The Market Thatcher Something

The cartoon below is my comment on what’s been going on this past week in Isn’t-It-Great-That-Great-Britain-Is-Great-Again. Actually, it’s not my comment as you can see and I’ll probably get fined or jailed for copyright infringement. During the Reagan/Thatcher years I visited Nicaragua and found this cartoon in a Managua newspaper (I did not note which newspaper or the exact date, but I was in Nicaragua in February of 1987). I cut it out and kept it and found it this week when, while trying to avoid the news, I remembered seeing it in the Roosevelt Hotel all those years ago. While Ronald Reagan, a partisan party politician (as they all are, of course) who divided the country, was granted a state funeral and was elevated to the status of national hero during his funeral week, it is now Market Thatcher’s turn.

It’s estimated that the non-state state funeral will cost the taxpayers between £8mil to £10mil in this time of austerity. An official state funeral must be sanctioned by Parliament which would also include an agreement to use public funds to pay for it. The Tory/Liberal Democrat government avoided the parliamentary debate and vote but nonetheless insisted the public pay for the event. Rather cowardly I thought. Some people suggest that the best way to honour this particular free market warrior is for the government to put the entire funeral out to tender, accepting the lowest bids, of course. Kind of like what it’s doing with the NHS. Who knows, the military of Equatorial Guinea might have won the contract to put Market Thatcher on their wagon and escort her to the church.

Market Thatcher supporters allow no criticism of the Iron Lady who died in the London Ritz and their tone of voice, perhaps more than their actually words, implies that any and all criticism is blasphemous. So, the cartoon is just a gentle reminder that not all people considered Ronald Reagan and Market Thatcher to be great saviours.

By the way, I call her Market Thatcher because just as the death news was breaking, a young person on Twitter not realising everyone was talking about an actual human being thought instead the news was about a “market thatcher something to do with our Queen.” Though obviously humours, mistaking the person for the ideology, the name really is appropriate. Market Thatcher was a capitalistic free market ideologue who could be considered a saviour – of the rich, of course. And we must not forget it was Ronald Reagan and Market Thatcher who got the free-for-all ball rolling, which kept rolling faster and faster until it hit the wall in 2008.

Oh, one last thing. For the record, having great conviction as a politician isn’t in and of itself a reason to be elevated to sainthood. There are a number of politicians who had great conviction that most of wish had never been born.

 

Copyright © 2013 Dale Rominger

The Meaning of Maundy Thursday Feet

As the Easter season passes I’ve been thinking about feet, or more accurately the washing of feet. Christianity has, rightfully so, been in the news over Holy Week and one thing the media loves to cover is the ritual washing of people’s feet. Pope Francis, for example, did it in a prison and even washed the feet of two women (which caused outrage, but more about that later). The ritual is loosely based on Jesus’ washing of his disciples feet found in John 13:1-17 (and only in John), and if you click on the John reference you can read the full narrative. But for my purposes the following will suffice:

¹² When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. ¹³ “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. ¹⁴ Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. ¹⁵ I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. ¹⁶ Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. ¹⁷ Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.

Theologians have had and continue to have a field day with these seventeen versus in John and I certainly don’t want to get into it all here...the linguistic differences between the two verbs “to bathe” and “to wash,” the theological meaning of being “clean,” the link between the post-resurrection community and the ritual, etc. However, grounding all the exegesis and theology, Herman Waitjen says: “By washing his disciples’ feet Jesus is subverting the hierarchical structures of patron-client relationships and the honor/shame culture of the Mediterranean world.”[1]

First, and obviously, the disciples didn’t need their feet washed during the meal. If their feet had been washed it would have been by the women as they entered the house before the meal. The act is purely symbolic. Second, Peter’s confusion and resistance indicates that the act was indeed contrary to what would be expected: “No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.” Or as Waitjen put it, Peter is “adamant in his hierarchically ordered cultural perspective.”[2] Most would agree this subversion of the hierarchy through the ritual of foot washing is supposed to point to the paradigm of the new community, indeed new humanity, where the disciples wash each others’ feet and “symbolically engage in acts of cleansing that close the past and open the future to greater wholeness and integrity.”[3]

All this subversion of the old hierarchical ideology and the creation of the new “horizontal” (as Waitjen puts it) community could lead one to believe that the rejection of the old hierarchy implies the introduction of a new egalitarianism. Perhaps, however, there is a reminder not to get too carried away: “Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. “¹⁷

So, we all should wash each others’ feet and live whole and healthy lives in our new horizontal community free from hierarchical structures, which finally leads me to the Pope.[4]

We’ve come a long way from that foot washing narrative in John and I suspect that both the reasons for and the meaning of today’s foot washing ritual by church leaders is somewhat removed from all the theological implications and ramifications of the original. This year Pope Francis chose to conduct his foot washing in a prison, which many thought was bold and others profound. Whether bold or profound, it points us to the first fundamental requirement of church leader foot washing rituals:

• The person whose feet are being washed must to be “below” the one doing the washing.

The ritual will make no sense if a pope washes the feet of a pope, or a teacher of a teacher, or even a banker of a banker. The person must have less status and power than that of the Pope, otherwise the ritual is stripped of all meaning. There has to be a power cap.

• There need be no actual relationship between the person being washed and the person washing.

While Jesus had a relationship with his disciples, it is extremely unlikely any of the prisoners were Pope Francis’ disciples. In fact, if the Pope had a close personal relationship with those he washed, it would change if not undermine the power dynamics in the ritual. I’m assuming the prisoners were chosen carefully. I doubt the Pope walked into the yard or mess hall and chose people at random.

• The foot washing ritual does not change the status and power of the participants.

 During the ritual the power cap is not reduced or eliminated. When the ritual was completed the Pope got in his car and went home and the prisoners went back to their cells, as would be expected.

• The foot washing ritual is about the one who does the washing, not the one who is washed.

What are the names of the prisoners? What do they look like? What were their crimes? What did they say about the ritual? While their experience may have been very meaningful, we will never know. We will never hear from the prisoners, while we might hear from the Pope (though he does not have to speak at all, letting the images speak for him). There will be little or no speculation about what the ritual might have meant for the prisoners, but there will be direct and indirect conclusions about what the ritual means for the Pope (it will further nurture his “humble” image, for example).

So what’s the point?

The ritual does not subvert the hierarchical relationships between the one who washes and the one who is washed. Nor does it subvert the power and wealth of the Vatican or other institutional churches. It does not create “horizontal” new communities. When the Pope says he is a servant of the prisoners, in what way does this statement have meaning? I doubt he returned to the Vatican and began selling the vast and extremely valuable Vatican art collection to use the money to support the poor. Perhaps he has been moved to advocate for prison reform, though I doubt it. At the very least, perhaps he will become a regular visitor of the prisoners since he is their servant. Again, I doubt it. When it’s all said and done the powers and principalities, both secular and religious, are secure, foot washing or no foot washing.

It is legitimate to also ask in what way the ritual and the Pope’s claimed status of being the servant of prisoners have symbolic meaning? I would suggest that a symbol that does not eventually impact, and hopefully change, the everydayness of existence is rather vapid. Does the symbolism have meaning beyond, for example, praying for prisoners? And in what way does the symbolism of the ritual and statement affect or even benefit the prisoners? If the Pope is indeed their servant, perhaps they could instruct him to come visit them, get them a lawyer, get them out of prison. Perhaps not.

I am in no way suggesting that the ritual is not meaningful for the Pope and all church leaders who conduct foot washing rituals during Holy Week. In fact, I suspect it has significant meaning. But I do wonder if church leaders are really aware of and grateful for the role people with less power and status play in the ritual. Do they thank the prisoners and the homeless and the poor whose feet they wash for aiding them in receiving greater theological wisdom or for increased spiritual integrity, or for even the good feelings of humbleness they might have on their way home?

As a kind of afterthought: Pope Francis was the first pope to wash the feet of women in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. His minders downplayed the act saying it was due to circumstances. Traditionalists in the Roman church were, on the other hand, disturbed or outraged. Their fear was it might indicate that the new Pope is in favour of ordaining women. Surely not! But think about it. No pope has ever washed the feet of a woman during Holy Week. It is not that woman are second class citizens in the Catholic Church, they are not citizens at all. My wife went as far to say that they are non human.

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger

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[1] Waitjen, Herman C. The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple. London: T & T Clark International, 2005, p. 239.

[2] Ibid., p. 239.

[3] Ibid., p. 331.

