And Lethargy for All

Bob Herbert says this in todays New York Times:

There’s a hole in the American system where the leadership used to be. The country that led the miraculous rebuilding effort in the aftermath of World War II can’t even build an adequate system of levees on its own Gulf Coast.

The most effective answer to this leadership vacuum would be a new era of political activism by ordinary citizens. The biggest, most far-reaching changes of the past century — the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement — were not primarily the result of elective politics, but rather the hard work of committed citizen-activists fed up with the status quo.

It’s time for thoughtful citizens to turn off their TVs and step into the public arena. Protest. Attend meetings. Circulate petitions. Run for office. I suspect the public right now is way ahead of the politicians when it comes to ideas about creating a more peaceful, more equitable, more intelligent society ("Long on Rhetoric, Short on Sorrow").

This is a good perscription, but it will require that we have more guts and energy than our leaders.

An Unusual Election

I heard an interesting fact this week on the Diann Rehm Show. Not since 1952 have we had a presidential election where there was neither an incubant or a vice-president running for office.

Willie Loman?

Yesterday in the New York Times, Frank Rich wrote, "President Bush always had one asset he could fall back on: the self-confidence of a born salesman. Like Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” he knew how to roll out a new product, however deceptive or useless, with conviction and stagecraft. What the world saw on Wednesday night was a defeated Willy Loman who looked as broken as his war" (“He’s in the Bunker Now”). That's a surprising and interesting image of our president.

Land of Disparity

In today's New York Times, David Brooks writes the following:

Income inequality is on the rise. The rich are getting better at passing their advantages on to their kids….Seymour Martin Lipset, the eminent sociologist who died at 84 on New Year’s Eve. Lipset, …was relentlessly empirical, and rested his conclusions [about inequality] on data as well as history and philosophy. He found that Americans have for centuries embraced individualistic, meritocratic, antistatist values, even at times when income inequality was greater than it is today.

Large majorities of Americans have always believed that individuals are responsible for their own success, Lipset reported, while people in other countries are much more likely to point to forces beyond individual control. Sixty-five percent of Americans believe hard work is the key to success; only 12 percent think luck plays a major role. In his “American Exceptionalism” (1996), Lipset pointed out that 78 percent of Americans endorse the view that “the strength of this country today is mostly based on the success of American business.” Fewer than a third of all Americans believe the state has a responsibility to reduce income disparities, compared with 82 percent of Italians. Over 70 percent of Americans believe “individuals should take more responsibility for providing for themselves” whereas most Japanese believe “the state should take more responsibility to ensure everyone is provided for.”…Political movements that run afoul of these individualistic, achievement-oriented values rarely prosper. (“The American Way of Equality")