PRE-OCCUPIED

PRE-OCCUPIED

For two months, protesters have occupied a square block in lower Manhattan known as Zuccotti Park.

The park, named for the citizen who contributed to its creation more or less as a condition for developing other profitable property in the same neighborhood, is itself a misnomer. Most of it is made up of faux marble "benches" affixed to granite slabs. There are a few rows of thin trees that run diagonally across the venue and a couple of small roundabout flower gardens. But other than that, the "park" is hardly a green space.

It is also very small. It is sandwiched between one modern high rise office building on the north and a twenty-one story landmark built in 1905 on the south. To its immediate east is another modern office building and to its immediate west lies a Burger King and a hamburger cum pizzeria joint.

So, all things considered, calling it a park is the rough equivalent of calling Herman Cain a presidential candidate -- accurate perhaps as a technical matter but not particularly serious if one is interested in apt descriptions.

At somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 or 3 am today, the New York City Police Department cleared the "park" of those who had decided to sleep there. The ostensible reasons for this police action were that (1) the "occupiers" were somehow creating health and safety risks for themselves and others in the surrounding community and (2) the "occupiers" were effectively precluding others from "using" the park as the publicly accessible space it was intended to be.

I work about a half a block from the park and walk by it to and from my office and during lunch approximately half a dozen times a day. During the two months I have been observing the "occupation," I never noticed any "health and safety" problems. Virtually to a man and woman, the protesters were disciplined in respecting police instructions not to impede pedestrians and other passers-by, myself included. I never witnessed a fight or any violence. And the "occupiers" apparently understood the need to leave the park for other more appropriate facilities when mother nature called or personal hygiene demanded.

Nor were the protesters, by New York City standards at least, particularly loud. For some portion of every afternoon, a group on the western edge banged on ersatz drums, accompanied by an occasional saxophonist who tried to inject some harmony (musically, that is) into the drum beat. And late at night -- I am a lawyer who has occasional late nights -- the place was placid. If, as the Mayor says, businesses in the area were complaining, they could not have been the ubiquitous fast food and push cart vendors, who never had it so good. And, for the record, my firm never complained.

As for interfering with "others" who wanted to use the park, this too is a stretch. From about 11 pm to 6 am on a daily basis, the park was never used by anyone other than the occasional drunk stumbling through or couple making out. At other times, but really only in the good weather, it served as a venue for al fresco lunch goers and the occasional skateboarder, the latter of whom were risking far more as a matter of safety and health than any of the occupiers and presumably can begin doing so again.

In any case, it would have been far easier to suggest alternative neighborhood venues for those pre-occupation occasional users who sometimes showed up before Zuccotti became famous. In fact, if public use is the park's purpose, Zuccotti and Mayor Bloomberg should send the "occupiers" a thank you note for having finally brought some reality to what had previously been mere pretense. Because, put simply, for the first time in its lifetime, Zuccotti Park finally lived up to its billing and got a real workout.

Of course, Bloomberg and the Police Commissioner and the editorialists at the right wing New York Post are really just pulling our leg. They didn't clear the park out of concern for health, safety, skateboarders, neckers or the seasonal lunch crowd. They cleared it because, in the belly of the high finance beast that is Wall Street and from which this park sits mere blocks away, the occupiers were making a point.

In fact, they were making a number of them.

The gap between the rich and the rest has grown way too large. The dream of working hard and getting ahead is dying. Corporations are not people. They are creatures of the state. They have no inherent or natural rights. In fact they are not "natural" in any sense of that word. The government, which for years levelled the playing field and enforced some regulatory constraints on a culture of high finance that would literally create a depression before it sacrificed an opportunity for quick profit, has been captured and rendered powerless.

This is the "message" of "occupy Wall Street" or OWS. It has spread throughout the world. And it is not going away.

Because the kids and the hippies and the unemployed and the angry who camped out for two months on a city block in New York -- beating drums, annoying Mayors, and telling the truth -- didn't just occupy a park.

They occupied our mind.

BIG BOB

BIG BOB

My Dad died this week.

He loved martinis, women named Joan, a breaking news story, and books. In 1975, he had to give up the martinis, because, as it turned out, he loved them too much. Then, he loved God.

