Responding to my earlier post, Eunice Levis of EKG Films forwarded this PSA.
As I said before, I’m sure the good folks at the ACLU would appreciate any support you can give for their opposition to Arizona SB1070.
Edit: Same day, 2034 hours: And, should you happen to have business in Arizona, maybe you should dress appropriately.
Here’s a great American, fretting about immigrants:
Few of their children in the country learn English; they import many books from [their nation of origin] …. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only [the other]. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal writings in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our courts, where the [non-English] business so increases that there is continual need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our legislators what the other half say.
If I didn’t tip my hand with the use of the word “great,” it may surprise you to learn that the American doing that fretting is not a current member of the Republican Party, but Benjamin Franklin; and the immigrants occasioning that fretting are not Latinos but Germans. The above passage is a quote from one of Franklin’s letters, dated 9 May 1753, which I found in H.W. Brands’ excellent biography The First American.
These were my people Franklin was fretting about. Most of the time it’s easy to forget that I have an ethnicity, much less one that was once at odds with an English-speaking colonial culture. That’s my privilege as a white man in the twenty-first century U.S. Many folks don’t enjoy such a privilege—particularly not in Arizona, where a widely-discussed law will soon allow police to ask for proof of legal residence based on only a “reasonable suspicion” that someone is in the country illegally. It’s an invitation to racial profiling, aimed squarely at people of the current fret-worthy ethnicity, Hispanics.
Fortunately, the American Civil Liberties Union (among other organizations, including the federal government) will contest the law. In another 250 years, maybe this law will seem as quaint as Benjamin Franklin complaining about street signs in German—but before then, I’m sure the ACLU would appreciate your support.
Todd: Daddy, what do taxes pay for?
Ned: Oh, why, everything! Policemen, trees, sunshine! And let’s not forget the folks who just don’t feel like working, God bless ’em!
— Exchange between Ned Flanders and his son Todd, from The Simpsons episode “The Trouble With Trillions”
I usually send in my tax return as soon as I get all the year-end paperwork, because it’s so insanely easy to do it online these days, and I like to put a refund in the bank. In fact, I’ve already got my refund, and put some of it toward a new camera. The IRS didn’t give me a total refund, though—which leaves me to contemplate what the Feds are doing with the little bit they kept.
In principle, I’m in favor of taxes. There are lots of things that are simply only do-able by lots of people banding together and chipping in, like roads and other infrastructure, the arts, scientific research, or the social safety net. Or national defense. This last gives me pause every tax season for the simple reason that I’m opposed to violence, including the officially-sanctioned kind. Partly this is because I was raised in a pacifist religious tradition, but if my country’s militaristic foreign policy of the previous decade proved anything, it’s that “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
I know I’m in a minority among Americans; but it’s a frustrating minority to be in. As the national debate fixates on government spending, everyone is worried about the Federal budget deficit, but no-one seems to be interested in how the Pentagon is contributing to it. The Obama Administration has proposed the biggest military budget since World War II, and while spending associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is supposed to end in a couple years (good luck with that), the baseline Pentagon budget will just keep growing, overwhelming savings from the spending freeze the Obama Administration has proposed for select non-military programs. It’s not as though the Pentagon is some paragon of responsible spending—there’s certainly room to cut its budget, if only the Administration would put in the effort.
In short, balancing the budget without cutting military spending will end up cutting non-military Federal programs in support of greater and greater military spending. The Federal spending that’s mostly unproblematic for me threatens to be overwhelmed by the Federal spending that I mostly don’t support.
So what’s a tax-paying pacifist to do?
Some folks who think like me withhold a symbolic portion of their taxes. Many join the campaign for a peace tax fund—the right to request on the tax form that one’s taxes go only toward non-military spending. A very few others make lifestyle choices that let them live on an income below the lowest tax bracket. But each of these options has its own problems.
Withholding taxes implies that the money is used for military spending against my will; but it’s not as though I have any less say in how it’s spent than any other taxpayer. More, in fact, since I vote in off-year elections. I’d object to another American withholding taxes in protest of, say, funding for the National Science Foundation—I can’t very well do the same for military funding.
Similarly with the Peace Tax Fund: I just don’t believe that spending decisions should be made at the level of the individual tax return. Passage of a Peace Tax Fund would imply that there could be an Anti-Medicare Tax Fund, or an Anti-National Endowment for the Arts Tax Fund (under, presumably, less-cumbersome names).
Finally, living below the taxable income threshold is a sacrifice I’ll admit I’m not willing to make. I live pretty simply as a graduate student; I’m frankly not sure how I’d make due with less, even given Northern Idaho costs-of-living.
All of which leaves me to vote for slightly-less-militaristic Democrats, fill out my online 1040EZ, and wait for my refund.
With its mildly lefty contrarian tone and frequent crossovers with NPR – and, I should say, solid but accessible policy analysis and spot-on cultural reviews – Slate has long been a staple in my online reading. It’s also been a staple in my podcast lineup, ever since I got my first iPod and suddenly needed something to put on it for long spinning sessions. Since several of the Slate podcasts are calling for listeners to recruit more listeners this week, I thought I’d note my favorites, and where to get them.
The Political Gabfest is the original Slate podcast, and the template for newer models. Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk about (usually) three topics in the week’s (usually) political news. Plotz is a liberaltarian grump, Bazelon more idealistic, Dickerson focused on the political mechanics behind the issue of the moment; all three bounce off each other in endearing and enlightening ways. Dickerson mediates (or tables) at least one Plotz-Bazelon argument per episode. (Subscribe in iTunes.)
