SEARCHING FOR EEYORE

One of the highlights of my time working in the Southwest was being involved with an equine sanctuary. It was a place whose mission was to provide a lifetime sanctuary for neglected horses, mules, and burros. It was one of those places that have sprung up all over the West to address the disaster and tragedy of how ineptly Uncle Sam enforces the Wild Horse and Burro Act of 1971, designed to protect animals as much a part of our heritage as the Eagle. 

Over time I became aware of the fact that equines built this continent as surely as did man. On a human basis, we have reason to understand what cruelty and injustice are about, seeing much of both where we live and work in our journeys. Our human troubles are nothing compared to what some of these special souls have been through.

Burros can tell you their biography in a glance if you let them. And it is in the eyes a donkey or horse speaks his story, whether the journey has been met by man’s best side or his worst. They speak of the love and fear and abuse and hate they have met on their path.

If I had been asked a few years back if animals had intelligence and souls, I would have thought the person was a new age whack who took a wrong turn on the way to Sedona. As I spent time with my special friends in the burro pens, I learned that by quieting our minds these beings could help us to understand, the things their lives had been about. It’s all there given time: stories of never being given a kind word, a pat or a touch, of being isolated and alone without another donkey or person to simply be with.

You can sense the fear of an animal who shakes if a person approaches. You realize the reason why it takes weeks for some to advance to eat an apple, and know they were probably beaten. It takes weeks to get some to accept a pat or touch, though you can sense the craving they feel at the same time for a person to show them, love. 

That is because until they met you or another, a human hand meant pain and abuse, or an object tossed when they brayed. Then there are those whose owners simply chose to open a gate after their work was done, leaving them to the hands of a government and people who want them to die in the name of water for grazing more cattle and myths that burros and wild horses desecrate our environment as much as a man.

The magic of these creatures is they forgive with much more facility than man. They communicate in a way that is silent, maybe telepathic, but in a manner that is unmistakable to an open mind and heart. I cannot say for certain if there is a place called heaven after we pass, or prove there is a destination for animals to go as well. But it seemed well within possibility each day I saw the small victories won. I learned these beings have found a way to forgiveness of man for all his neglect and cruelty we seldom find for each other. They wish only to be allowed to run free or cared for if we bring them into our world. And like most of us, they seek to feel those fleeting moments where we feel a human touch after our own dark nights of the soul.

NEEDLESS END

Sadly there came a messy and inexcusable end, where it was demonstrated exactly why the Wild Horses and Burros in the west live such tenuous existences. Imagine a board that fired the leader of a 150 resident organization for a quarter-century, with most choosing to resign the same time. Imagine leaving an animal you own in a place you claim to despise while moving Heaven and Earth to get donors to stop helping to buy feed. Imagine going to the depths of filing papers listing a fake corporation board, and trying to sell a huge property to another entity for a dollar. Imagine doing anything you can to keep animals from being adopted by loving homes, because it was not a dramatic enough rebuke to its founder.

Imagine an endgame hastened by a Board President’s annual Italian Vacation, and a subsequent roundup alleged to have been punctuated by cattle prods, roping techniques banned from rodeos, and several deaths of the elders. Picture the anger it must take for a woman to post negative comments on old stories about a place shut months ago. Or the cynicism of sending out fundraising appeals for a place after its closure, to pay an old friend's debt.

In the entire morass, there was never a thought given to the creatures, most are said to have been taken to Texas for no explicable reason, in a cloud of obfuscation. Why send more donkey's to a state that has thousands of abandoned equines dying of drought, and home of a State Parks department committed to shooting burros whenever they can because of perceived overpopulation?  My friends once again found themselves victim to the same species that mess up so many things that wildlife face.

Over the nearly one year their home was winding down, almost all of the residents were offered homes, pastures, and local rescues were interested in assuming operations. Those seeking an adoption policy consistently were thwarted in favor of this Kafka- inspired and a rather farcical end.