Which, I have discovered, can be just as intoxicating.

He was an over the top guy and made sure you knew it. He was not cool. He was hot. And like most non-cool, hot, over the top guys in this "too school for cool" era of phony understatement, he was teased for it.

Relentlessly.

Too bad.

We could use a little hot today. From a President, who is way too cool. And from a culture, which has turned cool into a synonym for smart.

Which it decidedly is not.

He had a high school education and about a year of college. He was what the old timers call a "newspaperman". Not a "journalist" or "broadcaster" or "personality" or, God forbid, "talking head." He worked for the Daily News, one of New York City's two remaining tabloid newspapers, for twelve years, from 1950 to 1962. And then for WNBC-TV in New York and NBC News for the next twenty-five.

He loved the news business. And it loved him back. He was the first newspaperman in NYC to report that Mafia kingpin Albert Annastasia had been killed. In the "if it bleeds, it leads" tabloids, this was a big deal. Most of us remember "Houston, we have a problem" because Tom Hanks said it in the movie "Apollo 13". Daddy actually heard it late one night over the Mission Control radio as he covered that space shot from the Johnson Space Center outside Houston.

He never won a Pulitzer. In fact, he probably gave one up. He crossed a police line at a murder scene in the '50s one day because, as a beefy Irish guy, everyone at that time thought he was a cop. When the real cops kicked him out, he grabbed the wrong trench coat. It belonged to one of the Chiefs at the NYPD's Division of Internal Affairs. In the pocket was a list of all the corrupt cops the NYPD was then investigating.

He gave the list back.

So long Pulitzer.

He was also over the top in his imperfections. Because he loved those martinis for too long, he missed Cub Scouts, Little League, most of his first marriage (to my Mom), and a good chunk of his pay check.

But he conquered that demon as well.

And then was passionate about the conquest.

To a defrocked, alcoholic priest who he sponsored to recovery in "the program", as all the AA guys and gals affectionately call it, he was that guy's Jesus.

Which, all teasing aside, is pretty amazing when you consider the source.

In my teens, long before Tim Russert wrote any books, he was "Big Bob". Not because he was all that big. He just couldn't be missed. He wouldn't let you.

Thank God.

Because . . .

Now he is.

WHAT BARACK SHOULD SAY

WHAT BARACK SHOULD SAY

The market is tanking.  The unemployment rate is still north of 9% and much higher when you count those who have stopped looking.  It is almost a given that we are on the verge of a second recession.  Corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, waiting for demand to re-emerge.  And governments here and in Europe are fixated on lowering deficits and debt in what has turned into an undisguised contest between creditors who insist on being paid and debtors who can't do it.

We are in big trouble.

And, better late than never, the President has to come out swinging.

Here is what he should say:

"Fellow Americans --

On a crisp fall day in November almost three years ago, you and I made history.  We proved the naysayers wrong and the optimists right. Instead of just talking about American exceptionalism, we demonstrated it. 

We relegated our two centuries plus compromise on Jefferson's promise that "all men are created equal" to the proverbial dustbin of history, elected the son of a Kenyan immigrant and Kansas student to our highest office, and reignited the American dream for many across the globe who wondered if it still truly existed.

Today, it is time to call on that exceptionalism once again.

Our nation and our world is hurting. 

Close to one fifth of our fellow citizens are unemployed or underemployed.  Economic growth across much of the world is now anemic as demand in developed countries -- our own included -- has stagnated.  Home values have plummeted.  And so have the retirement nest eggs in our 401k's.  The vast majority of you think  the nation is on the wrong track.  And you are right.

The reasons for this downward spiral are not all that mysterious.

From 2001 to 2008, we turned a federal surplus into our largest federal deficit.  We gave the rich and super rich tax breaks they didn't need and that many of them did not even want.  We fought two wars but paid for neither of them.  And we continued our now thirty year love affair with deregulation, allowing Wall Street to create worthless mortgage backed securities that it peddled the world over, armed with nothing more than Standard & Poor's phony assurances that these securities would never go under.

Well, and not for the first time, Wall Street was wrong.

And so was S & P.

The result was the financial crisis of September 2008, two months before I was elected and four months before I took the oath of office.

