Can We Just Acknowledge This is the Worst Congress Ever?

The Holier Than Thous in Congress that head up the House Committee for Government Reform and Oversight have declared war on the city of Saint Paul Minnesota and are demanding a massive probe into some slum lords that got shut down under Mayor Randy Kelly (who isn't the mayor anymore) back in 2002. I kid you not. Can we just acknowledge that this is the worst Congress ever? John Slides over at Monkey Cage recently had a graph that showed this Congress has passed fewer bills than any since, well the 1880's (again I kid you not). Oh and 20% of those bills were about renaming post offices and plazas...oh, they also passed a bill to order the United States Mint to mint commemorative baseball coins to help fund the Baseball Hall of Fame, but alas, that bill died in committee in the Senate. Recently the independent investigation of that whole "Fast and Furious" thing came out that showed that Holder was completely in the clear, and the whole "investigation" by Congress was pretty much a joke. Basically some guys in a ATF field office employed some highly dubious investigative strategies with bad results, but no, the Attorney General was not aware of this (there are over 14,000 swore FBI agents in the country, and thousands more of civilian personnel, no the Attorney General is not aware of everything they do every day and that's just one agency he oversees) and didn't do anything wrong. So the whole thing was basically an absurd show trial joke. And now Congress is demanding the City of Saint Paul pony up 180 million smackers, and why? Well because of discrimination against poor slum lords or something. And stuff. And Obama is a socialist. Essentially the City decided not to take a case to the supreme court after the NAACP and a whole lot of other people like former Vice President Walter Mondale said that this Supreme Court could use slum lords getting shut down as a a legal pretense to gut all fair housing legislation passed in the last 40 years. So the City of Saint Paul decided not to risk the role of the dice in front of Tony Scalia and that means they obstructed justice, and that means they need to pay 180 million dollars. And why? Well because of discrimination against poor slum lords or something. And stuff. And Obama is a socialist. Because Congress said so.


Worst Congress Ever.

King for a Day

 I posted this somewhere else earlier today, but I'll cross post it here too.  If only because my friend and co-worker Alex keeps whining at me about how i don't update this thing enough:


So here's a thought experiment, lets say you were named King or Queen (or Caesar or Empress or Czar or Boss of all Bosses) of Minneapolis for a day.  What would you do?  Well I got a list of things, but lets define what I'm talking about.  Being Empress for a day gives you unlimited authority, but you are only in charge for a short time, so you  can't change everything.  Nor can you get rid of a politician you don't like, being Czar means you don't have to deal with school board members or city council persons.  Heck being The Sun King means you don't even have to deal with the Board of Estimate and Taxation!  Now, I said before that I got a list, and I really do, but gah, i can only name one thing so I narrowed it down to a sort of top three--Southwest light rail, getting rid of the silly Board of Estimate and Taxation and having a regular city budget process, or dealing with all those dang parking lots in downtown...so hard to choose...okay...King John, First of His Name, Lord of the Northside and Southside, of Nordeast and Southeast, Defender of the Realm and General Nice Guy hereby issues the following decree:

"From this day forth, the acres of parking lots between downtown and the Metrodome shall be no more, forever and for all time.  They shall be replaced with mixed used development and tall buildings.  Parking accommodations will be seen to with multi-layered parking structures and underground parking garages below said buildings.  It shall be filled with office space, apartments, condos, coffee shops, restaurants, bars and boutiques.  Considerations for affordable housing should also be on the agenda.  Also a charter high school partnered with major Minneapolis corporations such as US Bank and Target that stresses career training and placement and/or another charter school partnered with the University of Minnesota that focuses on math and science.  I would also like to see a nice small park, with a small pond and some ducks.  It shall be known as "Downtown East" or possibly "Johnville."  Let all good men declare their loyalty in the war on parking lots, and let us all bask in the radiance of a nice, cool new neighborhood.  And an increase in our property tax base"

Well that's my plan.  Also I'm going to be unfair and make another ground rule, nothing about stadiums (yeah I know a lot of you guys don't like the new Vikings stadium deal, well okay but lets talk about something other than that {I mean a good majority of posts here are about not liking stadiums, that's fine, but last time I checked with was the Minneapolis Issues Forum not the Minneapolis Anti-Stadium Forum}, like you know the other 99.9% of of issues facing our city that don't involved stadiums).