[4] I speak of Pope Francis not because he is the only church leader who undertakes the foot washing ritual on Maundy Thursday or because he does the ritual in any extraordinary way. I use the Pope because he is no doubt the church leader most favoured by the media and, well, we are all talking about the new “humble” pope right now. However, for my purposes here, the Pope represents all church leaders who wash peoples’ feet during Holy Week.

Prostate Cancer in a Nutshell

Prostate cancer has a human face, well several faces. At a dinner last week with volunteers for the charity Prostate Cancer UK, men with prostate cancer and women who have lost a husband, father, or brother to the cancer, there was a lot of laughter and some serious talking (I suspect our jokes about prostate cancer and the consequences of treatment might not go down well at a regular dinner party or the church social, but they help us). The man sitting to my right on two occasions had to have his urethra scrapped clean of scar tissue, which can develops after surgery, had severe incontinence and eventually had to have an artificial urethral sphincter put in (a procedure you do not look forward to). Across the table from me was a woman whose husband had died a painful and horrible death, and while the year of dying brought them closer together, she was still raw. The woman to my left wondered if it were her fault her husband couldn’t get an erection; yes, she knew his treatment had damaged the nerves that enabled him to have erections, but still, in the moment of love she couldn’t help but wonder despite herself. The fourth member of our quintet was on hormone treatment to keep his cancer at bay, but he was humiliated by his man-boobs and had taken to wearing loose fitting shirts. It was all fun and pain over wine and chicken, and all of us in that upstairs pub room were alive.

March is prostate cancer awareness month, and believe me when I say we need a little awareness raising. For example, cancer tumours have specific molecular structures and over many years researchers have identified particular molecular structures for various forms of cancers, from breast cancer to leukaemia. Based on their work, specific drugs have been developed to attack directly those molecular structures in cancer tumours. None of this work has even begun in the area of prostate cancer. No sustained research to clearly identify molecular structures and thus no drugs created to attack them.

In the UK, one man dies every hour of prostate cancer. It is the most common cancer among men. There is no reliable test for prostate cancer and no test at all to distinguish between an aggressive killer cancer and a more benign cancer that a man can live with for years. There are often no symptoms until it is too late. When you are deciding what to do there is a lot of guesswork involved. If you guess wrong, you’ll pay. If you guess right, you’ll pay.

Owen Sharp, the CEO Prostate Cancer UK, wrote:

This is where we stand. We have a test that divides medical opinion and isn’t fit for purpose. Treatment options that leave men impotent, incontinent and alone. A gland that can be as vicious as it is silent and awareness levels that should put us all to shame. This, in a nutshell, is prostate cancer in the UK.

Some people say prostate cancer only kills old men. Let’s put aside that this accusation and excuse – for this is what it is, an excuse – is misleading, ill-informed and inaccurate, and think about exactly what these people are saying: it doesn’t matter that men are dying, they’re old. We may live in an ever-changing landscape of advancing technology and scientific endeavour but this thinking drags us straight back into the Stone Age.[1]

Prostate Cancer UK  is taking a more creative and aggressive attitude towards prostate cancer, and given that I have been diagnosed with prostate cancer myself, I’m more than pleased. Read, for example, the statement in the charity’s Manifesto:

Our heritage is founded on a sense of outrage that men with prostate cancer were – and still often are – given a raw deal; insufficient clinical knowledge about the nature of the disease; totally inadequate diagnostics; and treatments which all too frequently result in unnecessary physical and psychological damage. This sense of injustice runs through all that we do and we will work tirelessly to change the status quo.

Outrage. Raw deal. Injustice.

While Prostate Cancer UK is taking off the gloves, the charity does not lack a sense of humour. The Sledgehammer Fund was launched with a TV advert staring Bill Bailey and was followed by other ads to raise both awareness and funds. The prostate gland is as small as a walnut, but as the ad says “it’s a hard nut to crack – and it’s going to take a sledgehammer to do it.”

The purpose of the campaign, as stated on the charity’s website, is:

to reach up to 96% of men and women over 45 across the UK. This urgent information about prostate cancer should reach nearly all the men in the UK who are at a high risk of developing prostate cancer, and their families. The adverts and the accompanying press activity is set to inform many thousands more men about prostate cancer and will raise money to help us:

• find anwers by funding research
• support men and provide vital information and lead change
• raising the profile of the disease and improving care.

So please have a look at the adverts by clicking here! And after you’ve had a look and a browse around the website, send some hard cash.

We’ve got a long way to go, but thanks to Prostate Cancer UK, Movember, increased funding for and interest by medical professionals, we are making progress.

This blog has been about the situation in the United Kingdom, but the last time I looked at the website’s statistics, people from over 30 countries visit The Back Road Café on a regular basis. So, if you are from a country other than the UK, find your prostate cancer charity and see what you can do to help. And if you don’t have one, get together with some other guys and start one. After all, Movember started with three guys sitting in a Melbourne pub.

Copyright © 2013 Dale Rominger

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[1] Sharp, Owen. “In a Nutshell.” Progress: Prostate Cancer News and Views. Issue 1, February 2013.

Joycean Pretensions or Just Good Writing

I’m reading Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. In many ways it’s an excellent novel. I immediately liked the characters and am more than interested to find out what happens to them. Having lived in Berkeley and Oakland and spent a lot of time on Telegraph Avenue it is almost impossible not to react with considerable sentiment to the book, though the book itself is not sentimental. On the other hand, I am often reminded of the immortal words spoken by Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus. When discussing with Mozart his latest composition, the Emperor said: ”...there are just too many notes, that’s all.” There are times when reading Telegraph Avenue when I say to myself, “There are just too many words.”[1] Still, Telegraph Avenue is an excellent read.

However, on page 239 of my edition, just over half way through the book, I ran into Chabon’s Joycean flow of consciousness. For eleven pages there are no periods or paragraph breaks. A friend in California emailed me saying she really enjoyed the chapter. Me, I found it annoying and pretentious, very grateful that it is only eleven pages long. I cannot discern the creative and/or structural purpose of including this Joycean imitation in the middle of the book, except that it might be conveying a free flying parrot’s point of view.[2] I can see no reason why it was not punctuated as is the rest of the book. I can see no added narrative value in leaving out punctuation. As result, I interpret the chapter as a pretentious allusion to James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is no doubt unfair, but I can’t help myself.

I have two problems with flow of consciousness writing. First, I don’t like Ulysses. It almost always tops the list in best novel surveys even though the book is practically unreadable. You have to read books about how to read Ulysses! I have a friend who took a entire correspondence course on how to read the book.[3]  Still, it is considered by virtually everyone as one of the greatest novels in the English language and has been lovingly imitated by many authors. Chabon’s short flow of consciousness (in comparison to Joyce’s which ran for forty-three pages in my edition) is not the first such flow to be inserted into a novel and certainly will not be the last. But it seems to me that the insertion should in some obvious way enhance the narrative. Why a flow of consciousness at that point in the novel? How does it add to our understanding of characterisation? Or plot? Or meaning? What value does it add to the overall narrative experience? Or does it simply associate the book and the author with Joyce and Ulysses? I am not adverse to reading challenging novels. For example, Bohumil Hrabal’s The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), Milan Kundera’s Immortality, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and the six volumes of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust were all challenging but also rewarding novels in which part of the reward can only be realised by working your way to the end.

My second problem is that I simply do not like books without punctuation. It is, perhaps, that I do not possess the intellectual ability to understand the reason some novels must lack traditional structure. I have tried. I made it through Blindness and All the Names by the winner of the Noble Prize for Literature José Saramago, but crashed out on The Cave. Even Hrabal, one of my favourite authors, tried his hand in free flowing fictitious writing in Dancing Lessons for the Advanced Age. Saramago’s first two novels, in what has loosely been called his trilogy, are excellent, as I am sure is The Cave. And I enjoyed Dancing Lessons. But the structure of the novels did not seem to contribute to their value. The work it takes to get through the novels, due to the structure, did not enhance the rewards. If anything, the structure became a distraction from the novels’ inherent value. I spent much of my reading energy deciding where to place commas and periods and paragraphs. But perhaps that is the point! Perhaps if I were sitting with Saramago he would say the entire point is that I become an active participant in the creating of the novel and thus its meaning. And if that indeed is the case, then I can understand and accept the aim but have to admit I just don’t like it. 

