The good news: Barney Frank is going
A Congressional bete noire of the Right is retiring because of redistricting. The bad news: who’s next in line to take his place as ranking Democratic member of the Financial Services Committee. Megan McArdle brings the bad news. She’s right: for all his faults – and they are legendary, especially with the Fannie/Freddie mess — Barney Frank is not remotely an idiot. His replacement? Hoo boy. She makes Forrest Gump look like Dwight MacDonald.
Fortunately, America is not facing an economic crisis, much of it centered on the financial industry. Therefore, we can afford to have nitwits like her in positions of elite political leadership.
UPDATE: I agree, Barney Frank can be a hilarious guy. I like his wit. The Atlantic has a nice video collection of his greatest smart-aleck hits.
OWS 2.0 for 2012
You really need to read John Heilemann’s long reported piece for New York magazine on the Occupy movement’s strategic retreat for the winter. If you thought the movement had finally petered out, think again. That may turn out to be the case, but not if the leaders — yes, a cadre of leaders has emerged, Heilemann reports — have anything to do with it. Excerpts:
It’s perfectly possible that this perception will be borne out, that the raucous events of November 17 were the last gasps of a rigor-mortizing rebellion. But no one seriously involved in OWS buys a word of it. What they believe instead is that, after a brief period of retrenchment, the protests will be back even bigger and with a vengeance in the spring—when, with the unfurling of the presidential election, the whole world will be watching. Among Occupy’s organizers, there is fervid talk about occupying both the Democratic and Republican conventions. About occupying the National Mall in Washington, D.C. About, in effect, transforming 2012 into 1968 redux.
The people plotting these maneuvers are the leaders of OWS. Now, you may have heard that Occupy is a leaderless uprising. Its participants, and even the leaders themselves, are at pains to make this claim. But having spent the past month immersed in their world, I can report that a cadre of prime movers—strategists, tacticians, and logisticians; media gurus, technologists, and grand theorists—has emerged as essential to guiding OWS. For some, Occupy is an extension of years of activism; for others, their first insurrectionist rodeo. But they are now united by a single purpose: turning OWS from a brief shining moment into a bona fide movement.
Unlike the anti-war movement, OWS can already count on a basis of mass support: the widespread conviction in American society that OWS’s complaints about the economy and unfairness have substantial basis in the truth:
Capitalizing on this support is the central issue facing OWS, and its ability to do so will depend on myriad factors, including the behavior of plutocrats, politicians, and police. (In terms of presenting shocking and morally clarifying imagery, the recent pepper-spraying incident at the University of California, Davis, struck many as reminiscent of Bull Connor’s goons dousing civil-rights protesters with fire hoses in 1963.) But it will also depend on which of two broad strains within OWS turns out to be dominant: the radical reformism of social democrats such as Berger, who want to see a more humane and egalitarian form of capitalism and a government less corrupted by money, or the radical utopianism of the movement’s anarchists and Marxists, who seek to replace our current economic and political arrangements with … who knows what? “My fear is that we become the worst of the New Left,” Berger says. “I don’t want to live in a fu*king commune. I don’t want to blow s*it up. I want to get stuff done.”
Lots of fascinating discussion in the piece about OWS’s struggle to relate itself (or not) to the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. It’s easy to see how they could turn Obama 2012 into Humphrey 1968. If there’s an economic collapse this winter — I’m looking at you, Eurozone — and OWS has managed to use its Valley Forge wintry exile to get smart and get organized, 2012 could be a pretty eventful year.
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Eurozone death countdown. 10…9…8…
Wolfgang Munchau, writing in the Financial Times, says December 9th may well be Armageddon for the EU:
If the European summit could reach a deal on December 9, its next scheduled meeting, the eurozone will survive. If not, it risks a violent collapse. Even then, there is still a risk of a long recession, possibly a depression. So even if the European Council was able to agree on such an improbably ambitious agenda, its leaders would have to continue to outdo themselves for months and years to come. … Italy’s disastrous bond auction on Friday tells us time is running out. The eurozone has 10 days at most.
