Be Careful What You Wish for, Mr. Brooks

On Friday’s NPR “Week in Politics” roundup, conservative columnist David Brooks said America had to make a choice between a “redistribution” of wealth, in which the rich would pay substantially more in taxes, and a “meritocratic” approach, in which “you give people the tools to compete and succeed.”  E.J. Dionne replied that this was a false choice.  In fact, the rich would be much better off under a redistribution policy than under one that truly gave people the tools to compete.

            Why? Because really giving people a level playing field (as we always say, even though very few games above the sandlot level are ever played on a tilted playing field) would mean giving them equal starts in life, at least through college.  Now hang on readers, it’s going to be a bumpy ride, filled with big numbers.  But I was an English major, and if I can get through it, I have confidence you can too.  And let's stop at high school, for convenience.

            Let’s take 90% of the 73 million U.S. children under 18, and consider what it would cost to give them the same “tools to compete” as the top 10%. 

            I expect the costs to level the playing field for the 65 million constituting would have to include at least these:

• ·      Equal quality of health care, including pre-natal care
• ·      Equal quality of education, from pre-school through high school
• ·      Equal nutrition
• ·      Equal access to technology
• ·      Equal provision of safe home and neighborhood conditions

The cost of health insurance alone would be at least $150 billion  (calculating the cost of a high-quality health plan, then generously presuming that the 65 million are averaging half that now).

Equal education, based  on the average cost of an independent school education like the Bush, Obama, Biden, and Jobs children had or have, versus the average cost of public education, and adding pre-school costs for all, would cost around $750 million.

Spending $1000 a year to give each child ages 6-17 a computer and internet access at home, and just $30 a week to provide better nutrition, adds another $120 billion to the total  (assuming a quarter already have access to these).

      The last item, safe homes and neighborhoods, is probably so enormous as to be incalculable, but just increasing the number of police and firefighters by 25% would cost $17 billion annually.

That’s a grand total of just over $1.1 billion.  Today, according to the Heritage Foundation (no friends of redistribution) the top tier pays 71% of all income taxes, or $835 billion.  So their taxes would have to be raised by 130% in order to level the old playing field.  That would mean a top tax rate of around 70%, compared to the 28-35% brackets that exist now.  So Mr. Brooks would be wise to accept redistribution by raising the top rates 10% as a much less costly alternative.

Next Blog: What would America be like if everyone could “compete and succeed,” and what would we mean by success?  And a lot fewer numbers.

When the Soul Soars (For the Dedication of the MLK Memorial)

                                                               

A few years ago, I attended a friend’s installation as head of a Quaker elementary and high school.  (Schools heads are not inaugurated, sworn in, or crowned, they are installed.  “Made me feel like a plumbing fixture,” another friend observed.)  Describing why she was so enthusiastic about her new school, my friend mentioned the interesting questions posed to her by members of the community during the interview process.  She singled out one question in particular; a teacher had asked “What makes your soul soar?”

            Yes, when said out loud that’s a doubly ambiguous question, but she accompanied it with gestures that dispelled any confusion.

            I spent the remainder of the ceremony half attending to the event and half pondering the question for myself.  (She never said what she answered, and I never asked her later.)  By the time we marched out, I had settled on three things:  music, the sea, and righteousness.  Of these, the last is the only one that can actually bring me to weep.

            It started a long time ago.  As a boy, I wept when Robin Hood shot an arrow out the window from his deathbed, and told his men to bury him wherever it landed.  I wept more than once and in more than one version, when King Arthur went to his last battle, hoping that, in T.H. White’s words, “There would be a day – there must be a day – when he would come back to Gramarye with a new Round Table which had no corners, just as the world had none – a table without boundaries between the nations who would sit to feast there.”

            I couldn’t have given it a name then, but I believe I was moved by the righteousness of these men, and by the failure, or death, that ended their striving.

