You Can’t Handle the Truth
This week’s news brings to mind Jack Nicholson’s famous rant in “A Few Good Men”. We see the truth staring us in the face, and we can’t handle it.
Mitt Romney’s aide Eric Fehrnstrom repeated Richard Nixon’s advice to run hard to the right in the primaries and steer back to the center for the general election. The Republican conservatives and the news media acted as if this was some sort of apostasy. Fehrnstrom’s one mistake was using a metaphor which could be visualized:the Etch-A-Sketch.
My sense is that Romney is already starting his pivot to the center because he realizes that the Tea Party is a spent force. America is not a Right Wing country despite Rush Limbaugh’s protestations. The business wing of the Republican Party see an epic defeat in their future, borne on the wings of all the talk about returning women’s rights to the 1950′s, invading Iran and impeaching moderate and liberal judges.
And then there is all the handwringing over Sergeant Robert Bales, who is accused of murdering 16 Afghans last week. The Army and the news media tried to spin this as a good soldier who just snapped because he saw a friend die from an IED. But now the truth emerges that Bales joined the Army to escape from a criminal prosecution for securities fraud.
A former victim called Gary Liebschner described Bales as a smooth-talking conman who had caused him to lose $1.2million in savings. Working as a stockbroker, he had sold AT&T shares on Liebschner’s behalf, but disappeared with the proceeds. “He robbed me of my life savings,” Mr Liebschner told ABC News. “We didn’t know where he was. We heard the Bahamas, and all kinds of places.”
The real truth is that Bales was just a cog in a senseless war. Whatever his motives for joining the Army, he was probably asking the same questions as the young Marine Rep. Walter Jones visited last week in Bethesda.
He said he had recently visited Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital to see wounded troops: “I had a young Marine lance corporal who lost one leg,” in a room with his mother.
“My question is,” the Marine asked him, “Why are we still there?”
Jones also read an e-mail from a military big shot whom he described as a former boss of General Allen’s, giving the congressman this unvarnished assessment: “Attempting to find a true military and political answer to the problems in Afghanistan would take decades. Would drain our nation of precious resources, with the most precious being our sons and daughters. Simply put, the United States cannot solve the Afghan problem, no matter how brave and determined our troops are.”
Bales’ crime may be the My Lai Massacre of the Afghanistan War, but we will still ignore the larger truth that we have been killing women and children in Afghanistan and Pakistan for years. We just call it “collateral damage”.
And finally there is the very public NFL rebuke of New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton for sanctioning a bounty program for his defense to injure opposing players. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s statement that he was “profoundly troubled” by the bounty program reminds me of Claude Rain’s famous line in Casablanca, “I am shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here.” The truth is that NFL defensive players are paid to do damage to their opponents. That’s the way they keep score.
I don’t really have an answer as to why the news media feels it has to constantly peddle these half truths. Does anyone really still believe that politicians mean what they say, that war is honorable or football is just a sport?
21st of the 12th month as I recall. I like the cartoon that shows an Oreo Cookie and the Mayan calendar side by side and asks which is the more accurate prophecy. I’m “going hippie” and asking the age old question: Do You Know Exactly How to Eat An Oreo?
The contract we imagine we have is awfully powerful but as you point is imaginary and can lead us into some terrible places as it did you and my brothers who never quite came out of country. One of them managed to settle down until the last war started and the nightmares came back. The other one simply never came home although he did. I’m sure you’ve seen it.
But my comments come out of the first-hand in-my-face experiences I am having right now as I work in a place created by generals for themselves and their lot to have after retirement careers. I’ve heard the speeches about how “we can run this just like the Army” and while I appreciate their need to keep in contact with their own, to have the assurance their backs are covered just like they were back in the corps, that they love these machines like they love their grandchildren, that they get a little lost and paranoid without the sea of green, at the end of the day, it can’t be the corps. It is a civilian business no matter who the customers are and the civilians around them don’t share those experiences, don’t accept the same assumptions of discipline and disciplining, cannot go wink wink nudge in the face of clear and documented violation of civil rights, and really, this transition has to happen.
