Rich Man's Disease

Now that the class warfare season has begun, with the Rich attacking the Poor, debaters and bloggers should be careful how we employ certain terms, one of which is "the rich man's disease." This concept, the philosopher Wittgenstein might point out, has several quite unrelated meanings or uses. It's easy to confuse or conflate them.

In one context "rich man's disease" is a reference to sexual addiction, a malady found only among the wealthy. It has never been diagnosed in the poor, who are merely lewd or sluttish.

In a second context "rich man's disease" is kleptomania, a treatable disorder. Again this emotional problem doesn't develop among the poor, who merely steal things and go to prison.

A third type of disorder--and a considerable handicap--attacks rich Christians, who are nearly all born with a reading comprehension deficit. For example, they read the Bible without comprehending key passages like "Sooner shall a camel (or rope in some translations) pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter heaven." To date there is no known cure for this disease and no attempt to find a cure.

In discussions with the rich, we should at all times remain polite and supportive, keeping in mind that we might be addressing someone burdened with diseases unavailable to the likes of us and someone certain to go to Hell if the Good Book has any truth in it.

Can Obama Win?

The cable and network analysts of our Presidential horse race are a waste of time, unless you find them entertaining, and I do. If you want to predict who will win the popular vote in the next election consider the following.

1. The campaigns by the Democratic and the Republican candidates will cancel one another out. Also the campaigns will be followed only by voters who are already committed. Republican and Democratic voters cancel each other out. Everyone else will find the campaigns an annoyance and pay them little attention.

2. The election will be, like all Presidential elections, a referendum by the voters on the party in power in the White House. Should that party remain in power in the White House because it's doing okay or not?

3. The criteria used by our pragmatic, uninformed, independent voters in judging the White House will be varied and subjective. The election will not be decided by one or two factors like the economy or foreign policy or who is likable.
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Most of the above comes from THE KEYS TO THE PRESIDENCY by Allan Lightman and Ken DeCell, who have worked out a list of 13 factors that enable them to predict the popular vote in Presidential contests. Their system has worked for the last 33 Presidential elections. No other predicting system comes close to that record.

Note that the 13 keys predict the popular vote and not the outcome, which has been stolen several times by Republicans (Hayes/Tilden and Bush/Gore come to mind).

This method does not use polls, because polls are, as many have learned, unverifiable and unreliable.
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The Thirteen Keys

There is no way to weight these keys and apparently no need to do so. The operating rule is that if five or fewer of the following keys are false, the incumbent party wins the popular vote. To date this method has been accurate in every case.

True or false is determined by general voter perception, not by right or left ideology.
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1. The White House incumbent party gained seats in the last House election. (False)

2. There is no serious contest for the incumbent party's nomination. (True)

3. The incumbent party candidate is the sitting President. (True)

4. There is no significant third-party candidate. (T/F)

5. The economy is not in recession. (T/F)

6. Real per-capita economic growth is positive. (T/F)

7. The incumbent has made major changes in national policy. (T/F)

8. There is no sustained social unrest. (T/F)

9. There is no major incumbent party scandal. (T/F)

10. There has been no major failure in foreign or military affairs. (T/F)

11. The administration has achieved a major success in foreign or military affairs. (T/F)

12. The incumbent candidate is charismatic or a national hero. (T/F)

13. The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. (T/F)

Veronica's Secret

Veronica's Secret, whatever it was, turned out to be the best kept secret of the 2oth Century. To this day no one has revealed the secret, but it's not because of lack of research. When I received the Veronica's Secret catalog in the mail, I studied each page closely, hoping to find clues, and so did many other scholars. Somewhere in those photographs of busty young women in their underwear lay the answer. . . .

I believe it is now clear that at least one person has figured the secret out, and that is Sarah Palin, who, each day, looks more like a Veronica's Secret model, only older and with a gigantic gong (old football term for a player's head). Palin is as welcome among male political reporters, including liberals, as a Veronica's Secret catalog. In fact, nearly all men in politics gravitate to her, except for Michele Bachmann's husband.

We'd better start counting on this new Veronica's Secret factor playing big in future American politics. By 2016 we are likely to see one of Fox News' row of indistinguishable blond ladies leading the Republican ticket (and keeping the secret, of course).

The Gaddafi Loyalists

As a leftist--a pragmatic one--I've had no problem deciding which side to support in the Arab spring. When ordinary people go into the street to overthrow a brutal dictator with tanks, I hope they succeed. I find it sad that a few people on the Left support the tyrants, but then some people are daft.

I'm not talking about pacifists. They oppose violence and war as a matter of principle, and I respect that. I'm talking about flat-out support for tyrants like Gaddafi.

Two of the leading Gaddafi loyalists are people I long admired--and I was wrong to do so. Cynthia McKinney has celebrated the vicious 40-year reign of Gaddafi in many venues in the Middle East, including Libyan television. Celebrating Gaddafi seems to have become her new profession. Hugo Chavez is on the net with a video I've watched in which he claims that the fall of Tripoli's Green square happened not in Libya but in Qatar, where it was staged with actors.

McKinney and Chavez are, of course, trapped in ideologies that make it impossible for the United States to be on the right side of an issue even by accident.