The Culture Gabfest applies the Gabfest model to cultural news. Stephen Metcalf moderates in Plotz-y tones, and is usually joined by Julia Turner and Dana Stevens – but the Culture Gabfest often includes fourth or fifth panelists to discuss particular topics. My tastes track Metcalf’s pretty closely, but Stevens’s reviews were informing my movie-going decisions long before the podcast launched. (Subscribe in iTunes.)
Dana Stevens also helms Spoiler Specials, in which she and another film critic or two dissect a current movie, with no regard to hiding plot points. It’s great fun after you’ve seen a movie, or, if you’re into schadenfreude, often just as much fun with reference to a movie you have no intention of seeing (Transformers, for example). (Subscribe in iTunes.)
Hang up and Listen is back to the Gabfest model, but about sports – the conversation between sports journalists Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca is like sports talk radio, but you don’t call in, hence the name. In fact, it’s not really like sports talk radio, inasmuch as I, a nerd whose sports are unwatchable individual endurance events (running, cycling), find it totally interesting. Part of this may be because both Fatsis and Levin Pesca* are regular NPR contributors, who are used to talking sports with an audience that doesn’t follow them. (Subscribe in iTunes.)
Conveniently, you can subscribe to each of these individually at the links I’ve given above (they’re all on a weekly-ish cycle, with Spoiler Specials somewhat less frequent), or get them as part of Slate’s daily podcast stream. If you go with the daily stream, you’ll get a few less-frequent ‘casts I’ve left out, that are nevertheless good when they show up.
*Corrected 15:18, 18 Feb 2010
Or at least Secretary of Homeland Security? Of course, this kind of perspective is (by all conventional wisdom) unelectable. But I can dream, right?
Of course 100% security is impossible; it has always been impossible and always will be. We’ll never get the murder, burglary, or terrorism rate down to zero; 42,000 people will die each year in car crashes in the U.S. for the foreseeable future; life itself will always include risk. But that’s okay. Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy our country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.
Really, any political party that adds the removal of unproductive security theater from TSA procedures – Passenger pat-downs before the flight from Lewiston, Idaho to Moscow, Idaho? Really? – will be a serious competitor for my vote. I’m looking at you, Modern Whig Party.
I can’t help but think this is going to strain Rick Warren’s warm, personal friendship with Melissa Ethridge.
Via Slog. Yesterday’s Fresh Air also had a great (by which I mean alternately appalling and rage-inducing) interview with Jeff Sharlet. My reaction: more or less as before. Also, thank God (or whoever) for Fred Clark.
Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.
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They say they also want to speak to younger Christians who have become engaged in issues like climate change and global poverty, and who are more accepting of homosexuality than their elders. They say they want to remind them that abortion, homosexuality and religious freedom are still paramount issues.
This, of course, is on the heels of the threat by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. to discontinue charitable work if the city council passes a law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Christianity was founded on stories of a man who preached sacrifice of self to the needs of others, went drinking with prostitutes and other social outcasts, and was executed as a common criminal by the government. The figure of Jesus as described in the Christian scriptures is, to me, an ideal I can only hope to emulate. Yet many of the people who take his name for their moral identity — and the loudest, most vehement and visible of those who do — would evidently react with disgust if they met their Lord on the street, and condemn his teachings as un-American if they actually understood them.
I wanted to write something more scathing than that. But I’m just tired. I’m going to hand the mic over to that guy they keep claiming to follow.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
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Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices — mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.
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Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
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You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?
(Matthew, chaper 23, New International Version.)
Mike Konczal considers the effect of breaking Defense Department spending out as a separate line item on pay stub tax witholding statements, alongside Social Security and Medicare. If citizens saw a number for military alongside social spending, they might make more informed choices about the relative values of each.
How much of your two weeks work cycle would you like to spend working to keep a global military hegemony going? I’d probably want to clock it out around my first coffee break on Monday (which is fairly early), but that’s me.
Some pacifists withhold a portion (or all) of their Federal taxes in protest against military spending, and there’s even a campaign to let people opt out of funding the military on their tax forms. Maybe Konczal’s idea would be a good alternative?
Courtesy Slacktivist:
Here I would remind us, again, of Wendell Berry’s distinction between religion and superstition. Religion, Berry said, is belief in something which cannot be disproved. Superstition, on the other hand, is belief in something that has been disproved. The former can be reasonable, the latter cannot. For all of Bill Maher’s railing against religion as “mere superstition,” it seems he doesn’t understand either of those ideas. His latest anti-vaccine, anti-medicine, anti-science crusade is superstitious nonsense. It’s religulous.
Heard about R. Crumb’s comic-book adaptation of Genesis? The Slog passes this along from the Daily Telegraph:
“It is turning the Bible into titillation,” said Mike Judge, of the Christian Institute, a religious think-tank. “It seems wholly inappropriate for what is essentially God’s rescue plan for mankind.
“If you are going to publish your own version of the Bible it must be done with a great deal of sensitivity. The Bible is a very important text to many many people and should be treated with the respect it deserves.”
Thing is, Crumb’s adaptation is an entirely straight-faced illustration of the text. (Check out NPR’s excerpt, if you want to see for yourself.) So, yes, Adam and Eve are naked, and Lot has incestuous (and unwilling) sex with his daughters. But these are straight out of the text! That’s right: a Christian “think-tank” is objecting to the very concept of illustrating the Bible. Slacktivist is right, in spades.