So what would you do?

The Anatomy of a Lie

On the tenth anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, I can recall a great example of how we are increasingly living in a “post-truth age.”

More than a national tragedy, 9/11 was a national failure.  As outlined in the 9/11 Commission’s Report the entire first nine months of the Bush Administration was marked by senior officials in the White House and Pentagon consistently and repeatedly ignoring growing warning signs that would later become crystalized the most famous presidential briefing ever, aptly titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike US.”  Much and more has come out about Bush’s fumbling of the looming attack, and a great Op-Ed piece in the New York Times yesterday does a great job summing it up.  In the aftermath, the Bush Administration would go into overtime trying first to prevent independent investigation, then defending its failures and finally being forced to tell flat out lies.  One example of this post-9/11 mendacity was leveled by Condi Rice before Congress, where she claimed “no one could have anticipated [that terrorists would use planes as weapons.]”  This is a lie and I can prove it.

This type of plot has repeatedly been used in popular fiction for decades before 9/11.

• In the bestselling Tom Clancy novel “Debt of Honor” an ultra-nationalist Japanese terrorist flies a jumbo jet into the Capitol resulting in Clancy’s protagonist Jack Ryan becoming President.

• The Stephen King novel "The Running Man" written under his pseudonym “Richard Bachmann” ends with a man on the run from a corporation trying to kill him for televised entertainment in a future dystopia getting revenge by flying a plane into its high rise corporate HQ.  It was later turned into the Schwarzenegger blockbuster “The Running Man” (the ending was changed for the movie).

• The entire plot of the 1980 John Carpenter movie “Escape from New York” is dependent on Air Force One being flown into a building in a future New York where Manhattan has become a giant lawless island prison.  The President survives (in a futuristic escape pod that looks like an Easter egg) and Kurt Russell is sent in to rescue him.  This is a popular movie that is on cable pretty much every weekend and also has Isaac Hayes as the marauding gangster lord of the city.

So of course the entire 9/11 plot was in fact “imagined” by whole bunch of different authors in popular creative mediums.  Let alone the fact that this type of attack was in fact tried before.

• In 1974 a man named Samuel Byck tried to hijack a jet to flyit into the White House.  He was shot and killed by police in the airport.

• A commercial pilot in 1994 tried to hijack a FedEx cargo plane to use in a suicide attack.  His motives were not political, he was a disgruntled employee who was going to be fired for lying about his flight experience to get his position.  He severely injured the crew but they were able to fight him off and land the plane.

• One of the Columbine shooters wrote in his diary about fantasizing about doing such a suicide attack.

It’s amazing that no one has tried to point these basic things out in the media.  The fact is Condi Rice said something to Congress that is objectively false.  Yet even when this falsehood is easily knocked down shown to be simple evidence of the Bush Administration’s continuing push to rewrite history and cover up their failings, it is ignored.  Indeed it is treated as Gospel.  In the age of “post-truth” the saying of a lie, can make it true.  And no amount of research can bring the truth to light, at least outside of the world of blogs.

Convention Season!

So its convention season again and with it come complaints about how irrelevant modern presidential conventions are, typically launched by the very people who have to cover them for the unwashed American masses to view on TV.  This is a typical complaint and in many ways it’s quite accurate.  Indeed, the last convention in which there was a serious challenge on the floor would be in 1980 when Ted Kennedy tried (in vain) to unhorse Jimmy Carter and the last time a upset could have possibly occurred would probably be 1976, when it was in the realm of possibility (but highly unlikely) that Ronald Reagan could have upset Ford.  For those of you keeping score at home, the last time a convention started and the winner was still largely in doubt would probably be in 1960, if not earlier.  So the critics are right that national party conventions don’t “matter” as they don’t pick nominees any more, but they are missing the larger point.