ONE PERSONAL NOTE

I have left out names here. The story can be found in other places online, and I am certain that karma and conscience have already begun to balance those scales. What happened here happens to too many animal-based non-profits each year. In the case of Horses and Burros, it looks bleaker each year in terms of BLM’s behavior, which is setting policies on these creatures, while still incapable of actually counting heads to understand how many they manage.

Then there is the advent of domestic horse slaughter returning to New Mexico, a picture ripped from “the Misfits” readying itself to be remade again. For real. I learned of the last one personally. There are even Wildlife Parks (hopefully non-domestic) that are alleged to take equines to be fed to the big cats. In some of those places, they are fed alive.

I still am searching for my donkey friends, trying to find what was their outcomes. An effort was made to obscure the true destination of residents, and nobody can say what really happened to my buddy Eeyore. The gathering was executed without any effort to find out names, family groups, or backgrounds. Though a spotted burro is rare and easy to locate, nobody asked seems willing to let us know the true outcome for my dear friend, and really the rest of his herd. Tragically I had a place for Eeyore to go, an escape plan from the uncertainty, a place just around the corner until we could find him a forever home. It was thwarted by the same sins that sum up this story. Starting with those sins fed by ego. and driven by those darker impulses of the human spirit., Robert Kennedy spoke about during his time.

 

THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER ?

Over the past weeks, the rightist blogs have erupted with posts declaring Barack Obama as the worst President ever. No one deserves intellectual dismissal more than many of these authors.  But it poses an interesting question. A few months into a second term, especially after the turmoil of past weeks it is time to ask how Obama will be remembered as a president. Thanks to polls of academics and other observers out; we are getting an idea of the potential historical verdict. 

The great statistician Nate Silver has given us some very interesting metrics that help us to look both at the incumbent’s achievement and the consequences of any shortcomings real or imagined. It matters that there is much time left in the second term, but whether you think Obamacare is horrible and that the consequences of the legacy even worse, or the polar opposite, it’s interesting to look at what these results say. 

BACKGROUND

A starting point is to look at the most consequential Presidency of the recent past, known by the term “the Reagan Revolution.” It was broadly defined by lower taxes on the upper-income brackets, increased expenditures for Defense, (in retrospect) a less shrill cultural conservatism, and the promotion of business, private initiative, and American exceptionalism place in the world. The two Presidents Bush and Clinton operated within the broad outlines in how the policy was framed, but in terms of tax and fiscal policy, Reagan’s paradigm has still remained the dominant theme.

Though Obama wrote critically of Reagan in his first book, he developed an understanding of his success. By the 2008 campaign, it was obvious that #44 understood #40 then more than his immediate successors may have, but pointed in a direction that sought to restore aspects of the consensus that prevailed in Washington prior to January 1981. 

The long-time keeper of the Democratic flame was Edward Moore Kennedy. Ted’s endorsement of Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008 provided his candidate credibility amongst the traditional party base. Though overshadowed by the memory of his brothers, it is clear that by the length of years, and in terms of his legislative record he was by far the most consequential of the three. From the 1965 immigration reform to the vastly expanded federal role in education, "Teddy" was the most prominent advocate for the creation of a universal entitlement to health insurance and, though he did not live to see the Affordable Care Act enacted, he would have fought fiercely for his top policy priority. Kennedy worked with Republicans frequently, even while fighting movement conservatism. An interesting counterfactual debate would be what would have happened with the ACA if he had lived. 

The rest of the story is familiar. In the midst of two unpopular wars and a brutal recession, the voter’s association of these events with Republicans elected Obama and produced large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. In the infamous words of Rahm Emanuel, it was a crisis Obama should not waste. The new majority went to work, passing a trillion-dollar stimulus, a universal health care bill, and major financial reforms. They built on Kennedy’s work on education policy, and immigration. They reduced defense spending while increasing expenditures on health care. 