That crisis drove America and the world to the brink of Depression.  Huge financial houses collapsed or had to be substantially reorganized.  Their names are familiar to all of us -- Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch.  Much to the chagrin of many of you, the government was forced to bail out the banks, those same irresponsible parties who had brought the world to the brink in the first place.  But if we had not done that, all most assuredly would have been lost.  And we would have suffered the first Depression in almost eighty years.

There are not many of us alive who remember the 1930s.  And none of them seem to be in Congress.  But those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it.  So it behooves us to take a look back at that grim decade -- an America of 25-30% unemployment, whole families living in shanty towns in our public parks, children going to bed hungry at night, poverty on the rise, especially among the aged, and business at a standstill.  And it also behooves us to understand how we were able to end that Depression.

Because the answer may surprise many of us living in today's America.  And it will certainly surprise my opponents in Congress and on the Presidential campaign trail.  The answer is simple --

The Government did it. 

We called it the New Deal then, crafted and guided by a President -- Franklin Roosevelt -- who lifted himself from a wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees. Roosevelt's New Deal put people to work, stimulated demand, regulated finance capital to end the abuses that had caused the Depression, and ended poverty among the aged with Social Security.

And today we need to do much of that again.

So tonight I am proposing, and tomorrow I will send to Congress, a New Deal for the 21st Century.  Call it New Deal, 2.1. 

Instead of ignoring the weapons at our disposal in the current fight against unemployment and recession, it will enlist them.  Instead of pretending the private sector will magically renew itself, it will create the demand business needs to spend the money it is now sitting on and generate the growth and jobs we so desperately need. Instead of trusting Wall Street and the multi-nationals to behave themselves and pay their taxes, it will use the long arm of the regulatory state and the law to make them do it. And instead of assuming Government is the problem, it will use Government to solve the problem.

The centerpiece of today's New Deal will be a stimulus sufficient to the size of the problem at hand.  It is time to stop playing politics with our economy.  Without consumer spending, there can be no recovery.  And at this point, the only way to get consumers to spend is to lower their debt burdens and get them the jobs that will give them the money necessary to do so.  To do so, I will ask Congress to fund an additional $200 billion stimulus for this fiscal year and the next.  The only strings attached will be requirements that the money increase consumer demand.  It will not be used to shore up banks or enrich those who were so heavily favored over the past ten years.  It will be used to permit states to fund the projects now suspended due to their own budget crises, and to put money in the pockets of America's working class. 

Wall Street, of course, did not just nearly cripple the American economy in the last quarter of 2008. It also left us with a very painful hangover in the form of a housing market where values are going down, foreclosures are going up, and even willing buyers and sellers face difficult and often insurmountable barriers to completing their deals.  The central reason for this problem in the housing market is the glut of foreclosed properties.  In the past, I have proposed programs that were designed to incentivize private lenders to renegotiate existing loans in an effort to alleviate and ultimately resolve the foreclosure problem.  Those efforts have not been sufficient.  So tonight I am proposing the creation of a new Federal Housing Authority.  This FHA will have the power to write new mortgages with lengthened terms and lower interest rates so that properties in foreclosure can be re-financed and the housing market can recover.

And here too it is helpful to remember some history.  The 30-year mortgage Michele and I used to buy our home in Chicago was not some vehicle given to us by the ancients.  In fact, at the start of the Depression in the 1930s, it did not even exist.   Most of the properties foreclosed upon then were under mortgages containing much stricter terms -- typically five years of interest only payments with principal due in the form of a balloon payment at the end.  It was no wonder that those without jobs lost their homes and farms as the Depression continued.

President Roosevelt more or less invented the 30-year mortgage to fix that problem in the '30s. And today we should imitate his creativity and fashion a mortgage instrument sufficient to the challenges of today's housing market.

I know my opponents will oppose this New Deal for the 21st Century.  They will say we cannot afford it.  They will claim it is Government run amok and that I am a Socialist or worse.  They will embrace the rhetoric of our founders while they demonize the very Government those founders gave us.  In truth, as with the sorry recent spectacle in which necessary debt ceiling legislation was held hostage to the extreme views of the irresponsible and the uninformed, they will try to create a new crisis rather than solve any existing problems.

