ brew of Cheney-style anti-jihadism mixed in with old-fashioned rightwing anti-feminism and a sour dash of anti-Semitism.

A major purpose of this week is to wake up academic women to the threat posed by militant jihadism. According to the Week’s website, feminists, and particularly the women’s studies professors among them, have developed a masochistic fondness for Islamic fundamentalist. Hence, as anti-Islamo-Fascist speakers fan out to the nation’s campuses this week, students are urged to stage “sit-ins in Women’s Studies Departments and campus Women’s Centers to protest their silence about the oppression of women in Islam.”

Leaving aside the obvious quibbles about feminist pro-jihadism and the term “Islamo-Fascism,” which seems largely designed to give jihadism a nice familiar World War II ring, the klaxons didn’t go off for me until I skimmed down the list of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week speakers and found, incredibly enough, Ann Coulter, whom I last caught on TV pining for the repeal of women’s suffrage. "If we took away women's right to vote,” she said wistfully, “We’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream; it's a personal fantasy of mine."

Coulter is not the only speaker on the list who may have a credibility problem when it comes to opposing oppression of women in Islam or anywhere else. Another participant in the week’s events is former senator Rick Santorum, whose book It Takes a Family blamed “radical feminism” for pushing women into the workforce and thus destroying the American family. A 2005 column on that book in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, began with: “Women of America, I hope you look good in a burqa. If Senator Rick Santorum,R-PA, has his way, we will all be wearing the burqas discarded by our recently liberated sisters in Afghanistan…” (This was the before the Taliban re-emerged.)

Not quite in the burqa-promoting league, but close, is another official speaker for the week, Christina Hoff Sommers, who has made her name attacking feminism for exaggerating the problem of domestic violence and eliminating opportunities for boys. These are the people who are going to save us from purdah?

Another disagreeable feature of jihadism – anti-Semitism – is also represented on the list of speakers for Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week, again by the multi-faceted Coulter. Just last week on CNBC, she referred to America as a “Christian nation.” Asked where this left the Jews (not to mention the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans and atheists), she said they could be “perfected” by converting to Christianity.

You might imagine that this view of Jews as “imperfect” would bother  Horowitz, who is famously alert to any hint of anti-Semitism on the left. But no, he defends Coulter, writing that "If you don't accompany this belief by burning Jews who refuse to become perfected at the stake why would any Jew have a problem?" Sure, David, and if that’s the threshold for intolerance, Osama bin Laden could probably win an award for humanitarianism.

Maybe none of this should be surprising. When Mel Gibson, who is not known to be a member of the Hollywood left, unleashed a drunken anti-Semitic tirade on his arresting officers, Horowitz also rose to his defense, arguing that ensuing outrage reflected a “hatred” – not of anti-Semites -- but of Christians.

As for the anti-feminism of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week: This fits in neatly with the thesis of Susan Faludi’s brilliant new book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. She shows that, in the wake of an attack by the ultra-misogynist Al Qaeda, Americans perversely engaged in an anti-feminist campaign of their own, calling for an immediate restoration of traditional gender roles. Coulter was part of that backlash, opining in 2002 that “feminists hate guns because guns remind them of men.”

Before you put on your costumes to celebrate Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week, let me set the record straight. American feminists do not condone, defend, or ignore jihadist misogyny. In fact, we were warning about it well before Washington turned against the Taliban and have been consistently appalled by the gender dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Iran.

But if the facts don’t fit in with Islamo-Fascist Awareness, they have to go. For example, in a May ‘07 column in The Weekly Standard Christina Hoff Sommers  listed me as one of the “feckless” feminists who refuse “to pass judgment on non-Western cultures.” What? If Sommers had even done ten minutes of research she would have noticed, among other things, a column I wrote in the New York Times in ’04 stating that Islamic fundamentalism aims to push one-half of the Muslim world—the female half-- “down to a status only slightly above that of domestic animals.”

Yes, feminists tend to hate war and sometimes even guns, and this may be why Horowitz and company hate us. They should know, though, that we especially hate a war that seems calculated to inflame Islamic fundamentalism world wide. If many Muslim women around the world willingly don head scarves today, it’s in part because our war in Iraq has, tragically, pushed them to value religious solidarity above their feminist instincts.

Or maybe I’m missing the point of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week. Maybe it’s really an effort to show that our own American anti-feminists (and anti-Semites) are just as nasty as the ones on the other side. If so, good job, guys! No need to continue with the trick-or-treating, you’ve already made your point.