Merry Christmas.
UPDATE: Moody’s says all European sovereigns are in danger of a bond rating downgrade, and the OECD today warns policymakers to be “prepared to face the worst.”
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Educating Mexican migrant children
Steve Sailer is exasperated by the NYT’s discovery of a “crisis” of education among the children of NYC’s Mexican immigrants, who have dropout rates more than double that of other immigrant demographic groups. Writes Sailer:
How exactly is it a “crisis” if it “endures?” There’s very little evidence that Mexican-Americans en masse consider their children’s or grand-children’s or great-grandchildren’s relative lack of education to be a crisis.
From a Southwestern U.S. perspective, however, as amply documented by social science research, none of this looks like a crisis, a crossroads where something has to change. Instead, a relative lack of education among Mexican-Americans just looks like Situation Normal for at least four or five generations at a stretch.
“Sadly and directly in contradistinction to assimilation theory, the fourth generation differs the most from whites, with a college completion rate of only 6 percent [compared to 35 percent for whites of that era]. … [T]he educational progress of Mexican Americans does not improve over the generations. At best, given the statistical margin of error, our data show no improvement in education over the generations-since-immigration and in some cases even suggest a decline.”
Telles and Ortiz believe that a “Marshall Plan” that invests heavily in public school education will address the issues that disadvantage many Mexican American students.“For Mexican Americans, the payoff can only come by giving them the same quality and quantity of education as whites receive,” they said. “The problem is not the unwillingness of Mexican Americans to adopt Americans values and culture but the failure of societal institutions, particularly public schools, to successfully integrate them as they did the descendants of European immigrants.”
I’d have to read the book to understand this view, but this sounds to me like the typical liberal academic solution to every educational problem: throw more money at it. By now we know well that more educational spending is no panacea at all for chronic educational underachievement. Part of the problem is no doubt structural (that is, badly run school systems). But part of it is also surely cultural — “mind-forg’d manacles,” to use Blake’s term. Not having read the book, obviously, I don’t know to what extent, if at all, the authors examined non-material (e.g., cultural) reasons behind the failure of Mexican-Americans to thrive educationally, but this 1995 Atlantic Monthly essay by the Mexican professor and diplomat Jorge Castaneda strongly suggests that cruel and dramatic social and economic inequality in Mexican society has created a culture of fatalism within the Mexican poor, one that is incommensurate with North American ideas of self-betterment and self-empowerment through education. Castaneda writes:
But the inequality is not simply economic; it is also social. A government undersecretary (one level down from the top echelon of public service) earned in 1994 (prior to devaluation) approximately $180,000 after taxes, excluding health insurance and perquisites but including all sorts of bonuses, premiums, and expense accounts — almost twice what his U.S. counterpart earned before taxes. His chauffeur (provided by the government, of course) made about $7,500 a year. The official addresses the employee with the familiar “tu,” while the latter must speak to the former with the respectful “usted.” The official and his peers in the business and intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (there are exceptions, but they are becoming scarcer), well educated, and well traveled abroad. They send their two children to private schools, removed from the world of the employee. The employee and his peers tend to be mestizo, many are barely literate, and they have four or five children, most of whom will be able to attend school only through the fifth grade.
Certain equalizing institutions that reduced injustice and segregation in the United States for many years, before they ran into nationwide resistance, have never really existed in Mexico.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it can’t be that Asian immigrants to the US are coming out of societies that were relatively just and socially egalitarian, hence their ease of assimilation (relative to Mexican immigrants and their children). Can it be?
