Is President Obama the Problem or the Solution?

By Tom Kando

President Obama’s visit to China prompts me to write this:

By far the most important topic of discussion between the two governments is the trade relationship between China and the US. It’s simple: America has gone into hock to sustain a living standard far beyond its means. China now owns nearly two trillion US dollars, and its surplus continues to grow by a quarter of a trillion a year.
Soon, Americans - the taxpayers, the consumers, the government, i.e. all of us - will only have money left for one thing: to finance our debt. Just like what would happen to you if you owed so much on your credit card that you’d have to spend your entire paycheck on the finance charge.

Of course, China is also in a fix. Lender and borrower are inseparably joined at the hips, like Siamese twins. The devaluation of the dollar is bad for both sides. As the value of the dollar declines, Americans become poorer and inflation is soon to follow. At the same time, China’s investment in the US loses much of its value. So both sides lose, just like the banks who recently made all those bad sub-prime loans and the borrowers who shouldn’t have borrowed. The borrowers lose their homes and the banks don’t get their money back. Everyone is screwed.

I have no idea how President Obama, the Chinese leadership and the rest of the world are planning to fix things, i.e. to change course from the catastrophic direction in which the world economy is headed. But catastrophe is the only word which aptly describes the situation which President Obama inherited.

And that is what I want to emphasize: Every one of the staggering problems which are threatening our very survival were created by decades of economic mis-management and societal breakdown.

President Obama has inherited the worst conditions ever handed down to a newly elected US President: The worst economic recession in three quarters of a century; two wars; out-of-control deficits at all levels of government and in our trade with nearly every country; a collapsing dollar; a rapidly growing number of uninsured, unemployed, uneducated, unhoused; a seemingly irreversible polarization of income, with both poverty and opulent wealth still skyrocketing, while the middle-class vanishes; a brainwashed population which renders even the discussion of the only remedy - raising taxes - anathema, and which has put it its head that somehow the government, and not Wall Street, is the problem.

I am not so simple-minded as to blame the Bushites for everything (although they sure didn’t help). I understand that the seeds of our undoing were sown over a much longer period of time than the eight years of neo-conservative mismanagement. Maybe the problem is cultural. Maybe we are like ancient Rome. Maybe we are failing as a society. But I don’t want to believe this.

All I know is that it is obscene to blame the new President for these problems. His, and his team’s, efforts so far are nothing short of heroic. I don’t know whether they will succeed, but the problems they are facing are so daunting that it is miraculous to even see them try.

My French friend Paul said this to me, in a joking way, immediately after Obama’s election last fall: “You Americans drove your country into a ditch, so now of course you turn to a black man to bail you out. Figures.” leave comment here Read more...

Why do the Europeans get it so often wrong?

By Tom Kando

See, I told you that I would switch sides next time. So here I go. Now everyone can be mad at me: If there is a way for Europeans to misunderstand America, they’ll find it. Here are some examples:

1. This week, Elsevier Magazine (The Dutch Time or Newsweek) has a major story about American politics. In it, there is a great deal of emphasis on the popularity of people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and Fox News. The Dutch (and other Europeans) have the impression that most Americans are mesmerized and brainwashed by these right-wing demagogues.

To be sure, millions of Americans are. But what most Europeans don’t understand is that more Americans are not. I estimate that three-quarters of the American people find these demagogues unattractive, and one-third finds them positively repulsive - as I do. Certainly the vast majority of people on the East Coast and on the West Coast, in the major cosmopolitan centers, find people like Glenn Beck a bad joke, convinced (as I am) that ignorant, vulgar, dishonest and self-inflated people like that eventually end up in the ditch, as Joe McCarthy did. But most Europeans believe that these people represent America. That’s wrong. We elected Obama, remember?
Besides, we have our Glenn Becks, but they have their Geert Wilders, their Le Pens, their Jorg Haider, their Istvan Csurka and many other cuckoos.

2. A recent dialogue with some Dutch friends went like this: The American visitor says: “Why are Europeans so ungrateful? Don’t they remember that Americans fought and died by the hundreds of thousands to free them from Fascism?”

The European replies:“Ha! It’s not the Americans who freed us, it was the Canadians.”

Apparently, some Europeans will deny America credit for anything. Yes, yes, I know, technically, it was the Canadians who played the major role in Holland’s liberation in 1945. But for crying out loud, everybody knows that the Normandy invasion and the entire defeat of Hitler in Western Europe was an overwhelmingly American affair!