The fragile economy, inevitable reaction to the bailouts of the financial system, and the automobile sector (started under Bush), and the health care law contributed to a Republican majority in the House of Representatives after the 2010 midterms. Newly elected “Tea Party” Conservatives interpreted this victory as an expression of popular support for their neo-libertarian views on limited government and social policy. 

The events of October 2013 demonstrated is that functional control of the House Republican Conference does not equate to divided government, where one party controls the presidency and the other controls the entire Congress. The brand of divided government that existed from 1995 to 2001, helped re-elect Clinton as it enabled him to run as a centrist on the basis of welfare reform. The divided government in 2007 through 2009 closed the book on the difficult second term of George W. Bush. The aftermath of 2010 as a consequence has been today’s rather schizophrenic government. 

The 2012 election result begged the question of which party would prevail. A historic distaste of the electorate for Congress, coupled with the tepid approval ratings of Obama, raised hopes that voters would make a clear choice. Instead, the people returned the failed arrangement of power that had made the Congress of 2011 to 2013 a nightmare. 

The result of the 2008 election was not shocking to Conservative Republicans. In 2012 they believed the election would be a victory for Mitt Romney. Their stunned reaction when the called the election for Obama, was epitomized by the viral video of denial seen on Fox News. 

The stunned silence was accompanied by the growing realization that the country was no longer a place where the capture of 60 percent of white voters was enough to win elections. As the Democrats learned in 1980, years of power brought both a misunderstanding of the culture, new media, and demographics. They had viewed the 2006 midterm and 2008 elections as an aberration, much as Democrats had viewed those of 1968 and 1972. Obviously, 2012 proved the pundits incorrect. They lost sight of the real country that voted in elections. 

Like the Democrats of 1979, Republicans failed to read the results correctly. They have lost the popular vote in five of six straight presidential elections. Despite the desultory leadership of Congressional Democrats, they have had control of Congress for 10 years since 1992, a result due more to success crafting safe districts in decennial redistricting.

More problematic was the perceived bankruptcy of what seemed to be new ideas in 1980 and 1994. Conservatives failed to limit government and growth in entitlements and reductions in the tax burden for the upper brackets, made deficits far worse in the George W. Bush era. Americans continued to look to Washington for economic justice and civil rights and guard those entitlements once given. 

More crucially, the battles of the conservative backbenchers against immigration reform and other issues seemed to have an undertone of racism. The veiled code words that motivated the base since 1968 produced the desired result in driving Anglos to the voting booths in 2012. Sadly for the Republicans, the images of Willie Horton and the continued emphasis on social issues did not work in a demographically changing country that ironically embraced one aspect of the libertarian agenda.

They had adopted a laissez-faire attitude towards same-sex marriage and other matters that meshed poorly with the Christian Right social agenda while nominating a Mormon candidate that did not excite that dwindling evangelical base. In the aftermath of the shutdown of 2013, the Republicans meanwhile have fallen into the infighting and ideological purges that remind one more of the San Francisco Democrats of 1984 than the heady days of the Reagan revolution of 1980 and the Gingrich revolution of 1994. 

OBAMA IN HISTORY

Second terms are usually toxic to a Presidency. Since the disaster of FDR’s second term attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court, we have seen two impeachments in 1974 and 1998, the tragedies of Vietnam and Korea in the days of two elected Vice Presidential successors, and of course the disintegration of the second term of George W. Bush, when unexpected events overran the ability of his and an inevitably less talented second-term team to react. So the following is subject to change. 

The 2012 Gallup poll taken February 2–5, 2012, asked 1029 adults in the US, "How do you think each of the following presidents will go down in history—as an outstanding president, above average, average, below average, or poor?" By adding Outstanding and Above Average rankings, Obama is third with 38%, with Reagan at 60% and Clinton at 50%. This is included, as it omits the Kennedy Presidency which is widely at variance with other similarly tenured Presidencies in public polling. 

