Blue Dog Hell

Paul Krugman's column in today's New York Times is on the same them as my post yesterday. Forget the Republicans in Congress -- they were never going to support Obama on anything anyway. Those who want a public option in helath insurance should focus on the so-called "moderate" Dems.

We Didn't Drink the Kool Aid!

Who would've thunk it! After all the incessant and unbearable MSM propaganda excoriating the supposed cluelessness -- if not the outright un-American-ness! -- of Obama's proposal that John and Jane Q. Public should have the option of joining the same sort of public health insurance plan available to their Congresspersons and Senators, today's New York Times provides a Gestalt altering jolt: The people have tuned out the media whores! They have figured it all out on their own. They want a public option. They are prepared to pay more for the public option, if needed. They are not scared by the bogeymen being paraded on TV by Conservatives for Patients' Rights, the Republican Party, the health insurance industry, their lobbyists, and the bought-and-paid-for media. Maybe they even think Michael Moore was right in "Sicko."

See the article for yourself: "In Poll, Wide Support for Government-Run Health" by KEVIN SACK and MARJORIE CONNELLY, The New York Times, June 20, 2009. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Americans overwhelmingly support substantial changes to the health care system and are strongly behind one of the most contentious proposals Congress is considering, a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The poll found that most Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes so everyone could have health insurance and that they said the government could do a better job of holding down health-care costs than the private sector.

Now, will Sens. Kent Conrad (D-ND), Max Baucus (D-MT), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and other such let's-give-in-even-before-the-fight-has-truly-begun Democrats finally set aside their "co-op plans" and other distractions and fight for the President's plan? Don't bet on it, but at least they can no longer go on TV and say that "the American people" do not support the public option.

That's what friends are for!

Alan Cullison has an interesting report from Afghanistan in today's Wall Street Journal: "Suicide Bombers Tip Afghan War", August 1, 2008. The opening paragraph caught me off guard and made it harder to concentrate on the rest of the article. Here it is:

Earlier this year, Hamza turned 20 years old, and without a job or family where he lived in Pakistan, he confided to a friend that he was considering suicide. His friend had a suggestion: Kill himself along with some American soldiers across the border in Afghanistan.

Philosophical Notes, High and Low

Economists have always been interested in what philosophers -- especially those writing on political philosophy or distributive ethics -- have to say on what our priorities ought to be. This is not just a concern of those living in -- or those who advise those living in -- the White House, or 10 Downing Street, or the Elysee Palace. Anyone with a little bit of cash left over for charity might wonder if there is a sane and systematic way to think about where one's money would do the most good. Any voter heading to the polling booth may worry about the rationale behind the way our government allocates foreign aid in our name.

When faced with humdingers of this kind, economists instinctively reach for three tried and true formulae: Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, John Rawls's liberalism, and Robert Nozick's libertarianism. Rawls, who is often acclaimed as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, argued that any action, whether by an individual or by a group, should be judged by the extent to which it improves the life of the least well-off person (that the individual or group can reach).

Fans of Rawls will be happy to learn that Google.org, the enormously well-endowed philanthropic arm of Google.com, has taken their side. Writing in Slate, Larry Brilliant, the head of Google.org has recently endorsed the Rawlsian approach.

What caught my eye, however, was that instead of mentioning Rawls, Brilliant invokes Gandhi:

Gandhi was once asked, "How can I know that the decisions I am making are the best I can make?" He answered: "I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it?"

The Gandhi quote is dated, in Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule by Anthony Parel (Lexington Books, 2000, ISBN 0739101374), to 1947, several years before Rawls completed his dissertation at Princeton, and a decade before his famous paper on "justice as fairness".

So, without knowing it, Rawls was actually a Gandhian!

