Category: America

“Well, God is in his heaven, and we all want what’s his…”

Somehow in the past fifteen years I’ve been blogging (!), I missed writing about “Blind Willie McTell.” Ever. This despite the fact that the song made the playlist of one of the first mixtapes I ever made back in 1991. And I don’t know that I ever connected the dots on the song’s meaning, in all that time, beyond the vague sense of prophetic dread conveyed by the slowly more intense vocal and piano performance.

It’s twenty-five years since I put that mix tape together, and I’ve spent the last few years feeling as though “this land is condemned.” If the response to the Obama presidency has taught me anything, it’s that slavery was the original sin of this land, and that its repercussions still play out today. So on the heels of writing about the Underground Railroad in my town, about misattribution of black collegiate spirituals by white a cappella performers, about the bureaucracy of slavery, of carefree use of the symbols of the Confederacy a hundred (or 150) years after the end of the Civil War, and of minstrelsy, listening closely to the song again bears dividends.

And I am left feeling that amid revival tents, amid the attempts to dress up the past betrayed by cheap hooch, and despite the otherwise redemptive charge of the blues, we are left with this: an arrow in the doorpost, the ghosts of slavery ships, and the promise of our life in these United States undercut by power, greed, and the inevitable corruption and decay of our descendants.

Democracy inaction: review of the Lessig presidential race

Larry Lessig in the New Yorker: Why I Dropped Out. This was the second part of a two-part essay about Lessig’s presidential bid. The first part, Why I Ran for President, reads like the first page of a thesis of political science. Sadly, the second part is much shorter and details Lessig’s major misstep—his distracting promise to resign from the presidency once he passed a package of reform aimed at eliminating corruption in the federal government.

Lessig shows two types of unfortunate naïvety in this narrative, one of which he acknowledges. He calls the promise to resign “an albatross that would ultimately sink the campaign,” and notes the inability of the press to explain it in a soundbite, the confusion of the voting public, and other factors that contributed to sinking the campaign. But I think he misses an important point. Another reason that this promise sank the campaign was the insight it provided into Lessig’s more serious naïvety: his belief that the culture of American federal-level politics could be fixed in one term via legislative fiat.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned over eight years at Veracode trying to convince enterprises, software suppliers, and individual software developers to take security seriously is that you don’t change culture overnight. You don’t do it with a law. You don’t do it with economic incentives. You do it, at least in part, by changing norms – what people will and won’t accept – and by showing people what “good” looks like. You can’t do that by passing legislation and then leaving in the middle of the night.

Lexington, Massachusetts and the Underground Railroad

I mentioned a year ago in passing that our new house in Lexington, Massachusetts was on the site of the old Robbins house, rumored to be a former Underground Railroad station. This week as I thought about the Civil Rights movement, I wondered about the Underground Railroad in Lexington and did a little more research.

Judging from the National Park Service’s list of sites on the Underground Railroad by state, there aren’t any NPS-listed sites in Lexington on the UR, though Concord’s Wayside House was. In fact, the town’s historic places brochure only lists the Robbins House as an Underground Railroad site.

The stronger, historically verifiable association is between Lexington and abolition. The grandson of Minuteman John Parker, the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, lived at the Parker homestead, formerly located at 187 Spring Street; he was not only outspoken on abolition but was one of the Secret Six who funded John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. But my immediate neighborhood has a strong claim to being an epicenter of abolitionism in Lexington. The Stone Building, located two doors down Mass Ave from us, often hosted speakers on various topics, including abolition. Next door, Follen Church, whose first minister was the abolitionist Charles Follen, frequently hosted abolitionist messages from the pulpit.

So there may be no firm documentary evidence of an Underground Railroad site in Lexington, on my property or not, but there is certainly plenty of evidence that I live in a historic hotbed of  abolitionist thinking.

The history beneath our feet

New Yorker: Unearthing the city grid that would have been in Central Park. Fascinating read about history right under our feet, in the form of 8.5″ square, three foot tall stone markers that were carefully placed across New York City to mark street intersections—including in the land that is now Central Park.

I did an archaeological dig in fifth grade—the site, a trash dump in the backyard of a commercial site, didn’t yield much—and another one summer in middle school in Colonial Williamsburg, which yielded foundations and fragments of pipes and glass. What I discovered didn’t change the world, but it changed me. I learned that sometimes the past is in the present, just a little out of reach—or maybe so covered that it’s not recognizable. Or put another way, history is garbage with context.