3. The Swine flu? Some of my European friends like to call it the “American flu.” When I first heard them use that label, I questioned this, and they replied:

“Well, it comes from your country.”
“I thought it came from Mexico,” was my surprised answer.
But they insisted that it originated in the US.
“Well, let’s just call it the H1N1 flu,” I suggested graciously. That way, no one gets blamed. But they kept calling it the “American flu.”

4. There is this guy Maarten, who publishes a provocative Magazine called Maarten! I picked up a recent issue totally dedicated to America, under the title “Maarten Goes America.” It contains political and cultural analyses of the US by many Dutch authors. There is some sympathy, some understanding and some refreshing thinking. Maarten questions some of the stereotypes which Europeans hold about us - things like the “superficial” American (p. 3). Good. He points out that we handle immigration better than they do (p. 62). Thank you, Maarten!

But there are also some stupid things: One article lists America’s ten most important films. Number One, as most representative of American culture, is The Godfather, followed by movies like Dr. Strangelove, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, JFK and Wall Street (p. 82). Apparently, only conspiracy movies made the list. This is neither good film history nor good sociology.

Maarten also avers that Baseball and American Football are “lame,” i.e. boring. Now that gives a whole new meaning to the words “pot” and “kettle”!
I can’t think of anything more boring than European soccer - sitting through a dreadful hour and a half to see a bunch of men run up and down a field and score one or zero points, usually by penalty! Contrast this with the rich, mathematical and psychological strategies required in baseball and American football - games comparable to chess in their intellectual complexity - not to mention the awesome organized,controlled, violence of American football - magnificent sports! leave comment here Read more...

The Power of Language

by Madeleine Kando

I teach French. And sometime Spanish but only when I can get away with it. I teach very little people. They are so young in fact that they barely understand the concept of another language. But that’s ok. We all like the way French sounds, me and my students, and that is a good start.

I try to teach my young brood that French has two genders.
‘Yes’ I tell them. ‘In French every word is either a boy word or a girl word. The moon is a girl word and the sun is a boy word’. So we play a game with animal beanbags. I put down two boxes. One for the boy beanbags and one for the girl beanbags. I tell them that an elephant is a boy word and a turtle is a girl word. Five year old Marty asks: ‘what if the turtle is a boy?’ ‘Aha!’ I say. ‘Very good question! Well, the poor boy turtle still would be called ‘la tortue’. He would still have a girl name.’ Marty’s face shows great confusion but eventually he accepts this as a fact of life. Kids are good at that. They accept things.

Then I realize that maybe explaining this to a 5 year old is counterproductive. After all, French babies don’t know about gender, yet they never make a mistake by saying ‘le tortue’ instead of ‘la tortue’. To them the animal’s name is ‘latortue’, period. Eventually they will learn that the ‘la’ part is the article and the ‘tortue’ part is the noun. The trick is then to avoid saying something like: ‘Maman, il y a une latortue dans l’eau!’ (Mom, there is a ‘theturtle’ in the water).

In my older classes I tell my students that words put together the wrong way can create havoc if you are not totally familiar with a language. Like a sign in Norway that reads: “Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar”. And I warn them never to ask ‘Ou est la salle de bain’ (Where is the bathroom) in a Paris café or they might be mistaken for a vagrant in dire need of a bath.

These young students of mine should become aware that words are so powerful that they can shape the course of history. As an example I tell them about George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in 2003 when he said: ‘The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ (Which meant that Saddam was developing a nuclear weapon).

‘What if Bush had said: ‘The British government believes that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ 'Would the word ‘believes’ have qualified as a reason to go to war?’ I ask them? (It turns out that the British government only ‘believed’ Saddam had bought yellow cake since we never did find WMD’s, but that’s just a small detail in hindsight).

‘Even your own name is important' I tell them, 'and depends a lot on when you were born. How many parents, do you think, named their baby boy ‘Adolf’ after the second world War? Even though ‘Adolf’ means ‘Noble Wolf’, there was nothing noble about Adolf Hitler.’

Words have many degrees of strength, from neutral to inflammatory to offensive. They can stir up strong emotions. To illustrate we play a game by ‘conjugating’ verbs that increase in negative intensity like this: I am uninformed, you are ignorant, he is stupid’. Or: ‘I am slim, you are skinny, he is emaciated. And: I am laid-back, you are inactive, he is lazy. And so on.