It is hard to shift from a mindset where the adversary is to be wasted fast and with the least expenditure of ammo to one where the competition might be your next bidding partner, where a customer is kept at a distance for the sake of legal ethics over one where the customer was your subordinate in the last command. It is very tough. Then there are the young ones who want to come home but are gun crazy, possibly and unfortunately too often alcoholic and/or med’d up like a San Francisco street walker. So we have to help them make those adjustments and that is the good companies like ours can do: provide the half-way house with a career. Give them the space and the time and the training so they will not fail, will not retreat as so many do from family and friends, and then find themselves living under a bridge.
See Golddiggers 1933: The Forgotten Man. I think that is part of that contract and I see it both honored and screwed up. But I have to believe honoring it as best we can is the right thing to do. I’m seeing too many broken people everyday to get up and go to work if I don’t believe that. Semper fi, as the Marines say FWIW, but as an old hippie who can’t be any other way now, I quote the Bard Arlo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QTeBO6IqoU
@John Papola
Re “interest:” Hey, you seen this little bit of financial news? “Goldman advisor says completed work on sukuk” http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-goldman-sukuk-idUSBRE82S0U520120329
And to add a little context, how about this? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/29/1078872/-Goldman-Sachs-Tries-To-Get-Into-Islamic-Banking-or-Why-They-Hate-Us-
And Goldman, as I see it, is both a “voluntary association” and very clearly a “government-like organization” and pretty plainly a post-national, self-serving bunch of shit peddlers. But that’s just me. And gee, “interest” and “leverage” and the fact that there are various kinds of “money,” real and notional and fiat and stuff, makes it all possible…
Just remember, as you work so diligently on effectuating your Ideal: a very few successful termites can bring the whole house down, if they can just chew through enough structural members…
My point is that I don’t think one should be evaluating these things as unfair or fair, good or bad, when trying to make a point about money being a medium of exchange.
I gave those examples to demonstrate that a transaction can be evaluated differently by different people using different contexts or by the same person in different circumstances.
In this particular my point is that an argument that “interest is good” is not an argument that “interest helps poor people” because the first is a mistake that does not lead to the second.
I know you meant that interest is a good way to encourage people to save, contribute to economic expansion and be rewarded for putting a surplus aside further benefitting from that surplus later in their life.
But economics being what it is one does not prove that by arguing that “interest is good” because that’s no more an argument than “equality is good” which I’m sure is an argument you would be suspicious of.
In detail if banks don’t pay adequate interest that makes lending them your money wise then in that particular interest is not good – it’s a bad deal. But if a policy has been built on the presumption that interest is in and of itself good capital allocation is corrupted.
If you want interest to be good and to encourage behaviour you seek then you may want to encourage it through policy. But I suspect that as a libertarian you don’t think governments should form policy to make such things so – you think that free movement of individuals capital do good through competition.
@Fentex
I believe I’ve offered the economic/utilitarian argument for interest. There’s also the fact that interest happens. So the question being implied by JT was whether or not usury should be banned by the state, which is simply a price control. The economics of price controls are well understood and tested repeated. I don’t see why I can’t argue “allowing interest is good because the outcomes which are driven by economic understanding of human behavior”.
That’s it. I’m not and never have attempted to claim that any particular interest rate is “good” for any particular transaction. That is the charge you are leveling at me, but it’s unfounded. I’m arguing to the general principle that allowing interest to emerge in the market for savings is a good thing and prohibitions or restrictions in general are a bad thing.
Everyone likes to receive interest. Nobody like to pay it.Everyone loves credit. Nobody likes debt. Big deal. There isn’t any sound progress to be made with dolled up versions of these truisms. Nor are we going to arrive at universal or equitable policies/rules if the rules can change based on utterly arbitrary situational distinctions about when one voluntary contract is “good” or “bad” assuming that it is entered into honestly.
The “Mythbusters” had a segment about whether one could swim faster in water, or in syrup. Too bad they didn’t add one more environment: a manure lagoon at a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/porkmanure.html
I can’t think why that notion should occur to me, when the subject of partisan scientific economics is on the table…
Remember those termites, whose flatus is rich in methane and CO2…