It goes without saying, I could never even dream of standing in the shadows of writers like Saramago and Hrabal. And I must admit, Chabon’s eleven pages of free flowing bird flight did have commas, which helped.

Copyright © 2013 Dale Rominger

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[1] Chabon might respond to my comment by echoing Mozart’s response to the Emperor: “Which few words did you have in mind?”

[2] A parrot by the name of Fifty-eight is set free after its owner dies.

[3] After he completed the course he concluded Ulysses is a great book. But I nonetheless ask, can a novel be great if you need to go to school to understand it? Or is that the point? The greatness of Ulysses is in its lack of understandabiltiy? I’m also aware that Ulysses is credited in changing the Western novel forever.

Thank You Liberal Democrat Party

I posted the following on Facebook the other day:

I confess I’ve become weary of Tories complaining about Liberal Democrats. To all Tories everywhere: YOU LOST THE ELECTION! And yet, you are transforming British government and society in ways that Margaret Thatcher would have wet herself over. You are finally fulfilling your dream of privatising the NHS. Hell, you’re privatising everything. You’re killing off green technology. You’re cutting welfare. You’re protecting the banks (oh wait, all parties do that). I know you’re not getting everything you want, but goodness, me you’re getting most of what you want. And who do you have to thank for this, given you lost the elections. The LIBERAL DEMOCRAT PARTY! If they hadn’t formed a government with you I doubt you would be getting away with this stuff. It’s Liberal Democrats who sit around the table with you arguing and creating policy. It’s Liberal Democrats who vote with you to get all this crap passed into law. You shouldn’t be bitching about Liberal Democrats, you should be sending each and every one of them thank you cards. You should put Clegg and Alexander in your hall of fame. So enough already.

It upset a few people, partly that I expressed anger and partly because I expressed this particular opinion. For those of you who think expressing anger in general and/or on Facebook in particularly is wrong, sorry to have upset you, though I can’t resist saying that a couple people expressed angry at my expressing anger. And if it were simply the words “wet, ” "hell," “crap” and “bitching” that got you upset, then again, sorry. We can delete them. But as far as the opinion goes, well that’s something else.

The most frequently voiced defence of the Liberal Democrat Party’s actions in government is that their presence restrains the Tories who would otherwise be passing even more draconian legislation. This is an empty defence. It implies that if the Liberal Democrat Party had not formed a government with the Tory Party, that the Tories would have won a second election or would have formed a minority government after which, in some mysterious way, it would have succeeded in passing through Parliament an even more rightwing agenda. The first assumption is possible, but not probably. The second assumption is nonsense, being based on the supposition that the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrat Party would have for some reason voted with the Tory minority.

In any event, I don’t care about what might have been. I’m not interested in Liberal Democrat imagined parallel universes or confessional angst. I’m interesting in what is happening. Student fees were substantially increased. Liberal Democrats voted for that. The NHS is being sold off bit by bit. Liberal Democrats voted for that. Green energy government subsidies have been largely dropped and the green agenda is being forgotten. Liberal Democrats voted for that. Welfare is being capped, welfare recipients are being “charged” (through reduction in benefits) for extra bedrooms, disabled and the ill are losing some of their benefits, etc. Liberal Democrats voted for all that. The very wealthy had their rate of tax cut. The Liberal Democrats voted for that. The austerity budget is setting British society back a decade or more and has killed off growth. Liberal Democrats vote for that. I could go on and on. My obvious point is that none of these changes which are transforming society and radically reducing government could have happened without Liberal Democrat support and votes. So sorry, but since the Tories did lose the election, they are very much indebted to the Liberal Democrats. And as far as the Liberal Democrats complaining and attempting to distance themselves from the actions of the coalition government and at the same time claiming credit for now being a grown-up party capable of being in government, it just doesn’t wash. They can’t have it both ways, though I can’t blame party members for wishing they could.

How far will the Liberal Democrat Party go? Well, pretty far. We hear a lot about “being in government” and “making the hard decisions.” Fair enough. But what does the party now stand for? Well, another vote is coming up for the Liberal Democrats that will push that question to its limits. The coalition government is proposing “secret courts,” which were not in either the Tory or Liberal Democrat manifestos before the election and were not in the coalition agreement. Nonetheless, in a couple of weeks the House will vote on secret courts. In an article on the Observer, Henry Porter writes:

It is difficult to see how Lib Dem MPs could vote for a bill that restricts rights under the law, at the same time as increasing state power. The justice and security bill is self-evidently against everything they stand for, which may explain recent confusing signals from the party and why a Lib Dem voted against Tory amendments in committee.

Despite Clarke's spin that the bill mostly conforms to the Lords amendments, it is plain that it has reverted to its original objectionable form. As the campaigning Tory David Davis says, if the Lib Dems can't vote against the justice and security bill, what on earth is the party for? The vast majority of the party know, but do their MPs know and does Nick Clegg?

It will be an interesting vote, but it can’t pass into law without the Liberal Democrats voting with the Tories.

Why so much anger directed at the Liberal Democrats and not the Tory Party? Well, I am angry at the Tory Party, but it is a different quality of anger simply because the Tories are doing what I expect the Tories to do. Anyone who thinks that Cameron has changed the party at its core is as naive as the people who thought George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” was in anyway an actual description of the Republican Party. But the Liberal Democrat Party, the self-proclaimed most liberal party in the UK, has become partners in one of the most rightwing governments experienced in Britain. It feels like betrayal. What does the party stand for? All too often it seems like it stands for “being in government.” There is nothing wrong with a party wanting to form a government! That is what parties exist for, to govern. But if the “being in government” trumps what the party originally stood for, then it should be damned at the polls.

If the election were held today, the Liberal Democrats would more than likely lose a number of seats in Parliament. And if there were another hung Parliament with Labour winning the most seats, we can only hope the Liberal Democrats have enough seats to form a government with Labour, because I am confident that they will with equal zeal support a Labour agenda and vote on legislation that would actual negate much of what they are now doing in government. Why? Because being in government is about making the hard decisions.

Copyright © 2013 Dale Rominger

Javelin is Deactivated

It was a bad night for the Grand Old Party. By the time the sun rose so unkindly, the GOP wasn’t feeling all that grand. Javelin, Romney’s code name, was deactivated and his Secret Service agents disappeared. That had to hurt. Along with only writing his victory speech, Romney planned a $25,000 eight minute fireworks display over Boston harbour. Unfortunately, the barges were unloaded and the victory fire was taken away as the very solemn, and virtually all white, crowd left the convention hall. There’s nothing quite like losing a presidential election.

To the leading rightwing ideologues in the Republican Party it apparently was the end of the world. Rush Limbaugh on his radio show:

In a country of children where the option is Santa Clause or hard work, what wins?...Romney did offer a vision of traditional American in his way...It was rejected in favour of a guy who thinks that those who are working aren’t doing enough to help those who aren’t... I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country. I don’t know how else you look at this.

Bill O’Reilly, live on Fox News:

It’s a changing country, the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama…The white establishment is now a minority. You’re going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things, and which candidate between the two is going to give them things?

Anne Coulter being interviewed by Laura Ingraham on her radio show:

If Mitt Romney cannot win in this economy, then the tipping point has been reached. We have more takers than makers and it’s over. There is no hope…A country no longer interested in conservative ideas. It’s interested in handouts.

And, of course, there is Donald Trump’s tweeting frenzy.

These statements tell us a lot about the Republican Party’s direction over the past thirty years. First is the contemptuous labelling of people as: children seeking fantasies; rejecting of hard work; wanting to be given things; feeling entitled; takers and not makers. These words and attitudes are strikingly similar to those articulated by Romney when he dismissed 47% of the American people as self-defined victims who will never accept responsibility for themselves and for whom he has no real interest. A distain for almost half of the population is held by more than just Romney in the Republican Party. And they are baffled by their election defeat.

Second is the equally remarkable definition of who “these people” are and are not. They are not Traditional Americans. They are not the White Establishment. The are not adult hardworking makers. They are children, who want stuff, handouts, and to alleviate any possible confusion O’Reilly identified them for us: Hispanics, Blacks, LGBT and women.

What O’Reilly and Coulter failed to say, that which they always fail to say, is that their “traditional Americans” also feel entitled and are far more powerful and connected to get the stuff they want. For example, Coulter has no difficulty in taking taxpayers’ money for her family business in the form of farm subsidies. Sher Valenzuela, a candidate for lieutenant governor for Delaware, was equally happy to take $2 million in federal loans and approximately $15 million in federal contracts to help establish her upholstery business. There was no mention on election night of the $14 billion the oil industry takes in government subsidies[1] or the taxpayer’s money the bankers are still taking to save their industry.