Computer related terms can be quite a mouthful in French. Instead of ‘spam’ the French say:‘J’ai recu du courrier indésirable d’origine inconnue’. (I received undesirable email of unknown origin). There is a bug in my program is ‘le programme souffre d’un défault du logiciel’ (The program suffers from a logical mistake). ‘You can always substitute the English word and put a ‘le’ in front of it (le spam, le web)' I tell them. 'Just remember that it is officially verboten!'

The French, purists as they are, seem to be under the illusion that they can censure their language. But it's a lost battle, like prohibition. You cannot tell a language what to do. It is one of the most organic processes of human life. That is the power of language!
leave comment here Read more...

The Student and the Teacher

By Tom Kando

The other day, I wrote that Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, despite what his venomous detractors were saying and writing. It wasn’t just Limbaugh, Beck and other rabid right-wingers who ridiculed the President for receiving the prestigious award. He was also made fun of by all the PC crowd - Saturday Night Live, Letterman, Conan O’Brien, you name it. But here is a thought - an analogy if you will (which will aggravate many of you):

When the Nobel Committee gave our President the Nobel Prize, it was the equivalent of giving him an "A" for his firs midterm.

You see, Europe is the teacher, and America is the student. Europe is the parent. America is the child. So what the teacher is saying is that President Obama has passed his first midterm with flying colors. He is a brilliant and promising student. (His predecessor flunked out of school).

The analogy continues: Europe is old and wise. America is young and less experienced. It is learning.

How dare you! Some of you will say. Europe has f... up more than anyone else - as recently as six decades ago, it tried to commit mass suicide. It gave us Fascism, Communism, Colonialism and Racism. And they are supposed to teach us? Don’t make me laugh!

But wait. That’s also part of the analogy: The older folks (teachers, parents) whose job it is to teach the younger folks always have a lifetime of trials and errors behind them. It’s called experience. And that is why they should be our teachers. Isn’t the best AA counselor a reformed alcoholic? The best psychologist someone who has undergone psychotherapy?
For example, it is because of its catastrophic experience that Europe knows, with absolute certitude, that war is not the way to go. War is not only immoral, but it is also stupid.
I can’t get into a debate here as to whether or not some wars are just and necessary. There is always that one prototype of the just war: the one against Hitler. Yes, that one had to be fought. But by and large, most wars were stupid and unnecessary. The world (that is, all sides) would have been better off without most of the wars which have been fought, including World War One, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, you name it.

Another lesson we should learn from Europe is that universal, publically funded health care is good. They have had it for the better part of a century, and they are the better for it. It works. People are healthier while spending less on medicine, and the government isn’t broke (at least, no more than here). Everyone wins. Again, experience.

Tomorrow, I might turn around and say that Europe has a lot to learn from America - our country’s youthful idealism, optimism, elan vital, creativity, freedom. But today, this is my insight.
leave comment here Read more...

Why are we in Pakistan - and Everywhere else?

By Tom Kando

Day after day, we read how much the Pakistanis hate us, and how they blame us for all their woes. Some believe that car bombings, such as the one that killed 150 people last week, are carried out by Americans. Sure. And the World Trade Center was blown up by George W. Bush, right? Why on earth does America behave this way? We just increased our aid package to Pakistan by $8 billion. That’s over and beyond the annual billions we have already been spending on that country for God knows how many years. When two married people hate each other, they get a divorce. Why are we even there? Oh yes, I forgot - Al Qaeda, the Taliban, terrorism.

If that’s the reason, then we should also be in all the other potential havens for terrorists, including Somalia, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Iran, North Korea, Chechnya, practically every other Middle Eastern country, half of Africa, and don’t forget the narco-terrorists in Latin America. We should be "nation building" not just in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also in dozens of other countries.
Is there a quicker way for America to bleed and to spend itself into oblivion? Nuts!
leave comment here Read more...

My Hairdresser

by Madeleine Kando

You might think that the best place to get information these days is the internet but I would rate my hairdresser as a close second. That’s where I find out who recently had a tummy tuck, whose kids are on ritalin for ADD, how much my neighbor’s husband makes per year and so on.

Hairdressers are so many things rolled into one you see. They not only take care of our looks, they are our therapist, our business adviser and our personal gossip columnist.