Conventions do have a point in our modern age, for while they don’t make important decisions on candidates they do play an important role in communicating with folks other than the national press corps or political junkies like yours truly.  It’s hard to remember, but most of the American electorate doesn’t pay attention to politics that much.  They live busy lives and the news in general and political news in particular can be both quite boring and rather depressing.  In addition, our culture, especially our media culture, doesn’t celebrate people involved in or following politics at all.  The professional hardened cynic is almost always the hero in political drama and a loyal party foot soldier or idealist activist is at best a sap and at worst a fraudulent charlatan.  Thus why people like Andrew Sullivan or David Brooks might know all about Mitt Romney and this election, lots and lots of Americans still don’t.  The result is that conventions play and important role in introducing candidates, showcasing political parties and their messages to millions of Americans who are just now starting to tune into the election.  You and I might know who Paul Ryan is but millions of American’s are going to learn about him this week, many for the first time.

In addition, conventions help political parties organize and communicate with themselves.  Political science has shown for decades now that large percentages of Americans base their position on issues base on what stance the party they tend to vote for takes.  Just think about Republicans and Iraq, they go from supporting a President who boasted at his convention about pursuing a “more humble” foreign policy, to largely supporting the invasion of Iraq, and after no WMD’s turned up many Republican voters still claimed they were the cause of the war and were in fact there.  Partisan voters, activists and other party actors can use these events to organize their parties’ positions from the new marriage equality plank the Democratic platform to the GOP platform that now calls for the end of Medicare.  The mass media events that are conventions are in some ways the only way to organize political parties with millions of members all over the country.   

To be sure the media often covers events where nothing of “importance” is decided.  How many people were actually impacted by the O.J. Simpson verdict directly (one of the most watched Television event in recent memory) or who wins a gold medal in coordinated diving?  Not many, but the media still covers it none the less.  And lots of things treated as political or national news don’t have a big impact on people’s lives either; every year they announce the President’s physical, he’s always fine, and announcing the movement of the Dow Jones Average is a nightly ritual on TV news despite the fact that most Americans have no net wealth, most don’t own any stock and almost none actually hold large quantities of stock in the 30 companies that make up that average.  Still it gets reported like clockwork.

The reason these complaints get rolled out every four years is the media itself.  First of all they rarely take place in New York, Atlanta or Washington (where most press big wigs live and work) so that means usually they have to fly to somewhere out in Middle America (imagine having to go to Denver or Tampa for one of these things, these people are supposed to be writing about THE FATE OF THE NATION, and these are places ESPN henchmen get sent to cover a football game!)   Then they have to stay in regular hotels with no swanky restaurants, I’m sure David Brooks is quite annoyed right now, no decent room service!  In addition, most press big shots are out of their traditional information networks at these things.  They are no longer discussing the Great Game of Washington with their lunch buddies from the Cato Institute or various Titans of K Street, no now they have to talk to some delegate (gah, that’s just one step above a regular voter!  How am I supposed to get my WaPo column and live the high life when I’m in a swamp talking to Ron Paul people wearing stupid hats!)  And to add injury to these insults the political press is no longer in control of the actual coverage.  In almost every other political event what gets reported is filtered through the writing of reporters of columnists where only a tiny bit of the actual coverage is what some politician actually said.  TV is usually worse with talking headed pundits who don’t even show us what America’s political leaders said, they explain what it all means, and then argue for three minutes about who is “winning.”  But during conventions the reporter is made largely irrelevant as our political leaders communicate directly with the American people without the traditional middle man.  It is all very frustrating.  And if there’s one thing a frustrated reporter knows, it’s how to complain.  Hence the complaints.