They, however, are not new to America or unique to this era.  They are merely the heirs to the plutocrats who denounced President Roosevelt in the 1930s. They have spent much of the last three years worrying more about my birth certificate than your jobs. And they have spent all of the last Congress avoiding the problems that you and I hired them to work on and solve.  Almost all their ideas -- from continued tax cuts for the rich to deregulation of the financial sector -- have been tried and have failed.  So, unable or unwilling to confront the reality of their own failures, they have simply taken to repeatedly, and often viciously, denouncing me.

This too, however, is an old song sung by deniers throughout our history.  Indeed, in the 1930s, those same sorts denounced President Roosevelt.  He knew it and so did everyone else.   As he put it then: "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me. And I welcome their hatred."

Tonight, I  join my predecessor,  FDR.

I welcome their hatred as well.

It's time to put America to work again.  There is not a family among us that faces a problem by denying itself the tools necessary to solve that problem.  And neither will we.  A friend of mine once counselled that we should pray as if everything depends upon God but act as if everything depends upon us.  And so we will --

Beseeching the Almighty to give us the strength and wisdom necessary to reject outworn shibboleths.

Thanking our God for the plenty with which we still  are blessed.

But in the end echoing President Kennedy's understanding that, on this earth, God's work must truly be our own. "

INDEBTED

INDEBTED

Whatever happens next week as we approach our current rendezvous with destiny, also known as the debt ceiling crisis, one thing is certain.

Wall Street is getting what it wished for.

And apparently does not like it.

The stock market just closed for the day, suffering its worst weekly loss of the year. This was apparently caused by the double news whammy visited upon us in the last twenty-four hours -- a report on GDP which measured the growth rate in the last quarter at an anemic 1.3% for the year, and the continuing debt ceiling debacle in Washington.

The former came on top of revised figures for the first quarter, lowering the growth rate from a previously reported 1.9% to an actual 0.4%, which now makes the current "recovery" the weakest on record and puts us more or less on the brink of another recession.  The latter is a consequence of Tea Party madness, that uniquely dysfunctional blend of ideological extremism made possible by  the political ennui that kept large chunks of the 2008 electorate on their couches in 2010, thus allowing the patients to now run the asylum.

The current Speaker of the House, John Boehner, is by no means a happy camper.  Even his proverbial deep tan has begun to fade as he scurries to convince his caucus to support his plan to raise the debt limit.  It apparently does not matter, either to him or his caucus, that the  plan for which he still has not gotten a vote will be dead on arrival in the Senate.  The idea here is to get the right wing offering on the table so that the Senate and the Administration are forced to negotiate against it. 

Be that as it may, however, the plan itself is laughably inept.  It would "solve" the crisis for a few months so that it is timed to arise anew in the upcoming 2012 election year.  And it will weaken the economy by cutting spending and pulling demand down.

Boehner et al. do not care.

It is now an article of faith in their party that spending must be cut regardless of the consequences.  Though this intransigence ignores a solid century of economic data and history, no one in the current Congress actually remembers the Depression of the 1930s, even if the few octogenarians still serving might actually have been alive during some part of it.  Instead, the mantra that deficits will kill us rules the political roost.  The Tea Partiers universally assert that the 2009 stimulus package did no good and that TARP in 2008 was a failure as well. 

The facts belie both assertions. TARP rescued the financial system from certain implosion and the stimulus forestalled a second Great Depression where unemployment would have exceeded 20%.  Indeed, the only problem with the stimulus is that it was not large enough, and the only problem with TARP is that it did not exact nearly enough concessions from Wall Street in exchange for the bail out.  More to the (immediate) point, today's debt ceiling crisis is an entirely manufactured one.  We have repeatedly raised the debt limit over the last thirty years of conservative ascendancy, and we have done so for one and only one reason.

The alternative to doing so is stupid. 

Even their hero, Ronald Reagan, said as much in an earlier version of this same movie.  During his Presidency, the limit was raised seventeen times.  On one such occasion, Reagan betrayed an uncommon impatience with all the political bluster. "Congress consistently brings the government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility," he said. "This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the federal deficit would soar. The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations. It means we have a well-earned reputation for reliability and credibility – two things that set us apart from much of the world."

