All posts by Steve Stern

Everything I believe about inequality is wrong

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

Every time I read about the rich getting richer and everybody else slowly getting poorer, I get pissed. Every time I read about Bain Capital buying a company – say KB Toys, worth $302 million by putting up $18 million and borrowing the rest – driving it into staggering debt and, then, bankruptcy, and walking away with a an $85 million dividend taxed at a special low rate, I get hot, sweaty, pissed. It seems so unfair, first the making of money by closing down a company, by eliminating jobs, and then, to compound the unfairness,  to pay less taxes than the people who work for a living.

It is unfair, but when I drive by Pyramid Lake and see the RVs crowding the shore, I am beginning to think that the unfairness may be better for the planet. Actually, I know it is better for the planet and I am just beginning to admit it.

In 2005, because of a long drought and for other – more endemic – reasons, the lake level of Lake Powell dropped low enough to expose the Cathedral in the Desert. Michele and I went to Lake Powell to go see it. We were blown away, but I was even more blown away by the long line of 4wheel drive trucks towing elaborate ski-boats at the boat ramp. It was an early weekend in May and the line to get in the lake must have been longer than a mile, one 4X4 after another each with a trailer carrying a heavy duty skiboat. Each rig owned by a middleclass American living the Dream.

When I hear about Scott Walker busting unions, I get enraged, but I am starting to think he is right. Union people, the vaulted and abused middle class of the American Dream, make too much money – well, to be more accurate, they don’t make too much money, they spend too much money, they buy too much shit – and it is not good for the long term, health of our planet.

In the Scott Walker case, it is not like the state workers will starve. They will still have jobs, they will just get paid less and get a smaller – maybe much smaller – retirement. Yes, they might not be able to have a big 4X4 and a skiboat, but they will still be wealthy by almost any historical measure. The tenants of modern trailer parks live in more, real, luxury than Roman rulers. Every one of them has access to unbelievably good health care, they all have cars, they all have televisions and heated houses, and – probably – air conditioning. Even after their Unions have been busted and the American Dream is dead, the workers Scott walker went after will be living a life of almost unimaginable wealth by even 1960’s standards.

That is not to say that Scott Walker isn’t a asshole; he is, after all, commanding others to sacrifice without having to sacrifice himself, asking others to sacrifice while probably enriching himself. If the test of a moral assertion is where its burden falls, Scott Walker flunks. That is my problem with conservatives, they are always demanding change that makes life harder for others, never for themselves. But that doesn’t change the basics; we can’t continue to live like this.

The transit of Venus

Around home, Bay Area Walks, Current Affairs, Religion, Science

Michele and I went up Russian Ridge to watch the transit of Venus. I have read about the transit of Venus across the sun several times in the last couple of days, but Michele has been talking about it for a month. Since it was going to be at sunset, I suggested that we go up where we could see the sun sink into the ocean with Venus in transit. It turned out to be colder than we both thought it would be – in the mid 40’s when we got back to the car after standing outside for an hour – but the light was golden and then sun sank right on cue.

As it sank, Michele got the picture she wanted: Venus visible against the setting sun on the lower right hand side right where she knew it would be.

I got what I didn’t expect, the wonder of seeing Venus as a round object – not just a bright star – twenty three and a half million miles from us….crossing in front of the sun.

 

Paul Fussell R.I.P.

Art, War

Paul Fussell died a week or so ago and I didn’t know until Michele read his obit in Time late last night. Fussell was a writer who I very much admired. Not so much for how he wrote – although he was a very good writer winning a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award – but for what he wrote about. At a time when most writers glorified war with books like A Band of Brothers, he wrote – in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War and The Boys’ Crusade – about the horror of war, about  how people die in war in agony,  mutilated, and disfigured. Fussell wrote about a war that was not honorable, a war that is is gruesome.

He knew first hand, having been a front line infantry officer in Europe when the turn over in junior officers was 100% every six months. One story that is burned into my psyche is how his platoon slaughtered a group of trapped Germans. And that was not the gruesome part, the gruesome part was that the story of the slaughter became a joke told to cheer people up when they were down, Remember the turkeyshoot? when we killed all those Germans trapped in the basement?

Fussell also wrote about Class in America, a topic I know by personal experience to be taboo. His book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is a classic and, even twenty years after it was written, still dead on.

I won’t say that I will miss him – like I miss David Foster Wallace – but I am saddened that he is no longer with us.