Some hairdressers are better at listening than others. Especially the ones that don’t really understand English that well. As you confess your sins of the month, they nod a lot and once in a while respond with an empathic ‘da’ or ‘si, si’. It’s very therapeutic.

In a well staffed salon, the sharing can become a little overwhelming. As I am listening to my hairdresser’s weight loss advise, the woman next to me is engaged in a sinister conversation about the gory details of a bikini wax gone sour which left her looking like a plucked chicken down there.

I have known my hairdresser for a long time. She started out as a trainee in a large hairdresser salon and eventually started her own business. Since then, her reputation as a hair stylist and, more importantly, as confessionalist has spread and she is now fully booked. While I am whisked to a hairdryer, she is already fully engaged in the next client’s confession and I feel completely forgotten and abandoned.

Eavesdropping onto the next client's confession and my hairdresser's total engagement, I console myself with the thought that MY confession, of course, was a lot more interesting.

If I was more coordinated with my hands I probably would want to become a hairdresser. What a wealth of material I would gather to write about. But I am not confident enough. It takes a lot of guts to pick up a pair of scissors and slice through someone’s hair. Haircuts are so irreversible you see. And being confronted with that kind of decision making on a daily basis is only for the brave hearted. Not me. leave comment here Read more...

Sociology as bs: Deconstructing Michael Jackson

By Tom Kando

Hi Folks: While I love Sociology, I must also recognize that my discipline is sometimes full of bs. So I thought I’d illustrate - as a joke - the style of some of my "post-modern" colleagues. For this, I use the current post-mortem cult and economic exploitation of the late great Michael Jackson. Be aware: the paragraph is basically meaningless verbiage (= bs), not unlike some of the things which some sociologists write. At the end, I try to help you with an interpretation of this spoof:
The subtext of the narrative which celebrates Michael Jackson as perhaps our greatest cultural icon is a social construction as well as an intersubjective symbolic reproduction. The bureaucratization (or even bureaucretinization) of our post-modern culture must be deconstructed along gender, ethnic and other diversity motives rather than through a totalizing and essentializing Weberian, Parsonian or even Perrowian perspective. A corporate culture grounded in post-modern chaos theory reveals that both the performative and the totalizing narratives are sublimating gender-specific and race-specific heterosexist motives into the larger text of a constructivist throwback to value rationality. Kohlberg's moral stages drive the social reproduction of interpretive schemes used as moral categories denoting or even connoting a Eurocentric labeling process. Thus, sociologists' interpretations are not, as Irving Louis Horowitz recently argued, in a state of decomposition but they represent, rather, a fertile and aromatic compost


Interpretation:
1st sentence: This says nothing; just that there is a lot of talk about Michael Jackson...
2nd sentence: This says nothing; it just drops some sociological words and names.
3rd sentence: same.
4th sentence: same
last sentence: an inside joke - Horowitz was unhappy with the way Sociology was going.
leave comment here Read more...

My success story

by Madeleine Kando

I first started loosing weight when I was 13. I had to bike 5 miles each way to school and I was 110 pounds but had other things to think about than worry about loosing a measly 5 pounds.

The trouble continued after I went through a physical fitness program and started my first job at a roller skating rink where I spent about 3 nights per week on roller skates. Hello, the next 5 pounds came off!

When I was 21 I lived in Spain for a while with a French roommate, Michelle. She was small and I admired her physique and it wasn’t too long before I shed another 5 pounds trying to emulate her petite stature.

So when I moved back to Holland I decided to shape up and started my first diet by following the typical Dutch milk/eggs/cheese/herring thing and cutting out every bit of vegetables I could. I got up to 140 pounds...for like a week! But I just couldn’t keep it up. I just couldn’t say no to those damn vegetables.

Of course, I knew that the key was to stay on the couch and watch tv. I locked the doors, threw away my health club membership card, drove everywhere I could and gave away my bike. But my weight went up and down like a yo-yo. Vegetables and fruits kept luring me back!

By the time I turned 30 I had had it. I surfed the internet for some weight gain motivation. And by pure chance I found this gem of a site: ‘STAYPUT’. This is one of the best things that has happened to me. I spent the better part of two days sitting (the site’s first recommendation) and reading the articles. I had hit the jackpot. I was going to gain every last bit of weight and keep it! I started with STAYPUT’S 4-day challenge, a balance of meats, milk, cheese, cookies and ice cream at every meal.