On not forgetting

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As a fourth year undergrad student, I entered Julian Bond’s course on the history of the Civil Rights movement in the fall of 1993 not knowing what was going to happen to me. I didn’t really realize how much the class was changing me until I worked on my class project, which ended up being a paper on Virginia’s Massive Resistance laws.

Learning that my home state had, not fifteen years before my birth, decided that closing public schools was preferable to having to integrate them was mindboggling. Learning that a superintendent who still has an elementary school named after him in my home town could cite the small number of black applicants to a school as a reason not to desegregate it was shameful. Understanding the perfectly legal mechanisms that were used by segregationists and racists to avoid, subvert, and delay the implementation of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board decision made me aware that there were more dimensions of evil than just cartoonish Klansmen.

In that context, it’s easy to understand why university students would want to remove the name of slaveowners from  buildings. And why there have been calls to tear down monuments to Confederate soldiers. I find myself looking on such calls with mixed emotions, however.

As the historian of the Virginia Glee Club, I’ve had to grapple with the University’s mixed legacy on slavery and race. I learned about the Movement there, and the Glee Club was integrating truck stops on tours during the 1960s, but many of the Lawn buildings were probably built with slave labor, and as late as Faulkner’s first year as writer in residence, his proposal (in “A Word to Virginians“) of going along with integration met with an outcry there.

One cannot change history by removing names, and one cannot remove the stain of slavery’s original sin from the United States by removing monuments. Until one understands that one’s parents or grandparents felt no shame in putting out an issue of the student magazine with a triumphant Lee standing over Grant in front of the stars and bars (see above), one can’t understand the forces that shaped the culture that exists today.

Securing freedom

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On this Independence Day, I was looking for a photo of a flag when I came across this one. I shot it in Concord, Massachusetts in a cemetery that was full of graves like this one. And I realized there isn’t a better image for this holiday for me.

On July 4 I normally write about Thomas Jefferson, who took the work of a committee and turned it into a universal declaration of human rights (and who died 185 years ago today, along with his comrade in revolution John Adams). But on this day for celebrating freedom we should also remember those who gave nobly and without reservation, even to the ultimate sacrifice, to secure those freedoms.

Obama: undoing the death spiral

Going into today’s election, even if there is a massive jerk of the electoral knee and all the wackos — witches, Aqua Buddhists, whatever — get elected tonight, I’m grateful for the last two years under Obama.

Not because he’s lived up to his hype. The second coming of Jesus couldn’t have lived up to the expectations placed on his shoulders. But because he’s the only politician in a generation to have looked at our current problems–rising costs to employers, burdens on the individual, impossible budgetary challenges to state and local governments–and have the courage to confront some of the real causes rather than just bemoaning the effects.

I’m talking about health care reform. Spiraling health care costs are used by systems dynamics textbooks as classic examples of reinforcing feedback loops, where over time the cost of coverage rises higher and higher in an accelerating fashion. Sterman’s book says that this explains the failure of the so-called “medigap” coverage plans that covered the difference between what Medicare would pay and the actual cost of health care plans:

…In the late 1980s… underwriters had to raise premiums, including the premiums for medigap and Medex. In response, some of the elderly were forced to drop their medigap coverage. Others found they could get lower rates with other carriers or by signing up for plans offering fewer benefits or which capped benefits for items such as prescriptions. However, only the healthiest seniors were eligible for those other, cheaper plans. The sickest of the elderly…those with so-called pre-existing conditions…were not eligible for less expensive coverage or HMOs and had no choice but to stay with medigap…. As medigap losses mounted, premiums grew…[forcing] still more of the comparatively healthy elderly to opt out of medigap… Those remaining with the plan were, on average, sicker and costlier, forcing premiums up further. (Sterman, 176)

What Sterman describes in the context of a case study from the 1980s and 1990s is what is technically called a death spiral–a case where market failures (the inability of the market to provide coverage at reasonable costs) resulted in the destruction of all the health plans that were there to meet that coverage (“by 1997 only Medex remained.”) The same sort of death spiral was in effect for the broader market, with secondary effects that included precipitous increases in the cost of health care coverage for businesses and governments, with no market force in site to stop it.

Obama’s health care plan put together a set of measures to ensure that the size of the pool remained stable, including eliminating the pre-existing coverage denial that caused seniors to flee their medigap plans in the first place. There are certainly flaws in the plan, but by and large it is the first serious attempt to get the insurance market under control and reverse some of the insane cost spiral that affects every American business and every American.

Did the Republicans in Congress attempt to propose a credible counter policy to address the crisis? Did they hell. They trotted out lying rhetoric about “death panels” and demonstrated the shortest path to Godwin’s Law.

