Category: Social & Political Issues

While still small, the movement to ban circumcision seems to be growing in California.  A few weeks ago I read that a petition drive had yielded enough signatures to get banning circumcision of newborn males on the ballot in San Francisco.  Now a similar petition effort is underway in Santa Monica. 

There is little likelihood these or other measures would pass, and even if they did, they wouldn’t hold water in court.  But still, it does give one pause, at least if one is Jewish like me, or Moslem, like many of my friends.

I visited wholebabyrevolution.com, run by Jena Troutman, the woman who is leading the ban circumcision movement in California.   It repackages its litany against circumcision in several ways, in a “25 reasons” list, an FAQ and several articles.   It all comes down to three messages:

1. It is medically unnecessary
2. It has medical risks
3. It has lifelong side effects, the most dramatic of which is decreased erotic sensitivity in that area.

Reasons number two and number three are patently false, disproved by lots of research, and in the case of decreased sensitivity, a whole lot of anecdotal evidence as well.  As to the lack of medical necessity: many studies have shown through the years that women with circumcised partners have lower rates of uterine cancer and that circumcised males are far less likely to contract certain bacterial diseases in that area.  As a feisty aunt of mine might say, if it doesn’t hurt and it might help, what’s the problem?

Now that I’ve demolished the arguments of the ban circumcision movement, I want to speculate about its origins, to wit, is it a veiled attack on Jews and/or Moslems (since many Moslems also circumcise new-born males)?  I saw not a note of anti-Semitic or anti-Moslem ideas on either the website or any of the dozens of medically-themed articles against circumcision you can find at wholebabyrevolution.com.  (The impressive list reminds me of the equally impressive lists of articles I used to see on the health benefits of gingko biloba and laetrile.)

Despite the hygienic approach of the materials and the campaign, I assert that based on the given information, any act to ban circumcision is inherently and irrefutably anti-Semitic and anti-Moslem.  We may never know, but it’s difficult not to wonder if behind the smiley and earnest dedication of Jena Troutman lurks some money that hates Jews, and may hate Moslems, too.

I think Jews should learn a lesson from the small ban circumcision movement, a lesson that I believe many enlightened Moslems have known for some time: that there are more communalities between the Jewish and Moslem religions and cultures than there are between either of these venerable civilizations and Christianity.  Think of ancient language, dietary restrictions, multiple daily prayer times, prayer repetition, professions in Diaspora, musical traditions, methodologies of its great philosophers—the list of points at which Jewish and Moslem culture touch are endless.

American Jews should contemplate these similarities when asked to join forces with the American religious right in the kind of holy war proposed by the likes of Professor Samuel P. Huntington of the “clash of civilizations” theory.  And Israelis might remember these similarities when they consider the civil and economic rights of Palestinians and when they contemplate the possibility of negotiating peace in the Middle East.

In his regular column on the Op/Ed page of last Saturday’s New York Times, Charles Blow presented survey results from the Pew Research Center in chart form without explanation.  His article, titled “False Choices,” is loosely related to the chart and proposes that “we need both sensible tax increases and sensible spending cuts to address the deficit.”  I generally like what Blow has to say, but I reject this assertion, for two reasons: 1) The deficit should not be an issue until we have more people working; 2) Tax increases, and not cuts to job-creating programs, should be the only way to cure the deficit problem because taxes are currently too low on higher incomes; additionally, raising taxes always produces jobs.  Of course, maybe by “sensible cuts,” Blow means cuts to military spending, which I enthusiastically support.  Alas, Blow is not specific.

But I don’t want to quibble with Blow, but instead shed some light on the Pew study he presents. I want to do the math for everyone who saw, or didn’t see, the article, and extrapolate from it a phenomenon that truly is frightening: Americans acting and voting against their own best interest.

The results of the Pew study of a representative cross-section of adults nationwide show that while 53% of those surveyed are following the debate on raising the U.S. debt ceiling very closely or somewhat closely, only about 48% believe they understand what would happen if the debt ceiling is not raised. 

Despite their uneasiness with the subject, an incredible 73% of those surveyed are very concerned or somewhat concerned that not raising the debt limit would force the United States to default and hurt the nation’s economy. The Pew study thus shows that Americans are well aware that it’s a very bad idea not to raise the debt ceiling.

And yet when asked if they wanted their Congressional representative to vote in favor of or against raising the debt ceiling, only 19% said in favor, while 47% said to vote against. (34% said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion.)

So once again, Americans seem to be voting against their own best interests.  They realize that raising the debt ceiling is a necessity, and yet they want their Congressperson to vote against it.  

What is going on here?  Last week, I told you about a group (too small to be statistically representative) whose incomes depend to a large extent on the government doling out money to nonprofit organizations, yet nevertheless are against tax increases that for the most part wouldn’t harm them.

Eight months ago, I noted that working class whites are supporting the very political party—the Republicans—that has been taking money from the working class since Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency.  