I sent Sailer’s link to an old friend who teaches public school in California, and who was telling me 15 years ago that unchecked Mexican immigration was wrecking California schools. Why? It’s not because the immigrant children were less capable than any other kids, in her view. It’s because they came from families where education was not valued. She said any progress she and her colleagues made in educating these kids would inevitably be sabotaged by parents who would withdraw their children from school for weeks at a time for long visits back home to Mexico. That, and the almost complete lack of parental support for the mission of educating kids (e.g., parents didn’t expect their kids to do homework). My friend surmised that there must be something very deep in the culture of Mexico that holds education to be something for the wealthy, and in fact an impediment to doing “real” work, which is manual labor. By contrast, the kids in her classes who came from Asian immigrant families were strongly dedicated to their schoolwork, and were pushed down this path by their parents, many of whom spoke almost no English (cliches come from somewhere).
The late Samuel Huntington pointed out that Mexican immigrants to the US and their children live with certain facts that no other immigrants have done. For example, the country they leave behind is not across an ocean, but right next door. Mexican immigration to the US did not come in a single big burst, but has been continuous. Mexican immigrants largely settled in the American Southwest, creating a large communal concentration that worked, and works, against assimilation to American norms. And there’s this from Huntington:
The persistence of Mexican immigration into the United States reduces the incentives for cultural assimilation. Mexican Americans no longer think of themselves as members of a small minority who must accommodate the dominant group and adopt its culture. As their numbers increase, they become more committed to their own ethnic identity and culture. Sustained numerical expansion promotes cultural consolidation and leads Mexican Americans not to minimize but to glory in the differences between their culture and U.S. culture. As the president of the National Council of La Raza said in 1995: “The biggest problem we have is a cultural clash, a clash between our values and the values in American society.” He then went on to spell out the superiority of Hispanic values to American values. In similar fashion, Lionel Sosa, asuccessful Mexican-American businessman in Texas, in 1998 hailed the emerging Hispanic middle-class professionals who look like Anglos, but whose “values remain quite different from an Anglo’s.”
To be sure, as Harvard University political scientist Jorge I. Domínguez has pointed out, Mexican Americans are more favorably disposed toward democracy than are Mexicans. Nonetheless, “ferocious differences” exist between U.S. and Mexican cultural values, as Jorge Castañeda (who later served as Mexico’s foreign minister) observed in 1995. Castañeda cited differences in social and economic equality, the unpredictability of events, concepts of time epitomized in the mañana syndrome, the ability to achieve results quickly, and attitudes toward history, expressed in the “cliché that Mexicans are obsessed with history, Americans with the future.” Sosa identifies several Hispanic traits (very different from Anglo-Protestant ones) that “hold us Latinos back”: mistrust of people outside the family; lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition; little use for education; and acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven. Author Robert Kaplan quotes Alex Villa, a third-generation Mexican American in Tucson, Arizona, as saying that he knows almost no one in the Mexican community of South Tucson who believes in “education and hard work” as the way to material prosperity and is thus willing to “buy into America.” Profound cultural differences clearly separate Mexicans and Americans, and the high level of immigration from Mexico sustains and reinforces the prevalence of Mexican values among Mexican Americans.
I found that Robert D. Kaplan article from The Atlantic Monthly (1998) that Huntington references. It’s worth quoting at length. Kaplan interview Alex Villa, a “semi-retired” gang leader who lives on the impoverished south side of Tucson:
“The schools have made things worse [said Villa]. In high school, in the Mexican areas we were taught about Latino history and pride, while the blacks were taught about black history and pride. What the teachers never emphasized was respect for each other’s cultures, or how to think like an American. My sophomore year blacks and Mexicans had a full-fledged riot.”
“What about your old gang?”
“It’s a subcell of what had been a larger gang.” Villa went on, talking about gang “empires” and “territories,” including one controlled by Yaqui Indians — “tough little guys whose territory was surrounded, yet they were able to hold off other groups.”