The Right's Academic Universe

What is the purpose of the universe, anyway? I hadn't started reading the Sunday papers with this question in mind, but after slogging through mass rapes in Congo, bombings in Baghdad, and K-Fed'€™s worthiness as a father, I could no longer dodge it. Then, in the middle of the New York Times Week in Review section -€“ some of the priciest real estate in the print industry -€“ I came across a two full-page ad under the headline "Does the Universe Have a Purpose?"€

The text of the ad was the responses of 12 scientist and philosopher-types, ranging from the purposeless (biochemist Christian de Duve), to the purpose-driven (Jane Goodall) and the just plain whiney, as in astronomer Owen Gingerich'€™s "œFrankly, I am psychologically incapable of believing that the universe is meaningless." (Suck it up, Owen, it's the only universe you've got.) I was miffed that I had not been asked to contribute my theory that this is a trial universe which has turned to be defective. But I was even more distracted by the sponsor of the ad - the John Templeton Foundation.

Just a couple of weeks ago the Templeton Foundation had showed up in the news in a somewhat less exalted context. John M. Templeton Jr., the president of the foundation, turns out to be one of the funders of Freedom's Watch, the new rightwing group which has been running pro-war commercials conflating Al Qaeda with whomever it is we're fighting in Iraq. You may have seen the one in which a veteran complains that stopping the war now would render the loss of his legs meaningless, much like the universe itself.

This is not John Templeton Jr.'€™s first or only venture into rightwing politics. In 2004, he started the group Let Freedom Ring, aimed getting out the evangelical Christian vote for George Bush. He recently joined the Romney campaign'€™s National Faith and Values Steering Committee, a group which includes an anti-abortion activist and a fellow from the Heritage Foundation.

So the real question may be, "What is the purpose of the Templeton Foundation?"€ Founded by John Templeton Jr.'s father, Sir John Templeton, the investor, the foundation set out to bridge science and spirituality while -€“ on a not obviously related track -€“ promoting free enterprise. In just the last ten years, it has become a serious force in the academic world, generally funding anything too soft and fuzzy for the governmental grant-makers -€“ studies, for example, on optimism, happiness, character, forgiveness and faith. This year, its $1.5 million annual Templeton prize went to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who states, on the foundation's website, that "We urgently need new insight into the human propensity for violence."

Maybe he should have started by querying John Templeton Jr. on that one. Or maybe there was a mistake, and the foundation had intended the award, not for the Canadian philosopher, but for the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor.

And what are we to make of Templeton's stickiest project of all - an $8 million grant to create the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, that last being defined by Templeton Sr. as "total constant love for every person with no exception"? Are there some major oedipal issues between the Templetons Jr. and Sr., or is the universe just a little too tricky for me?

But the Templeton's most famous baby is the young field of Positive Psychology, launched by University of Pennsylvania's Martin Seligman after his five-year-old daughter accused him of being a "grouch" and he resolved improve his outlook. Pos Psych carves out everything ordinary Psych, with its bent toward pathology, ignores, which is in itself an admirable ambition. In practice though, it tilts dangerously, for something that considers itself a science, toward the prescriptive. If you'€™re not happy -€“ or optimistic or upbeat - you better get to work on that now, and we have the "coaches" to help you.

Put all this happiness and optimism together with John Templeton Jr.'€™s political agenda and you could come up with some pretty paranoid scenarios: For example, that the Templeton Foundation is a plot to numb Americans into smiley-faced acquiescence to the status quo. And could it be a coincidence that Templeton helped finance the re-election of the most optimistic president we've had since Ronald Reagan?

So I attended the 6th Annual International Positive Psychology Summit conference in Washington DC last week to see what was up, and am happy - make that also optimistic, hopeful and almost positive - to report that this Templeton-spawned group could probably not plot its way out of a paper bag. The presentations I sampled occupied the full range from mediocrity to silliness. At the mediocre, or sub-mediocre, level was a paper on the effects of a Christian summer camp on teenagers, suggesting that it enhanced such virtues as self-control and patience. For silliness, you couldn't beat a couple of sessions featuring "€œcoaches" and management consultants using their power points to illustrate how to make corporations more "positive" and "€œstrength-based."

Strangest of all, Pos Psych'€™s founder Martin Seligman appeared, to the dismay of many in the audience, to renounce the whole enterprise, stating from the podium that "I'€™ve decided my theory of positive psychology is completely wrong, so I've put forth a different notion." All I can report is that the new notion expands Pos Psych's jurisdiction to include anthropology, political science and economics, and seems to be based empirically on Seligman's love of bridge - the card game, that is, not the link between the spiritual and the scientific. Beyond that, my lengthy and detailed notes offer no enlightenment.

When that session came to an end, I cornered the young psychologist who had been appointed by the Templeton Foundation to give out this year's Martin E.P. Seligman Award for Outstanding Dissertation Research in Positive Psychology. "What about John Templeton’s funding of pro-war commercials?" I asked him. "No comment," he responded at great length, mentioning along the way that he'€™s been asked that question before.