Why Don’t You Read a Book

Recently, I got around to reading some of the reviews that came out about Game of Thrones Season Two.  Despite being one of the best shows on television, the reviews I saw where rather mixed.  Much of this can attributed to the “frustrated-English-grad-school-casualty” philosophy that tends to dominate a lot of critics in this day and age.  Critics, especially critics in New York, seem to see their role in life as being to attack everything, well everything but Sex in the City, and write in a sort of preening/whining Village Voice-esque tone.  In addition, Fantasy has always been a denigrated genre in American literary circles and I suspect the same goes to for the world of TV.  But what I can’t stand is when critics are just simply wrong about historical fact and use their ignorance of history as a way of attacking a TV show.  Emily Nussbam took a typical stand in her review in the New Yorker: From the start, the show has featured copious helpings of pay-cable nudity, much of it in scenes that don’t strictly require a woman to display her impressive butt dimples as the backdrop for a monologue about kings…”Game of Thrones” is not coy about the way the engine of misogyny can grind the fingers of those who try to work it in their favor.  An episode two weeks ago featured a sickening sequence in which King Joffrey order one prostitution-a character the audience had grown to care about-to rape another…But while the scene may have been righteous in theory, in practice it was jarring, and slightly incoherent, particularly since it included the creamy nudity we’ve come to expect as a visual desert…But there is something troubling about this sea of C.G.I-prefect flesh, shaved and scentless and not especially medieval.  Leaving aside the fact that all TV shows are “scentless”, that is they are a visual and audio based medium not an olfactory one, what struck me was that last sentence where open sexuality is described as “not especially medieval.”  This is utter nonsense. To begin with the books the TV show was based on was heavily based in medieval history.  Most fantasy, especially stuff that comes from Tolkien, creates a world where technology might resemble the Middle Ages but human behavior seems to have for more in common with Victorian norms and mores.  Romance looks a lot like it does in Withering Heights with distant lovers constantly pining away for each other.  The world Robert Jordan created in his “The Wheel of Time” series has no swear words stronger than “blood and ashes” and no one is ever dirty.  George R.R. Martin, who wrote the books, deliberately set out to create a world that resembled life in the Middle Ages, and did a huge amount of historical research before he began writing.  Accordingly, the show maybe set in a fantasy realm but it does resemble the period in history it was based on, even in the portrayal of sexuality that seem to get Nussbam all in a tizzy. Life in the Middle Ages was nasty, brutish and filthy.  Violence and cruelty were regular parts of life and ever present, much as it is in the show.  Common games played in that era by villagers included one “sport” which consisted of a group of men chasing a pig around a fenced in area, such as a village square, armed with clubs beating the pig to death while spectators cheered them on.  Another one popular with young men in France was to take a cat and nail it to a tree through its abdomen.  Participants then take turns standing in front of the dying cat with their hands behind their back trying to beat the cat to death with their face and forehead.  You proved you manliness and skill by killing the cat without it managing to scratch out your eyeballs.  These types of cruelties seem shocking to our modern sensibilities but they were rather tame compared to what people did to other people in that age.  A common problem you would face as the host of banquet or feast was people getting drunk and stabbing each other to death with their daggers at the dinner table.  French nobles solved this problem in later centuries by introducing the practice of hosts providing silverware for attendees, as is the modern custom, with knives with rounded off tops to make it harder to stab someone to death.  This is why your table knives have rounded off tops.  Even this level of violence was relatively tame compared to life during war time, where most tactics involved slaughtering your opponent’s peasants and burning his lands to the ground to reduce his incomes and prove he was unable to defend his friends and subjects.  Raping and pillaging was seen as a normal and effective way to reward your men for the hard work of taking a town or city.  Witnessing a town being "put to the sword," that is the methodical killing of all of its residents, was probably a “jarring” experience as well.  All of this is recorded fact, but I’m sure if it was put into the show-especially the cat game-it would be dismissed as “unrealistic” or “outrageous” by people like Nussbaum.   Sexuality and gender relations were also very different from contemporary American customs.  Medieval life was a bawdy and social affair, every day-especially for the nobility-was never ending parade of social customs and rituals done with others.  Hypocrisy and contradiction was built into all forms of life.  The entire ideal of courtly love seems so foreign to how we live today it seems to have come from another civilization.  As Barbra Tuchman points out in her great book about the 1300’s A Distant Mirror: If tournaments were an acting-out of chivalry, courtly love was its dreamland.  Courtly love was understood by its contemporaries to be love for its own sake, romantic love, true love, physical love, unassociated with property or family, and consequently focused on another man’s wife, since only such an illicit liaison could have no other aim but love alone…The fact that courtly love idealized guilty love added one more complication to the maze through which medieval people threaded their lives.  As formulate by chivalry, romance was picture as extra-marital because love was considered irrelevant to marriage, was indeed discouraged in order not to get in the way of dynastic arrangements…Guided by this theory, woman’s status improved less for her own sake than as the inspirer of male glory, a higher function than being merely a sexual object, a breeder of children, or a conveyor of property. In no way did people in this time act like well to do New York professionals without computers and wearing goofy tights and they were not “prudish” compared to modern American sexual customs.  In the crowded dense world of the medieval city numerous people would sleep in the same room.  A common practice would be for the master to sleep with his wife in a bed in a small room with his servants sleeping on the floor only a few feet away, obviously being personal witness to whatever would occur.  One English King fathered 16, yes 16, children out of wedlock, another age 29 married a six year old for a variety of political purposes.  He fell ill and died before the holy wedlock could be consummated.  A popular story of the 14th century began with the line “a Priest and his lady went off to bed.”  There are records of the building of a Cathedral in Italy that document contributions from all aspects of medieval society including wealthy merchants, local guilds and “Rafela, a prostitute.” This is how people lived for centuries, but put a scene like that in the show and no doubt critics would complain about its lack of “realism.”  But this is because of their ignorance of history, not poor production choices.  Their world was simply very different from our own.  Thus Joffrey’s cruelty might shock modern critics like Nussbaum but in no way was it “not medieval.”  Patriarchy and male superiority were hallmarks of medieval life, Joffrey as a king could do as he pleased and he never would have to worry about being arrest by the NYPD after being accused of sexual assault by a chambermaid, unlike modern political figures.  Indeed history records a French nobleman, Gilles de Rais, who acted like a modern serial killer before finally being caught and burned at the state.  The legend of Count Dracula is based on the myth of a Romanian noble “Vlad the Impailer” who was famous for impaling captured Turkish soldiers on large spikes.  These examples might be extreme but they give a picture of Joffrey’s behavior being quite possible. What we see here is an attempt to distill all of the ways that people can look at life through the narrow lenses of early 21st Century American rich people.  When something comes along and points out that in no way is our own culture and ways of living “normal” or “natural” some people seem inclined to push back.  But this is wrong.  While the world of Westeros may be a fictional creation of one man’s imagination, it’s a powerful reminder of the different possibilities for how people can live and interact.  And we shouldn’t dismiss it because the possibilities, both good and bad, for change in our own society can seem quite unsettling.