Third is the fearful description of what these colourful takers have done. They have taken everything. Traditional America is lost. The country is lost. Hope is lost. The great and famous speakers for the GOP and conservative America actually sounded more than disappointed and worried. The sounded fearful.

So who are all these takers, these “non-traditional” people who voted for Obama and Armageddon this election. Well, the exit polls are fairly clear. Obama won:

• 93% of Black votes;
• 71% of Hispanic votes;
• 73% of Asian votes;
• 49% to 47% of the Cuban American vote (amazingly);
• 68% of single women votes (who now make up 23% of the electorate);
• 90% of the LGBT vote;
• 60% of 18 to 29 year olds;
• 52% of 30 to 44 year olds;
• 63% of those earning less than $30,000;
• 57% of those earning between $30,000 and $49,999.

These are the people of whom so many Republicans show contempt. Like religious fundamentalists proudly rejecting rational thought to indicate the depth of their faith, Republicans dismiss and/or damn million of Americans and still believe they will win national elections. (It is no surprise that the GOP lost the presidency and lost seats in the Senate while holding onto the House.) In an interview on election night a young Hispanic man standing behind the counter of his small grocery store was asked why he didn’t vote Republican. He said this: “We are like Republicans. We value family as the centre of our lives and we are religions. But they don’t want us here.” We can assume he found the policy of “self-deportation” offensive.

Adding to this disturbing disconnect from the American people by the GOP is the fact that Republican officials admitted they had reached their goals for voter turnout. They did not lose because Republicans stayed home. Their traditional America turned out. The Republican strategists acknowledged that they were confounded by the Obama  turnout on election day. As the New Times reported, the power of the Obama operation "stunned Mr. Romney's aides on election night, as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn out in places like Osceola County, Fla." In other words, they did not know, or at least did not know enough, about who would go to the polls for Obama. Who actually did turnout for the President were those people named and dismissed by O’Reilly and ridiculed by Coulter, Limbaugh and Trump.

Now read what President Obama said in the conclusion of his victory speech:

America, I believe we can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunities and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founding, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight. You can make it here in America if you're willing to try.

I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and forever will be, the United States of America.

And together, with your help and God's grace, we will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on earth. Thank you, America. God bless you. God bless these United States.

(To view President Obama’s speech click here. To read the text of the speech click here.)

President Obama also identified people, but he identified us all and not as over and against each other. No lost “traditional America” or “white establishment.” No demeaning others based on double standards. No contempt. No bewilderment about who and what the United States is and is becoming.

You say, he won, what do you expect? Fair enough, but he’s been saying these things for years. He is not confounded or frightened by the people that make up the United States. He knows who they are, and as one commentator said on the night, he probably learned the names of all their pets too.

Why did Romney lose? For many reasons, but one more exit poll helps us understand how people respond to contempt and acceptance. When asked to choose the candidate who "cares about people like me," President Obama had an impressive 81% to 18% edge.

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger

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[1] A subsidy is defined as any government action that lowers business costs, raises the price received or lowers the price paid by consumers. There are a lot of activities under this simple definition: tax breaks and giveaways, loans at favorable rates, price controls, purchase requirements, government contracts and grants, etc.
See: OilChange International and Gasoline and diesel usage and pricing.

The Preaching Life ~ The Drunk and the Lamppost

I don’t preach anymore, but a thought came to me one dark night that perhaps when I was preaching I had become a proof-texter. It is such a hideous crime for a preacher to become a proof-texter that I began to wonder if I had become confused about the exact definition of proof-texting and thus was falsely accusing myself of the crime.  After all, no minister wants to acknowledge he or she is or was a proof-texter! So, I turned to that rich seam of communication: Facebook. I wrote this:

Can someone give me a definition of proof-texting? All of a sudden I'm wondering if  what I think it is, is not accurate.

Within a couple of minutes I got back this:

It's using the Bible like a drunk uses a lamppost...For support instead of illumination.

This communication made me laugh and despair simultaneously. Laughter because it was funny, despair because it reinforced the fear that I had indeed become a preaching drunk leaning against a lamppost. I quickly googled proof-texting. For those of you who have not gone to seminary or trained to be a preacher, here is a more formal definition (from Theopedia: A Encyclopaedia of Christianity):

Proof texting is the method by which a person appeals to a biblical text to prove or justify a theological position without regard for the context of the passage they are citing.

In one last desperate attempt to clear my name, I decided to ask a completely neutral person who has heard me preach on numerous occasions. At dinner I asked my wife if I had become a proof-texter. She said: “No you illumine the biblical text with your ideas.” Then, without taking a breath, she laughed with more gusto then seemed appropriate.

How did it happen? I did not become a proof-texter as some act of rebellion (I have never been a rebel looking for a cause, though on many occasions a cause, often with a human face, would find me, entreat me, seduce me to do something, not because I was particularly needed, but because I was a human being). I did use the lectionary for years. I mean, how could I not? In my time it was purported that the lectionary had come down from on high, free of crass human influences such as history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, economics, politics, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and theology itself. The lectionary by its very nature is purity, offering a weekly divine mystery to be solved though prayer and study (actually why did God put these particular Old Testament, Psalm, New Testament and Epistle readings together this week?). It’s all nonsense, of course. A major characteristic of the West’s understanding of reality is that its understanding is free floating, unpolluted by life itself. In the West we speak universal truths. They come to us through Platonic archetypes or divine revelation. For example, while others do Third-Eye theology, Minjung theology, Liberation theology, Black theology, etc., in the West we do Theology. This too is nonsense. Primarily, we do straight white male theology with a leaning towards market capitalism (though times are changing thanks to Feminist, Black, Liberation theology, etc.). Sometime in the past someone or some gathering of someones (let’s hope it was a gathering) wrote the lectionary, and they didn’t do it having somehow magically removed all memories of and influences in their lives. What they did represents a certain understanding of reality and theology.  

Be that as it may, somewhere along the way I stopped using the lectionary. I attribute this heretical act to the death of a sixteen year old girl, though my memory may suggests this tragic event precisely because it is so dramatic. It no doubt reasoned that I might be able to justify my crime given the demands of responding to a youthful death. The story is this.

I was the minister in the only church in a small town south of San Francisco. One a Friday night a sixteen year old girl in the town died in a motorcycle accident. The lectionary readings for Sunday were useless. I had three choices: one, cram the girl’s death into the readings; two, ignore the girl’s death; three ignore the lectionary. I chose option three, and have been sliding down the slippery slope ever since. If the lectionary didn’t work given the lives we were living in our church, community, nation and world, then to hell with the lectionary. Guilty as charged. No excuse. Take me away.

In an email correspondence about biblical interpretation I wrote this:

[B]iblical interpretation is influenced, if not determined, by these factors: the biblical text (the text itself guides our understanding of its narrative world); theology (our understanding of God); Christology (our understanding of Christ); tradition (our community’s understanding of faith and action through time); and praxis (the interaction and relationship among the text, theology, Christology, tradition and what is actually happening in our world and lives at the present time).

I would suggest that you can replace “biblical interpretation” with the word “preaching” and it still makes sense.

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger

I'm an Indie Author! So Proud!

I just found out that I’m an Indie Author. Can’t tell you how proud I am. No more slightly questionable references to “self-publishing” or “print on demand publishing,” and I certainly don’t have to put up with the insulting words “Vanity Press” anymore. Years ago I was the Head of the anthropology and sociology department at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. Actually, I was the anthropology and sociology department so they had to make me Head. It was a very small college. Still, my mother was proud and I got a lot of free books from publishers. Anyway, one day a female student set up a table in the lounge of one of the class buildings and began flogging her book, a sci fi adventure. Her rich father had spent $7,000 to have not a great number (it must be said) of hardback books printed by some Vanity Press! It was all so embarrassing, this young person trying to sell her own books. It was so embarrassing that I had to buy a copy. Regardless of my desire to help her, this was a noble institution of higher learning so we made her wear a big scarlet letter V on her clothes and repeat over and over again; "Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is Vanity " whenever she was on campus.