And well he might be. The Templeton Foundation's academic beneficiaries include not only opportunists and self-help gurus, but some serious scientists, and they need to dissociate themselves from the reckless belligerence of John M. Templeton Jr. I'm not saying they should return their grants, just chip in a little of that Templeton largesse for a full-page ad in the New York Times with an intriguing headline like "What Is the Purpose of Science? Clue: It'€™s Not War." Charles Taylor, with his $1.5 million award, should organize the effort.

The Clinton Campaign: Running on Ambien

Just a year ago the hot question was: Is America ready for a black or female president? As the campaigns wear on, the question has shifted to: Can America survive the tedium of its black and female candidates?

Obama, for example, hasn’t turned out to be any more challenging to white America than re-runs of the Cosby show. He was slow to pick up on the Jena 6 case and never showed up at the rally – although, to be fair, neither did Clinton or Edwards. Like the others, he has refrained from noting that Giuliani, in addition to being a cell phone exhibitionist and a 9/11-abuser, presided over a New York City police department famed for its torture and killing of young black males.

But it’s Hillary who’s causing the citzenry’s heads to pitch forward and collapse on their chests. Every time she opens her mouth, her flat, monotonic voice lays out yards of opaque white gauze, muffling any possibility of “discourse.” Where does she stand? Over here, and a little to the side, and maybe a few steps to the right. Hers is known as the “flawless” campaign, but no one in it seems to be able to turn off the endlessly triangulating tape in her head.

Lately she’s taken to emitting to sudden, inexplicable, bursts of deep laughter – known in the media as “the cackle.” Whether this is a deliberate “humanizing” touch or a glitch in the computer program no one knows. According to the New York Times, the “weirdest moment” came in response to a question from Bob Schieffer about Republican charges that her health plan would lead to “socialized medicine.” As the Times reports, “She giggled, giggled some more, could not seem to stop giggling –‘Sorry, Bob,’ she said – and finally unleashed the full Cackle.”

Maybe she has a better sense of humor than I’d imagined, because the thought that her plan to turn health care over to the private insurance companies might be “socialist” has me rolling on the floor too.

I just wish I could work up the same degree of enthusiasm for Hillary as my friend Katha Pollitt, who recently told the Times: “If people don't stop saying incredibly sexist things about Hillary Clinton, I may just have to vote for her.” But what are these incredibly sexist things? True, there was the whole faux “cleavage” issue, and the occasional whack-job who writes to enlighten me about Clinton’s bisexuality or Chelsea’s true daddy.

Then, in of all places – feminist Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday – I found a genuinely sexist comment about Hillary. Dowd apparently approvingly quotes Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, saying that Clinton is “like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone.”

Now I’m all for having literary editors, poetry editors, and the like commenting on our political process, but the “nagging housewife” image is not only a sexist stereotype – it’s about 50 years out of date, stemming from an era when most married women were financially dependent on their mates. Besides, male politicians are never likened to stereotypical husbands, even though some of them can be equally hard to dislodge from the recliner in front of the TV or, as the case may be, the Oval Office.

But the “hellish housewife” comment does not make Hillary a feminist martyr, nor does it make me any more willing to listen to her, either now or for the next five years. Trying to say nothing to offend, she ends up saying nothing to inspire or even inform, and Obama, though still far more engaged and human-like, risks ending up with another Ambien candidacy.

Part of the problem is structural. We make our presidential candidates campaign for at least a year at a stretch. Take a normal person and subject him or her to month after month of trail mix and chicken Caesars, sleep deprivation, and the need to be “on,” smiling and handshaking, 16 hours a day. No solitary moments of reflection, no walks in the park, no escape into thrillers. What do you get after a few months of this? A golem, the artificial, man-like creature of Kabalistic lore, a personoid incapable of normal responses.

So yes, America is ready for a black or a female president. Just be sure to wake us up when it happens.

We Have Seen the Enemy — And Surrendered

Bow your heads and raise the white flags. After facing down the Third Reich, the Japanese Empire, the U.S.S.R., Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, the United States has met an enemy it dares not confront – the American private health insurance industry.

With the courageous exception of Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic candidates have all rolled out health “reform” plans that represent total, Chamberlain-like, appeasement. Edwards and Obama propose universal health insurance plans that would in no way ease the death grip of Aetna, Unicare, MetLife, and the rest of the evil-doers. Clinton – why are we not surprised? – has gone even further, borrowing the Republican idea of actually feeding the private insurers by making it mandatory to buy their product. Will I be arrested if I resist paying $10,000 a year for a private policy laden with killer co-pays and deductibles?