Though Reagan's right wing heirs embrace their man, they ignore his words.

And not just on the debt ceiling.

Reagan also raised taxes eleven times while he was President, and he never submitted a balanced budget.  To ease the rhetorical pain,  he called those tax hikes "revenue enhancers," but today's GOP would have none of that.  In their world, if a tax cut is allowed to expire or sunset, those who do nothing to stop the eventuality are raising taxes nonetheless. 

In the current debt ceiling debate, some commentators claim that Reagan would endorse the Boehner plan.   If, however,  Reagan's actual conduct in office is  the measure of what he would now do, the far greater likelihood is that he would endorse Obama's plan.  The latter cuts more over a longer period of time, contains some "revenue enhancers" in the form of closed loopholes, and eliminates the repeated near term "brinkmanship" that the Boehner plan guarantees and that Reagan himself wearied of.

As noted, Wall Street's vote is already in, and while the Street liberally funded the GOP's mid-term ascendancy, it is in no mood for a replay of this sorry spectacle six months from now. 

So, Mr. Speaker, here's some advice. 

Cut your losses. 

Can the Tea Party.

Win one for the Gipper.

 

ON THE ART OF BEING DUMB

ON THE ART OF BEING DUMB

Some very smart people do some very stupid things.

Exhibit A this week is Anthony Weiner, the talented and pugnacious New York Congressman whose triple-X twitter messages (and pictures) to on-line "fans" have now been plastered all over the tabloids. An emotional apology has not kept the vultures from hovering over the carcass, even as Weiner himself claims not to be dead yet. 

NY pols are already angling for his job, and inasmuch as the state itself is slated to lose two Congressional seats to redistricting in 2012, his is now the downstate seat most likely to be eliminated by the politicians who get to draw the lines.  The same thing happened to New York's scandal-plagued Rep. Stephen Solarz in the early 1990s.  Before the voters get a chance to kick you out, your erstwhile friends do.

Weiner's idiocy, of course, didn't kill anyone.  He hasn't started a war, destroyed a career (other, perhaps, than his own), or polluted the planet (non-metaphorically, that is).  The tweets were supposedly consensual (though I am not sure all his "friends" knew what coming before it got there).  And they were meant to be private (a big stretch in the Internet Age but one in which my kids' generation swears it still believes; their facebook accounts are all private, at least insofar as access by the parents is concerned) .

So why do we care?

Everyone I ask tells me "it's not about the sex." 

This reminded me of those famous lines from Sen. Dale Bumpers' impassioned defense of President Clinton during the latter's impeachment trial -- "When you hear somebody say, 'This is not about the money -- it's about money'. And when you hear somebody say, This is not about sex -- it's about sex."  So maybe, probably, that's exactly what it's about. 

But maybe not. 

Sen. Bumpers was quoting H.L. Mencken when he made those comments.  And the famous Mencken also famously said that "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."  Mencken, of course, was talking about us.  He was noticing our repeated penchant for stupidity.  When the "thems" of the world mess up, we like to think they are not "us."  But in a democracy, we lose that cover.  Because the "thems" we elect are "us."

Sometimes stupid is endearing, even not so stupid. 

The whole point of Forrest Gump was that the bright guys didn't get it.  Not the bright guys in the White House who started an unnecessary war.  Or the smart Lieutenant Dan, tied to a war hero's needless destiny of death passed down through a familial psychosis that the "dumb" guy first saved him from but was only later thanked for.  Or the liberal counter-cultural Jenny, who finally accepted the love that had been there from the beginning. 

The mindless runner turned out to be not so mindless after all.  While everyone else was trying to figure him out, he was noticing a sunrise.  And couldn't tell "where earth stopped and heaven began."  That sort of poetry is hardly stupid.

Unfortunately, Anthony Weiner is no Forrest Gump.

He's just one of us.

GOOD FRIDAY

GOOD FRIDAY

It is overcast and cold on April 22 in New York. 

After a brutal winter, the lawn sports large blotches of patted down straw, a sort of sub-Arctic permafrost in a region that is supposed to have none.  The heavy coats still hang in the pantry ready to be called into action yet again, unable to retire to their seasonal cedar closet.  Even the dog is confused by it all.  She can't  catch the necessary whiff, blown away as it is by the unseasonable chill breezes that never allow spring to come.

