Page Two
Please, don't ask my son if we are related
By Louis Black, Fri., July 1, 2005
Once when playing on the basketball court with friends he was wearing a Chronicle T-shirt. A coach asked him if someone in his family worked for the paper. "We're associated with it" was his response.
At the 10th anniversary outdoor screening of Dazed and Confused I brought him and his friends. Later in the evening running into the gang I stopped to chat. Right away my son said, "No offense meant Dad, but I don't want to meet any celebrities and you tend to attract them, so can you go off?"
In a way, being a writer is also to be engaged in this distancing experience. There is a difference between your authorial voice and who you are in your daily life. Sometimes it is even very dramatic, but more often the problem is in an encyclopedia of subtleties.
This column has been largely politically focused for a couple of years, but politics are neither a main nor dominating interest. I like to think that I can be funny, but I know I can't write funny (you should read my wife!). "Page Two" is much more somber than I am.
I can't imagine that in this column I don't often come across like a polemical, pontificating know-it-all. Whereas there is some truth there (OK, maybe a lot), it doesn't quite cover it.
My real distress over current politics, besides the tragedy of Iraq, is the death of dialogue and compromise. Currently the Republicans are leading all in disabling and/or demonizing differing points of view, but it's not like Democrats aren't also in the contest.
Sometimes all I want this column to do is suggest alternative points of view and make it clear we can differ on issues without either side being evil.
The very act of writing slows ideas down. Minimal, decent internal editing also mars the flow. This is a column of opinion clearly under my name. Therefore, everything in the column is what I think, very intentionally so. Now, when I make a point in the column, it would be more than redundant to continually clarify, "As I see it ..." or "I believe ..." or "It seems to me ...." Yet to make a series of assumptions in a piece without those clarifying cautions comes across as know-it-all and arrogant.
One of the crucial ideas at the heart of this column is that the core of a constitutional republic with an elected government is conversation, interaction, compromise, and dialogue.
In last week's rant I got carried away. It's not just the political ideas that are being implemented nor even how thoughtlessly and destructively this is being done that distress me the most. It's how so many Americans have decided the solution to every situation is to hate – really, really hate – other Americans. There are those who are thrilled not just because one side is triumphing over the other but that the other is being viciously and unconstitutionally crushed. Their ideological success is less important than their opponents' humiliation and degradation, even if their own constitutional protections are vanishing in the process.
The greatest pleasure seems to come from a partisan, inherently anti-democratic attitude based not on spirituality, religious tenets, or humanism, but an intense fear of the future. This fear is severe enough to breed an insane reactionary fantasy that this country must head back into the past. Such backward time travel is not just impossible but this past where times were better, people were nicer, and God was everywhere is so fictional as to be hallucinatory.
These ideological reactionaries are everywhere along the political spectrum, from the noble savage enthusiasts and "civilization is an unhealthy plague destroying the more noble natural world" through anarchists and libertarians to "the Bible is the literal word of God" and post-modern jingoistic nationalists (it's okay to be racist again!). All sides are just about as myopic. I have as little patience with the "U.S. is evil and always wrong" crowd on the left as I do with the "U.S. is holy and always on the side of good" gang on the right.
Right now there is a celebration of closed-mindedness, an unwillingness to compromise, and a complete lack of respect for differing ideas that is deeply disturbing.
Certainly there are arguments, disagreements, and fights over ideas, issues, and policy, but that is the democratic hallmark. In the name of national security or defense or protecting society and ourselves we are limiting and denying long-established freedoms, handing those who would destroy us exactly what they want.
So I'm here. Almost every week. And I'm talking. I wish I were funnier. I wish I weren't so worried about this country and this state. But I am and so this column is.
There is no way for the Texas state government to cut taxes and improve education while solving the Robin Hood financing crisis. This is the political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Wouldn't it be sweet but ...
We are not willing to pay for the quality of government we want. Just cutting the fat from the budget, as so many suggest, doesn't begin to pay for everything else. This is more evident in Texas because we only have regressive taxes – property and sales – which hit the lower and middle working class disproportionately hard. People who are overtaxed despair at the government's eating up their money. There is a firm conviction that most government spending is inefficient and plagued with fraud. Taxes are accepted by hate radio as the government stealing from you to give to your lazy neighbor (i.e., minorities on welfare, often illegal immigrants, driving Cadillacs). Government impacts all of our lives all of the time, which costs money, lots of money.
But let's just pretend not. Let's vote to improve social services and cut taxes. Let's make up the bogeyman of the "Toll Road Lobby" and the "Toll Road Profiteers" as if, rather than going toward road construction and road maintenance, toll revenue will all be stolen. Yes, a certain amount of Hill Country money might go elsewhere around the state, and who knows what hellish road visions this will fund. But get rid of the "Toll Road Lobby" and we are still going to be paying that money in some way. This state is already grievously underfunded and undertaxed. Money to run it has to come from somewhere.
Meanwhile, citizens declare brave those politicians who cowardly come out against tolls knowing their vote won't count anyway but are willing to coddle angry activists. Politicians who try to be rational, courageously explaining the situation, are labeled crooks, con artists, and sell-outs.
America, ya gotta love it. And I do.
I guess the point is that if you encounter my son, please don't ask if he's related to me. To my wife, you ask that question only at considerable personal risk, consider this a warning posted.
Aren't those kidnappings in Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas just horrifying? What about Haiti, that's an unsolvable mess, isn't it? Whenever you have a wealthy upper class and a large disenfranchised lower class you invite just such a situation.
The right loves the idea of fewer taxes and smaller government. Those with earned or inherited wealth spent millions to get the inheritance tax revoked. They funded the extreme conservative anti-tax right even more lavishly. Bush rewarded them with dividend cuts that will only be significant to those so fantastically rich it will make very little difference in their lives. They just hate paying taxes, they hate the idea of government (We the People) taking some of their money and spending it for the good of and the health of the community.
Most of that money doesn't go for Cadillacs; it goes to create a social safety net that protects all citizens and keeps all citizens involved and enfranchised in society. When the poorest class becomes large and widespread enough to feel they have no vested interest in the society, it becomes much more a danger than big government. People aren't poor because they have to be or they want to be or they're counting on their working fellow citizens to support them. We are all in this together. I care little about the discrepancy in wealth between the poorest and the richest Americans. I care tremendously about how much of the population doesn't make enough money to live decently. But the argument is that the free-market system will fill all the jobs that government does, and any jobs it can't fill probably shouldn't exist.
Essentially, this is the same as arguing that if the polio vaccine doesn't work for cancer, it's time to throw the whole inoculation program out. Government was not fictionally created in a basement in the Soviet Union by the ghosts of Karl Marx and Lenin working with Mao and the devil to be brutally imposed on the American people by godless foreign agents pretending to be concerned citizens.
Government evolved in response to the needs of the community. This process is inherently flawed and awkward, but it doesn't mean it's worthless. 