It’s not only the Democratic candidates who are capitulating. The surrender-buzz is everywhere. I heard it from a notable liberal political scientist on a panel in August: We can’t just leap to a single payer system, he said in so many words, because it would be too disruptive, given the size of the private health insurance industry. Then I heard it yesterday from a Chicago woman who leads a nonprofit agency serving the poor: How can we go to a Canadian-style system when the private industry has gotten so “big”?

Yes, it is big. Leighton Ku, at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, gave me the figure of $776 billion in expenditures on private health insurance for this year. It’s also a big-time employer, paying what economist Paul Krugman has estimated two to three million people just turn down claims.

This in turn generates ever more employment in doctors’ offices to battle the insurance companies. Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing physician, wrote in The New Yorker that ''a well-run office can get the insurer's rejection rate down from 30 percent to, say, 15 percent. That’s how a doctor makes money. It's a war with insurance, every step of the way.'' And that’s another thing your insurance premium has to pay for: the ongoing “war” between doctors and insurers.

Note: The private health insurance industry is not big because it relentlessly seeks out new customers. Unlike any other industry, this one grows by rejecting customers. No matter how shabby you look, Cartier, Lexus, or Nordstrom’s will happily take your money. Not Aetna. If you have a prior conviction – excuse me, a pre-existing condition – it doesn’t want your business. Private health insurance is only for people who aren’t likely to ever get sick. In fact, why call it “insurance,” which normally embodies the notion of risk-sharing? This is extortion.

Think of the damage. An estimated 18,000 Americans die every year because they can’t afford or can’t qualify for health insurance. That’s the 9/11 carnage multiplied by three-- every year. Not to mention all the people who are stuck in jobs they hate because they don’t dare lose their current insurance.

Saddam Hussein never killed 18,000 Americans or anything close; nor did the U.S.S.R. Yet we faced down those “enemies” with huge patriotic bluster, vast military expenditures, and, in the case of Saddam, armed intervention. So why does the U.S. soil its pants and cower in fear when confronted with the insurance industry?

Here’s a plan: First, locate the major companies. No major intelligence effort will be required, since Google should suffice. Second, estimate their armed strength. No doubt there are legions of security guards involved in protecting the company headquarters from irate consumers, but these should be manageable with a few brigades. Next, consider an air strike, followed by an infantry assault.

And what about the two to three million insurance industry employees whose sole job it is to turn down claims? Well, I have a plan for them: It’s called unemployment. What country in its right mind would pay millions of people to deny other people health care?

I’m not mean, though. If we had the kind of universal, single-payer, health insurance Kucinich is advocating, private health insurance workers would continue to be covered even after they are laid off. As for the health insurance company executives, there should be an adequate job training program for them – perhaps as home health aides.

Fellow citizens, where is the old macho spirit that has sustained us through countless conflicts against enemies both real and imagined? In the case of health care, we have identified the enemy, and the time has come to crush it.

Fear of Restrooms

I don’t suffer from fear of flying – it’s fear of airports that cripples me. Anything could happen to you in an airport: You could be apprehended by the TSA, the DEA, and, as we just learned from the Larry Craig case, by the vice squad. I’m at the point where I’m beginning to develop subsidiary phobias – to Cinnabon, Sbarros, and, most recently, airport restrooms.

I don’t know whether lesbians hook up in airport ladies’ rooms. Judging from my lesbian friends, they don’t hook up at all. They fall in love, move in together, and start devoting themselves to home improvements. But if they do, on occasion, cruise airport restrooms in the manner of a U.S. Senator, what signaling techniques do they use? And could I have inadvertently been employing them?

Because, face it, how many of us knew that the way to attract a fellow male stall-dweller was by tapping your foot and swiping your hand along the floor? Just three days ago, in DFW (Dallas/Ft. Worth airport to you infrequent flyers), I was in the ladies’ room performing the well-known automatic-faucet-activating gesture: frantically waving my hands, palm down, under the faucet, hoping to activate the sensor. Then, just before screaming, “Why don’t they let us turn on our own damn faucets?” I realized that the hand-waving could be a signal and that the lady at the adjacent sink could be an officer of the law. I hastily abandoned the effort to wash.

Once – and I admit this with some trepidation-- I even consciously communicated with the occupant of an adjacent stall. What I said was: “Could you pass me some toilet paper?” Then I reached down under the partition separating us to collect the proffered paper. Now I realize it would have been wiser to leave the restroom unblotted, because a hand reaching into one’s stall is surely a Craig-like signal.

For the last six years, between September 01 and today, my main airport worry was that I might look or act like a terrorist. No dangling earrings or dark lipstick, was my rule, though I had no hard evidence that female terrorists prefer them. No anxious glances at the uniformed personnel. No reading Guns and Ammo; instead carry Real Simple and Martha Stewart’s Living. No tantrums when the TSA confiscated my eyeliner. But now I see that my efforts to look less like a terrorist might have made me look more like a, heaven forfend, lesbian.

