Bob Schwartz

November 8, 2015

Ask for Forgiveness: The Perfect Ben Carson Strategy That He Won’t Use

Ben Carson

Ben Carson has gotten caught embellishing/lying about some details in his life that are part of his inspirational narrative.

What’s weirdest about his response—spin, blame the media, discount the degree of untruth, etc.—isn’t that making up stuff is unusual for politicians. Zebras and stripes, leopards and spots. What’s weird is that being a sincere and serious Christian, all he has to do is tell the truth. Say that he exaggerated or even lied, and ask for forgiveness. Because he is, after all, only human, only a sinner like us all.

His many Christian supporters should not only forgive him. They should see him as a model of genuine Christian contrition and humility. Which presumably is what God and Jesus ask of us. Not to be saints, which we can’t be anyway, but to be self-aware, confessing humans, bent on being better. It is entirely possible that he could actually make gains among Christian supporters for doing that.

If those supporters refused to forgive, that might put in question the depth of their unconditional Christian commitment. Lying itself doesn’t put your faith and commitment in question (remember, only human), but stubbornly persisting in finding every which way not to say you have lied is a little more troubling. And maybe a little less Christian.

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November 7, 2015

A Blue Blanket

A Blue Blanket

A million items
Flood the closet.
Stacks and shelves
Hangers and boxes
Haphazard cascading
Valued and worthless
Detritus of a life.
In their company
A blue blanket
Carefully folded.
Any night
It may take its place in a dimmed room.
Cover for a middle hours half sleeper.
Blue cloud in a black sky,
Warm soft comfort
Caught between memories and dreams.
The way to sleep and then,
Morning through the blinds,
Folded and away again,
Until another restless night.

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November 6, 2015

Pay Attention to Religion in America: Even If You Don’t Drive You Can Get Hit By a Car

Pew Research Center

The final report of the Pew Research Center 2014 Religious Landscape Study has just been released: “This report focuses on Americans’ religious beliefs and practices and assesses how they have changed in recent years.” (For those who don’t like to read, here’s a topline video.)

No matter your own religious inclinations, investigate. This is the best overview of religion in America, a survey of more than 35,000 U.S. adults.

Why should you care?

Let’s say you don’t have much to do with cars. You don’t own one. Maybe you even live in a city where you don’t need one, and in fact it is trouble to have one. You think that cars are a problem, not a solution. Anything having to do with cars is totally outside your area of interest.

Except that everywhere you go, the phenomena of cars surround you as part of your world. Streets, traffic, traffic lights, energy, etc. You can’t escape it. Why? Because hundreds of millions of Americans own and use hundreds of millions of cars that occupy a huge piece of our economic, social, psychic, cultural, legal space.

You don’t have to believe in cars, but you should not ignore or dismiss them or the people who own and use them. You don’t have to be an expert on cars, but it might be helpful to have some basic understanding and interest.

Because whether or not you believe in cars, if the traffic light is broken when you cross the street, you will believe in the car that hits you.

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November 5, 2015

Does the New Jeb Bush Book Infringe Hundreds of Copyrights?

Jeb Bush - Reply All

A funny thing: None of the Bush politicians are lawyers. Though they do know some.

Which is one reason Jeb’s new book of his e-mails from being Florida governor (Reply All) is perplexing, along with the question of why he’s publishing it at all. He makes a big point of saying in it that in Florida, letters and e-mails to the governor are part of the public record, which is true. Anyone has the right to read them.

But…that doesn’t settle the question of whether the writers of those letters and e-mails still hold any copyright in them, such that if you (Jeb) decided to collect them all, and publish them in a book of your own that you sold, you might not be infringing their rights. Because the two things—being a public record and giving up the right not to be copied—are two separate things.

I’ll leave it to other lawyers and to journalists to pursue this matter, if it’s worth pursuing, because frankly, I don’t care that much. Maybe it’s just the spectacle of a campaign unraveling in so many ways that has piqued my interest a little. Or wondering, as historians may if they care to, how this all went so wrong.

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November 5, 2015

Wonderful Inspiration

The word inspiration is lovely and wonderful. Especially if you are involved in breathing as a practice, which is everybody, or in being inspired or inspiring.

Breathing is good. So is that thing when you hear something or read something or see something and you sense something happening in you and to you.