Can’t Take Politics Out of Politics

Recently the State of California held their primary elections for State Legislature.  It was a brand new system designed by “reformers” to make the system “better”.  In short it was an overhaul of the traditional primary and general system to try and elect more “moderate” candidates, as the reformers thought more “moderates” would solve California’s problems.  It was an attempt to get around the political impasses in the Golden State by getting rid of politics and replacing it with something else.  What that something else is, “reformers” have never quite explained…

Alas it was not to be:

All incumbents who ran this year advanced to the fall campaign, and all but four finished in first place. Likewise, 101 of 113 non-incumbent candidates endorsed by the major parties advanced.

The primary elections showed how irrelevant the whole reform effort was as.  What we are seeing here is the fool’s errand of trying to take politics out of politics.  Political scientists have long documented, indeed since the 1790’s, that when faced with a new environment or system of elections political parties respond.  They work around complex rules meant to limit their power and find new strategies to do what political parties do best: organize candidates, elected officials and voters, take positions on issues and win elections.  In California the parties responded by borrowing a page from the Iowa playbook, both the Republicans and Democrats held endorsing conventions to choose a candidate for offices and then worked hard to get the word out to activists and party loyalists on whom the “right” candidate to vote on was.  As you can see from the results, it worked quite well.

This is not unique.  After Watergate liberal Democrats in Washington were at the height of their power, they won a landslide in 1974 and won the presidency in 1976.  Many of these liberals were products of the fierce ideological battles of the 60’s and they sought to try and fundamentally reform our politics systems and make them “better” and more “democratic”.  Indeed, they largely shied away from the nitty gritty of passing regular legislation to deal with common problems.  No, they wanted to change the entire political process instead.   They passed strict campaign finance laws to try and limit the role of money in elections, the passed the War Powers Act to try and limit the presidency in foreign policy and prevent future Vietnams and got rid of the old boss dominated system by introducing a national system of primaries and caucuses to pick presidential nominees.