Short of some undisclosed evidence that the 9/11 killers were closeted Wahabist gays, you may wonder, as I do, why – with the “threat level” at an ominous orange – agents of the law are being deployed to detect people of alternative sexualities. Larry Craig was apprehended by a man apparently consigned to spend his entire day on the can, watching for errant fingers. Possibly this fellow has some intestinal issues which made this a necessary posting. But, sphincter control permitting, could he not have been more usefully employed, say, interviewing passengers as to their willingness to blow themselves up to score some theological point?

This is what El Al, the Israeli airline, does, and it’s believed to have the tightest security in the world. Its security people no doubt have bathroom breaks, but they spend a lot of their time on their feet too, interviewing prospective passengers: Why are you traveling? Who will you be seeing? Why aren’t you carrying any tourist books? El Al doesn’t rely on interviews alone of course. They also confiscated my baggy of peanuts, though who knows what havoc you could wreak with them.

The official justification for the security measures that have made air travel so scary is that they keep us safe – and, beyond that, free. But I’d feel safer and a whole lot freer if I didn’t have to worry about accidentally impersonating a gay person. I’d feel freer still if I knew it didn’t matter, travel-wise, whether I was gay or straight. If lesbians want to cruise the ladies’ rooms for quickies, which I very much doubt that they do, and if one of them should hit on me, which I find even more unlikely, I can always say, “Uh, not right now, I’ve got a plane to catch.”

As for the fellow who unintentionally revealed the presence of the sex police in our airport restrooms: I’m hoping Larry Craig comes back and comes out. This will no doubt involve a tearful public renunciation of his past homophobia and a lifetime membership in the Log Cabin Republicans. But he’ll meet plenty of guys, and in the end it will be so much easier not to have to pretend to take a leak every time he needs a little loving.

Freshpersons, Welcome to Debt!

Welcome to Fleece U., where our mission is to take feckless teenagers such as yourselves and turn them into full-fledged citizens of our economy, meaning, of course, debtors.

Many life-changing things will happen to you in the next four years. You will make lasting friends, including perhaps the love of your life. You will drink more than you ever thought possible and bitterly regret it in the morning. You will lose your virginity, if you happen to have brought it with you.

Our stellar faculty ardently hopes that along the way you will be amazed by calculus and charmed by the tipsy conversation between Alcibiades and that wily old radical, Socrates. There is also a general expectation that you that you will come out of here with some hazy notion of spelling and grammar.

But never forget that your real purpose here is to shake off the pointless freedom of youth and assume the burden of debt. To this end, we have just raised our tuition in an attempt to keep up with such top-of-the-line institutions as George Washington University (now weighing in at $39,210 a year, or $50,000 with room and board). You will find us also charging a plethora of additional fees – a “student activities fee,” a “technology fee,” and an “incidentals fee.” In addition, we will be experimenting this year with a “snow removal fee,” a “lecture hall seat-use fee,” and the installation of pay toilets in the dorms.

It would be short-sighted to resent these fees, since they provide valuable experience in bill-reading, and will come in handy when you confront your own personal monthly utility statements. At present we do not charge any additional tuition for this training in bill-reading, though we are considering adding a special “fee fee” in the future.

Another thing that will help ease you into the status of debtor is the price of your textbooks – about $120 to $180 for a new, graffiti-free copy. True, this seems high when you could buy a hardcover of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for $20 or less, but the aim is to teach you that a book is something to treasure (and, again, we charge no extra fee for this lesson.)

On average, you will graduate with a respectable-sized debt of $20,000, which will enable you to establish your all-important “credit history.” If we have succeeded in our educational mission, you will be a first-rate debtor, capable of making minimum monthly payments much of the time. As fresh offers of credit cards and home equity loans pour in, you will beam with pride at your achievement.

Please note carefully that Fleece U degree cannot guarantee you a future income that will allow you to pay off your debts. Many of our most promising graduates are now, three or four years later, working for $8-12 an hour serving up lattés, counseling disturbed youth or creating business computer networks. They are set for a lifetime of debt, and we are proud that they first began to accrue it right here, on our lovely mock Oxfordian campus.

We don’t have to remind you not to stigmatize debt as a condition associated with poverty. In 2006, for the first time, the average household’s debt exceeded its income. By becoming a debtor, you will have entered the American mainstream! We have confidence that you will go on to mature effortlessly from college debt to car loan to mortgage to medical debts occasioned by the ever-growing gaps in coverage.