***

In a recent article in The New York Times, the Princeton philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, discusses the recent spate of experimental work in philosophy that presents philosophical quandaries -- e.g., Would you kill someone if it would save the lives of four other people? -- to randomly chosen people, notes their answers, and even peers into their brains using sophisticated scanning technology to see what actually goes on inside when people are pondering ethical imponderables. (Incidentally, this is also the subject of Appiah's just published book, Experiments in Ethics.)

While reading Appiah's article, I was reminded of an idea for a cartoon that had occured to me many years ago when I was thinking idly about precisely this issue: the need to do empirical research on the ethical choices that people actually make in their daily lives. Here's the cartoon idea: Two philosophers are seated at adjoining tables, in the dining area at a philosophers' conference, with waiters standing by to take their orders. One philosopher turns to the other and says: "I'll order the egg and you order the chicken. We'll find out which comes first!"

How the media spins Chavez

The Guardian, a highly respected left-of-center British newspaper, still has on its Web site an uncorrected report about Hugo Chavez's notorious speech at the UN in September 2006, during which he had held up a copy of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival and recommended it to the audience. Towards the end of the report, Rory Carroll writes:

Last week the former paratrooper lamented not meeting Prof Chomsky before he died.

Of course, Chomsky was alive and well and The Guardian's readers would have taken away from the smirk in Carroll's report a portrait of Chavez the ignoramus, of Chavez the buffoon. At that time, many other reports had gleefully amplified the alleged flub. I had read about it in The New York Times and had seen gleefully condescending reports on TV.

Sadly for Chavez haters, the report, it turns out, was false, made up, spun out of whole cloth. Prof. Chomsky explained it all in a recent interview on C-SPAN. Reporters who later went back to the text of Chavez's speech found that Chavez was lamenting the passing of John Kenneth Galbraith and regretting not having had the opportunity to meet the famous liberal economist. Some reporter then substituted Chomsky for Galbraith and wittingly or unwittingly set off a viral lie.

The New York Times later corrected the error but, as is usually the case with such corrections, in a way that guarantees that not two in a hundred readers, if even that, would see it.

So, what does Bill Clinton think of Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev?

If you haven't done so yet, please read After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton, By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr., in yesterday's The New York Times. In September 2005, Clinton accompanied a Canadian businessman named Frank Giustra to a meeting with Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan's president-for-life. Nazarbayev's brutal suppression of dissent notwithstanding, Bill was positively effusive, according to the article, in his praise for his dinner host:

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy [the OSCE].

Within forty-eight hours, Frank Giustra got the lucrative rights to a Kazakh uranium mine. Later, out of the goodness of his heart, Giustra donated $130 million to Clinton's charitable foundation.

As I was working my way through the article, I felt a certain pressure on the back of my neck, as if a few blood vessels back there were about to explode. Luckily, I then came upon the following passage:

After Mr. Nazarbayev won [another elcetion in December 2005] with 91 percent of the vote, Mr. Clinton sent his congratulations. “Recognizing that your work has received an excellent grade is one of the most important rewards in life,” Mr. Clinton wrote in a letter released by the Kazakh embassy. Last September, just weeks after Kazakhstan held an election that once again failed to meet international standards, Mr. Clinton honored Mr. Nazarbayev by inviting him to his annual philanthropic conference.

Laughter had once again been proved to be the best medicine, in this case, for high blood pressure.

Murky Water

Liberal people in the West and elsewhere are often justifiably critical of the unfair treatment of women in some Muslim societies. But the even more egregious unfairness towards women in the Hindu societies of India has not provoked proportionately vocal censure. Deepa Mehta’s recent film Water, which was nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar but lost, could help to remind the world of the unusually cruel treatment that women in general and widows in particular have had to endure in Hindu societies.

Unfortunately, Mehta’s film is set in 1938 and, consequently, it cannot highlight the awful fact that Hindu widows continue to this day to be treated with a malevolence that is unimaginable in civilized nations. Even today the remarriage of widows remains exceedingly rare.