Goodness have things changed. Just a month ago I was a self-published author of questionable repute. But now I’m an Indie Author, which nicely associates me with the bold and creative band of Indie Directors who make Indie Films. I’m an Indie Author who writes Indie Books. I don’t work for The Man! I’m an Indie. Here’s a picture of me in a café in Rome contemplating my next Indie Book not giving a damn what The Man might think. (Look at that concentration!)

Two things made it possible for me to call myself an Indie Author. First the obvious: Technology. The home computer allowed people to save large documents at home. The Internet (or is it the World Wide Web, I can never remember?) opened the window to the world while sitting at home. With the Internet came email which made it possible for individuals to send large documents around the world. With the advent of Internet commerce, on-line bookstores and self-publishing print on demand websites, the book writing and selling business became available to anyone with an Internet connection. Now anyone anywhere can, with little effort and little money, make their book available to millions of readers. With print on demand technology there is no need for a traditional publisher to commit to print runs and stockpiling books that may have to be pulped later. With print on demand if one book is ordered, one book is printed. If a thousand books are ordered, a thousand books are printed. Simple, and environmentally friendly. Actually there is less and less need for traditional publishers. Your book can be made available as an eBook, paperback or hardback just by turning on your computer (and, of course, putting out some money – a hint, wait for the “special offers!”).

No more trying in vain to get past the Gatekeeper – you can’t get to a traditional publisher without first finding an agent, and many agents will not even talk to you without first hiring a “reader.” I once sent out fifty letters to agents. Ten never even acknowledged my existence. Most scribbled their reply, usually “not taking clients,” on my original letter and sent it back to me. Three actually wrote me kind and encouraging letters in return. But no more. And the media is taking notice. The New York Times now includes Indie Authors on the best selling lists. The New York Review of Books reviewed an self-publish book. It’s a start. Some day an Indie Author is bound to be on Oprah.

The second reason I can proudly call myself an Indie Author is that established authors are now self-publishing and they certainly are not going to be called anything but Indie Authors! If they can do it, I can do it. And you can do it. There’s not a traditional publisher on the face of the earth who cares that I’m an Indie Author. But there are a whole lot of publishers that are losing sleep because established authors are going straight to Kindle, the Nook and Kobo.

There are downsides, of course. The first is bad editing. If you put out crap, people won’t read your second book and won’t tell anyone about your first. If you can’t edit, get someone who can. Perfection is what you want, but since becoming obsessed by the embarrassment of typos in my books, I now regularly find one, two or three typos in books from traditional publishers, and sometimes more in eBooks.

Second is a bad book cover. Everything I read says you need a good cover, and that includes for your eBook version. If you can’t do it yourself, get someone who can.

Third, bad marketing. It’s one thing to say that your book is available throughout the world through Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but it’s another thing to say it will be noticed among the hundreds of thousands eBooks, paperbacks and hardbacks out there. The obvious first steps are creating a website and getting it out there in the Cloud through Facebook, Twitter and any other way you can think of doing it. But at bottom line, you may need to pay someone to help you. (I’ve read that when it comes down to it, it is still word of mouth that sells the most books so some Indie Authors are making their eBook version free for the first month or two hoping to establish a readership. It has worked for some.)

I haven’t included in my top three downsides bad book content. Obviously if your book is crap it won’t stand much of a chance. But the notion that crap books come from self-publishing and good books come from traditional publishing is just nonsense. Heavens, there is so much crap out there that at times you have to wonder about the Gatekeeper. However, two admissions: First, at present I would expect more crap from the self-publishing world, and second, a lot of crap sells.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of articles and essays about Indie Authors and self-publishing. Just google Indie Authors and self-publishing. However, I did find this particular series of articles helpful. Here they are:

Significant Disruption For Traditional Publishers Still To Come; 

Make Yourself Findable; and

Indie Authors Are Underpricing Their Books.

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger

It’s Time to Move Your Money

If ever you wondered who actually controls our world, surely you no longer have any doubts. After the 2008 global financial crisis (which continues today) accumulated a loss of some $10trillion, you would have thought that governments around the world would have done something substantial. To date they have not. The Financial Regulatory Reform bill in the United States was half-ass, and even that barely made it past the Republican Party. Project Merlin in the United Kingdom was an even worse attempt. The Euro Zone bounces from one crisis to another. Executive bonuses continue to flourish and the banks fail to lend as citizens around the world are made to cover the banking industry losses through alarmingly high unemployment rates and the dismantling of social services. While unemployment continues to rise and austerity cuts take their toll on many societies, the financial industry bonus culture has returned to pre-2008 levels and taxes on the very wealthy have been reduced.

It is instructive to compare the political and societal responses to the current crisis to those of the Great Depression which began in 1929. While the causes of each crisis are not dissimilar, the reaction to both are strikingly different. In the 1930’s people were angry and channelled their anger into action groups and organisations. At the same time governments took control of the financial sector through regulation and legislation that criminalised behaviour that caused the crisis. Not today.

It’s not as though our complaints about the banks are unfair. In an article in The Guardian entitled “Bare-faced bankers should be treated as criminals: prosecuted and imprisoned”, Ferguson Charles writes:

Selling defective mortgage securities during the housing bubble; creating and selling securities to bet on their failure; bringing the world to the brink of collapse; colluding to manipulate interest rates; hyping your failing company while secretly selling your own stock; cooking the books; assisting Bernard Madoff. For many people in banking, it would seem, securities fraud, accounting fraud, perjury and conspiracy are just another day at the office.

And we can now add to the list of complaints that of money laundering. Again Ferguson sums up the charges:

...no customer was beyond the pale. Several banks aided Iran not just in evading general sanctions, but in concealing payments directly involving its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. Evidence suggests that HSBC and other global banks also performed similar services for various combinations (depending on the bank) of Hamas, North Korea, Sudan, Gaddafi's Libya, Hezbollah, African warlords, ex-dictators, drug cartels, and banks linked to al-Qaida, among other distinguished clients. The amounts processed totalled hundreds of billions of dollars.

Whether it’s selling us phony mortgages or unneeded insurance, or financing warlords and drug cartels, the banks have let us down. In return our politicians demand we pay the price to protect the banks while not bringing the industry under control. Indeed, many politicians are protecting the bankers.

Obviously we need banks (!), though perhaps fewer banks that are too big to fail. There is something we can do. We can move our money to ethical banks.

For those of you in the United States and the United Kingdom there are two websites to help:

Move Our Money in the US; and

Move Your Money in the UK.

There are ethical banks, building societies and credit unions we can turn to. In the UK, the two obvious examples of ethical banks are the Co-operative Bank and Triodos. For most of us moving our money will not be difficult, though obviously it will take time. For some it may be a complicated and stressful activity, but I would still encourage all of us to move our money. And a reminder:

The moral integrity of an act does not depend of the efficacy of that act.

It would be nice if we were all billionaires and moved our money together. But the fact that I am not wealthy does not diminish the moral and authentic importance of my actions. And while transferring my finances to another bank may not shock or even be noticed by my original bank, if enough of us do it, the too-big-to-fail banks will eventually notice. In the meantime, we can invest in banks that deserve our business.

In closing I would like to recommend two books, different in tone and focus but both worth reading. The first is Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Time Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (London: Harvill Secker, 2012). Frank does an excellent job comparing our responses to the 1929 and 2008 financial crises. The other is Inside Job: The Financiers who Pulled off the Heist of the Century (Oneworld Publications, 2012). If you want to understand what caused the 2008 crisis and what are the  resultant consequences, this is an excellent book. (Inside Job follows his Oscar winning documentary of the same title.)

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger

How Not to Buy a Kindle

The first step is easy: Do not buy your Kindle from amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.cn, amazon.fr, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, or amazon.co.jp. You really don’t want to make the purchase in the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, or Japan. The reason for this is simply. When you buy your Kindle in one of these countries, Amazon rips you off big time (I really want to say Amazon bends you over and has Its way with you, but that would be indelicate). Let me use the UK, where I live, to explain what I mean.

If you live in the US and order, for example, a Kindle Touch Wi Fi on amazon.com it will cost you US$99.00. The exact same Kindle Touch produced in the US and then shipped to the UK when you order it on amazon.co.uk will costs you £109.00. I realise that does not seem overly impressive, but it does becomes so when you do the currency conversion. Depending on the exchange rate on the day of the purchase, the person who ordered his Kindle Touch on co.uk will pay between 60% to 70% more than the person who ordered hers on .com. That’s 60% to 70%!