You will see the value of all this debt when the day comes, as it inevitably will, when you wake up and ask yourself, “Who am I and what am I doing here?” You will be tempted to take long walks, read the Upanishads, or try out for a new career as a trophy spouse.

In a crisis like this, you could easily spend thousands of dollars on life coaching and motivational DVDs. But you won’t have to, because you’ll have debt to keep you going. You will get up, shower, and toil faithfully in your cubicle year after year until, in the fullness of time, your family acquires the debt for your interment (at which point we trust you will have remembered Fleece U in your will.)

So think of debt as the great motivator. Think of it as our gift to you. Because for at least the next academic year, we are not even thinking of charging for it.

It’s Not Easy Being Ultra-Rich

On Labor Day we customarily give a nod to America’s underpaid and overworked blue and pink collar workers – janitors, flight attendants, forklift operators and the like. But this year let’s go a step further and salute the most reviled and despised of the people who make our economy happen, the mere mention of whom causes the average forklift operator to spit on the floor. You are thinking perhaps of telemarketers, human traffickers, and the fiends who answer the phone when you to try to make a claim on your health insurance. But I’m talking about our CEOs.

Just in time for the holiday, two liberal groups – United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies – have issued a gleefully malicious new attack on our CEO class. They point out that the CEOs of large companies earn an average of $10.8 million a year, which is 362 times as much as the average American worker, and retire with $10.1 million in their special exclusive CEO pension funds. They further point out that the compensation of US CEOs wildly exceeds that of their European counterparts, who, we are invited to believe, work equally hard.

And, in what they must think is their cleverest point of all, the UFE/IPS folks state that: “The 20 highest-paid individuals at publicly traded corporations last year took home, on average, $36.4 million. That’s … 204 times more than the 20 highest-paid generals in the U.S. military.” You know what we’re supposed to think here: Wow, but generals have all that responsibility! They’re responsible for national security, or at least for conducting the wars that increase the threats to our national security and thus help justify ever greater increases in our national security apparatus!

But someone has to speak up for our beleaguered CEO class, and let me begin with that spurious comparison to the top military brass. Could we put patriotic emotion aside for a moment and look at this in a hard-headed, bottom-line, sort of way?

Suppose you are the general responsible for all the service people currently in Iraq, about 130,000 in round numbers, and suppose you manage to lose every single one of them in some ghastly miscalculation. With the death benefit for the family of a dead soldier running at $100,000, your mistake will cost a total of $13 billion. Sounds like a lot, I know, until you consider that a hedge fund manager or financial company CEO can lose that much in a single afternoon, without anyone even noticing. Q.E.D., there is simply no comparison between a general and a CEO.

That’s a side issue though. The real point, which the CEOs and their usual defenders are strangely reticent about making, is that it’s damn expensive to be rich, and extravagantly expensive to be super-rich. Before you start playing your air violins, consider the costs of maintaining up to five different homes, some of them up to 45,000 square feet in size, most with swimming pools, tennis courts, guest houses, and wine cellars requiring constant supervision.

The poor whine about having no home at all, or maybe a two-bedroom apartment for a family of six. They should just think for one moment of the tribulations involved in running four or more mansions, each with its own full-time staff. There’s the problem of getting between them, for example. A friend of mine, of very modest means himself, consults for a billionaire couple who commute between London and Los Angeles by private jet, with their dogs following in a second private jet.

But much of what we know about the extreme costs of wealth comes from Wall Street Journal columnist Robert Frank’s recent book Richistan. The ultra-rich, who are drawn largely from the CEO class, require staffs of about 40-50 people, including not only cooks, maids and nannies, but “lifestyle managers” (to set up the entertainment schedule) and – in a throw-back to the original gilded age -- butlers. It’s the butler’s job, among other things, to deal with any issues that may arise from the proliferation of homes. For example, if the boss is in Palm Beach, Frank reports, “and wants to send his jet to New York to pick up a Chateau LaTour from his South Hampton cellar, the butler makes it happen, no questions asked.”

Nor are the ultra-rich in a position to cut back on their expenses – by, say, running down to the supermarket for a $12 bottle of chardonnay. If they were to do so, their friends would despise them. As Frank explains, the Richistani word “affluent,” meaning someone with less than $10 million in assets, translates into English roughly as “scum.”

A mean-spirited critic of the ultra-rich CEO class might grumble that the rich should simply find a new circle of friends. But who exactly might these new friends be? If you were in the $100- million-in-assets set, you could hardly consort with the class of people for whom a pittance like $10,000 might be a transformative sum, possibly allowing granny to get her insulin and the children to have warm winter clothes. People of that class could not be trusted not to pocket the silverware or rip out the gold fixtures in your powder room. They might even make a lunge for your throat.

(Barbara Ehrenreich admits to being on the board of the Institute for Policy Studies.)