There is just nothing good about this particular Friday.

Earlier in the week, the markets were roiled by a ratings agency report from Standard & Poors (or S&P, as they are known in the trade) that  it was not at all confident that America's pols would get their act together and tackle the deficit.  This has been widely reported as an initial shot across the bow by the credit markets, a warning to the borrower that the bill will come due and the lenders were worried they might not get paid.  The borrower is the US government.  The lender is the rest of the world but at this point largely China. 

My first reaction was to say "What gall!"  S&P, after all , was one of the three ratings musketeers who told us not more than five years ago that all those mortgage backed securities, three-tiered collateralized debt obligations, and insurance like credit default swaps were triple-A investments.  Perfectly safe.  About as likely a risk to default as the US itself.

Namely, none at all.

They were not even close to being right.

Now we are all supposed to believe that the US deficit, which is largely a problem that would go away if the Bush era tax cuts were allowed to expire and we were careful about not starting any more unpaid for wars, has for the first time attracted S&P's attention because it is unsustainably large. 

This is pure rubbish.  As a percentage of GDP, the deficit is nowhere nearly as high as it has been at times in our past.  There is no danger of default, at least not one uninduced by right wing politicians in Washington refusing to raise the debt ceiling.  And, to top it off, the real problem now is an anemic recovery that DC's deficit hawks threaten to kill with their hypocritical zeal to stop all non-discretionary spending.  A recovery, by the way, necessitated by that near-death, near-Depression we experienced in 2008, for which S&P (along with the other ratings agencies who failed to do their job, and the then GOP government in love with deregulation, which had for eight years failed to do its) was among those responsible.

But I have now calmed down.

Because I realize that, in some sort of feat of cosmic consistency, the ratings agency's hypocrisy and gall has at least come at the right time in the liturgical calendar.

We are in what we Christians call Holy Week.  As a matter of history, the week had a lot of ups and downs.  It started off well enough.   A triumphant entry into Jerusalem from the non-Roman east, on a donkey no less, that  inspired some of the poor masses.  But that entrance sent the authorities into fits of worry that a city exploding with Passover pilgrims might throw off the Roman yoke.  Which more or less explains the rest of the week -- a banquet of sorts with twelve very close friends, and then an arrest, show trial and killing by those same worried authorities. 

Through it all the watch word was hypocrisy.  Whether it was the hypocrisy of Roman authorities trumping up charges . . . or of crowds choosing to save a felon and kill a saint . . . or of friends denying they even knew you.

There was, in truth, not much good about that Friday either.

We need a lot more honesty from the institutions that nearly killed us in 2008, which includes Standard & Poors.  And they should at least start with the notion that, having been fatally wrong and egregiously self-interested in 2008, they ought not repeat the act in 2011. 

The creditor class in this country and in the world is worried about their money.  In particular, they are worried about the value of their assets, which happen in large part to be the loans they have made to all the debtors, most of whom are now having trouble paying them back.  The creditors succeeded earlier in the decade in making it much more difficult for debtors to be discharged in bankruptcy.  And they now do not want the governments of the world easing that debt burden by spending or inflating, which effectively devalues the debts and, consequently, their wealth.  Standard & Poors is in glorious hock to the creditor class.  The banks pay S&P and, as we saw in 2008, S&P does their bidding.

What we need most at this point is to finally hold the hypocrites to account and to start calling a spade a spade. 

And what we need in our politics right now is a little . . .

Easter.

PS  In my last post I talked about a lecture I was going to give at the end of March.  I did so, at Mt. Aloysius College in Cresson, Pennsylvania.  For any who are interested, here is the you tube link -- http://youtu.be/ByKsGr6NF8k



THE PROFESSOR IN ME

THE PROFESSOR IN ME

I am teaching a college class at the end of March. The class will be at a small Catholic liberal arts college in western Pennsylvania.

What will I say to them?

I have already spoken to the President of the college, a friend from law school. I told him I wanted to say something taking off on the theme that "those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it." I told him that this was a point made by the philosopher George Santayana in the early part of the last century. But in beginning to prepare the presentation, two problems have emerged.

