Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren has many fans, including me, who would like her to be President of the United States, but fully understand her refusal. We have an immediate appreciation of her.

And her opponents abhor everything about her.  She relates in her new, tenth, book, “A Fighting Chance,” how President Obama's senior advisers explained to her why he wasn't going to nominate her to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she conceived, created, loved and chaired in its first months. They acknowledged her competence and appropriateness for the job and said: “But ...for some reason, you are like a red-hot poker in the eye of Republicans.”

Now, when Elizabeth, or anyone,  draws out such strong emotional responses like that from both sides of aisle, you can be fairly confident that she is touching very basic issues. I think also that our emotional responses to her are of such great depth and strength that they must be “over-determined.” That is to say, there has to be more than just one item, one reason, one cause, of feelings of such depth and strength.

Elizabeth is not trivial, inconsequential, game-playing, bought, beholden, stupid, uninformed nor emotionally stunted. She confronts her opponents with the real issues that go deep, basic issues that they don't want to face, and she doesn't leave anyone an out.

One of those issues is that  the system is rigged, “hijacked by the rich and powerful,” rigged in favor of the “haves,” but the “haves” simply do not want to admit this. An example of this is the fact that the big banks, and she is quite knowledgeable about them, can easily buy off publicly-elected politicians. There is absolutely no denying this fact on the conscious level. She writes of preparing to give her talk at the Democratic convention in Charlotte:

“The system is rigged. That's what I wanted to talk about. For me, that captured what was wrong with the country, how our government has been hijacked by the rich and powerful. How it didn't have to be this way. How we could do better.”

Another issue Elizabeth presents unavoidably is the woman question. She is so far ahead of her opponents in her clarity and standing on the issue that they don't have the remotest conscious clue of where she is. I mentioned Christina Romer's comment in a previous post on first meeting Elizabeth: “Why is it always the women? Why are we the only ones with balls around here?”

There is a male strutting that goes on by men who consider themselves important, superior, more experienced, more knowledgeable, wiser, tougher, and all that. They dress and posture for the role, and feel free to talk over you when you are talking, and they cultivate a million ways to express how superior and important they are. Sometimes it's hilarious even and sometimes it is just pathetic. In any case, they pick up fairly quickly when you're not buying into it and therefore are not pleased with you. Not a bit. You are then a lethal enemy to everything they “are.” You are like a red-hot poker in their eye.

Jimmy Carter, “A Call to Action”

Jimmy Carter says in his new book, “A Call to Action,” that the most important issue the world needs to face is the enhancement of women's lives. The first sentence on the flyleaf reads: “The world's discrimination and violence against women and girls is the most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights: This is President Jimmy Carter's call to action."

I thought several times as I was reading the book of Diane Ravitch's writing that the the first step in true reform of education is to assure adequate prenatal care for women.

Carter went on the Charlie Rose Show recently to promote and to discuss his book, but Rose seemed just to want to discuss Israel. Carter politely told him a couple times that he wanted to discuss the book, but Rose clearly was not interested. However, I heard enough to know that I had to read the book.

Jimmy Carter has an awe-inspiring list of accomplishments. Just his eradication of Dracunculiasis, called guinea worm disease (GWD), in Africa is inconceivably magnificent, in my eyes. He has done so much more and is still very much doing it at ninety years of age.

He writes a lot in his first chapter about the misinterpretations of religious scriptures that promote the destruction of women's lives. Rightly so, but I was more struck by the passages later in the book in which he points out that it is actually women who make things work.

Here are some quotes from the book, for the truth of them, and to provoke your interest in the book, and simply for sharing:

p.70. Of even greater significance is what we have learned about the vital role that women can play in correcting the most serious problems that plague their relatives and neighbors. Almost everywhere, we find that women are relegated to secondary positions of influence and authority within a community but almost always do most of the work and prove to be the key participants in any successful project.

p.156. There have been surprising reductions [of Female Genital Cutting] in Kenya and Central African Republic. It is not clear why this is so, but it seems obvious that outside pressure has had little effect except in encouraging the education of young women...A public opinion poll that same year [2008] revealed that only a third of the younger women wanted to see the practice continued, while two-thirds of the the older women supported its continuation. Because the decision to perform FGC is made almost exclusively by mothers, without consulting their husbands, these numbers give hope that the next generation of daughters might be spared.

p.193, quoting Ela Bhatt: “I have faith in women...In my experience, as I have seen within India and in other countries, women are the key to rebuilding a community. Why? Focus on women and you will find an ally who wants a stable community.”

p.35. There are now more than five times as many American inmates in federal, state, and local prisons as when I was president and the number of incarcerated black women has increased by 800 percent! An ancillary effect is that this increased incarceration has come at a tremendous financial cost to taxpayers, at the expense of education and other beneficial programs The cost of prosecuting executed criminals is astronomical. Since 1973, California alone has spent roughly $4 billion in capital cases, leading to only thirteen executions, amounting to about $307 million spent for the killing of each prisoner...Despite the proliferation of excessive imprisonments, the number of pardons by US presidents has also been dramatically reduced. I issued 534 pardons in my four-year term, and in their eight-year terms, Ronald Reagan issued 393, Bill Clinton 396, and George W. Bush 189, but in his first term Barack Obama issued only 23.

Leonard Cohen on Montreal

Beware of what comes out of Montreal, especially during winter. It is a force corrosive to all human institutions. It will bring everything down. It will defeat itself. It will establish the wilderness in which the Brightness will manifest again. [The first paragraph of “Montreal”]

There is a short piece of prose, entitled “Montreal,” in the recent Everyman's Library Pocket Poets selection of Leonard Cohen's poems and songs, a book well worth owning.

The city of Montreal has been particularly important to me because I lived there for four years as a student, attending the same university that Cohen attended. It was an overwhelming experience for me, even annihilating, so I've given it a lot of thought over the fifty years since then, trying to bring bits and pieces of it together.

Now, this "Montreal" poem feels clarifying, solidifying and delightful to me. I find that it pulls together most of my experience of Montreal. I've often thought of how Cohen once said that he “realized” that “Suzanne” was a Montreal song, because I felt that it was, too, but now I see Montreal in many other places in his thought.

I believe also that what Cohen says about Montreal in this poem applies to every other gathering of people I've experienced – annihilation then a protection. Finding or developing the protection can take fifty years or more, however!

Here's the remaining paragraph of “Montreal:”

  

We who belong to this city have never left The Church. The Jews are in The Church as they are in the snow. The most violent atheist defectors from the Parti Québécois are in The Church. Every style in Montreal is the style of The Church. The winter is in The Church. The Sun Life building is in The Church. Long ago the Catholic Church became a pebble beside the rock on which The Church was founded. The Church has used the winter to break us and now that we are broken we are going to pull down your pride. The pride of Canada and the pride of Quebec, the pride of the left and the pride of the right, the pride of muscle and the pride of heart, the insane pride of your particular vision will swell and explode because you have all dared to think of killing people. The Church despises your tiny works of death and The Church declares that every man, woman, and child is protected.

Cohen recently said that his long-term depression "has lifted” but my own view is that we are, or should be, rightly very troubled at how upside down and backward the world has become, or is, and that it takes one's whole lifetime's thought-work to resolve the big questions of our unique souls with regard to the situation.

He has a new album, “Popular Problems,” coming out later this month, on his 80^th birthday.