            Later on I found myself moved as much when righteousness won its little victories as when it suffered its big defeats. One story in particular exemplifies for me the experience of witnessing righteousness.

After years of research on genocide and cruelty, scholar Philip Hallie described his reaction to reading about a small town in France which, under the leadership of its Protestant and Catholic ministers, determined to rescue its Jews:

“About halfway down the third page of the account of this village, I was annoyed by a strange sensation on my cheeks.  The story was so simple and so factual that I had found it easy to concentrate upon it, not upon my own feelings.  And so, still following the story…I reached up to my cheeks to wipe away a bit of dust, and I found tears on my fingertips.  Not one or two drops; my whole cheek was wet.”

That night, he says:

“Lying there in bed, I began to weep again. I thought, why run away from what is excellent simply because it goes through you like a spear….To the dismay of my wife, I left the bed, unable to say a word, crossed the dark campus on a starless night, and read again those two pages on the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.  And to my surprise, again the sear, again the tears, again the frantic, painful pleasure that spills into the mind when a  deep, deep need is being satisfied, or when a deep wound is starting to heal”

                       

  --  Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed; see also the film “Weapons of the Spirit”

            Just last week, I encountered a very similar moment in Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Science of Evil.  The incident described comes from the autobiography of Thomas Buergenthal, a Holocaust survivor who became a cofounder of UNICEF and a judge at the Hague:

“At just nine years old, Thomas was rounded up with thousands of Jews and taken to Auschwitz.  There he had to watch while an inmate was forced to hang his friend who tried to escape.  An SS guard ordered the inmate to put the noose around his friend's neck.  The man couldn't fulfill the order because his hands were shaking so much with fear and distress.  His friend turned to him, took the noose, and in a remarkable act, kissed his friend's hand and then put the noose around his own neck.  Angrily, the SS guard kicked the chair away from under the man to be hanged.

Nine-year-old Thomas and the other inmates, watching the man kiss his friend's hand, rejoiced at that simple act that said (without words) ‘I will not let my friend be forced to kill me.’”

I hope others will share here their stories of righteous acts read about, in fiction or history, or witnessed in person.

Minimum Impact

I was rereading Getting to Yes, the classic on negotiation from Roger Fischer and William Ury, when I came upon this wonderfully nuanced sentence: “You will have not only a strong interest in affecting any agreement you reach, but also one in effecting an agreement.” [italics authors’] What a difference a letter makes, I thought, and what a fine-tuned distinction.

            A moment later, though, it struck me that, in the not too distant future, that sentence may be not admirable, but incomprehensible.   (Compare for example, this sentence:  “She was a buxom maid, but I determined that her homely sister would make me a much better wife.”  A few centuries ago, any reader would have realized that the speaker was not referring to the torso of one lady or the face of the other, but rather to one’s lively, cheerful disposition and the other’s domestic skills.) 

            The villain in the piece is, of course, impact.  Technically, impact first meant “to pack together,” or “to strike against, collide.”  This is why we still say, “the passengers died upon impact.”  It also had two very special use: bones and especially teeth are impacted when they are jammed together in a way requiring surgical intervention, and impact wrenches combine torque with car-crash force.  These are the only definitions accepted by the 1971 American Heritage, for example, nor is any sense of affect for impact mentioned in the OED.

            With almost unimaginable speed, however, impact became, first a noun for the effect on something, and then a verb for affecting something.  The Free Online Dictionary notes that as recently as 2001, 80-85% of its usage panel objected to impact as a verb meaning affect. Now, in the mere space of a decade, the dictionary concedes “the verbal use of impact has become so common in the working language of corporations and institutions that many speakers have begun to regard it as standard.”

            I am a descriptive linguist.  I believe that a word means what its users mean by it.  I am sad, for example, that “gay” has a new meaning that makes lines like “Glitter and be Gay” from Bernstein’s Candide strike the ear a bit oddly, but I can  accept the new meaning, because it gives us a simple and judgment-free word for the clinical label formerly employed to marginalize a group of people.  After all, trying to prevent language changing is exactly like King Cnut sitting by the shore and commanding the oncoming tides not to wet his robes. 

