Last week a poll revealed that 75% of the American people are dissatisfied with the U.S. Congress, and that’s one of the lowest figures for Congressional popularity in some time, if ever.  On the surface, one might conclude that, to improve its standing, all Congress has to do is to reverse course.  Alas, that would result in close to the same figures, I suspect.

Why?  Because, if you’ve been reading about all the Congressional shenanigans, you know that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Republican senators aren’t happy with the Democrat-controlled Senate or the President, and the Democrat-controlled Senate and Democratic representatives are close to furious with the Republican-controlled House. 

For all these ideological differences, there’s one absolute similarity between both sides in Congress.  Neither they, nor their supporters, really want to deal with the facts of the situation they face.  In reality, if they did, most of them feel they’d soon be voted out of office.  Both sides are wrong, and neither side can afford to admit it… or to compromise.

Everyone agrees in principle that the U.S. government can’t keep spending more than we collect in various tax revenues.  What they’re vigorously opposed on is where to make up the difference, either through spending cuts or increasing revenues.

We can’t keep increasing the amount the federal government spends on health care unless we increase taxes, and if we cut federal health care expenditures to avoid raising taxes, the cuts will be so deep that the poor, the lower middle class and working classes will suffer when they reach retirement age, if not before. The same problem exists in dealing with Social Security – unless future retirement ages are increased, but that will likely result in effective benefit cuts because, for a variety of reasons, many older workers retire before they’re eligible for full benefits.

There are other funding sources, of course, but one or another entrenched interest opposes them, and thus, so do the legislators beholden to those interests.  We’ve all seen the disasters, for example, created by the speculation in all sorts of financial transactions.  So what about a federal tax on securities and stock market transactions?  Not just on capital gains, but on the transaction itself, paid not by the investor but by the entity handling the trade.  Do you really think Goldman-Sachs would let Congress anywhere near that? Most agriculture subsidies go to corporate farmers?  Do we really need them?  Especially when the ethanol tax credit raises food prices?  Just try to cut those subsidies and revenue losses.

Over forty percent of all Americans pay no federal income taxes.  Just see what happens if any legislator suggests that they should.  What about getting rid of mortgage interest payment deductions for second homes?  Not first homes, but second homes, vacation homes, etc.?  Why should taxpayers get a tax deduction for a vacation home?  Suggest this, and the realtors and the bankers will be after any Congressman who does.

The list of possible fixes is long, and many of them would indeed work, but one thing is clear.  Everyone knows the system needs fixing, and no one wants to pay for it.  Each interest wants someone else to pay for it, and because that’s so, Congress can’t come up with a solution… and everyone’s mad at Congress, because each representative and Senator is indeed representing the interests of those who either elected them or contributed the funds that elected them.  But, for all the talk about reaching a solution, woe betide any representative who thinks about compromising with the other side.

Just ask former Senator Bob Bennett what a single vote toward a compromise does to a senator’s career.

Let me say from the onset that I am not the biggest fan or supporter of Barack Obama, and I certainly think he’s made more than his share of mistakes, both in leadership and in the tactics he’s used or failed to use in attempting to set and carry out his policies.  That said, I am absolutely and totally appalled by the continuing furor over whether he is a U.S. citizen and the fact that he felt compelled to use his own discretionary funds to send an attorney to Hawaii to obtain an official birth certificate from the state government there. 

Copies of his birth certification have been available online for years.  There are newspaper stories in the original Honolulu papers from fifty years ago announcing his birth in Hawaii.  Come on… those couldn’t have been planted fifty years ago.  Who back then even knew that the son of an 18 year old Kansas girl and a black Kenyan graduate student would be president of the United States? 

Now, I realize that such rational arguments will not suffice against the blind fanaticism of the most rabid “birther” types, because nothing penetrates fanaticism, whether that fanaticism is of the far right or the far left, or of Islamic fundamentalists or of hard-core IRA members or of the extreme Northern Ireland protestants.

But why do the rest of us buy into this “debate”?  Why do the supposedly “reputable” members of the press keep fanning the issue to keep it alive?  Why do theoretically intelligent politicians and candidates harp on it?  Because there’s nothing too low and base they won’t do to garner votes from the most ignorant and prejudiced of Americans?  And why is it even being discussed when the United States is involved in two or more wars, when the financial and economic future of the United States is on the line, and when the Congress will have to decide the future of what our government will be like in what it funds and what it does not, and who gets taxed how much and who doesn’t? 

