Empathy

This is the lead paragraph of an article in the current Economist, on a story about the receding of the world food shortage in recent months:

"Mulualem Tegegn bought a donkey last year. As a hard-working Ethiopian farmer, aged 58, he saw the purchase of the beast as a return to better times after several seasons in which drought and high prices had forced him to sell his livestock and take his grandchildren out of school to work on the farm. This year, he will have enough grain to buy a goat or two, and the donkey would make the long trek again to school. This is how things are supposed to be."

This is how things are supposed to be? Huh? I doubt that that unbylined writer meant it the way it sounds -- that Third World farmers are supposed to get by with donkeys and goats and tough shit for their dreams about John Deeres and refrigerators. The writer probably meant only that things had returned to a dusty, miserable normality that was better than starvation. His phrasing simply lacked empathy.

But this does point up an unfortunate truth: We who enjoy the good things of life also tend to show little empathy for have-nots. They are not individuals but abstractions. This is why do-gooders make television ads (think Sally Struthers) focusing on a single emaciated and doe-eyed waif in, say, Sierra Leone, and tell us that Khalifa will have a chance to live if we'll only contribute a few dollars to "adopt" her. Charity fund-raisers are painfully aware that appeals to improve the quality of life for thousands of children won't match donations for a single "real" youngster.

This same psychology of empathy obtains with health insurance for the less fortunate. We'll happily donate ten thousand bucks to help one winsome Little Willie walk again, but allow the government to tax our $350,000 household incomes by not even half of that to help tens of thousands of the poor to obtain access to health care? No way.

Little Willie is "real," for we have looked upon his face. All those other poor folks are faceless and therefore to be forgotten.

This is not how things are supposed to be.

Dignity

This morning I read the passage in Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals in which Abraham Lincoln felt it beneath dignity to vote for himself for president on Election Day 1860, but went to the polls to cast his ballot for Illinois state and local offices.

A few minutes later came David Brooks's New York Times column on the code of manners that George Washington followed. I am not generally an acolyte of Brooks's conservative politics, but read him for his stylish and principled reasoning, free from partisan name-calling. He writes:

"The dignity code commanded its followers to be disinterested — to endeavor to put national interests above personal interests. It commanded its followers to be reticent — to never degrade intimate emotions by parading them in public. It also commanded its followers to be dispassionate — to distrust rashness, zealotry, fury and political enthusiasm."

Brooks misses the sense of privacy and politeness (sometimes called "gravitas") our national leaders used to have. In particular he cites Sarah Palin's recent chaotic press conference: "Here was a woman who aspires to a high public role but is unfamiliar with the traits of equipoise and constancy, which are the sources of authority and trust."

Conversely, Brooks hopes the famously quiet and calm but nuanced behavior of Barack Obama will have an impact on the rest of us:

"Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presidency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery."

The same thing, I think, ought to apply to autobiography. Today's personal chronicles are tell-alls that go into embarrassing and excruciating detail about their authors' missteps with booze, drugs and sex, as if they were written with the hope that Oprah would notice and call them to her show for a hour-long wallow in personal catharsis.

On all levels of American life we need a return to dignity -- and let us not mistake that for stuffiness.

The chickins come home to roots

As an old copy editor, I couldn't help feeling a pang of schadenfreude at the Washington Post ombudsman's admission yesterday that more and more readers are complaining about an increasing number of typos, grammatical errors and errors of fact in the newspaper.

But what do you expect when, to save money, a newspaper cuts its copyediting staff in half? The work load doubles for the survivors -- and even triples. Copy editors are now expected to design pages and find art for them, and often have to wear multiple hats as section editors (one book review editor I know has to edit the real estate section as well, and sub for the weekend features editor from time to time).

Let's face it. For a newspaper, maintaining a high quality of reliability is labor-intensive. Without that, its credibility will take an enormous hit.

A loss of credibility means a loss of readers. And a loss of readers means a loss of ad income, and a loss of ad income means . . .

For the want of a few copy editors, a newspaper could well go under.

Tommy's chum

"Before I could add a weary shrug a tall and skinny fourteen-year-old lad tumbled down the stairs with all the finesse of a runaway beer barrel, a big yellow Lab mix on his heels, claws drumming the oaken treads. Tommy Standing Bear, an Ojibwa from the reservation at Baraga, was Ginny’s foster son of three years and Hogan his dog."

That's a snippet from Hang Fire, the novel in progress, and Hogan is a ten-year-old of such singular character I was compelled to write him into both A Venture into Murder and Cache of Corpses.