Some etymology notes from the Oxford dictionary:

Middle English enspire, from Old French inspirer, from Latin inspirare ‘breathe or blow into’, from in- ‘into’ + spirare ‘breathe’. The word was originally used of a divine or supernatural being, in the sense ‘impart a truth or idea to someone’.

Our word spirit is based on Latin spiritus ‘breath or spirit’, from spirare ‘to breathe’—the ancient Romans believed that the human soul had been ‘breathed’ into the body—the image is the same as ‘the breath of life’. The sense ‘strong distilled alcoholic drink’ comes from the use in alchemy of spirit to mean ‘a liquid essence extracted from some substance’….Spirare forms the basis of numerous English words including aspire (mid 16th century) from adspirare ‘to breath upon, seek to reach’; conspire (Late Middle English) from conspirare ‘to breath together, agree’; expire (late 16th century) ‘to breath out’; inspire (Late Middle English) ‘breath into’ from the idea that a divine or outside power has inspired you; and perspire (mid 17th century) ‘to breath through’; and transpire (Late Middle English) ‘breath across. In English spirit was shortened to sprite (Middle English) which in turn developed sprightly (late 16th century).

So at least three big ideas are related that might not seem so. Breathing, spirit and inspiration. Add to that aspire, conspire, transpire, expire and most fun of all, sprites, and you have an entire family.

You have hopefully had those moments of inspiration. Sometimes it seems literally to go to your head, propelling your mind to places it hasn’t been. It may also skip your mind entirely, going straight someplace inside that lifts you, like a filled balloon, though that’s not quite it either. Maybe it’s more like a good clear fresh breath gently filling your lungs. What, of all riches, could be more immediately real and inspiring?

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November 2, 2015

If You’re Tired of Hearing About the Vietnam War, Tell Our Leaders to Stop Reenacting It

This weekend, an administration official tried to explain in an interview what exactly we are now doing in Iraq and Syria. It was like a ghost or the walking dead, sounding eerily and unhappily exactly like the rhetoric that was rolled out in the middle days of the Vietnam War.

There are roughly three groups about Vietnam: those who lived through it on the home front, those who lived through it (or not) in battle, and a generation or more that is so tired of hearing about a war that ended forty years ago. So tired of it. Can’t you all ever get over it?

Too bad. No, we should never “get over” Vietnam, no matter how many generations pass, and no matter how tired those generations are about the lessons we might learn. Vietnam was the first truly modern war of the media age and of the post-national era.

In media terms, it offered the best possibility up to that time to say positive stuff about a complex war policy, have it widely broadcast (though not as widely as digital today), and have the media endorse it and people believe it. Okay, that does sound like a description of what happened in Iraq, but that just proves the point.

As far as post-national warfare, Vietnam was technically a civil war, but it was obviously something else too. There was an army of North Vietnam, but there were also indigenous forces and a people’s movement trying to upset an unacceptable status quo, which we supported and ultimately defended. For a while. Until there was no more government of South Vietnam. And then it became a matter of just not losing. Which we did.

Another parallel is not paying attention to history, our own and that of others. The French abandoned Indochina, but that was supposedly just because they were, well, French. Americans know and are better than that. Just as in Afghanistan, where the Soviets abandoned their war, but that was supposedly because, well, they were Commies. Freedom loving Americans know and are better.

Which brings us back round to Iraq and Syria today. If you make the effort, you could go back to the LBJ days of Vietnam and hear exactly the same words that were spoken this weekend. Not just something like it, but exactly. Such as: it’s their fight, not ours.

There are things worth fighting for on the world stage, even when it is not on our homeland. But it is hard enough to figure out what those things are, and even harder to commit ourselves and our loved ones to the fight, when we are swimming in a sea of official stuff and nonsense. We want the brutal truth, if our leaders can tell it, especially when it is bound to be a brutal and long fight.

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October 23, 2015

One Breath

One breath is the wind
Leveling mountains,
Raising mountains,
Emptying rivers,
Filling rivers.

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October 23, 2015

Not Born Bored

Here we are now
Entertain us
Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit

A study by Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation finds that, among other things, lots of high school students are bored. Suggested solutions included making teachers better and the experience more interesting.

There are some other possibilities, but to consider them we should look beyond high school.

First, people are not born bored. Babies are not bored. Everything is interesting to them.

