Helping the Middle Class & A Question of Gratitude

Quin Hillyer wrote in the American Spectator blog in reference to the Iowa victories of Huckabee and Obama:

One other thing: It also shows that the American people have no idea how good their lives are. The strong response to economic grievance-mongering shows that people who are incredibly wealthy by every historical standard are somehow convinced they are barely making ends meet -- barely making ends meet while their families have two cars, three TVs, four cell phones, and untold numbers of other gadgets in homes they themselves own. There is a word for this: spoiled. Huckabee and Obama are smart enough to appeal to the spoiled Americans who have no idea what real hardship is.

Now, when I ran into this quote here, I was a bit surprised that it was met with universal derision. You'd think that Hillyer had just called for the surplus population to be reduced. It's true, if you go and read Hillyer's whole piece, he comes off as cranky. But his base point is something that's struck me increasingly for a while.

In every election, it seems, each party redoubles its commitment to "do something" for the middle class. Democrats don't make much noise any more about new programs to help the poorest in the nation, instead there's huge focus on issues that hit the broad span of the 30th to 75th percentile in incomes: people who rally and vote and donate and generally are good to have in your political coalition. Democrats have even joined Republicans in proposing "middle class tax cuts", arguing that the broad-based tax cuts of recent Republican administrations have disproportionately helped the rich.

But here's the catch: taxes have change since Reagan promised to improve things back in 1980. For all the rhetoric about "tax cuts for the rich" the tax cuts served up over the last 30 years by Republican administrations have got things to the point where the lower and even the mid-middle class pay virtually no income taxes. If you have three kids, a mortgage, tithe and make under 60k per year, you will get all your withholding back at the end of the year. At this point, the middle and lower classes pretty much only pay the two true sacred cows: social security and medicare. Goodness knows, I have no desire to see more of my hard-earned income swallowed by the every-hungry maw of Uncle Sam, but I'll admit it seems a little worrisome when the upper and upper-middle class constitute the entire tax base. Generally, if you pay for something, you own it...

I don't blame anyone for looking out for themselves to a reasonable extent. It's our job as informed voters to support fair taxation, policies that protect jobs, etc. So perhaps many would feel that I'm over-reacting.

But as I listen to political rhetoric, primarily on the "we're here to help" left but also on the "compassionate" right, it seems that a lot of what we're hearing is: "Life shouldn't be so hard."

On it's own, there's nothing wrong with that. Making people's lives easier is a worthy goal. But in trying to sell a plan to make people's lives easier, we all to often find pundits and politicians making it sound as if we have things incredibly hard. And yet we don't. Though some people in some places may have it somewhat harder now than 50 years ago, on the whole our modern American society has it so good compared to most of the world now and throughout history it's almost unimaginable.

A while back I was reading Wild Blue by Stephen Ambrose, which tells the story of the B-24 crews of World War II mainly through the eyes of the crew George McGovern commanded, earning himself a Distinguished Flying Cross during the course of 35 combat missions. (I'm not a fan of McGovern politically, but the book is very, very good, I recommend it.) As he's talking about the backgrounds of all the members of the crew, Ambrose talks about one of the airmen being amazed at the food available to men in the Army Air Corps. Growing up on a small family farm in the midwest, he'd grown up on a diet of corn meal, dairy, vegetables from the garden, and only the most occasional meat: Cornmeal mush for breakfast; cornbread for lunch, and cornbread as a staple of dinner as well, along with meat and vegetables when available.

That kind of minimal requirement monotony is almost unimaginable in modern America, yet for a Depression-era farm boys who made up McGovern's crew, it seems to have been fairly un-remarkable. (It reminded my of my own grandfather, who joined the Navy in 1945 out of a small New Mexico mining town. When asked what had been the biggest change for him going into the Navy he replied: "The food. You could go back and get seconds as many times as you wanted.")

Today, obesity is a major problem in the lower class. The massive food producing operations which put nearly all family farms out of business over the last fifty year mean that you can get food in the US for unimaginably low prices. You can make a filling meal for a family of five for the cost of 30 minutes work at minimum wage. Our housing prices are up, but out that's in part because our homes are now often 2000-3000 square feet, rather than the 1200-1500 of fifty years ago. The cost of college is spiralling up, but at the same time in two generations we have gone from a situation where only the economically and intellectually elite go to college, to a point where nearly everyone does. I could go on, but you get the idea.

In the end, it's a tone that's annoying me here. No, the middle class in our country is not sitting around eating bon bons. We work hard, we worry, we hope not to hit some piece of adversity that swamps us. But that's not something that sets us apart from the rest of humanity. That's one of the things that unites us with Chinese farmers and medieval peasants and paleolithic hunter-gatherers. We've always lived by the sweat of our brows, and found meaning and pride in our ability to do so. In almost every way, it's easier and more comfortable to do so in the modern US than at any other time or place in history. We should, I think, be conscious of that, and grateful for it. We don't live in a perfectly equitable society, and gratitude does not necessitate believing that, but if we fail to be grateful for what we have and where we are, we make ourselves profoundly disconnected from the rest of history and humanity.