Since then I read labels religiously and many times decide the item isn’t worth the price if it doesn’t contain enough calories. I also finish everything that’s on my plate. After a couple of minor mis-steps along the way I am now 32 pounds heavier at my goal weight of 170 pounds!

So, STAYPUT, thank you so very much! You have changed my life. It can be done. leave comment here Read more...

Will we ever travel to the stars?

By Tom Kando

I just read that astronomers have discovered another thirty extra-solar planets. Altogether, we have now identified over 400 such bodies, circling near-by and not-so near-by stars. This raises the wishful thought of traveling to those planets, some day. If we are ever going to find extra-terrestrial life, that’s where we must look for it.The effort to establish radio contact with extra-terrestrials on some of those planets is worthwhile. We could get a message to some of them in 5 to 10 years, and vice-versa. So we’d only need to wait a decade to 20 years to get a reply. However, traveling there ourselves, or expecting them to land here, that’s another matter.

Now that we have landed on the moon and probed the outer limits of the solar system with our machines, we often assume that Star Trek-like interstellar travel is just around the corner. Forget it. Not in a million years. It's one thing to cross the solar system and perhaps land on Mars or even circle Jupiter. It is quite something else to reach even the closest star.

The closest star, Alpha Centauri, is 1.3 parsecs away, or 4.3 light-years. Since light travels at over 186,000 miles per second and there are 31.5 million seconds in a year, light covers nearly 6 trillion miles in a year. Alpha Centauri is over four times farther than that, i.e. over 25 trillion miles away.

Assume that we somehow manage to double the speed of our currently most advanced space vehicles. Some of our satellites and rockets can now circle the earth twice in an hour, so let's assume that we can speed them up to 100,000 miles per hour. At that speed, it would take an astronaut 29,000 years to reach the closest star. That's about as much time as has lapsed since Cro-Magnon man!

Now let's assume, fantastically, that we can speed up space travel to one-tenth of the speed of light. Our rockets would now travel at 67 million mph (faster than any conceivable Indy car, right?). We could reach the sun in two hours. How long would it take to get to Alpha Centauri? 43 years, i.e. the better part of a lifetime. Note that such a fantastic vehicle would travel one thousand times faster than our fastest space ships (e.g. the space shuttle) are currently capable of. (Today, our fastest space vehicles reach one-ten thousandth of the speed of light, which is the same difference as that between a man walking and the speed of the space shuttle itself).

Were we to use our current state-of-the-art vehicles for interstellar travel, we would reach the closest star in 58,000 years, i.e. fifteen times longer than the time elapsed since the construction of the ancient Egyptian pyramids.

Let's face it: We may not be completely earth-bound, but we are certainly the prisoners of the solar system - forever. And from what we have learned about our sister planets in the 20th and 21st centuries, it is becoming apparent that earth is the only livable, lovable and life-filled body in our planetary system. The moral of this story? We better learn to do things right here at home, because there is nowhere else to escape to - there is no exit! leave comment here Read more...

Did Obama Deserve the Nobel Prize?

By Tom Kando

I just sent this letter to the Sacramento Bee, in response to a whole slew of letters very critical of Obama's receipt of the Nobel Prize:

You recently published an amazing amount of vitriol about President Obama’s Nobel Prize. Even on the "Left Coast," many hate the man - viscerally, irrationally, moronically.True, the Nobel Committee was motivated to encourage the beleaguered President, in the face of the hateful opposition illustrated by such letters as Gonzalez, McPherson, Dupree, Moore, Bogetich, and Labahn.

But let’s not overlook the President’s real accomplishments: (1) His stimulus program has pulled us back from the abyss where decades of Republican and Wall Street greed and mismanagement had brought us. He has canceled wasteful military programs, including (2) the Eastern European missile shield and (3) a military airplane. He is improving relations (4) in the Middle East, (5) with Iran, (6) Russia and (7) North Korea. (8)He is engaged in a titanic effort to reform health care, and (9) his environmental policies are bringing America back to a position of leadership in that area as well.

Most importantly, he has fundamentally altered the planet’s political climate, from confrontation and contempt for America, to respect and cooperation. All these steps are tangible progress, not vague hopes. They can be taken to the bank.
This is a miraculous list of achievements, after nine months. This presidency is truly transformational. It richly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

leave comment here Read more...