            Yet when a word change costs us something in specificity and nuance, I retain the right to object, however futilely.  Impact not only seems to me a lazy way to avoid learning the distinction between affect and effect (a problem enhanced by psychology’s cooption of affect to mean the physical expression of one’s emotions).  It is also a matter of lost connotation. Impact, after all, always meant something bad.  No couple ever ran towards each other and kissed upon impact.  No returning soldier was ever impacted by a spouse’s or child’s hug. 

            Things now not only impact, they impact on, and are impactful.  We have businesses named “Impact Racing “ (helmets for potential collisions), Impact Supplies (cleaning, maintenance and safety supplies?), and Impact Guns (I’ll let that that one pass).  Does the word merely appeal to our desire to avoid complicated distinctions? Or is it a sign of our penchant for the violent, the aggressive, the biggest bang for the buck? (A feminist colleague of mine once stopped a speaker who had used that cliché with the announcement, “that metaphor is either military or sexual, and in either case, I object.”)

            I doubt this screed will impact upon impact’s impactful impact on our language, but I persevere in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most misunderstood observation: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

            I promise no more linguistic curmudgeonry for at least a month.

On the Killing of Citizens

From 1999 until 2010, I was interim head of eight independent schools – that is, I came in on short notice after the sudden departure of a school head or a failed search for a new leader, and ran the school for a few months to two years, until the board could find a new leader.

Knowing that, as the transition specialist William Bridges says (there’s a name that foretold a career), change challenges people’s confidence, making them unsure of their place in the new order, I always tried to assure them that I had not arrived as a hatchet wielder.  My favorite quotation at times like these was Samuel Johnson’s observation that “I have adopted the Roman sentiment that it is more honorable to save a citizen than to kill an enemy.”

Reading the news lately, it seems that for many Americans, it is not only more honorable to kill an enemy, but to kill a citizen.  To cite just a few examples:

·      The Republican debate at the Reagan Library where the audience cheered Rick Perry for his record of 234 (now 235) executions.

·      The subsequent debate where the audience applauded a shout of “Let him die,” referring to a Ron Paul staffer without health insurance.

·      The New Hampshire legislature’s 251-111 vote to override the governor’s veto – and ignore the views of the entire state’s police community -- and allow the use of deadly force anywhere in the state (rather than only in the home, as common law had always held).

·      The Arizona legislature’s vote, three months to the day after the Gabby Giffords shooting, to amend the state’s gun laws to override local wishes and allow open and concealed weapons on college campuses.  (Governor Brewer shocked the law’s advocates with what its sponsor described as a “very rude veto letter.”)

Today’s New York Times brings an analogous position regarding a symbolic form of killing. Over two-thirds of the states have recently introduced laws requiring state-issued voter identifications for voting, and several have cut back on the number of days on which voting can take place.  The argument, of course, centers on whether there is enough voter fraud to make such laws necessary, and on whether the laws will unfairly penalize certain groups.

But in another way, these laws echo exactly the “save a citizen, kill an enemy” concept.  A person who votes illegally does a fractional harm to the voting process. This harm  has an almost infinitesimal chance of affecting the outcome of any election with a sizable number of voters (read Charles Seife’s Proofiness Chapter 5: “Electile Dysfunction” to see how flawed the voting and vote counting process is aside from any deliberate malfeasance).  On the other hand, a person who is disenfranchised by the law is effectively “killed” as a citizen, since the right to vote is one of the  essential distinctions between citizens and non-citizens.  Weighing the two harms, it seems impossible to argue that such laws will not “kill” more citizens than its benefits might ever warrant.

P.S. In an outstanding case of what Alan Dershowitz called : “not passing the giggle test,” under the Texas law, licenses to carry concealed handguns would be an acceptable form of identification to vote, but not student ID cards.