Lickona is Back

For those wanting their Godsbody fix, Lickona is finally back, with more hair than ever, at the original Godsbody blog site.

Iowa: Economic Conservatives Feel the Pain

I headed over to the National Review blog last week for the first time in a couple months. I'd been sticking with the dead-tree edition of National Review for the last while, but I wanted to see what the reaction was to the Huckabee win in Iowa.

Total free fall.

I don't think I'd seen that National Review writers so mad since Bush nominated Miers to the Supreme Court.

Did we want the GOP to morph into a clone of the European Christian Democrat parties? Did no one care about economic and small government conservatism anymore? Was this a strictly sectarian vote of Evangelicals for a Baptist minister? WHAT THE HECK WAS GOING ON?

As things settled out, the basic conclusion seemed to be: Iowa is an unusual state, and the caucus system emphasizes that yet further. No need to worry, we'll get Romney or McCain -- or maybe Rudy at a long shot -- in the end.

That analysis may be basically right, but in what I could read about the sentiments being expressed in Iowa, I think there are two more things that people should take away from this:

1) All of us Christian conservatives who have been threatening to stay home or vote third party if Rudy is the nominee really are serious. After being told for months that Giuliani's pro-choice history didn't matter, Iowans turned out and voted for the most religiously vocal candidate available, and they did so pretty overwhelmingly. So for those who are now shouting, "Anyone but Huck," and wondering how to quiet the storm, the answer is: Throw Rudy overboard. There are much more conservative candidates out there than Rudy, and religious conservatives will be much more pliable once they're not being threatened with a pro-choice, anti-gun, cross-dressing New Yorker.

2) Even among registered Republicans, true intellectual conservatives are probably in the minority. We have a lot of tempermental conservatives: people who are pretty sure that most changes won't turn out for the good. We also have plenty of religious conservatives, who may not actually be all that conservative on size-of-government and economics, though those views are gradually rubbing off on them. But movement, intellectual conservatives are and probably always will be, a minority. So we shouldn't be shocked when it turns out that a lot of Republicans are actually quite open to a populist message combined with social conservatism and a proposal for a Fair Tax.

At the end of the day, I'm not crazy about Huckabee, though I'd vote for him in the unlikely event that he's actually the nominee. But the message I hope is getting through somewhere over in party headquarters is: If you totally ignore pro-life Republicans, things you don't like will start happening.

My Life Under the Dome

One of my most powerful memories from childhood is of sitting back in a large, old theater chair and looking up into the dome above as a planetarium projector (looking for all the world like a mutant ant on steroids) made the stars and planets wheel overhead.

My father was a planetarium lecturer. Not a very common trade: there are perhaps a hundred or two in the country, a thousand around the world. Dad ran the planetarium at Santa Monica College, and lectured part time at the Griffith Observatory for over twenty-five years.

A planetarium, for those unfamiliar with them, consists of a dome and a projector designed to be able to project up onto the dome the stars as they would appear at any given night within the last few thousand years -- or the next few thousand. You can see the stars as they would appear at any time, at any point on the world. A good, old fashioned star projector is a wonder of mechanical engineering. Star balls at each end contain a light source and thousands of carefully placed pin-pricks, focused by lenses, to project the stars in their correct place and brightness. Separate geared projectors show the planets as they follow their procession along the ecliptic, against the background stars.

The old lecturer's console up at Griffith (shown to the left, with the projector looming in the background) was a wonder of switches and dials encased in massive thirties-era woodwork. The lecturer, armed with a script, a dim reading light, and a laser pointer brought the lights down and summoned up the stars. There was always a brief "star talk" in which the lecturer pointed out the night constellations currently visible in the early evening, which planets were currently visible, and any upcoming astronomical events. Then the "feature" part of the show followed, which might cover anything from the anniversary of the moon landings, to the martian lander, to the set of conjunctions which may have been the "Star of Bethlehem."

These days, most planetariums used "canned shows". The movements of the projector and automated, and a pre-recorded voice gives exactly the same lecture every time. No wonder they're not very popular. As recorded entertainment goes, planetarium shows don't compete. But back then at least, Griffith shows were always life, with each lecturer giving the standard script his own flavor.

I wish I could claim that I'd retained more from those many afternoons and evenings under artificial skies. I can still identify a half dozen constellations and find Arcturus and generally know what planet I'm looking at in the early evening, but that's about it. Mostly, I have memories of bouncing in theater seats, looking at the ranks of dials, certain pieces of music that sound like stars coming out to me, and the tones of my father's voice as he walked the audience through the universe.

Réquiem ætérnam dona eis, Dómine. Et lux perpétua luceat eis.

Do We Need Morality?

My team at work tends to generate a lot of interesting lunchtime conversation (we go out for team lunch once a week) in part due to our Indian/US cultural split. We have two Hindus and one Jain on the Indian side and a Baptist, a Methodist, a "sort of spiritual" ex-Catholic and me on the American side, which certainly provides a variety of opinion. (The day our boss, the Baptist, was out, it turned out that all our Indians doubted reincarnation, while our Methodist and ex-Catholic both believed in it.)