“You don’t talk like you look,” I remarked. Villa again stared at me hard, and then said, “You cannot believe how easy it is to be trapped by your surroundings, how the world beyond the South Side of Tucson is not real. When I was in criminal court, I listened — really, for the first time — to how educated people speak. That’s when I realized how dumb I sounded. Thanks for the compliment. I’m still working on myself.”
Villa told me that he reads often in libraries. “I’ve learned to start sentences without saying ‘You know.'” He had arrived on time for our lunch — but for gang members it is a matter of pride to arrive late, to let the other fellow wait. I suspected that he was truly retired.
Villa had served a total of sixteen months, in a juvenile prison and in what he called an adult facility, for assault and battery. “In the adult facility I learned how to hot-wire cars, get through home alarm systems, and make silencers,” he said. He told me about “night crawlers” — gang lookouts who flash Bic cigarette lighters to indicate Tucson street corners where cocaine is for sale. I was also told by people in the area that cops are protected by gang members if “they let a certain amount of crime happen.”
Villa is a third-generation Mexican-American, born December 30, 1969. “I was a tax deduction,” he joked. His now deceased father was a roofer, his mother a medical assistant. “Because of my size, I was a natural leader in junior high school. Gangs are the most copycat of subcultures. It used to be zoot suits; now it’s tattoos. When I was thirteen, I got a tattoo” — he pulled up his T-shirt and showed me a big tattoo, which read CHICANO — “so the other kids had to get a tattoo also.” Villa continued, broadening the picture. “If you chicken out when it comes to committing a murder, all your friends from your entire life in the neighborhood will reject you — it’s like excommunication. Tell me, what law or punishment could be worse than that, especially since none of the hard-core gang members expect to live beyond twenty-one?”
According to Alex Villa, the real Mexican-U.S. border runs between south and north Tucson. “The South Side is the Old World. In the Old World if a car passed by floating on air, people would fear it, then worship it. In the New World they would dissect it to see how it works. In the Old World, even with the worst poverty, there is an extended family which provides stability. But in the New World, if there is no economy, there is no culture either, no family, nothing to hold people together. Just look at the poor whites and blacks. For South Side Mexicans to go into north Tucson for work is a death march. They hate north Tucson and envy it at the same time. South Side Mexicans have no idea of gradually accumulating wealth. What they know from their own experience is ‘If I could only sell a bunch of keys [kilos of cocaine], I could move to north Tucson.’ To think in terms of education and hard work as a way into north Tucson is, in fact, to buy into America. I know almost nobody in south Tucson who has bought into America.”
Fascinating stuff, the way the mentality of the “Old World” versus “New World” sets people’s expectations, and the trajectory of their lives. It is also fascinating, in a way not complimentary to our New World culture, that the fragmentation of our familial systems has left us all so vulnerable to the economy. Yet Villa — who, note well, is a third-generation Mexican-American — appears to suggest that the persistence of the familial system is also part of the problem within Mexican immigrant culture. This stuff is complicated.
What do you readers think? What have you seen where you live? Educate me. If you Google Huntington’s stuff on this topic, you get tons of liberals screaming racist racist racist racist racist. Of course that is par for the course when people are confronted with facts they don’t want to acknowledge. Nevertheless, there is a such thing as racism, and I am going to work hard to keep the discussion thread from being polluted by it. Help me out here, would you?
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Our resilient, ‘small is better’ future
Bill McKibben was asked to address a workshop of Vermont politicians, and was tasked with summarizing his work in a way that could be useful to them as they govern and plan for the future. The governor actually gave McKibben a smart assignment: to present his ideas in a way that could guide them as they make real-world decisions among all the different policy options they content with. Here is a portion of what he said:
Here’s my answer: we’re moving, if we’re lucky, from the world of few and big to the world of small and many. We’ll either head there purposefully or we’ll be dragged kicking, but we’ve reached one of those moments when tides reverse.