The Gallup poll about presidential greatness, taken February 2–5, 2011, asked 1015 adults in the US, "Who do you regard as the greatest United States president?" 

The Results:

Ronald Reagan (19%)

Abraham Lincoln (14%)

Bill Clinton (13%)

John F. Kennedy (11%)

George Washington (10%)

Franklin Roosevelt (8%)

Barack Obama (5%)

Theodore Roosevelt (3%)

Harry Truman (3%)

George W. Bush (2%)

Thomas Jefferson (2%)

Jimmy Carter (1%)

Dwight Eisenhower (1%)

George H. W. Bush (1%)

Andrew Jackson (<1%)

Lyndon B. Johnson (<1%)

Richard Nixon (<1%)

Nate Silver looks at matters from the same place as the inventors of “Money Ball” I will link his analysis for greater clarity, but looking at this one chart is fascinating as it looks only at those elected to second terms and the correlation of their re-election totals to ultimate rankings. 

Silver's analysis is as follows:

"Overall, there is a positive relationship between a president’s performance in the Electoral College when seeking a second term, and how the historians have ranked him. (The regression line in the chart below predicts that Mr. Obama will eventually come to be regarded as about the 17th-best president, somewhere on the boundary between good and average.) But it is an extremely rough guide — especially for the presidents who are successful in winning a second term, and who have an opportunity to enhance or undermine their reputations. Voters may judge a president’s first term, but history will judge his second."

MANY BLESSINGS-NOEL

THE BIG TOBACCO LEAGUE

Like most of those reading this piece, I’ll be watching the NFL sometime between now and sunset. After watching the PBS documentary “League of Denial” and reading the companion book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, it will be with a huge sense of moral conflict. 

The debate has been there for a while. and obviously, the League’s agreeing to a $765 million settlement last month with over 4,500 former players and survivors who had sued the league, indicates the NFL knew they had a severe legal problem. 

The legal tactics detailed in the book were executed in the face of mounting medical evidence, America’s favorite sport has ethical issues on the scale of Big Tobacco. Those running the planet’s most powerful sports brand have been using tactics to keep the issue hidden, which seems to be torn from the Philip Morris playbook. 

A few weeks ago, I posted a piece on Howard Cosell, who was one of the first to point out that given the amount taxpayers were spending on stadiums, the amount media was spending on broadcast rights, and the amount we as fans spend on tickets and merchandise, professional sports was a matter of compelling public interest. 

There is a huge body of work defining the risks of permanent brain damage our entertainers are taking on, in order to provide the masses America’s favorite sport. And knowing that playing in the National Football League can destroy men's cognitive health, leaves us with this real dilemma, which is that a couple of decades hence, many of the players we watch today will certainly be disabled. And we have not even mentioned all the collision-related trauma seen on High School Friday Nights or College Football Saturdays. 

Like millions of other American young men, I had experience with “having my bell rung”, back in my high school athletic days, and coupled with a more recent concussion admit to a small bit of shared terror. And this is trivial compared to what we will see on Sunday. I have more than one friend from those days suffering the effects of their participation every day, though thankfully (not yet) affecting cognition. And you are correct that we knew much of what playing collision sports entailed back in the seventies. It was a risk many of my contemporaries readily accepted, for an athletic scholarship was their ticket out of places and neighborhoods few escaped by other means. 

Football is the quintessential American game, and given the powerful images supplied by the networks and the nearly 50 years of the amazingly effective propaganda of its in-house organ, NFL Films, it’s become a pervasive part of our national culture. 

In a recent Huffington Post piece, commentator Tom Krattenmaker points out another interesting dynamic, “Now that the lid is starting to blow off, the revelations are sure to intensify the debate over the complicated relationship between faith, morality, and football.” 

I have always loved the classic quote by the football-addicted Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, that the NFL was “the last bastion of fascism in America.” As Krattenmaker observes, “In recent generations, evangelicals have used football as a huge platform to promote their religious values. And why not, you might ask? The qualities of football closely align with Christian virtues such as sacrifice, discipline, and courage.” 