Smashing Capitalism

Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.

First they stopped paying their mortgages, a move in which they were joined by many financially stretched middle class folks, though the poor definitely led the way. All right, these were trick mortgages, many of them designed to be unaffordable within two years of signing the contract. There were “NINJA” loans, for example, awarded to people with “no income, no job or assets.” Conservative columnist Niall Fergusen laments the low levels of “economic literacy” that allowed people to be exploited by sub-prime loans. Why didn’t these low-income folks get lawyers to go over the fine print? And don’t they have personal financial advisors anyway?

Then, in a diabolically clever move, the poor – a category which now roughly coincides with the working class – stopped shopping. Both Wal-Mart and Home Depot announced disappointing second quarter performances, plunging the market into another Arctic-style meltdown.  H. Lee Scott, CEO of the low-wage Wal-Mart empire, admitted with admirable sensitivity, that “it’s no secret that many customers are running out of money at the end of the month.”

I wish I could report that the current attack on capitalism represents a deliberate strategy on the part of the poor, that there have been secret meetings in break rooms and parking lots around the country, where cell leaders issued instructions like, “You, Vinny – don’t make any mortgage payment this month. And Caroline, forget that back-to-school shopping, OK?” But all the evidence suggests that the current crisis is something the high-rollers brought down on themselves.

When, for example, the largest private employer in America, which is Wal-Mart, starts experiencing a shortage of customers, it needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror. About a century ago, Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, never seemed to figure out that its cruelly low wages would eventually curtail its own growth, even at the company’s famously discounted prices.

The sad truth is that people earning Wal-Mart-level wages tend to favor the fashions available at the Salvation Army. Nor do they have much use for Wal-Mart’s other departments, such as Electronics, Lawn and Garden, and Pharmacy.

It gets worse though. While with one hand the high-rollers, H. Lee Scott among them, squeezed the American worker’s wages, the other hand was reaching out with the tempting offer of credit. In fact, easy credit became the American substitute for decent wages. Once you worked for your money, but now you were supposed to pay for it. Once you could count on earning enough to save for a home. Now you’ll never earn that much, but, as the lenders were saying – heh, heh—do we have a mortgage for you!

Pay day loans, rent-to-buy furniture and exorbitant credit card interest rates for the poor were just the beginning. In its May 21^st cover story on “The Poverty Business,” Business Week documented the stampede, in the just the last few years, to lend money to the people who could least afford to pay the interest: Buy your dream home! Refinance your house! Take on a car loan even if your credit rating sucks! Financiamos a Todos! Somehow, no one bothered to figure out where the poor were going to get the money to pay for all the money they were being offered.

Personally, I prefer my revolutions to be a little more pro-active. There should be marches and rallies, banners and sit-ins, possibly a nice color theme like red or orange. Certainly, there should be a vision of what you intend to replace the bad old system with—European-style social democracy, Latin American-style socialism, or how about just American capitalism with some regulation thrown in?

Global capitalism will survive the current credit crisis; already, the government has rushed in to soothe the feverish markets. But in the long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis. Who would have thought that foreclosures in Stockton and Cleveland would roil the markets of London and Shanghai? The poor have risen up and spoken; only it sounds less like a shout of protest than a low, strangled, cry of pain.

The War on Infrastructure

This morning, flanked by a dozen people who lost cars or family members in last week’s I-35W bridge collapse, President Bush declared a “War on Infrastructure.” Describing the July steam pipe explosion in Manhattan and the bridge collapse in Minneapolis as “cowardly attacks on our way of life,” he explained that until now, “the War on Infrastructure has been largely centered on Iraq, where it has been over 70 percent successful. Today, very few operating bridges, water mains or power grids remain for Iraqis to worry about.”

Anticipating the usual caviling, he added that the new war is in no way a distraction from the ongoing War on Terror. “The World Trade Center towers would not have fallen under the force of airplane collisions alone,” he said, “The role of faulty construction, which is code phrase for infrastructure, can no longer be denied.”

Ken Pollack, the Brooking Institute’s die-hard supporter of the war in Iraq, warned that the War on Infrastructure could be as difficult to win as the War on Terror. “We’d gotten used to fighting human enemies,” he said, “and now we’re up against abstract nouns.”

“We expected that there would be a dastardly attack on the homeland sometime this summer,” added Donald Rumsfeld, who will end his brief retirement to take charge of the War on Infrastructure. He attributed the nation’s lack of preparation to the Clinton administration, with its “hear-no-evil, see-no-evil policy toward highway overpasses.”

Congressional Democrats rushed to display their support for the president in his new initiative. Hillary Clinton promised to vote for the bombing of infrastructure on condition that the president checks in with Congress first, assuming he can find them and that the phone and DSL lines are working.