HA! What does Amazon take us for? Idiots? That’s not a slight increase in costs. That’s immoral and unethical. That’s cynical. That’s unjust. That’s outrageous. That’s maddening. It leaves you sitting in a dark room weeping. It’s just bloody wrong!

However, not being born yesterday I pulled myself together and decided to do the obvious and order my Kindle Touch from amazon.com. But amazingly Amazon wouldn’t let me do that. When I went to .com, Amazon refused my purchase with a friendly message instructing me to buy my Kindle Touch from amazon.co.uk where I could spend up to 70% more. Now if I visit .com and click on the Kindle page, it transfers me automatically to .co.uk. The bastards! How do they sleep at night? And I’m sure the same thing will happen to all you good folks in Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, China and Japan. Obviously our Amazon accounts and credit cards are grounded firmly in our home countries and Amazon knows everything. Amazon wants us to go home and stay there. There is no escape.

Infuriated beyond belief by this not insignificant injustice, I decided to make a principled stance. I announced to my wife that I was not going to buy a Kindle Touch through amazon.co.uk, and that I might at some undesignated time in the future think about boycotting Amazon all together. Maybe. But anyway, my bold and noble decision to refuse amazon.co.uk’s conditions leads me to the slightly more difficult second step in how not to buy a Kindle: You must purchase your Kindle in the United States of America!  Here are few ideas on how you can do this:

• Move to the US; or
• Take your holiday in the US; or
• Ask a family member in the US to buy one for you and stick it in the mail; or
• As a friend; or
• Ask an acquaintance; or
• Ask a family member or friend in your home country to ask a friend or family member in the US; or
• If you are member of the 1% fly to New York for the weekend (though I guess if you are a member of the 1% you won’t mind paying 70% over the US price).

Well, there you have it. Last week my wife came back from a business trip to the US with my Kindle Touch in hand. It’s great. Books really do download in 60 seconds or less. Amazing. I tried to register my Kindle with amazon.com because books are cheaper in the US, but Amazon wouldn’t let me do that. It sent me home. Of course It did.

A word of advice, however. Buy yourself a cover of some kind so you can hide the advertising that helpfully comes along with your new Kindle when you send it to sleep. When my wife’s old Kindle goes to sleep you get great pictures of famous authors. When my new Kindle is sleeping you get adverts for AT&T, Bose and numerous Kindle books. In the on-board manual Amazon tells me what a great advantage this is and emphasizes, as if it is a generous gift on Its part, that the advertising doesn’t appear in the book I’m reading. Thanks Amazon. You really do have my best interests at heart. And if ever I were to doubt that, I simply need to remember the question is not what is ethical, but what is profitable.

By the way. While Amazon UK made £3.3billion last year in the UK selling books and all sorts of things, and using our resources and services to do so, It paid no corporate tax in the UK. All perfectly legal, of course. The thing is, while Amazon UK operations are in the UK, Its headquarters are in Luxemburg. Amazon UK lives is the UK, but pays taxes in Luxemburg. Imagine that. Kind of like living in the UK and buying your Kindle in America. And it looks like Amazon is being investigated for its tax avoidance schemes in all your countries too, in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, or Japan. Still, my Kindle Touch is great. It has five dictionaries which means I can look up the words “integrity” and “personal.”

Now, let’s see. What is on my to do list for today? Oh yea. Remove my money from that greedy, lying, criminal bank. Right. Need to get on that as soon as I finish that eBook about the nature of consumer dreams and power in a corporate kind of a world.

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger

A Possible Solution: Send the Bastards to Jail

When I was a kid my three older male cousins took me under their collective wing for a summer on a New Jersey boardwalk. My cousins had summer jobs on the boardwalk and so we had a free run behind the scenes. There were numerous arcades where one could win stuffed animals and other prizes. The customer gave the vender his or her money and the vender hit a switch that sent a large colorful wheel spinning. Where the wheel stopped determined which prize, if any, you won. What the punter could not see was a second small switch behind the counter where the vender was standing which he used if he thought the wheel might stop on a large and expensive prize. Just a quick on/off would jolt the wheel enough to move it beyond the big prize win. Basically, the vender defrauded the customer to increase his profits.

Boardwalk at Seaside New Jersey, Photo by Bob Palmisano*The rigged switch was common practice and used up and down the boardwalk. No one thought it bad practice or really thought about it at all. If you were to ask a vender if he was doing wrong he would probably be bemused by the question. It was an arcade on a boardwalk for God’s sake. What did you expect? Ethics? Legal practices? Don’t be naïve. Have fun. If you’re lucky you might get a small stuffed animal on your third try.

Welcome to the world of banking. On the boardwalk you might lose a few dollars. In the world of banking you can lose a whole lot more, like maybe your house or your business.

This week revealed yet another banking crisis. It started in Britain, but has now gone global. Investigators are looking at banks in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Singapore and Japan. You just know it will spread. Preliminary evidence indicates bankers were involved in an international network that defraud their customers in order to increase their profits and thus their performance bonuses.

I read an article by Ian Leslie in The Guardian that explained this latest crisis, the rigging of interest rates, in ways even I could understand. There are two types of bankers involved: Traders and Submitters. The Submitters send information to the banking authorities about the day’s trading. The banking authorities then set “benchmarks interest rates” based on that data. The traders bet on the level of interest rates. So, if the Traders can influence the information sent out by the Submitters, then they, the Traders, can make substantial profits. And while the information sent out by the Submitter is utterly vital for the accurate running of the market and false reporting is disastrous, the falsifying of this data is not illegal. Why not? Indeed, while all this may seem rather esoteric, the fiddling of interest rates affects our mortgages, credit card payments, investments, pensions, etc.

Politicians in the UK are, of course, outraged and some (though not the prime minister) have suggested Barclays’ chief executive Bob Diamond should resign (the rigging slander was first exposed at Barclays). Not surprisingly he has refused. It seems that when the bank does well, Diamond is rewarded for his leadership in the form of huge bonuses. However, when the bank is found to be dishonest and failing, neither Diamond nor his leadership are held responsible. He has said he will forgo his bonus for 2011 which is supposed to impress me, though I would suggest that it is not his to give back. Either he didn’t know what was going on or he did. Either way a performance bonus seems utterly ridiculous.

The politicians are voicing all kinds of angst and anger at this latest crisis. Of course they are. However, it sounds all too reminiscent of the political rhetoric heard in 2008/2009, and if truth be told they did very little to rein in the banks after all their protestations to do so back then. We can only hope they are serious this time. I’ll believe it when I see it.

There is a lot of talk about the need to “change the culture” of the banking industry. There have even been some who have pointed out the obvious: that while bankers are proving incredibly immoral and unethical, that while they are interfering with the running of the market in ways that affect millions of people, they are doing nothing illegal. This dislocation between what is moral/ ethical and what is legal begs the question: Why is it that the law is not in harmony with what society deems immoral and unethical and politicians apparently think is unacceptable and deplorable behavior? Don't forget, these are the same bankers who brought the world economy to its knees in 2008/2009, who we bailed out at a the cost of billions, who refuse to grant loans to small business at levels agreed, who increased their pay by some 12% (in the UK) and gave themselves huge bonuses, who sold customers insurance they never needed, who flogged loans that could never be paid back. And through it all, no criminal charges. If ever you wondered who runs the world, stop wondering. Political talk is cheap, or rather in this case expensive.

So, our politicians delcare loudly the banking culture needs changing. Well, I have a possible solution.

To the politicians: Change the laws so that immoral and unethical banking behaviour is made illegal.
To the police: Arrest the criminals.
To the lawyers: Prosecute the criminals.
To the juries and judges: Send the bastards to jail.

That just might change the culture of banking.

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger
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* Boardwalk at Seaside New Jersey,  Photograph by Bob Palmisano

The Queen, the Comedian and an Angry Citizen (that would be me)

CNN International had a short article on the British Queen’s property earnings. For the first time the value of Queen’s estate reached £8bn, “an increase of 11% on 2011.” During Britain’s double dip recession and almost two years with no economic growth, the Queen’s “rural holdings experienced strong growth during the year, generating total returns of 19.5 per cent, comprised of 13.3 per cent uplift in value, to £1.2bn, and revenues of £25.9m.” 