Is it because no one wants to face the hard issues, including the issue of global warming, which was certainly a factor in the formation of the terrible tornadoes that just devastated Alabama?  Is it because all too many Americans don’t understand much of anything beyond their daily focus… or that they just don’t care? Because the press is incompetent in conveying what is at stake?  Or because most Americans don’t want to know that they can’t keep having all the programs that now exist without raising taxes and that they and their elected representatives must choose between fewer and less comprehensive programs and comparatively lower taxation [but likely some more taxes] and continuing all current programs with much  higher taxes, particularly on the middle class [since, as I’ve pointed out time and time again, taxing just the richest of the rich won’t raise the necessary revenue]?

Both the Republicans and the Democrats are effectively avoiding dealing with these issues and threatening, implicitly, if not explicitly, to shut down government and to destroy the credit-worthiness of the United States rather than back down – and the lead item in the news is that the president has been forced by media and popular pressure to provide – once again – an “official” copy of his birth certificate?  And now some of Obama’s black supporters are outraged that he did provide the certificate, while our “bread and circus” media hypes the whole situation.

If we aren’t the laughing stock of the world over this “birther” nonsense… we deserve to be.

Last week I read a review of the new Robert Redford movie, The Conspirator, and ran across the following: “It should be tense and thrilling, full of rich, powerful performances; instead it will make you feel like you should be taking notes in preparation for a high school exam.  And like the last film Redford directed, the terrorism drama Lions for Lambs, it’s painfully preachy and sanctimonious.”

Since I haven’t yet seen the film, I can’t comment on the first part of the above excerpt, but the second part suggests I might like the film, possibly because I thought Lions for Lambs was a good film.  I understand why many people didn’t like it, because it hits perilously close to all too many American illusions and self-deceptions, and given Redford’s choice of topic in The Conspirator [the trial of the boarding house owner who was suspected of helping Lincoln’s assassin], I suspect his latest movie is likely to do the same, if in a historical context.

The review, however, raises a legitimate question about all forms of “entertainment,” a question I’ll put in a satiric form, given my views of most of the most popular entertainment available today.  Does entertainment have to be largely, if not totally, devoid of meaningful content, depth, and questioning to be entertaining to the majority of today’s audiences and readers? 

Obviously, this question and the answer affect me personally and professionally, but they affect all writers, directors, and producers as well.  For years I’ve been criticized, as have Redford and a few others, by some readers for being “preachy,” and it’s no secret that books and movies that raise the kinds of questions we offer seldom, if ever, reach the top of the sales charts.  That’s understandable, and by itself, not a problem.  We all know the risks involved in attempting to make something deeper and more intellectually provocative. But what I’ve also noted is that more and more reviews are defining good entertainment in terms of, if you will, total detachment from depth or reality, and the movie producers are obliging them, such as with new releases that feature almost exclusively car chases, crashes, mayhem, sex, and violence.

Details of actual history, as are likely to be brought up in The Conspirator, can’t possibly compete in terms of instant visual appeal, but do all movies have to have the same kind of appeal, and do movies that don’t have such appeal have to be denigrated because they don’t?

One of the things [among many] that bothers me about the kind of reviews such as the one I’ve quoted above is the implication that anything with detail can’t be entertaining or engrossing, and that anything serious has to be “thrilling” to compensate for the seriousness, as if a quietly taut drama can’t be entertaining.  One of the most “sinister” movies I’ve ever seen shows no violence and contains no direct threats and yet reveals total social control of a family and a society where everyone is perfectly behaved.  It’s called The Age of Innocence.  Of course, just how sinister it appears to viewers depends entirely on their understanding of history and how societies work.

If you want dark and sinister, truly dark and sinister, review the backroom deals leading to the last financial meltdown – no car chases, no shootings, no bombs, no speeches, and no rabble-rousing.  Just men at desks pursuing profit and destroying millions of jobs, thousands of businesses, and creating uncounted suicides and broken homes.  But those details aren’t entertaining… and showing them in a movie would be far too preachy, and definitely not entertaining, or even exciting.

Give us zombies, the living dead, vampires, or car chases any day.  We just want pretend thrilling, not the truly sinister… and that’s fine, but enough of running down movies and books that deal with aspects of reality.  If reviewers don’t like them, they should just say that they’ll bore most people because they’ll make them think too much… that’s if they’ve got the nerve to say so.

As a result of a blog earlier this month and the paperback publication of Arms-Commander, I’ve received inquiries about and statements declaring that I’m a man-hater and pushing “feminist propaganda.”  Now, I’d be the first to admit that I’m fond of women. More than fond, in fact, but then, after having been married three times, if far more years to the lady whose companionship I now enjoy and appreciate than either of the other two, and having six daughters as well as two sons, it would be strange if I didn’t have a great interest in and appreciation of women.