An aunt of mine became a widow in the late 1970s when she was in her twenties. None of the elders in our family considered, even for a second, the possibility of arranging a second marriage for her. I remember asking my grandmother why no arrangements were being made for my widowed aunt’s remarriage. With some amusement at my naïveté, my grandmother pointed out that given the abundance of never-married girls to choose from, no man would ever consider marrying a widow.

(In case you are puzzled by references in the last paragraph to marriages being arranged, let me clarify that most marriages in India are “arranged marriages.” The parents of the boy or the girl advertise in the classifieds, responses are screened, astrological charts are compared, meetings are arranged, terms are negotiated, and, if all goes well, the wedding takes place on a date judged auspicious by the almanac or the family priest or astrologer. Arranged marriages are by no means peculiar to India. In fact, many non-western societies continue to have arranged marriages. When I joined Long Island University in 1990, I shared an office with Prof. John Petrakis who told me that he had had an arranged marriage back in his native country, Greece.)

Maybe my grandmother was right. Maybe as the Indian sex ratio, which is currently about 930 women for every 1000 men, continues to fall (as a result of—it is widely speculated—selective abortion of female fetuses and neglect and murder of female infants) a time will come when the marital prospects of widows will improve to a point where it would be the conventional social expectation that a widowed woman would remarry.

Another reason for optimism is that, as the institution of arranged marriages frays and Hindu men and women begin to emulate western mores and actively seek out their mates, the remarriage prospects of widows will very likely improve. The family grandees who arrange Hindu marriages have been keeping widows out of the mating game. When arranged marriages crumble and disappear, never-married boys and girls, divorced men and women, and widows and widowers, will all jump in together into the mate-finding mosh pit and every widow will finally be able to play the game on the same terms as everybody else.

Let me wind up this post by drawing attention to a few historical references in Water that I thought were quite shaky.

First, in at least two references, the film singles out Raja Rammohan Roy, a Hindu reformer, as the leading crusader for the right of widows to remarry. This is not quite true. Roy (1772–1833) had led the fight against sati, a horrendous Hindu institution whereby women were forced to burn themselves to death on the fires that were lit to cremate their just-deceased husbands. (If you are asking yourself what kind of people could even conceive such a thing, the answer is: My kind of people!)

The fight for the legalization of widow remarriage was waged primarily by Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891). Vidyasagar was a reformer from within, in the sense that as the Principal of Sanskrit College, Kolkata, he led a group of scholars who went through Hindu religious texts to prove that the subjugation of women in Hindu societies had no religious sanction. According to Wikipedia entry on Vidyasagar,

Vidyasagar proposed and pushed through the Widow Remarriage Act no XV of 1856. In December of that year Shreeshchandra Vidyaratna, a teacher at Sanskrit Colege and Vidyasagar's colleague, contracted the fist marriage with a widow under the Act. Vidyasagar was materially involved in arranging this wedding, and he campaigned tirelessly to implement the Act in society, offering to officiate as priest at the marriage of widows since orthodox priests refused. He encouraged his son to marry a widow and established the Hindu Family Annuity Fund to help widows who could not remarry. He financed many such weddings, sometimes getting into debt as a result.”

Water should be congratulated for reminding people about Raja Rammohan Roy. But its historical error manages to simultaneously devalue Roy’s far greater achievement in putting an end to sati and at the same time deny Vidyasagar the credit he deserves on the widow remarriage issue.

The film ends on an upbeat note with a collage of scenes evoking a wave of optimism linked to the emergence of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement, and the imminent departure of the British from India. The impression is created that things would finally change for Hindu widows when the British packed their bags and left. This struck me as an absolutely risible howler in addition to being an unworthy attempt to end an otherwise unremittingly gloomy film on a high note. The plight of the Hindu widows had nothing to do with the presence of the British, and the departure of the British from India—momentous as it was in numerous ways—could not seriously have been expected to make any difference to the oppression of Hindu widows. The mistreatment of Hindu widows is one sin that Indians can never blame the Brits for. This particular cross is for Indians alone to bear.