People do grow up and develop something called boredom, about which we don’t spend nearly enough time defining or considering. We just lump it into the avoid-or-eliminate category, and associate it with pain. Fortunately for the suffering bored, at this moment in history we may have the most options for escaping boredom ever.

Pointing to high schoolers or young people in general as the easily bored is unfair to them. Plenty of their elders pursue ways to keep things constantly interesting. Mobile phones at dinner tables are not the purview of those under 21.

There’s no doubt that high school is not what it should be, never has been, and deserves attention and improvement. The same goes for the hourly and daily and yearly lives of many people, just like those students stuck being in a place they don’t want to be and doing things they don’t want to be doing.

One small suggestion: Don’t be bored. Put another way, instead of regularly working hard to eliminate boredom, once on a while eliminate boredom as a category of experience. You don’t have to think like a baby. But you might discover that seeing everything as interesting, even awesome, can provide some incredibly cheap and available thrills. And while we wait for high school to improve, maybe that’s something we can try to get across to our kids. Once we learn to practice it ourselves.

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October 21, 2015

Netanyahu Scapegoats the Palestinians for Holocaust

The Jews killed Jesus. The Palestinians started the Holocaust. So who’s the scapegoat now?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that in the early days leading up to World War II, Hitler visited the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and it was that Palestinian leader who came up with the idea of the Final Solution:

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them.’

Historians have already weighed in heavily on how historically bogus this is, given that, among other things, Hitler published Mein Kampf three years before that meeting. The assertion has been described as “jaw-dropping”, with even friendly politicians “agog” at this dark nonsense.

Just when you thought it was the Jews who have for centuries been scurrilously blamed for every terrible thing, Netanyahu goes and turns the tables and scapegoats somebody else. Not just any somebody else. The enemy within and on the borders, the one that you could happily live without.

It appears that the very unpopular Prime Minister is trying to take lessons from Donald Trump, with whom he shares the kinship of attending Wharton. The strategy: Demonize those unwanted immigrants and/or natives. Say anything, no matter how incendiary, explosive, ridiculous or unrelated to fact about the enemies within, and people will love it. And you.

Just one glitch. Trump doesn’t lead a nation at the center of global conflict; actually he doesn’t lead any nation at all. And if America has a history of scapegoating, which it does (take your pick among religious, cultural, political and ethnic groups), it doesn’t compare in long-term viciousness to what the Jews have endured.

Starting, of course, with the big one. In fact, if you look closely at Netanyahu’s indictment, it is not that the Palestinians actually ran the death camps. They just planted the idea, whispering in the ear of an emperor, who was happy to carry out the deed. This time a German emperor, instead of Roman one.

Who’s the scapegoat now?

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October 19, 2015

No Refugees in the Democratic Debate

Adding insult to their injury, Syrian refugees were missing from last week’s Democratic debate.

There were some other important issues mentioned, often presented in sound bites, but many more conspicuous by their absence. But you would think the party that considers itself the more progressive, caring, humane and globally sensitive would take the opportunity to at least mention to the 15 million viewers that we are experiencing one of the biggest humanitarian crises since the end of World War II. The same goes, maybe goes double, for the individual candidates who had the floor and could have just once brought it up.

(Note: Jim Webb did raise refugees while talking about his wife, who is a refugee from Vietnam. But that was not in the context of the current crisis.)

The explanation of this is simple and typical, though not particularly happy. Raising questions you can’t answer, or can’t answer with some vague, equivocal, pointless comment is to be avoided. Either voters will realize that you have no answer, or if you do answer from your conscience and heart, you just might lose votes. Either way, as a candidate, you’re screwed.

This isn’t a Democratic purview. When Republicans get together in their overstuffed debate scrum, there isn’t much to be said about the refugee crisis, except that it is an obvious ruse to allow Islamic terrorists to enter our country. It does seem like an elaborate scheme—displacing millions of men, women, and children just to get a chance to disrupt American stability—but you know how tricky those people can be.

And so, the next time a Democratic candidate wants to tell one of those rise from adversity stories that is a sure fire way to seem human and humane, maybe he or she can mention the shared and horrific adversity that won’t just go away—even if he or she has some magic plan to “fix” Syria (which he or she doesn’t). Maybe the next time, at the podium or on a debate stage. Those refugees will certainly still be there, in an increasing hell on earth.

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