When the NFL agreed to the aforementioned three-quarters of a billion dollar settlement, it had one very disquieting effect. As William Rhoden noted in the New York Times, “By settling, the former players and their families won immediate financial assistance for pressing and sometimes costly medical problems. However, they lost a golden opportunity to learn more about what might have caused them.” Rhoden also points out these parallels between the NFL and Big Tobacco:

“A trial would have forced the N.F.L. to make a concession similar to the one made years ago by the tobacco industry. That industry was ultimately forced to agree with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases like lung cancer than non-smokers. There is no safe cigarette.”

There also is no safer football helmet. By settling the league stopped short of having to admit that mind-boggling collisions by behemoths at full speed might have a causal effect on later life.  Absent a discovery process, the can again has been kicked further down the road. 

Of course, the league will go on. Though it’s a matter of dwindling time before Riddell and other helmet manufacturers have to face their own encounters with product liability suits and the same legal process begins for the other taxpayer-supported colossus benefitting from big-time football, which is the college and now even the high school versions.

As far as "protecting the shield", the settlement comes without admission of liability. As Rhoden notes, in taking the settlement offer, “the former players — and by extension current players — have spoken: they know what they signed up for and are willing to take the risks. Without admitting guilt or revealing what it might have known about head injuries, the N.F.L. agreed to pay for the outcome of those risks. The settlement was a game-changer in the discussion about head injuries and player safety, and for the N.F.L., it came with a relatively cheap price tag.”

The NFL on its own is a 10 BILLION a year industry. The settlement is a fraction of the annual monies the league and the BCS series receives in TV revenues. The league has actually gotten off cheap compared to Big Tobacco, for we never really will know what they knew and when they knew it. 

One thing that is fascinating, is that the “League of Denial’ project began as a joint venture between ESPN and PBS. Given the fact that in the days leading up to the Frontline broadcast, the ABC/ESPN moniker was removed from the project, is indicative of both the leagues reach and the fact it is carried by the 4 major networks. At least for the foreseeable future, it’s doubtful there will be companion pieces on 60 minutes, NBC Dateline, or Fox News. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

It’s doubtful many will lose much time thinking of concussions come game time. At least, for now, the games are still there.  Few watching will dwell on stats like this one: 45 of the 46 brains of NFL players autopsied to date show the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative neurological disorder. Some players have also developed Lou Gehrig’s disease. 

Given the ongoing progression of athlete’s size and speed, it’s hard to be optimistic that coming years will demonstrate any result but a deepening list of causalities. With the recent settlement, there may be a hundred more cases like Junior Seau and the settlement will be cited as representing a proportionate solution. For now.

As consumers, we are now the only entity that can affect events. For now. As time goes on increasing numbers of parents in America will hit the point future Hall of Famer and frequent concussion victim Kurt Warner did, and start forbidding their kids to suit up. Though the settlement may have addressed the NFL’s issues, for now, it’s doubtful it will stop product liability suits against equipment manufacturers or the even the colleges benefitting from the BCS gravy change. 

And whatever way we personally address the dilemma of continued support of our beloved games, our grandchildren may yet join the rest of earth as soccer fans. For though the gates may be secure for now, it will be interesting to see how quickly the edifice of professional football crumbles without kids suiting up, especially when state-supported universities experience litigation that even the most football addicted boosters will not afford to support.

As far as myself, I plan to post this piece and take a walk to the local bookstore. It’s doubtful I’ll cease watching the NFL overnight. Going cold turkey on my lifelong addiction seems impossible, and it’s impossible to ignore the game’s cultural implications. But it will be from the perspective of a critic, and not that of a fan.