Take agriculture. For 150 years the number of farms in America has inexorably declined. In my state—the most rural in the nation—the number of dairies fell from 11,000 at the end of World War II to 998 this summer. And of course the farms that remained grew ever larger—factory farms, we called them, growing commodity food. Here in Vermont most of the remaining dairies are big, but not big enough to compete with the behemoths in California or Arizona; they operate so close to the margin that they can’t afford to hire local workers and instead import illegal migrants from Mexico.
But last year the USDA reported that the number of farms in America had actually increased for the first time in a century and a half. The most defining American demographic trend—the shift that had taken us from a nation of 50 percent farmers to less than 1 percent—had bottomed out and reversed. Farms are on the increase—small farms, mostly growing food for their neighbors. They’re not yet a threat to the profits of the Cargills and the ADMs, but you can see the emerging structure of a new agriculture composed of CSAs and farmers’ markets, with fewer middlemen. Which is all for the good. Such farming uses less energy and produces better food; it’s easier on the land; it offers rural communities a way out of terminal decline. You could even imagine a farmscape that stands some chance of dealing with the flood, drought, and heat that will be our destiny in the globally warmed century to come. Instead of the too-big-to-fail agribusiness model, this will be a nimbler, more diversified, sturdier agriculture.
And what works on the farm works elsewhere too.
More:
But the general direction seems to me increasingly clear. Health care? In place of a few huge, high-tech hospitals dispensing the most expensive care possible, all the data suggest we’d be healthier with lots of primary and preventive care from physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners in our neighborhoods. Banking? Instead of putting more than half our assets in half a dozen money-center banks that devote themselves to baroque financial instruments, we need capital closer to home, where loan officers have some sense for gauging risk and need.
Your average state or city leader could help push change in those directions: small investments in, say, slaughterhouses and canneries will help local farmers diversify. New zoning regulations can make rooftop solar quicker and easier to install. Higher reserve requirements will move money from Wall Street’s casinos back to Main Street’s banks. None of them will produce utopia—we will still have endless problems, but they’ll be more limited. A careless local farmer can still sicken his customers, but he can’t sicken millions of them at once. A corrupt banker can wreak havoc in his community, but not so much havoc that it topples the financial system. Problems will stay problems, instead of ramifying into disasters. If a hailstorm wrecks my solar panels, I’ve got an issue, but it’s not blacking out the East Coast.
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Gaudi, the anti-Modern Modernist
Antoni Gaudi i Cornet was the very opposite of a cultural subversive, and all that side of the French Surrealists — their fantasies of revolution, their hatred of the Church, their love of Stalin — would have disgusted him. Nor did he think his work had the smallest connection with dreams. It was based on structural laws, creaft traditions, deep experience of nature, piety, and sacrifice.
The last two were fundamental. Gaudi was a Catholic who believed in papal infallibility, episcopal authority, and the perennial philosophy of the Church. Far from being modernist in spirit, the Sagrada Familia was commissioned and designed as an ecstatically repressive building that would atone for the sins of modernism and the “excesses” of democracy. Gaudi was convinced of the reality of both grace and divine punishment: “Man is free to do evil, but he pays the price of his sins: God corrects us constantly, he castigates us all the time, and we must beg Him to punish and then console us.” His imaginative life was as much bound up with ideas of death, obedience, penance, deliverance, and transcendence as any of the mortality-haunted Spanish geniuses of the past: Saint Ignatius of Loyola, or Saint John of the Cross. “The idea of death,” he remarked to one of his disciples, “can never be separated from the idea of God; that’s why the churches have tombs in them … without thinking on death there is no morally or physically good life.” And again, “Everyone has to suffer. The only ones who don’t suffer are the dead. He who wants an end to suffering wants to die.”
That’s a passage from Robert Hughes’s terrific 1992 book “Barcelona,” a history of the great Catalan city. I bought it just before a quick trip to Barcelona in 1994, and started it on the flight over. I deeply regretted not having read the whole thing before my visit. It’s a wonderful book. Anyway, I think one thing (but not the only thing) wrong with contemporary church architecture is that it has exiled all memory of death. Which, ironically, is why it is so spiritually dead.