Pap the Teabagger

In a column last week in The Financial Times, Gary Silverman pointed out that Huckleberry Finn's father, Pap, sounded like a member of the Tea Party. (Thanks to Tom Belton for calling this to my attention.)

Pap is an unabashed racist and "whenever his liquor began to work, he most always went for the government." Pap is fearful, afraid the government will take away his meager belongings. When a free black man appears in his town, Pap flies into a rage. This black man is a professor from a midwestern state, has a mixed race background, dresses well and "could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything." Pap wants the man sold into slavery.

Living back before the Civil War, Pap would not have been a Republican, but times have changed. Frightened racists are today the backbone of the Tea Party, and that makes them central in Republican primaries. The Tea Party, unfortunately, is as American as apple pie.

THE HELP reviewed

The most popular movie in the USA is "THE HELP." At first glance this film about race and women's relationships might seem to be an odd pick for number one, but it packed our little theater on a Monday night. The movie was compelling and entertaining, and I recommend it with reservations.

THE HELP is a key American story, one that we enjoy again and again, working out (I think) feelings about ourselves and our history. We insist on this story in the same way that children may insist on hearing repeatedly a tale about how a duckling gets lost and then gets found. It's a safe way to deal with something uncomfortable and make sure it ends well every time.

This is the generic story (found in THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, HUCK FINN, AVATAR, THE BLIND SIDE, etc.) A member of the dominant culture comes to value those in the dominated culture and helps them, and rewarding friendships develop. The story's protagonist, of course, is the helper from the dominant culture (the culture that buys the most movie tickets).

Black intellectuals have criticized THE HELP--which sets out to show fictional black servants telling their own stories--as being unrepresentative of reality. I have to say this: the blacks strike me as being more real than the whites in the movie. The whites are mostly cartoon figures. I would not want to see this movie with a Tea Party audience.

I wonder what black viewers without doctorates think of the film. I suspect they enjoy it, as I did.

For me what kept THE HELP from being first rate was its sentimentality. That's often what separates the rest from the best. Everything gets slightly softened. The movie is comfortably moving, unlike life. That adds to popularity. The black intellectuals have a point, but this glimpse into how people treat one another--I've seen Latina house cleaners treated badly in Healdsburg--has value. And the movie kept the audience interested.

Juan Cole on Qaddafi

My guess is that the great majority of American voters remain unacquainted with the segment of the American Internet Left that once again mourns the overthrow of a mass murderer, this time the dictator of Libya for 40 years. I write of the tyrant Qaddafi (whose name has been spelled at least nine ways).

These mourners are, to borrow a descriptive term from Juan Cole, daft.

Let's look at what Cole had to say about the claim that the Libyan war was about oil. "That is daft. Libya was already integrated into the international oil markets, and had done billions of deals with BP, ENI, etc., etc. None of those companies would have wanted to endanger their contracts by getting rid of the ruler who had signed them. . . . Moreover, taking Libyan oil off the market through a NATO military intervention could have been foreseen to put up oil prices, which no Western elected leader would have wanted to see, especially Barack Obama, with the danger that a spike in energy prices could prolong the economic doldrums. An economic argument for imperialism is fine if it makes sense, but this one does not, and there is no good evidence for it . . . and is therefore just a conspiracy theory."

But why do most of us on the Left oppose dictatorships to begin with? It's not as if what we call Western Democracies are responsive to their citizens. If they were, the United States would have a single payer health care system. Western Democracies are obviously oligarchies run for the benefit of the rich--but the rest of us do have, on occasion, some small impact on decisions. Built into our governance systems is a bit of flexibility not found in the rigidity of dictatorships. We can and do change--to a degree--with the times. That's better than nothing. It's better than a dictatorship.

At least some of American mourners of Qaddafi suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome. They blame the war on Obama, giving little credit to the ordinary citizens of Libya, armed with handguns and axes, who attacked the dictator's tanks. Qaddafi's fall is Obama's fault, they totally believe, and so is everything else.

Obama Derangement Syndrome

The Republicans are having a hard time deciding which butthead to run for President. They have Mitt, an artificial man something like Nixon but without Nixon's gravitas. No one likes him. They have Michele, a primitive religious nutter who stares into the wrong camera with confused, half mad eyes. And now they have Rick Perry, my favorite because when he was a new legislator in Texas he wore tight pants--his nickname was "Crotch." You gotta love "Crotch Perry for President!"

Meanwhile the Democrats try to cope with the Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS). Those suffering from ODS believe that Obama was born in Kenya (the Right) or that Obama is a Republican (the Left). Right and Left ODSers agree on one thing: that Obama is a Fascist. There is no known cure for this malady, and it's a bummer, man.

PROF. WISDOM

About 50 years ago I came across a pamphlet written by Prof. Wisdom, the master of an unnamed discipline. In the pamphlet Prof. Wisdom argued that the Irish had descended from Neanderthals. Well, my grandmother came over on the boat from Ireland, and I enjoyed the pamphlet and showed around through the years on the assumption that it was false. It wasn't. It turns out the the Irish (and the rest of Europe) carry between 1% and 4% Neanderthal DNA. The only people lacking this DNA are Africans. And that is one of the things that make us different from the non-human apes.