The first is that the theme creates an enormous number of possible discussion topics. One would think a theme might narrow things down a bit, sort of like a topic sentence in a paragraph. But this theme is a "no-go" on that score. In fact, it does the opposite, creating an almost infinite number of emblematic moments.

Some are fairly self-evident to any of us over fifty. It is, for example, fairly obvious that, in the run up to Iraq, W and Cheney and Rumsfeld never read Robert McNamara's mea culpa account of US hubris in Vietnam. McNamara, a former chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, was JFK's and LBJ's Secretary of Defense in the '60s and substituted statistics (body counts, bomb tonnage, numbers of bombing runs or "sorties") for any real knowledge of the history and culture of Vietnam. Though warned by the French, victims of their own ill-fated effort at Dien Bien Phu in the early '50s to preserve their influence on what had previously been a French colony, the so-called "best and brightest" (McNamara was among the famous "whiz kids" or proverbial geniuses at Ford when Kennedy tapped him for Defense)doubled down in Vietnam, claiming (erroneously) that if Vietnam went communist Thailand and the Philippines were sure to follow, and that (again erroneously) if they just dropped more bombs and deployed more troops, all would be well.

It didn't turn out that way.

For years now, the revisionist conservative history on Vietnam is that we "cut and run" just as things were getting better. According to this view, a new commanding general, Creighton Abrams, and a new strategy, counter-insurgency, was beginning to take hold and create success in the early '70s, just as the overwhelming majority of Americans turned against the War. I have my doubts. Counter-insurgency was not going to end corruption in the South Vietnamese government, nor was it going to tip control in the north. Unlike in Korea, a stalemate was not really possible because there were too many ways into the south (many through Cambodia and the famous Ho Chi Minh trail) and too many indigenous fighters (the famous, or infamous, Viet Cong) living in the south's villages.

But let's for a moment assume the revisionists on Vietnam are right.  One would think that W and Cheney and Rumsfeld would have embraced that revisionism and learned from it before decamping into Iraq.  Here, however, is the bad news.

They ignored that "history" as well.

The failure in Iraq was a failure to both accurately anticipate how the the country would look once Hussein's regime fell and to deploy sufficient resources to maintain and rebuild the nation at that point.  Neo-conservatives hate nation building and spent all of the 1990s condemning Bill Clinton for it.  Nevertheless, when General Petraeus finally came to them with the counter-insurgency surge strategy in 2007, they were just embracing nation building by another name.  For that is what Petraeus' counter-insurgency strategy was and is -- a studied effort to deploy troops as ambassadors of de-centralized security and  service so as to give locals the space to rebuild their lives and their economy and create stakeholders in that new reality.  It basically sucks the oxygen right out of the local bad guys.  But it takes resources.  Lots of them.  And for four years W's Administration never committed the necessary resources to that effort.  They weren't nation builders.

Whew!

That's just one topic.  I could also tell the students I'll be talking to that the run up to the financial collapse in 2008 was just a replay of what went on in the 1920s before the Great Depression -- speculative stock buying and selling run amok with little or no underlying value and a corresponding absence of regulatory oversight.  Or that the thirty year period of conservative emergence and governance that began in the mid-1970s was a lot like the 19th century's Gilded Age -- the economic returns from enormous productivity gains (owing to nationalization of the American market thanks to railroads in the Gilded Age, and computerization of the home and workplace in our own time) migrated almost exclusively to the top. Or that Abu Ghraib was not really a "unique" event -- just ask the Native Americans.

Too much to say.  I'll have to make choices.

And then there's that second problem. It turns out that George Santayana did not say that "those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it." What he said, in his book Life of Reason I, is that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". More importantly, as his students have noted, his point was really more a part of his theory of knowledge rather than any sort of exhortation to learn from history so as to avoid colossal errors.  Apparently, however, the notices have been sent out and my appearance has been tied to the wrong quote. And the wrong context.  And it's all on me, because I gave them the wrong quote. And context.

I hope the students don't catch me.

If they do, I'll be forced to tell them the truth.

Which is this . . .

Even their professors make mistakes.