MANY BLESSINGS - NOEL

LEAGUE OF DENIAL- FULL PBS DOCUMENTARY

NFL  FORCES ESPN TO DROP OFF FRONTLINE DOCUMENTARY

GOD AND TEA

It came across my inbox a moment ago. Another fundraising appeal from the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee that seeks to leverage current events in the Capitol for advantage in the 2014 elections. It reminds us of two very germane facts of politics in America. One is that the election cycle never ends. The second is that everything going on this month is driven by winning and losing elections. “Governing” is an afterthought.

They simply do not care about you and me in the Congress of 2013. Those who lose the most in a debt default are the same folks that are losing in the shutdown. It’s those living day to day on their wages and those who are the most vulnerable economically. What happens to the millions on the cutting edge of these self-inflicted calamities, seems to have no place in Capitol Hill’s agenda. Crazier still is the fact that the people most asymmetrically affected by the antics, is the Tea Party's base. 

Given too many years of closely intermingled political action by many in the faith community, it seems as if many religious institutions are trapped by past support of one party and its candidates. In times of political and moral crisis, it’s been the job of the church to illustrate what happens to the individual when our other institutions fail. This is one of those times. We are facing a calamity inflicted upon us by elected leaders who are failing to accomplish their central mission. Which is to govern. 

One of the most discussed aspects of the 1960 election was the influence the Catholic Church might have on an elected Catholic President. Looking back on those days now, those fears were utter nonsense. Nobody in the Vatican or White House questioned the role of each branch of government in our politics. The daily work of government, especially those concerning the power of the purse, was designed to be the product of compromise and consensus between the branches of government and more crucially between the political parties. 

The idea of using government shutdowns and the full faith and credit of the country as hostages in these debates was heretofore inconceivable and for most of our history, it would have been called simple treason. Even now, the majority of Republicans and Democrats alike, believe in governing. There have always been differences in the scope of government’s reach, but not until now has there been a pervasive hatred of government as a concept and idea. 

In this atmosphere, politics is often confused with theology. Instead of a worldview being defined by spiritual beliefs, the reverse occurs and faith is defined by opinions on how we should vote on Election Day. When we look at Scripture, we are not seeing a work that cries against the government. The Bible speaks about the proper role of government in our lives. Amid all the political posturing we see surrounding these debates, it is too often stated as God’s will we vote a certain way. It’s time for people professing faith as justification to shut down the government to consult their source document. 

Forcing a great nation to shut down its government, is contrary to our best political traditions, but also counters what Scripture says. The current crisis is one of a pathological hostility to the government itself, from a group of political extremists and bigots. that is focused on annulling the last two presidential elections. It should be remembered that it is a minority of our elected officials who are demonstrating their nihilistic tactics and flawed ideology. But that extreme minority has hijacked their party and the process and has driven the nation into peril based upon fear and in many cases race. 

The tea party extremists are like to recite religious justification. But Scripture speaks of government as having the obligation to protect its people, to promote the common good, and to collect taxes to do so. Because of their professed hatred of government, those promoting this crisis are hostile to the poor, who are supposed to be protected as part of that common good. 

A reading of the Bible points out that there have always been those who are poor and afflicted. They blame the poor for the timeless curse of poverty while opposing any effort to protect the most fragile, much less do anything to lift them out of poverty. Instead, we see countless children are losing their Head Start, mothers with children losing WIC, and many of those most dependent on their paychecks are losing them via this self-inflicted disaster. 

FINAL THOUGHTS 

The criteria to evaluate and judge civil authority is simple. Do our leaders serve the people, guard their security, maintain a peaceful social order, and act to make the lives of its citizens better? The opposition to the government we are living through is not about the promotion of the commonweal. It’s obstruction meant to serve the ultimate power of wealthy and powerful special interests. However its packaged and promoted, it is simply not a position the tea party minority within a minority can find justification for in a Bible, often quoted but seemingly not read with comprehension. 

MANY BLESSINGS - NOEL

PS- One development of note is the return of Jim Bakker to the frontlines of televangelism. He even seems to have returned to his old haunt, Heritage USA. Here's a highlight.