Echoing her sentiments on Pakistan, she said she does not rule out the use of nuclear warheads on particularly entrenched elements of infrastructure, even if civilians are using them at the time. “Anyone who wants to be president has to be prepared to kill people,” she added – “with her bare hands if necessary.”

Perhaps the strongest anti-infrastructure rumblings have come from Dick Cheney, who sent a message from his undisclosed location shortly after the Minneapolis bridge collapse, stating that: “We will prevail even if it means water-boarding every last one of America’s remaining bridges.”

A spokeswoman from the Transportation Safety Administration announced that people seeking to cross bridges will be required to remove their shoes, jackets and all metal items. The effect of this measure on infrastructure is not known, but, she said, “It will definitely facilitate swimming.”

Opportunities in Abstinence Training

If things are not working out as planned, you might want to consider a career in the expanding field of abstinence education. The need is staggering: four out of five random people I surveyed on the street thought abstinence training is something you do with your mid-section in the gym. Plus, unlike any of the rest of the coaching industry – career coaching, life coaching, sales training, etc. – this form of training is generously subsidized by the federal government, and has been since President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill of 1996, which provided abstinence training for impoverished women (though not, alas, for him.)

It’s not rocket science, either. In fact, there’ve been men in my life who were naturals at abstinence training without the slightest formal preparation: One renounced dental hygiene; another developed a passion for Frank Sinatra – leading me in each case to embrace abstinence without any regret. In yet another case, marriage alone was enough to induce that sanctified state.

Most people, though, require a bit of training to get into the abstinence training business, so I went to the website of WAIT Training to look at the sample curriculum for an abstinence course. The suggested syllabus contained a lot about love, marriage and STD’s—none of it terribly technical – until I got to the part about how to explain the difference between the sexes, where the following demonstration was suggested:

Bring to class frozen waffles and a bowl of spaghetti noodles without sauce. Using these as visual aides, explain how research has found that men’s brains are more like the waffle, in that their design allows them to more easily compartmentalize information. Women’s minds, on the other hand are more interrelated due to increased brain connectors.

Maybe my spaghetti brain wasn’t up to this challenge, but it did seem to imply that sex would involve a mixing of waffles and pasta, possibly with maple syrup for lubrication. Disgusting, yes, but no doubt a surefire recipe for abstinence.

My next step was to call Joneen Mackenzie, executive director of WAIT (which is an acronym for Why Am I Tempted?) to further pin down the requirements for becoming an abstinence trainer. Her program admits only college-educated people, but they can be of any age or sex. “Do they have to be abstinent themselves?” I asked. Not at all, she assured me, proudly confessing to being “like an animal” with her husband. How about gays? Well, yes, they could teach abstinence to gay teenagers. So – no barriers at all, and you can become a Certified Abstinence Trainer after only two days of training.

There is, however, one shadow hanging over the abstinence training industry. A study commissioned by Congress revealed in April that abstinence training doesn’t work: Students exposed to such training turn out to be no less likely to have sex than those who are not, leading some to question the over $100 million the Federal government spends on it annually. Mackenzie dismissed the study out of hand, saying it had been undertaken before serious abstinence training really got off the ground.

But there’s a deeper problem with abstinence training as currently conducted: It’s being wasted on kids. What better way to make sex a big deal than to tell a kid they can’t have any for years, and then only after spending $25,000 on champagne and bridesmaid dresses? Furthermore, kids have become more sophisticated thanks to programs like DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), the website of which currently proclaims that “Cannabis can double chances of psychotic illness” and “Just one cigarette can lead to addiction.” If you’ve known honor students who smoke marijuana, why should you believe that teen sex leads inevitably to heartbreak and oozing genital sores?

Here’s my advice for the abstinence training industry and any novice abstinence trainers: First, leave the teenagers alone and focus on the vast neglected demographic of middle-aged and elderly people, including the married. Many of them have thought they just weren’t getting any, so imagine how happy they will be to see their lifestyle affirmed as a noble, pro-active, choice! Think of the market for silver chastity rings (see ) in nursing homes and other long term care facilities!

Secondly, and I realize that this may be more controversial: The abstinent training profession should be restricted to abstinent people. Would you undergo computer training with someone who hasn’t touched a computer since 1987? Would you hire a flabby, out-of-shape, personal fitness trainer? No, nor do I think you should study abstinence with someone who behaves “like an animal” in bed.

Abstinence may be easier to achieve than you realize. Contrary to the assumptions of the framers of welfare reform, poverty – or at least sudden downward mobility – can lead to the rapid exit of significant others. You should welcome their departure and, if you are heterosexual, take it as an opportunity to withdraw into your own gender-appropriate Tupperware compartment – spaghetti or waffle.