One day our Jain team-member (he keeps all of Jainism's dietary requirements, but he says his beliefs are untraditional enough in regards to the gods that he upsets his mother) threw out a question that generated it's due share of controversy: Why do we have morality?

He contented that morality essentially set up a second and parallel set of laws, enacted by those without the political authority to control the legal system. Why have both religiously determined morality and legality? Why not just have a single authority with a single set of rules?

This struck me as an interesting question, because for the life of me I cannot imagine people not having ideas of morality that deviate (or may deviate) from whatever legal/societal restrictions they find themselves under.

Imagine for a moment a situation in which a priest/aristocrat class sets all laws and there is no religious our moral structure separate from that single set of leaders. It is announced, one day, that having a beard is a moral abomination and all men must shave daily or have their heads cut off. Everyone follows this lead but one man, as he lifts his razor in the morning, thinks to himself: "This is not right. I should be able to grow a beard if I want to. Cutting a man's head off because of his hair is wrong."

That man has just invented a personal moral system. So long as we are capable of receiving instruction from some other source and thinking, "No, that's not how it is. Things are actually this other way," we will have systems of morality which are separate from the law.

Now I should say, this line of argument did not win over my colleague. He argued that when someone looks at an precept that is given to him and thinks, "That is not right," he is simply wishing that he were in charge instead.

That really, is what leaves me most confused about the line of argument. I am frankly rather flummoxed as to how one could not see the holding of such a conviction as morality.

A Military Pacifist

A career military man writes about peace in a post well worth read. Check the comments as well. While I don't necessarily share in the author's disillusion with the purposes of the Iraq War, I think he strikes the perfect Christian balance on understanding war and peace, and the place of the individual Christian with respect to them.

My Youth as a Santa Skeptic

When the Darwin children tore the wrapping off their Christmas presents last week, they bore tags like "From Mom and Dad" and "From Grandma" but not "From Santa". Santa has never made an appearance in Darwin family mythology, primarily because I was one of those aggressively skeptical children who refused to suspend disbelief in Santa starting around the age of 3 or 4.

I pestered by parents with questions: How does Santa get into houses without chimneys? How does Santa really know if people are good or not? How does Santa visit all houses in one night? Why does Santa seem to give the same sorts or presents that Mom and Dad would?

My parents didn't want to set a precedent of lying to their children, so I quickly sensed that the answers they gave me were highly qualified. "Maybe if Santa can't reach all the houses, he lets parents know what he would give and so the parents deliver the presents for him."

I smelled a rat and zeroed in for the kill: "There isn't really a Santa, is there? It's just a story that parents tell children."

Why go to all the work to spin stories for a child who insists on cold reality? Santa died: not with a bang, but with a whimper. Feeling in my youthful heart that I had now overturned one of the great frauds in history, I worked to spread the word. Other children, however, seemed less interested. Other adults were also not necessarily as free thinking as my parents when it came to unmasking the Santa game. In third grade I was ordered to the principle's office for blowing the whistle on our teacher, who had skipped over a few pages in the book she was reading aloud after lunch -- in which the main character's older sibling informed him that Santa was just Mom and Dad. Our teacher must have thought we still needed to be spared this harsh reality, and the rest of the class wasn't bothering to read along and didn't notice the skipped pages.

"Now why did you do that?" the principle, our one remaining nun -- and not a very severe one -- asked. "You teacher says one of the girls in your class was crying."

"It's true," I responded, dogmatically.

Sister sighed and told me to sit in the chair outside her office for half an hour and then go back to my classroom.

Now, in our family, there were three gift holidays in the lineup. On St. Nicholas Day cookies and chocolate coins and such showed up in our shoes, placed there by St. Nicholas. On Christmas there were presents and stockings, and on Epiphany there were one or two small presents in celebration of the Three Wise Men.

I'd quickly driven Santa from Christmas, such that my younger siblings never even heard of him, except as a pop-myth which other families believed in. However, I was much more hesitant to question whether St. Nicholas really had anything to do with the little presents that showed up in our shoes. I think it's mostly that I was worried it would be disrespectful to publicly question a saint.

Eventually, at around age six, I performed an attempt at a double blind test which for the longest time suppressed my willingness to dig further in that regard. The Jewish kids in the next apartment over had, of course, never heard of St. Nicholas day. When I realized this, I started talking it up to them (get candy before Hanukkah!) and encouraged them to put out their shoes and see if candy appeared. I figured that if it really was St. Nicholas, then he would know the shoes were there in the next apartment over, and the candy would duly be delivered.

Sure enough, candy appeared, though theirs was marked with pictures of Menorahs and the Star of David. Years later, my mom recounted to me that the kids had talked it up so much to their parents that they had figured they'd better provide candy lest the kids be disappointed, so the Hanukkah candy was dipped into early. (Another experiment foiled by the inability to control for all factors.) However, it was several years more before I dared directly question whether the saint was directly involved in delivering St. Nicholas Day treats.