Alas it also didn’t work.  Parties and special interests invented new ways to raise cash, so called “soft money” that we heard oh so much about in the 1990’s.  Every President has simply ignored the War Powers Act since its passage and it has never been enforced by Congress or the Courts.  And old big city and Dixie courthouse bosses were replaced by county party chairs and state legislators in Iowa and New Hampshire.  It’s an old rule in politics, being right is never enough.

The Culture Wars

A few weeks ago Mitt Romney caused quite the stir when he pronounced that culture is what determines why some countries and rich and strong and others poor and weak.  He cited the differences between the economic life of Israelis and Palestinians as an example.  There are a lot of problems with his example, such as the problem of ignoring the very real policies-check points and such-that make it enormously difficult to transport goods or people even a few miles in Palestinian areas.  This is not to say that Israel’s policies vis-à-vis the West Bank and Gaza strip are necessarily wrong (I am not a Shin-Bet agent or a human rights lawyer so I will defer on that question), it’s that they are very important in terms of understanding the economic differences between the two groups.  It’s also wrong because it ignores the very real historical events that resulted in two very different forms of governance and institutions for the two nations.  That is Israel won its independence from the British Empire, defeated attacking Arab armies from a number of countries and was created after a series of events generally called The Israeli War of Independence or The Founding of the State of Israel.  The Palestinians by contrast were largely on the losing side of said war and became a stateless people both inside the historic areas of the British Mandate of Palestine and scattered all over the world, including millions in refugee camps in other Arab countries.  These are very different historical courses and they certainly impacted why there are economic disparities between the two groups.  This is pretty basic stuff and if its news to Romney would someone please rent him a copy of Exodus?  I mean he could be the next President of the United States.

Romney’s argument is wrong as well, just like his example.  First of all, when people ascribe success to a group’s culture they never define what they mean.  Are you talking about informal norms or religious ceremonies?  Family structure or folk dances?  Define your terms!  Instead all they do is offer a series of vague cultural stereotypes, at best, from groups that are comparatively wealthy.  Thus America is successful because of its “strong work ethic”, do Mexican roofers in the US without proper documentation not work hard?  Or we “value education”.  Really?  Recently former US Senator and Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum announced that young people shouldn’t go to college because they would be “indoctrinated”.  Do people living in poverty in the slums of Mumbai not hope and dream their children could get the chance to go to a University?

Secondly, cultural proponents ignore that many of the cultural traits they see as being good or bad can be present in both wealthy and impoverished societies.  If you described a society where corruption was seen as normal and everyone knew an easy way to get out of a speeding ticket was to simply wrap some money around your license as you hand it to the cop Romney would probably nod his head and say that’s bad culture.  But I could be describing life in 1970’s Chicago or a poor Latin American country.  If I described a society where the highest value and most important thing was loyalty to your family I could be describing Sicily or Japan.  Sicily has always been poor compared to the rest of Italy, going back to the Roman Empire.  Japan is one of the wealthiest countries in the world.  This chicken or egg problem is common throughout descriptions of Asian societies by modern academics.  Through much of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century it was common for the smart kids to explain the poverty and failures of Asian nations through the lenses of culture.  British academic-lord-high-muckitymucks described Indians as “enfeebled”.  The Confucian tradition was blamed for why East Asian countries like China, Korea and Japan were poor and unable to stop foreign intervention in their internal affairs.  This is because it promoted family loyalty and conformity not the Western traditions of individual achievement and the pursuit of money.  Then in the 2^nd half of the 20^th century when Asian societies started doing better the narrative flipped, now their culture was better than us Americans because the promoted such values as self-discipline and such, hence the American obsession with Japanese culture in the 1980’s and early 90’s.  Now the key to economic success is getting auto plant workers to do mass calisthenics before shifts in Ohio, and anyone can kick anyone’s ass if you learn the ancient art of “wax on, wax off.”  The culture was the same, the reality of life in Tokyo in 1880 or 1980 just changed.     