I linked the CNN article on Facebook with the words: “Boy, did I get born into the wrong family.” A good friend commented: “If you were born into that family, would you give it all away?” To which I replied: “Goodness no. I would be entitled to it.” She then rightfully asked: “So if you wouldn't give it away and they are entitled to it, why does it make you so angry? Confused.” And finally my inadequate response: “It makes me angry, short version of course, because there is not an infinite amount of money and resources to go around, that most of the people on the planet are living in brutalizing poverty, that as a species we actually do have the intelligence and resource to better balance things out. Poverty is not naturally inevitable.[1] It is the result of a lack of will.” Now for a longer version.

First, when I said that I would be “entitled” to my wealth, what I meant was that if I had been born and raised in wealth, luxury and power it would be only natural for me to feel “entitled” to all three. I’m not sure anyone is actually “entitled” to great wealth for simply being born, however, I suspect my sense of entitlement would have been reinforced when I realized that the laws of the land entitled me to increase and protect my wealth in ways more common people could not.[2] None of this is to say that I would be necessarily insensitive to the situation of others, but people rarely give away wealth due to sensitivities. When a young man can take a military helicopter, land it on one of his family’s front lawns, pick up his brother and then fly off to a stag party without suffering any significant consequences, there’s a good chance he might feel “entitled.”[3]

Second, the point isn’t whether or not the wealthy “give it all away” for two obvious reasons. One, they won’t, any more than I am about to give away all my resources. Two, depending on the gifts of the wealthy is not a sound foundation on which to build and sustain a fair and just society.[4]

One of the requirements of justice is the fair distribution of opportunities, services and resources (particularly money.) Societies, if they choose, can legislate to assure a reasonably balanced distribution of all three and can do so without denying the obvious benefits of capitalism. To argue for a regulated capitalism is not to advocate for communism. To deny this possibility is to ignore the existence of societies that are in varying degrees of success legislating for fairness.[5]

Those who govern on our behalf write and pass laws that demand we pay taxes to the state. The taxes are then used to provide opportunities and services. This is obvious. However, those same lawmakers pass legislation that enables some individuals and companies to reduce their tax obligations or avoid them all together. The inherent unfairness in such laws highlight the difference between what is legal and what is understood as moral. It is not enough that something is simply legal. It must also be seen as moral and ethical. When a millionaire pays a lower tax rate from that of his or her secretary, most in society see that as unfair.[6] If a corporation works within a society, uses its resources and makes millions or billions of $’s, £’s or €’s, etc. through its people and pays no taxes at all, it can be judged as unfair.[7]

Last week a little known tax avoidance scheme for the wealthy was revealed in the British press. Over 1000 people were involved in this particular K2 scheme, but a leading comedian, Jimmy Carr, took most of the public heat. While the K2 scheme is perfectly legal, David Cameron announced that Carr’s tax avoidance was “morally wrong.” Most would agree, but while the PM was morally offended by the scheme, he made no suggestion that such tax avoidance programmes should be made illegal. If a tax law is deemed immoral, is it not reasonable to for such a law to be revoked. As Simon Jenkins said in his article “What’s morally Repugnant is that these tax scams are legal”: 

We are left with a moral quagmire. The rich are "entitled" to arrange their money according to the law, and we can merely condemn them as immoral. Wealthy executives claim the money they have filched from their shareholders and stashed offshore is "small in the totality of things". Yet revelations in the Times this week suggest that over £5bn a year may be lost to the exchequer…

Taxation has been damned for decades, however, it is tax revenue that supports our civilized societies. It is through taxation that we distributes social, political and economic resources throughout our society. It is, therefore, in the area of taxation that the notion of fairness for all is so vividly played out.

It is not only that the legal cover for the very wealthy is morally offensive, it also has huge practical implication. For example, “The US Senate calculated in 2008 that as much as $7tn of American bank deposits were located in British "crown colonies", dodging some $40bn in revenues.” There are literally trillions of $’s, £’s or €’s, etc., hidden away by companies and individuals in offshore banks. For example, there are 457,000 companies in the  British Virgin Islands which has a population of approximately 30,000 people. After the 2008 crash, which we are still living with, politicians of all stripes said it was time to tackle the offshore accounts that make it legally  possible for people and companies to avoid contributing to the very societies they exploit for resources and profits. Of course, nothing of any impact has been done. The amount of money controlled by and protected for a relatively small percentage of people is staggering.[8] If I pay my fair share of taxes that are needed for the running of society, why should others be exempt? And why do my elected officials protect them?

You don’t have to be a John Rawls to understand that a just society would do its best to approximate equality of opportunity, service and resources without stifling entrepreneurship. The evidence also show that social and economic inequality impacts public health, reduces educational opportunity, breeds corruption, warps politics and even harms the economy. You cannot legally protect the very wealthy and provide fairness in society. You cannot pretend society is fair when the majority of people experience a reduction in standard of living while millionaires “go on spending.”[9] Don’t kid yourself. We are not in this together.

So why am I angry? I am angry because many, though not all, of the very wealthy benefit from society but do not pay their fair share for societies. And I’m angry because my elected officials, while using the law to make me pay my fair share, also use the law to enable the wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. Before 2008 I would have said the following statement was overly cynical: “When we elect millionaires who take office and then protect billionaires, we can’t expect much change.” Now I’m not so sure.

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger

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[1] Many equate success and failure market and in life in general as akin to natural law, thus to regulate the winners and to try and save the losers is against nature and for many God’s wishes. See for example: Frank, Thomas. Pity the Billionaire. London: Harvill Secker, 2012, pp. 66-70.

[2] It not only takes money to make money, it takes money to save money.

[3] See: “Prince William flies multi-million pound RAF Chinook helicopter to cousin's Isle of Wight stag do... and picks up Harry on the way”

[4] I almost said for Two: It wouldn’t make a difference if they did give it all away. That actually is not true. The Queen’s property holdings are worth £8bn. That does not include her vast arts collection (one of the largest and most valuable private collections in the world, her financial investments nor her annual income. If were to “give it all away” and ring fenced the funds to say eliminating child poverty in Britain, it would make a difference.

[5] Denmark, for example, is making good progress in eliminating child poverty and provides a relatively high standard of living for the vast majority of its people.

[6] The Huffington Report on UK tax avoidance: “figures released for the first time underlined the need for action to prevent the super-rich exploiting the system of reliefs to reduce their tax bill below that of low-paid workers.” And according to ABC News an IRS report indicated that “…1,500 of America's 230,000 millionaires avoided paying any federal income tax in 2009.”

[7] For example, Amazon’s UK operation over the past three years “generated sales of more than £7.6bn in the UK without attracting any corporation tax on the profits from those sales.” See: “Amazon: £7bn sales, no UK corporation tax”.

[8] A global population of 11 million have assets of approximately $42 trillion (£27tn).

[9] Also see: “World’s super rich almost unaffected by debt crisis”.

Ray Bradbury Died, And It’s Personal

As you undoubtedly know, Ray Bradbury died. Of course I never met the man, but in his death I am learning much about him. For example, when he was twelve years old he visited a travelling carney and was “baptised” with electricity by Mr. Electrico who shouted “Live Forever!” The next day he went back to the carney to ask Mr. Electrico about this living forever thing and was told that he, Ray, possessed the soul of his, Mr. Electrico’s, best friend who died during World War I. The next day Bradbury began writing and apparently wrote every day of his life until he died at 91. However, while I had never met Bradbury, his death nonetheless feels somehow personal. The thing is this: Ray Bradbury, and other science fiction authors, taught me to love reading and revere books.

Ray BradburyAs a child I hated reading, to the point of having a rather unpleasant physical reaction when picking up a book (I can’t describe it, but it was definitely real and no fun). The reason for this hatred of reading was simple: I was bad at it. Until I reached the fifth grade my teachers either didn’t give a damn or actually humiliated me in front of my peers by mocking me while reading aloud during lessons (do teachers still make kids read out loud in class?). I remember vividly a teacher announcing to all in the class, as I stumbled along trying to read from a book held in my trembling hands, that I was very stupid. Fortunately, in the fifth grade I had a teacher who discovered I couldn’t read to save my live and quickly excused me from the humiliation of reading lessons. I can’t remember her name, but I can still see her face. She invited me to her home on Saturdays and, while feeding me tapioca pudding, she and her daughter, who was much younger than I was, taught me to read. That wonderful woman saved me.

