Respect for Respectable Ideas

I went out to breakfast on Sunday. I planned to fight the weeds in my garden in the afternoon, so I had on torn jeans. I was concerned that I would be out of place among the well-dressed Sunday public.

I was wrong. Jeans, hoodies, T-shirts, basketball shorts and camo were everywhere. My long-sleeve Levi’s shirt put me in the sartorial elite.

My expectations had been formed in another era, and I had not adjusted to the reality passing before my eyes. It’s not just dress styles that have changed. The whole idea of respecting Sunday has been shifting during my lifetime.

Membership in a religious congregation fell from three-quarters of Americans to just over half since the 1950s. Going to church has fallen slowly, too, from about 50% to a low of 36% last year.

Following public behavior, American governments have gradually stopped enforcing Christian practice. There was no baseball in Boston on Sundays until 1929, and then Red Sox could not play in Fenway on Sundays, because there was a church nearby, and had to play in the Boston Braves stadium.

Forbidding the sale of liquor on Sundays lasted much longer, into the 21^st century in many states. The lingering effort to keep Sunday respectable by not selling disrespectful alcohol continues in less and less rational forms, such as the prohibition in Illinois of retail alcohol sales until 11 AM, except in Chicago, where only the big supermarkets can sell alcohol after 8 AM. You also can’t buy a car on Sunday, but you can get gas, get your car fixed, and buy a motorcycle. Of course, you can buy guns on Sunday.

The most socially significant change on Sundays is the intrusion of retail commerce, led by the big national chains trying to put local business out of business. Respect for a common day of rest is gone.

Why was I concerned anyway, aren’t torn jeans fashionable? Just check the internet. You can get jeans with “distressing and a frayed hem for an extra edge of attitude” for $51, marked down from $80, or many varieties of torn jeans from Nordstrom’s for over $200.  “Gentlemen’s Quarterly” offers a style guide to ripped jeans, which declares that more than 2½ tears is trying too hard. Yves St. Laurent offers ripped men’s jeans for $750.

Big city folks putting on the Ritz usually get others to tear the jeans. My small-town students mostly do their own ripping.

But fashion rarely imitates life. Jeans with grass and dirt stains, ragged holes at the knees and obvious wear don’t pass GQ’s test and aren’t hawked on the internet.

So what do the artificial holes mean? Tearing jeans ruins them for work. Eventually they no longer can do their job of protecting the body from the rigors of dirty work. I don’t understand those carefully planned tears, but I don’t think they represent respect for the physical labor that causes real holes.

Maybe respect is what has really changed. Respect for Sunday, respect for work, respect for the ideas and customs which were dominant when I grew up. We see the evidence of new definitions of respect and disrespect in the news every day.

Some of the respect revolution has been welcome. Men generally exhibit much more respect for the integrity of women’s bodies, so now violators get slapped in the face, not on the back. But it will take more than a few outraged slaps to make any further progress.

Disrespecting black people is also no longer normal. Roger Angell tells the story of the presence on the Harvard lacrosse team of a black student in 1941, which caused the US Naval Academy team to refuse to play, until the Harvard athletic director overruled the coach and sent the student home. The President of Harvard apologized to the Naval Academy commander for the inconvenience.

There is still plenty of gender and racial disrespect across America, but the change has been remarkable.

Some respect shows disrespect for others. The conventional respect for Christian Sunday was not matched by any public respect for Jewish Friday evening and Saturday. America may be a majority Christian nation a bit longer, but government Christianity is no longer a virtue in the democratic US.

My torn jeans on Sunday are not a sign of disrespect, but an expression of a different culture, one of many that have combined to make America. We don’t need to all respect the same things. Respecting our diversity means understanding that Americans will respect different things.

Some traditional forms of respect are now controversial. Our public space is torn about the idea of respecting the Confederacy. Respect of equal rights leads to disrespect for slavery and its defenders. The oldest US universities, so disrespected by conservative pundits, are among the leaders in examining how they profited from and strengthened slavery. What conservatives call political correctness, I call honesty about the past.