So tonight when reactionary commentators are cheering about the rolling back of progressive initiatives, think of this: at least the progressives, for all their flaws, saw with clear eyes a real threat to America’s competitiveness and tried to fix it.

Happy birthday, Mr. Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was born 267 years ago, on April 13, 1743. Seventy-six years later he would lay the cornerstone at the University of Virginia.

I’ll have a few more thoughts later about Mr. Jefferson, UVA, and Founder’s Day, but for now two thoughts from the man himself:

Determine never to be idle…It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.

Vadala follow-up: untangling the issues

It’s been an interesting few days. While I was tied up at work, home, and a class, a lot of debate raged about my open letter to Peter Vadala, both here and where it was replicated on Facebook. (Side note: the major difference between this blog and Facebook was that here a bunch of total strangers were arguing theology with me and each other, where on Facebook it was all my friends. Vive le network socíale.)

Part of the debate was spurred by the abruptness of the letter, in which I reacted to a complex situation in a brief and simple way. As a result, I simultaneously accused Vadala of uncharity and was myself highly uncharitable.

But part of it is that it’s a complex situation. In the comments thread around the post on Facebook (you have to be my friend there to see the link), we discussed employment law, courtesy, theology, gay marriage, prejudice against homosexuality generally, free speech and the heckler’s veto, the Great Commission of Christianity, Biblical interpretation, queer deportment, and behavior in a pluralistic society. On this blog, there was some name calling and a lot of Scripture verses, which were somewhat to the point.

So many angles. Where to begin? I think, perhaps, with an acknowledgment that my knee-jerk response to a perceived injustice overlooked a lot of complexity.

I still feel that MassResistance’s use of Vadala’s firing to protest gay marriage is, as the Tin Man has put it, completely beside the point. This discussion would have come up without Massachusetts legalizing gay marriage–Vadala would have told the manager how much he disapproved of homosexuality regardless. But my response lacked, ironically enough, a certain charity. Perhaps I should have tried to remove the beam in my eye first.

The central question is still unanswered: what did I mean when I accused Vadala of a lack of charity? What do I mean when I acknowledge my own lack? I’m not talking about tax deductions, but the Christian concept of unconditional love for others, or caritas as it’s expressed in the Latin.

Caritas is one of the core virtues; not accidentally, the liturgical poem “Ubi Caritas” states that “where there is charity and love there is God.” The Greek translation agapē may be closer to the mark, describing God’s response to man through the gift of his Son. I like Thomas Jay Oord’s (uncited) quotation in the Wikipedia article: “an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being.”

So let’s break it down: was the manager charitable in (allegedly) continuing to talk about her upcoming wedding after noting that it made Vadala uncomfortable? No.

Did Vadala show charity by telling her that he thought homosexuality was wrong? Depends–he may have thought he was witnessing to her, but it was certainly not promoting well-being to pour disapproval on her love for her partner.

Did the manager show charity by reporting him to HR? Probably not. We don’t have the context to know whether she wanted or expected him to be fired. (But he was certainly at this point in violation of his employment agreement; see Tin Man’s assessment above.)

Did Vadala and MassResistance show charity by using Vadala’s case to sow fear about gay marriage laws? I’d argue not; they responded to ill-being by trying to use it to generate more ill-being.

Did I show charity in the open letter? No. I kneejerked, almost never a charitable move.

Right now the only charity has been with my friends who have helped turn my kneejerk into a serious discussion, for which I’m grateful.

But, and let me return one last time to my point about this whole thing: the use by MassResistance of Vadala’s faith-based objections to bludgeon the happiness of others is an act of supreme uncharity, and unbecoming to their cause.

Open letter to Peter Vadala

Please also see the follow-up to this post.

I was watching the evening news tonight, something I do rarely, when my attention was caught by a local item about a man named Peter Vadala being fired from his job because he “expressed his opinions” about gay marriage.

The story went on to clarify: a coworker mentioned that she was getting married to another woman, he apparently told her at length how wrong he thought gay marriage was. She complained to HR and he got the sack. The termination letter was then described, in which the company essentially said, you’re welcome to your beliefs but don’t use them to make other people uncomfortable in the workplace. Now he’s on MassResistance.org telling people in other states that if their state legalizes gay marriage, they too could be fired.

The real lesson of Peter Vadala, though, is that if you can’t keep from using your beliefs as a bludgeon, you can be fired. And rightfully so.

Here’s the letter I wrote to him through MassResistance:

I’m sorry for Peter Vedala that he hasn’t learned an important professional lesson: don’t impose your beliefs on others.