The first book I ever read cover to cover was Powder Keg: A Story of The Bermuda Gunpowder Mystery by Donald E. Cooke (illustrated by Harve Stein). A few years ago I searched the internet for a copy and found one! It is now a prized possession. While this revolutionary war story of young Tom Rawlins helping to bring gunpowder from Bermuda to Boston to fight the evil Brits was my first book, it was the discovery of science fiction that resulted in my love for reading. I devoured sci fi, sometimes reading until four in the morning. My family didn’t have much money back then so it was difficult to satiate my desires. When the library failed me I would use my meager allowance to buy sci fi paperbacks. I even considered turning to a life of crime. One day I took a fat hardback book (I don’t remember where I got it) and cut a hole in the pages the size of a typical mass market paperback. I planned go the bookstore, discretely place my chosen sci fi adventure in the hardback and then nonchalantly leave. In the end I couldn’t do it, perhaps more out of the fear of being caught then the longing to preserve my moral integrity. Nonetheless, I read so much science fiction that one day my father sat me down to share his concern that reading so much fanciful narratives written by so many questionable characters was warping my understanding of reality and would be, in some way he never explained, detrimental to my wellbeing. I remember saying to him, “But Dad, I’m reading!” And with that, looking rather sad, he let me continue. And so I did.

Dandelion Wine. Something Wicked This Way Comes. One More for the Road. The Illustrated Man. From the Dust Returned. The Martian Chronicles. I Sing the Body Electric! A Medicine for Melancholy. Quicker Than the Eye. And of course, Fahrenheit 451.

Without these books I may never have learned to love reading and books, and eventually writing. Without Bradbury’s imagination I might not have pondered and pursued the ephemeral notion that somehow creativity is a defining aspect of what it means to be human. And surely I would never have realized that if I wanted to become the person I hoped I could be, I would have to embrace creativity as if my life depended upon it (something, by the way, that I’m still trying to do well).

What am I without the imagination to create? Not much, I think. I am not saying that my humanness is determined by my being able to create well, like Ray Bradbury. If that were so I’d be in big trouble. No, it is not that I must create brilliantly to be me, but rather that being me is discovered and shaped in the process of my being creative. So, thanks to the man I never met, but whose imagination was life affecting and whose passing is personal.

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger

Shampoo, Tampons and the Olympics

As everyone knows Britain is hosting the Olympics this summer. As anyone who has paid any attention knows, the Olympics is thoroughly commercialised and all commercial interests are protected by a complex and impressive legal web. Of course, the companies and multi-national corporations that pay for the exclusive rights to the Olympics contribute financially to the event, though it should be noted that cost estimates for the Games have ranged from £12 billion to £24 billion, most of  which will be met by the taxpayers (apparently the higher estimates include the security costs while the lower ones do not). Nonetheless, make no mistake, exclusivity is important, expensive and protected by the full weight of the law. For example, the only beer you will be able to drink at Olympic grounds will be Heineken, and a pint will cost you £7.00! (The average price of a pint of beer in Britain is £3.17.) Heineken paid for its exclusive rights to the Games, and so will you if you want a beer.

Economics aside, however, I enjoy watching how companies have created convoluted narratives for TV adverts suggesting their various products are actually relevant to the Olympics. A major shampoo company has a TV ad with a leading US swimmer, who won numerous gold medals in Beijing, taking a shower and telling us that using this particular shampoo clears his head which enables him to win gold medals. If this shampoo can win gold for him, what can it do for me?! Hell, my shampoo has never won a gold medal for anyone!! A company pushing dishwashing liquid urges us to buy the now available limited edition of its product. “Limited edition” means the liquid comes in a gold coloured container rather than in the normal white container. I want one! It’s a limited edition and its associated with the Olympics! I’m sure the golden container will be worth a bundle on eBay. One of the most entertaining ads shows a female athlete running towards the high jump bar only to be stopped by “Mother Nature” lying in the landing area telling her she can’t compete. But no! The woman is using a particular tampon, to the dismay of Mother Nature. We next see the Olympic winner raising her arms behind the high bar, while a voiceover implies this particular tampon assure gold medals, which obviously other tampons do not (any more than any old shampoo can clear your head for competition).

The ads are stupid but nonetheless entertaining in their absurdity. I can’t imagine anyone will actually change shampoos, tampons or washing-up liquid based on the nonsensical and forced link between the product and the sporting event. However, I must assume that the positive association of a product with the Olympics (no matter how unlikely and unnatural that link) is worth the expense of buying exclusive rights. And I’m sure people are getting rich through all these sponsorships and legal protections (people actually get paid well for the ad concepts mentioned above).

Interestingly, in what seems like an anti-promotion, VISA has announced that cash machines in and near Olympic events will be shut down and that VISA will provide  its own machines. If you don’t have a VISA card or a cash card, however, you’re out of luck. You won’t be able to use your Master or American Express cards in a VISA machine. VISA is actually making it more difficult for people to get cash, so if you don’t have a VISA card and run low on cash, you know who to blame. It’s one thing to suggest that buying a particular shampoo or tampon will make you a winner, but quite another for a company to announce it is going to make your life more difficult in order to protect its exclusive rights. And let’s face it, hardly any of us associate cash machines with a particular brand, that is until now. Now we know that cash machines with the VISA brand may be of no use to us.

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger

Why The Back Road Café?

In the Review’s Author, Author section of Saturday’s The Guardian there was an excellent article by Jeanette Winterson. I encourage you to read it (just click the above link). She suggests that when she left Oxford the desire to be a writer was “the most hopeless and reckless of ambitions, as lofty as it was unlikely” while today such ambitions and hopes are “as ubiquitous as coffee shops on street corners. If you keep a notebook or blog or even tweet, you call yourself a writer.” And I might add, if you have a website or if you self-publish eBooks and/or print-on-demand books you call yourself a writer. Winterson is not necessarily being critical of this growing unsightly tribe of “armatures” and she certainly is not being elitist. Regarding this explosion of writers, writing courses, literary festivals, etc., Winterson sees both negative and positive possibilities. She says:

Jeanette Winterson“The crazy part of it is that we are breeding professional, competent, homogenised writers who will go on to teach writing that is professional, competent and homogenised. The intriguing part of it is whether this movement towards creativity and self-expression is really the start of a kind of Occupy – that it could be dangerous and confrontational, not homogenised at all…The arts are responsive to social change. Writing isn't something handed down from a big brain in an ivory tower – that's the academy, not the rough and tumble of creativity. Writing is a conversation, sometimes a fist-fight. It is democratic.”

I was actually moved and encouraged by Winterson’s article because recently someone asked why I created The Back Road Café. Though I would never have said the following at the time I was learning how to build a website, I do say it now (thanks to Jeanette Winterson): I did it to create a space for the “rough and tumble of creativity.” It was never my aim to create a homogeneous space. It was my desire to offer a place where people are free to express themselves (including myself, of course) and that through writing, reading and conversing perhaps even a “kind of Occupy” might occur.

Pretentious? Perhaps. But why not try? As Winterson said in her article, all we writers, bloggers, tweeters, self-published eBookers and print-on-demanders are not motivated by fame or fortune, because let’s be honest, it is very very unlikely any of us will obtain either. It’s not about recognition, it’s about self-expression and a kind democracy. It’s absurdly simple. We want to write and to read. And even more absurdly, we want to change the world. And why not? It needs changing.

To that end people are invited to contribute to The Back Road Café in whatever way  they please. There is nonfiction and fiction. There are one-off and occasional contributions posted in The Journal section of the site. There are regular contributions - so far a column from America, essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and today’s Church, and poetry, with more regular sections in the pipeline). There is poetry, songs, articles, travel writings, essays, journalism. It’s an open site.

Is The Back Road Café succeeding? I’d say, cautiously, yes. The site statistics I check each week are encouraging. The number of visitors to the site is increasing, admittedly slowly, but nonetheless increasing. The development of regular contributors is exciting. The variety and quality of the writing is good. And I’m told the site has a “good and welcoming feel.” On the anxiety side of the coin, The Journal has gone quiet, which is disappointing because that is the place where readers will encounter the most diversity of expression. Also, it has always been my hope that The Back Road Café would be an international space. So far it has been mostly an American and British café, but I have not given up hope. Currently, I’m in conversation with people in New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan. I’m not sure where those conversations will lead, but again, it can’t hurt to try.

So, if you happen to be reading this and you want to contribute, let me know (either on the website itself or by emailing thebackroadcafe@gmail.com). The more writers the site has, the more readers it will attract. The more readers, the more writers will be tempted to contribute. You don’t have to be a traditionally published author. You do have to want to say something and the desire that others will read your thoughts.

Copyright © 2012 Dale Rominger