Respect is good, when it comes out of the broadest respect for our fellow humans of all kinds.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October 24, 2017

Why Is Trump Still Popular?

I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected President. I thought his personal weaknesses were so outrageous that it would never be close.

I hadn’t tried to understand his appeal, because he was such a colossal jerk. I forgot that the American public is often mesmerized by powerful jerks, people who are bad and show it off. Millions of TV viewers paid to see the mobsters on “The Sopranos”, continuing a public fascination with showy criminals, real and imagined, from Al Capone to Bonnie and Clyde to the Godfather.

I didn’t see the importance of the Trump persona. Trump was rich, white and free. He could do whatever he wanted without apology, and get richer doing it. People like the Clintons fawned all over him and acted as if his constantly shifting, remarkably ignorant political ideas were just fine with them.

His magnetism for people who venerate celebrity gave his ideas some credibility. That’s all he needed.

His message was simple: I can do the economy better than anyone else. He had been saying that for decades, but in the years after the worst depression since the Great Depression millions of Americans wanted to believe him.

The experts of capitalism, moving smoothly among Democrats and Republicans and politicians all over the world, had brought us to a terrible place. Just like they said it would, the world economy had been booming for decades. After each unpredicted temporary implosion, the engine started up again. Unprecedented wealth has been created and shared around among the already rich, the experts themselves, politicians of all stripes, and quite a few people of modest means who found ways to succeed by being lucky and working hard.

I was one of those modest people. My father the refugee and my mother the secretary and the whole country told me that I could succeed. I could go to college, get a good job, keep it, make a better living. It’s all come true for me, and for many others I know.

But most Americans were going nowhere. Hourly wages for the typical worker have stagnated for 40 years. Those without a college degree did even worse. The median household income of a high school graduate fell by 25% from 1973 to 2013, as over 7 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. Instead of making automobiles, workers were serving hamburgers.

The hope for success, the so-called American dream, decayed, as the number of permanently underemployed, paycheck-to-paycheck survivors has grown.

Why not believe the promises of a larger-than-life businessman, whose wealth is beyond spending, who not only says he feels your pain, but who has a simple answer. I can fix everything, because I am great at whatever I’ve done. I understand now how many Americans, especially in the American places that the experts have forgotten, would see hope in the big man’s message.

From thousands of conversations with voters since the election, analyzed in countless reports, it is clear that other parts of Trump’s message resonated widely, finding a bigger audience than I had believed or wished. Trump’s adoption of the birther myth told us everything about that side of his appeal. Seeking an ever bigger stage to present himself as master of the universe, the rich man found a nasty idea to make his own. The former Democrat could easily take the whole stupid story away from the few crazies who had been promoting it and put his face on it.

The birther fantasy was always going to fail. No matter how many stories Trump made up about investigators and discoveries, his quest was a failure. Except that so many Americans wanted to believe that Barack Obama really didn’t deserve to be President.

Facts didn’t matter. Race mattered. For Trump, success didn’t matter, just trying was enough.

So Donald Trump was elected by a combination of the economic hopes and the racial resentments of white America.

I get that now. What I don’t get is that after 9 months of accomplishing nothing but alienating people across the world, creating a cabinet where the most important question is “Will he resign?”, reneging on promises to offer better health care for most Americans, not getting Mexico to pay for a wall, sucking up to the Russian hackers into our elections, draining no swamp and improving nothing for anybody, and lying, lying, lying, those white Americans are sending money to the billionaire Trump’s campaign fund.

Almost everybody who believes that white people have no social or economic advantages over black people supports Trump. Nearly half of Trump supporters think that whites face the most discrimination in America today. 70% of Trump voters agree that “white people are currently under attack in this country”.

So it doesn’t matter if Trump tries to take away their health insurance or give giant tax breaks to the rich. It doesn’t matter that he can’t deliver on any of his campaign promises. It doesn’t matter that he displays dangerous ignorance about every issue he steps into.