In 1966 journalist Neil Sheehan, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize, wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine about his own experience covering the Vietnam War entitled “Not a Dove, But No Longer a Hawk.”  Its opening paragraph is one of the best things I’ve ever read about the Vietnam War:

Americans, because they are Americans, arrive in Vietnam full of enthusiasm and with the best of intentions.  After a prolonged period of residence, they leave with their enthusiasm a victim of the cynicism that pervades Vietnamese life and with their good intentions lost somewhere in a paddy field.  I am no exception. 

Sheehan’s culture was overwhelmed by the realities of life in South Vietnam: a savage war that would kill god knows how many people, a corrupt and dysfunctional system of government that (he later goes on to tell a great anecdote about how that society was run: “Numerous complaints from the American Embassy led Premier Ky to warn his fellow generals at one meeting of the junta that they were embezzling too much and should exercise some restraint.  Their reply was that they had to think of their families.”) couldn’t solve any problems and all existing under crushing poverty.  After the fall of Saigon many Vietnamese (and Laotians and Hmong and Cambodians) would come to the United States where they would flourish in communities like the Twin Cities.  Because they stopped eating pho and started eating hot dogs?  Of course not, they went from an impoverished society torn by decades of war where education and social advancement were restricted to only a minority of well-born families (another great anecdote about the “democracy” we were supposedly defending: “A friend of mine once visited a hamlet with a South Vietnamese Army major who is one of the few field grade officers to defeat the system by rising from a humble beginning.  The major spoke to the farmers in peasant dialect instead of in the sophisticated urban Vietnamese most Government official’s use.  “You are not a major,” said one farmer in astonishment.  “Yes, I am,” said the major.  “No, you’re not,” said the farmer.  “You talk like a peasant and no peasant could become a major.”) to a rich society that hadn’t fought a civil war in a hundred years where school attendance was mandatory and anyone could start a business. 

Apply Romney’s logic to our own society and ask why Detroit-once the fourth largest city in the country-is poor and losing population and Chicago-one of the richest cities in the country-is prosperous and can make a strong bid to host the Olympic Games.  Is it because rooting for the Bears and eating deep dish pizza is better than rooting for the Lions?  I highly doubt it.  I think the following is more important.  Detroit’s economy was heavily based on the manufacture of cars, which would go into decline in the second half of the 20^th century as American auto manufactures lost out to foreign imports.  Chicago’s economy had a large manufacturing sector but it was broader based.  It’s also a center of transportation, commerce and finance.  The price of grain around the world is set on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and O’Hare is one of the world’s busiest airports, oh and there’s another one, Midway, both inside the city limits.  Detroit’s airport is out in the burbs.  Agency and chance also played a role.  Chicago produced Richard J. Daley during the 20^th century, a man who would wield more personal political power than probably anyone else in the history of the Republic.  He could pick Governors and be incredibly influential in the state legislature in Springfield.  So he could convince the University of Illinois to build a huge campus in the heart of Chicago to educate the city’s working class sons and daughters, even though the Board of Regents didn’t want to.  The University of Michigan is located in Ann Arbor not Detroit.  He ruled the Chicago City Council with an iron fist and so could bulldoze neighborhoods to build that University, despite their protests.  He controlled Cook County government and so could easily get vast amount of land to build O’Hare.  He could reliably control 14 votes in Congress and so could get the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations to pony up the dough to build that airport and the branch of the Blue Line “L” to connect it to the heart of the city.  Detroit had no champion like this.  And so in 1970 Daley could convince the world’s largest retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company to build a massive new headquarters in the heart of the loop: the Sears Tower, then the world’s tallest with 4.4 million square feet of interior space, second only to the Pentagon.  Meanwhile Detroit had to deal with Chrysler deciding to move to a 1,700-acre complex 17 miles outside of the city.

Cultural explanations for the wealth or poverty of nations or cities are just wrong.  But it’s important to recognize the deeper reason for these arguments.  They are meant to ascribe the misery of the miserable to themselves, and make a moral argument that the wealthy and powerful have what they have because they deserve it, they are superior beings.    This is an old line in conservative politics, people get what they deserve so don’t feel bad for the disposed.  And never think their but for the grace of God go I when you walk past the homeless man.  I mean Jesus, you might vote for Obama if you think that.