As you may know, during the Spanish Civil War, the leftist sacked the crypt and the workshop at the Sagrada Familia, and destroyed all of Gaudi’s notes and plans for the building, to ensure that it could never be completed. There is, or was at the time of Hughes’s writing, an official architect in charge of continuing the building. They’ve completed the Facade of the Passion, and it’s truly awful. It is hard to see anything Catholic in it — but then again, that is true of so many of the bare ruined Catholic churches of the postwar era. I bring up Catholic churches, even though there are plenty of equally ugly Protestant churches, only because unlike most of latter-day Protestantism, Catholicism still preserves in its theology an intact symbolic system.) Hughes’s devastating judgment:
It could have been done by Mormons, not Catholics. Subirachs is the official artist of the Sagrada Familia, and the results of his long labors, which adorn the portal of the growing Facade of the Passion and will in time proliferate over other parts of the building, must be seen to be believed. … Subirach’s work, from its faceless Christ to its ludicrous Darth Vader centurions — copied, of course, from the chimneys on the Casa Mila — is the most blatant mass of half-digested modernist cliches to be plunked on a notable building within living memory. It is sincere in the way that only the worst art can be: which is to say, utterly so. Art historians of the future will point to it, no doubt, as the precise moment when the public religious art of Catholic Europe died for want of anything better to do, almost exactly two thousand years after it began.
It is sincere in the way that only the worst art can be: which is to say, utterly so. Ouch. But true.
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Was DSK set up?
But Epstein’s article does appear to raise some odd questions about the case. It points out numerous holes and discrepancies in the accounts of those who portrayed Strauss-Kahn as an attacker, identifies a missing BlackBerry which may contain warnings to the Frenchman that he was being set up, and examines possible links between Sofitel staff and Strauss-Kahn’s political opponents.
The most unusual evidence described by Epstein is a security video of the hotel’s engineer, Brian Yearwood, and an unidentified man apparently celebrating the day’s events. Earlier, Yearwood had been communicating with John Sheehan, a security expert at Accor, which owns Sofitel, and whose boss, René-Georges Querry, once worked with a man now in intelligence for Sarkozy.
The unidentified man with Yearwood had been spotted previously on hotel security cameras accompanying Diallo to the hotel’s security office after the alleged attack. The video shows the men near the area where Diallo is recounting her story and, less than two minutes after police have been called, they seem to congratulate each other. “The two men high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes. They are then shown standing by the service door … apparently waiting for the police to arrive,” Epstein writes.
He added: “The whole thing is preposterous – it’s not based on any facts or evidence. It’s like saying Neil Armstrong did not set foot on the moon.
“Just think how many people would need to know about something like this – me and the rest of Miss Diallo’s legal team included. It is mind-boggling”.
Commenting on the surveillance video, Mr Wigdor said: “Who knows why they are celebrating?” he said. “There was no audio”.
Furious allies of Miss Diallo alleged that the author, Epstein, knew Mr Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers and pointed out that in the past he had questioned the official accounts of the September 11 attacks and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Epstein did not propose that either event was a conspiracy but wrote about several unanswered questions in the US government reports into what happened.
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Anathematizing ugly churches
A team has been set up, to put a stop to garage style churches, boldly shaped structures that risk denaturing modern places for Catholic worship. Its task is also to promote singing that really helps the celebration of mass. The “Liturgical art and sacred music commission” will be established by the Congregation for Divine Worship over the coming weeks. This will not be just any office, but a true and proper team, whose task will be to collaborate with the commissions in charge of evaluating construction projects for churches of various dioceses. The team will also be responsible for the further study of music and singing that accompany the celebration of mass.
Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Benedict XVI, consider this work as “very urgent”. The reality is staring everyone in the eyes: in recent decades, churches have been substituted by buildings that resemble multi purpose halls. Too often, architects, even the more famous ones, do not use the Catholic liturgy as a starting point and thus end up producing avant-garde constructions that look like anything but a church. These buildings composed of cement cubes, glass boxes, crazy shapes and confused spaces, remind people of anything but the mystery and sacredness of a church. Tabernacles are semi hidden, leading faithful on a real treasure hunt and sacred images are almost inexistent. The new commission’s regulations will be written up over the next few days and will give precise instructions to dioceses. It will only be responsible for liturgical art, not for sacred art in general; and this also goes for liturgical music and singing too. The judicial powers of the Congregation for Divine Worship will have the power to act.
Wonderful news. Let’s have some auto-da-fes, please. Ugly churches have been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. Remember the poured-concrete monstrosity that looks like an ottoman mating with an armchair? More here. And look, it’s the Mosque of Ming the Merciless.
(H/T: Andrew Sullivan)
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Greed: A tale of two classes
Religious left opinion leader Diana Butler Bass and I are hardly theological confreres, but I have to say she makes a really good point here. Excerpt:
This Black Friday, I expect that some religion commentators will write their yearly screed on the immorality of consumerism decrying the shopping frenzy gripping the nation on the day after Thanksgiving.
But I am not going to join that chorus. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t love consumerism or the outburst of materialism that accompanies American Christmas celebrations. It is, however, tediously easy for people who write columns, ministers who preach sermons, or those who are generally comfortable with their jobs or finances to look down on the rushing mobs grabbing electronics from Wal-Mart shelves. When it comes to consumerism, there exists a tendency to blame the customers for bad behavior and greed.
Of course, they are greedy people everywhere, those who will do anything to gain advantage for themselves at the expense of others—people who live in a soulless world of material possessions. But the oddest thing about the folks in lines at those discount stores: They are mostly poor, working class, or marginally middle class. These are the very people who attend church regularly, express higher levels of belief in God, and are more likely to give a higher percentage of their income to those in need. Indeed, nearly every survey in religion shows that the poorer the American, the more likely they are to be both faithful and generous.
While I think one has to be careful about giving the poor a pass for immoral behavior because they are poor — a tendency the religious left tends to have, as if poverty, or relative poverty, conferred innocence — it is also true that the religious right tends to overlook greed when it manifests among the “respectable” upper classes. We see the insane wafflemaker frenzy at Wal-mart and rightly are revolted. But how is the greed so nakedly on display there worse than the greedy frenzy that has taken place, and regularly takes place, on Wall Street? If we are going to condemn the greed of the poor and lower middle class on Black Friday, we had better be sure to hold the wealthy to higher standards. And vice versa. Greed is greed is greed.
UPDATE: I have a slightly different view of this after hearing my pastor’s sermon today. The Gospel reading was the story of the Rich Young Man, who asked Jesus what he needed to do to be saved. Jesus finally said to him, “Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and follow me.” The man went away sad. Father started by talking about how brutal people were to each other on Black Friday, and how awful it is that we are so greedy that we lose control of ourselves. It occurred to me while listening to him that, as I said earlier, greed is greed is greed. The difference between those wafflemaker berserkers and a pinstriped JPMorgan banker whose life is controlled by his desires for money and possessions is opportunity and scale. Father pointed out that none of us in the congregation has yet fulfilled the conditions Jesus laid down to the Rich Young Man, so we all have repenting to do. It was a useful lesson.
I think liberals tend to valorize the poor, and to excuse their greed, when it manifests, by saying they don’t know any better, or they’re only aping the wealthy. Conservatives tend to valorize the rich, and excuse their greed, often by saying that the rich earned their money, so they have the “right” to do with it what they want. As if allowing your life to be controlled by your desires for material things was somehow excusable if you earned the money fair and square. If I think about my own spending, it’s embarrassing to think about how often I rationalize buying what I want to buy when I want to buy it.
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