Is anything better for anyone in America because of what he has done?

No. What matters is that he has made American racism respectable.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October 10, 2017

Doing Things The Right Way

Doing things the right way is hard. It takes more time, energy, and resources than any of the other possibilities that we think of to ease the load. Daily compromises are unavoidable.

Doing things the wrong way in public means running the risk of being caught, the risk that your shortcuts, maybe justifiable, maybe not, are publicly discussed. Those moments are revealing about people who don’t try to get things right.

Tom Price was Cabinet Secretary of Health and Human Services, confirmed by the Senate, right at the center of American politics. He must have thought that appointment was a promotion from his House seat, Newt Gingrich’s seat in Georgia, where he had no primary challenger and beat his opponent for his seventh term 62% to 38%.

Now he could play a dominant role in achieving his political dream, getting rid of Obamacare and recreating America’s entire health care system, having led the Republican charge since 2009. After that, maybe he could go one step further and get rid of Medicare: his organization, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, publishes “The Physicians Guide to Opting Out of Medicare” and works to make vaccinations optional.

What a dream job. But now, as the Minneapolis StarTribune headlined on Saturday, “High-flying Price takes off”. From May to September, Price took a flight every week on private charter planes at taxpayers’ expense, costing us $400,000 in just a few months. He spent $25,000 of public money to fly from Washington to Philadelphia, when a train costs $72 and takes about the same time.

Price didn’t steal anything. All of his very expensive travel was on government business. His mistake was thinking that his time and comfort were worth a great deal to us, the people who are paying, at the same time as he was arguing that the government is spending much too much on our health care. Price is a hypocrite who doesn’t care a bit about the values of “Trump voters” or any voters.

In the wake of Price’s ouster, other Trump appointees have hastened to draw a clear ethical line. Billionaires Betsy DeVos and Wilbur Ross pay for all of their travel on their own planes, and others like Ben Carson and Alex Acosta fly commercial unless they are with the President or Vice President. They are clear that they would never use government money to pay for personal travel. That would be stealing.

So where does that leave Steven Mnuchin? The Secretary of the Treasury requested that a government jet take him and his bride on their honeymoon to Scotland, France and Italy this summer. Mnuchin is worth about $300 million. Mnuchin is also not guilty of stealing, because his request was turned down. But he tried, in a textbook attempt at corruption.

Now he says he’ll do the right thing in the future: “I can promise the American taxpayer the only time that I will be using milair [military aircraft] is when there are issues either for national security or where ... there’s no other means.”

Is the swamp being drained? Seems not.

Price resigned under pressure. Before his flights became a public scandal, Trump announced to the Boy Scouts that if Price failed to get the votes to repeal Obamacare, Trump would say “Tom, you’re fired.” A “senior White House official” complained that Price was “nowhere to be found” in the Republicans’ final effort to kill Obamacare. Price made the boss look bad, not because he wasted our money, but because he couldn’t deliver.

He’s gone, but the swamp is deeper.

Price’s luxury travel is the visible tip of the iceberg of the wider corruption of values and morality of those in power. Price said “all of this travel was approved by legal and HHS officials.” The Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin took his wife to Europe, where they visited four palaces, took a river cruise, and watched the Wimbledon tennis tournament, paid by taxpayers. He did a bit of work, too. The VA said that its “ethics counsel” okayed everything. The Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, who is proposing big cuts in his department, which includes the EPA, flew an entourage in private jets to the Virgin Islands for 3 days. Not a peep out of the swamp-drainer-in-chief.

Mnuchin will still decide what taxes we all will pay in the future. He and his fellow multi-millionaires will save enough by the tax cuts to take European vacations whenever they want.

Trump’s voters thought that draining the swamp in Washington would be the right thing. There is no evidence that it’s happening. Trump’s hand-picked advisors are living it up in unprecedented fashion at our expense. His ethics watchdogs say it’s all okay.

That’s not doing anything the right way.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October 3, 2017