Here he is, just because I felt you should know the distinguished gentledog.

Advancing in another direction

"Retreat, hell! We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction."

The liberal bloggers are having a good time with Sarah Palin's resounding misattribution of the quote to General Douglas MacArthur in her weird, rambling valedictory yesterday: Typical backwoods yahoo intellectual sloppiness, typical poor research skills and all that. ("The bull goose loony of the GOP," Paul Begala wrote. "Caribou Barbie," Maureen Dowd calls her.)

But what is truly interesting is that a sudden new spotlight is on the man who actually said it: Oliver Prince Smith (above), the much-decorated combat general who led his First Marine Division out of the Red Chinese trap at Chosin Reservoir in Korea in 1950. (As of 6 a.m. EST today, the Wikipedia entry for Smith does not carry the quotation. It should, and it will.) [Later July 4: It does now, in the lead paragraph as well.]

Smith had the wit of an intellectual. MacArthur, that five-star egotist, had none. That should have immediately tipped reporters to Palin's gaffe.

There's more. According to a December 18, 1950, story in Time magazine, Smith's cry of defiance was "an echo of a 1918 statement that has become a part of Marine Corps legend. Moving up to Belleau Wood at the head of a company of marines, Captain Lloyd Williams was overtaken by a courier, told that the order of the French area commander was to retreat. 'Retreat, hell,' snapped Captain Williams, 'we just got here,' and took his troops into battle."

Memo to Gov. Palin: If you're going to continue the battle, hire troops who can do the due diligence for your speeches.

Old Glory

This weekend we Americans celebrate the 233rd birthday of the United States with backyard beer, brats and bunting. Ours is a wonderful country, we believe, a shining City on a Hill, an example to all mankind.

But that exceptionalism so dear to our hearts is a pernicious myth that hides a host of crimes. Behind our flag we have polluted the planet and denied the overwhelming science that warns against global warming. We refuse habeas corpus to captured enemies we have tortured needlessly. We meddle militarily in the affairs of other nations behind the ill-conceived notion of "national security." Some of us want to keep out immigrants of color. Some of us want everyone to believe in their particular god.

We're not perfect and we should not strut down the street as if we were.

The Fourth ought to be a day of humility as well as pride, a day of reflection as well as celebration. We are a great nation but we could be ever so much better.

Thoughts on tobacco

All Americans should feel compassion for Barack Obama as he tries to stop smoking. The American presidency is the toughest job in the world, full of stress, with a new crisis to deal with every day. It is nigh impossible to beat a powerful addiction under conditions like that.

I know a fellow who started at 16, partly because he wanted people to think he was older, partly because he wanted to look tough, and partly because Camels gave such a nice buzz, at least in the early days. By his mid-thirties he'd tried to quit several times. Once he managed to stop for a few weeks, but he had a boss who was also a smoker, and at a drunken newspaper party the boss kept encouraging him to have one, just one. Being a weak-willed wretch, he gave in and was hooked again.

Not until he had surgery for suspected cancer (it wasn't) at age 35 did he stop for good. The guy in the other bed in the semi-private hospital room was the same age, and had quit smoking fifteen years before. Nonetheless he had come down with lung cancer. One look at the wastebasket overflowing with red-flecked tissues he coughed into, hacking through the night, and the fellow I know never again had another cigarette. There is nothing like the jolt of suddenly facing a vivid prospect of early death to wrench one off a runaway train.

Not that Obama ought to check himself into Walter Reed and find a roomie in the last stages of lung cancer. I wouldn't wish that on the most desperate tobacco addict.

I'm hoping Obama finds a way to quit, and that it doesn't ultimately prove to be too late. Even after almost 34 years without a cigarette, there is still a risk of lung cancer, a risk far greater than if one had never smoked at all. It's hard to keep from looking nervously over the shoulder for the apparition with the scythe.

It's nice that Congress has passed a law (which Obama has signed) giving the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco, but you can be sure that the still powerful tobacco lobby will keep the agency all but toothless.

Ban tobacco? That won't work. Look at the War on Drugs, a study in national futility. The only way out is to tax tobacco so punitively, to make smoking so expensive, that only the very rich can afford the habit.

But the wealthy are not likely to waste their money on tobacco. (Cocaine is another matter.) People of higher economic and social classes generally disdain smoking today; it tends to be the blue-collars, the poor and the uneducated, who get hooked.

And, of course, mindless youth. I was one.