I’m also sorry that he hasn’t learned about Christian charity.

I was further sorry to see him digging himself in further in continuing to claim that he is being persecuted for his faith. If I were his manager, I would have terminated him in a heartbeat for creating a hostile work environment, and I would have had cause.

Eight years ago today…

Tragedy:

…Forget about everything else. Here’s the story on washingtonpost.com.

Dave Winer has a good weblog of news stories as they come in. Use your common sense to sort through news and rumors. Don’t trust anything that isn’t linked.

The context: I had already awakened and written a short blog post, and was at work in the library at the MIT Sloan school, before I started seeing the headlines on Yahoo.

Note that the Washington Post story I linked to is no longer available. I didn’t link directly to Dave’s story, but his homepage is still there, of course, and his archives have the stream of September 11 news as it happened. Most of the news sites were slammed, but the blogs kept running.

Eight years on. Different leadership, different perspectives on how to keep us secure.

Osama Bin Laden is still at large.

Doug Ketcham is still missed.

We are still here.

(Also see, from 2002: One Year and Further thoughts; from 2003: Remembering and moving on; from 2008, Number Three on Flight Eleven).

Open letter to President Obama on copyright treaties and “national security”

I just used the Contact form on whitehouse.gov to send the following to President Obama and am reposting it here. Please reach out to the White House with your own concerns on this matter.

Dear Mr. Obama:

As a supporter, I was surprised to see that Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House’s Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, rejected a FOIA request for the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement by claiming that the proposed treaty was a “properly classified national security secret.”

My concern, as copyright extensions continue to eat away at the public domain, taking value from the public, is that worldwide negotiations about the future of copyright are being held in utter secrecy without any public input–without the public even being told what’s under consideration.

For an administration that pledged transparency and a reversal of your predecessor’s policy of putting things under the seal of “national security” to avoid scrutiny, this is upsetting and unbecoming. Why is this treaty considered a “national security secret”? Surely this would be a good opportunity to practice some of the transparency we were promised.

Sincerely
Tim Jarrett

I’m a little more optimistic than some of the BoingBoing commenters that this can be corrected.

Bobby Jindal is Kenneth the Page

The funniest meme to come out of Tuesday’s very serious speech by President Obama was the chorus of voices who noticed how much Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who delivered the GOP response, sounded like Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock. A Facebook group helped amplify the chorus of voices asking for a furtherance of the meme. And Jimmy Fallon obliged, spinning up Jack McBrayer, who plays Kenneth, to provide a response to the response to the response:

We are down the rabbit hole.

The meltdown: Where we are, where are we going

There’s a combination of feelings I’ve had over the past months as we work our way through the meltdown and resulting bailout of the banking system and the overall economy. Nausea and dread are pretty high up there; anticipation, wondering when the next shoe is going to drop; puzzlement.

For me the big one is the last one. I’ve got an MBA from a quantitative program, albeit with a focus in marketing rather than finance, and I’ve been having trouble finding a perspective that concisely explains what is going on, much less being able to get enough information that I can explain it to anyone else.

To that end, this interview with Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) on CSPAN was helpful (hat tip to Dave Winer for tweeting the interview). I’ve started it where he begins to explain what actually happened on September 18, when we were hours away from all the funds vanishing out of the banking system via an electronic run on the bank:

So that’s how we got to where we are. The question is, where’s the bottom?

I see conflicting evidence points. Bankruptcies and foreclosures abound, for sure, and there are people who are hungry. But there are still venture deals happening (albeit with existing portfolio companies) and companies are still hiring. So what’s going on? Has the meltdown not trickled all the way down, or are there simply a lot of firms that were less vulnerable thanks to their debt position that are going to ride this out?

A change is gonna come

I drove a historic route this morning on the way to work. Between Arlington Heights and Lexington runs part of Paul Revere’s route, where he famously rode through the countryside warning the people that the British were coming. I followed the route to Lexington Green, where stands a statue commemorating what happened next.

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It’s not a statue of Paul Revere. It’s a statue of an unknown minuteman, standing at the entrance to the green where the citizens of Lexington stood up to the British regulars and helped to begin our fight for the liberty to decide our own fate.

Today we celebrate a historic moment, the election of our first black President. There’s so much he stands for–our ability to transcend past griefs, our turning our back on mediocrity and division and selecting someone who can lead us through our troubles. But the Lexington Green has a word to say about today as well:

It’s not just about the leader and the message, though without the right leader and the right message nothing will happen. It’s about what happens next, about individuals taking up the call and the charge and standing up to make a change. I haven’t felt much of that about our country in the last little bit, but I feel it today.