That appreciation, however, has little to do with the facts of the situation on this planet and in the United States.  As I noted earlier, even in the relatively more “advantaged” United States, on average, working women make about 25% less than working men do.  The differential between men and women doing the same jobs ranges from almost nothing to as much as 40% at the higher corporate executive levels, but women’s pay remains, on average, significantly below that of men in the same or similar positions, as documented rather clearly in the current lawsuit against WalMart currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Although a recent article in the Wall Street Journal declared that working single men and women between ages 22 and 30 earned roughly the same amount, that purported equality doesn’t address the fact that there’s still a huge discrepancy between genders among married men and women and among older age groups. Despite the fact that women have had the ability to vote and run for public office in the United States for roughly a century, less than twenty percent of members of Congress are women. 

The situation was far worse in the past, and still is in many other nations across the world.  People tend to forget that less than two centuries ago, in the good old USA, married women could own no property, and all a woman’s clothes and her jewelry, even if provided by her family or earned or made by her, belonged to her husband.

Yet… when I write a book, such as The Soprano Sorceress or Arms-Commander, which depicts a woman in a fantasy world fighting against situations such as this, it’s called by some feminist propaganda or ultra-feminist. 

Come again?  I’ve depicted conditions similar to those which have existed for the majority of the time that human culture has existed on Earth… and I’ve had the nerve to suggest that, first, such conditions aren’t exactly fair to women, and, second, that a talented woman might just do better than a bunch of chauvinistic men. It’s not exactly my imagination that the three British rulers with the longest time on the throne were all women – Elizabeth I, Victoria, and Elizabeth II – and two of those three lived and ruled in a time when ruling wasn’t just ceremonial, and the times that they ruled were among those when Britain’s power was at a zenith.

It’s considered “realistic” when a novelist depicts sword-play and blood and gore in visceral detail, but unrealistic or propagandistic when he or she depicts sexual politics and traditional and historic gender roles in equally accurate detail?  But then, those who complain may really be suggesting that I’m pushing propaganda by suggesting that a woman can and would do better. 

As women take their places in more and more critical and important occupations, it’s becoming all too clear that very often they can do better than many of their male predecessors and peers, as incidentally that Wall Street Journal points out, and perhaps the fact that I occasionally depict that [as well as occasionally depict some truly competent and villainous women] troubles those readers who seem to think that the past gender roles of men and women were as matters should be and that I should not even attempt to suggest otherwise, either in science fiction or fantasy.

That’s feminist propaganda?

As described in the April 2^nd issue of The Economist, human beings are highly influenced, in fact, excessively over-influenced by designer labels.  Researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands did extensive research on the impact of designer labels on people and discovered, among other things, that people’s perceptions of others varied widely depending in the label/logo of the clothes they wore – even when the clothes were absolutely identical except for that label/logo. 

This influence ranged far beyond merely “rating” people.  When soliciting for charity, for example, volunteer solicitors were again clad in clothing identical except for logos, and those wearing “labeled” clothing received almost twice as much as those wearing garments without logos.  In various transaction games, those participants who wore designer labeled clothing were trusted with more than a third more in funds than those wearing unlabeled clothing.

Over the years, I’ve occasionally asked people why they’ll pay so much more for a “designer” outfit, and, invariably the response has been that they want the quality.  Yet I can recall, years ago, when Ralph Lauren created several items where the logo was not easily visible to others or in at least one case, not visible at all.  Those items were produced for less than a year because sales were so poor, even though the quality was the same as that of other Lauren clothing.  One customer even complained to my son, who was working at a Lauren outlet during his college years, that he didn’t want to buy any Lauren clothing if the label didn’t happen to be visible.

While there are people who can tell the difference between various styles and makes of clothes at a glance, studies have shown that the vast majority cannot – which may explain where the label/logo comes in. In fact, they even have trouble in discerning bad fake logos and labels. In the animal kingdom, such displays as the peacock’s tail essentially can’t be faked.  The healthier and stronger the peacock, the larger, brighter, and shinier the tail. An unhealthy peacock just can’t present a splendid tail. And the pea hens and other peacocks can tell the difference.

Humans clearly don’t have that ability.  According to the researchers, while people can pick up on human bodily physical clues fairly readily, they’re far less discerning when it comes to judging artifacts and clothing – which are stand-ins for wealth and power in a more affluent and technological society.

Could it just be that, in that inimitable human fashion, once again, humans are looking for the shortcut to making a decision?  Or is it a calculated decision because we know, deep down, that most others can’t really tell the difference between a good shirt and a great one, between a good one without a logo and a poorer one with a logo? 

That might mean, again, that we’re all about making decisions on superficialities.  And that we don’t want to admit it, even to ourselves.  But then, is that really anything new?