I understand that about a quarter to a third of the voters put more stock in social issues than economic or political issues; really I should say “social control” issues, because in all cases, these so-called “values” voters want to control what other people do, e.g., by opposing gay marriage and a woman’s right to have an abortion or by inserting Christianity into public and secular places.  Related to, and to a large extent overlapping, these “social control” voters are those who vote on the single issue of gun rights.  Whether they know it or not, except for the ultra-wealthy among them, these groups of voters have made a devil’s bargain with the economic free-marketers: support our values and we’ll support your economic policies even though they hurt us.

Of course that doesn’t explain the rest of those voting against their own interests.

Yesterday the Associated Press released the latest version of its surveys with GfK and it shows that two-thirds of the public say that Social Security or Medicare benefits can’t be cut because they are vital to their financial security as they age.

Hey, let’s face it.  One reason that Americans can spend so much in good times, and thereby serve as Atlas holding up the world’s economy, is that they depend on Social Security and Medicare to take care of a good part of their needs when retired or infirm.

More facts from the survey: 70% said Social Security is “extremely” or “very” important to their financial security in retirement, and 72 percent said so for Medicare.

The story points out that 54 percent believe it’s possible to balance the budget without cutting spending for Medicare, and 59 percent say the same about Social Security.

But the Associated Press does its best to spin the story away from the message the voters are emphatically communicating to elected officials: find another way to balance the budget than taking it away from the elderly.  Instead the article becomes a quiet little hand-wring that the experts have not been able to convince people to sacrifice their retirement benefits, even though the rich are currently paying an historically small share of total taxes.

First and foremost, like every other story I have ever read about the future of Social Security and Medicare, the writer focuses on the short-term and not the long-term.  Check out this statement: “Combined, Social Security and Medicare account for about a third of government spending, a share that will only grow.” True enough, but then the baby boomers will all die and the next generation of seniors will be much smaller, so Social Security and Medicare will not have the current problem it faces: not enough working people to support the growing number of retirees.

Demographers have likened the journey of the baby boomers through life to a rat passing through the snake that has just swallowed it: to the observer, a bulge is moving through the snake, from head to tail.  Because the population of boomers is so much larger than the one that came before it and was followed by a baby bust, wherever the boomers have been in their life cycle, its bulge has created both challenges for society and opportunities for businesses.  

Now we boomers are old, and that means there are more old people than ever before in history.  The very good news is that they’re living longer, which of course means we have the responsibility of paying for their Social Security and Medicare longer.  In a humane society, that should be a problem we all like to have, like the problem of having to pay for a child to go to Stanford or North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Every expert the AP story quotes says that we will have to cut benefits, and these opinions are underscored by statements such as, “Again, there’s a sharp difference between what the public believes and what experts say. Most experts say the programs will be there for generations to come. But they may look very different than they do today, and Americans should take note.”

No one in the article mentions raising taxes, nor does the reporter.  For some reason raising taxes is completely off the table.  And yet we could solve the temporary challenge presented by the baby boom bulge as simply as lifting the limit on income that is assessed the Social Security and Medicare taxes.

I’d like to see AP-GfK ask people if they would be willing to have higher taxes on the wealthy to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent while my rat of a generation completes its journey through the snake of life.  My guess is that Americans would be overwhelmingly in favor of it.  

Yesterday morning I entered the following search terms into Google News: “budget cuts school district.”  I didn’t stop perusing the articles until I got through 40 of the more than 7,000 listed, and the articles were still dated May 21 and May 20 (the two prior days).  I skipped ahead to the 120th article and we were still on May 18 (less than a week ago).

The 40 stories over a two-day period to which I linked came from all over the country, including South Berkeley, Michigan;  Great Falls, Montana; Iowa City, Pennsylvania; Levittown, Pennyslvania; Logan, Utah, the Meridian School District in Idaho;  the Plymouth School District in Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and the Pendleton School District in Oregon.

Most of the articles bemoaned the fact that state and federal budget cuts were leading to teacher and support staff layoffs and the curtailing of programs.  Of special note are these shockers:

• Philadelphia intend to close schools for at-risk students.
• Many Illinois schools districts are cutting pre-school programs, which have been proven to improve the performance of students in later years.
• Two PA school districts are considering cutting to four days a week (from a  story a few weeks back I remembered)

While there are a handful of stories about districts raising taxes (usually the millage on property taxes) or doing fundraising, the tone of virtually all the stories favored defeatist and discouraged hand-wringing.  School boards, parents and teachers seem to accept their fate in an oddly disoriented, almost catatonic way. We’ve seen some anger, but not as much as I think there should be among either parents or school districts. 

In fact, I think we should be seeing people everywhere up in arms!

The anger should be directed at our politicians for preferring the interest of one group of Americans above all others: the wealthy.

Board members tend to be smart, educated and media savvy.  They must know these well-documented facts:

• If Americans, and in particular the wealthy, paid in taxes today what they did 30 years ago, we wouldn’t have the tax shortages that are forcing these terrible cut-backs, which will hurt children, and in particular children in the poorest school districts.
• The recently negotiated budget cuts are paying for the two-year extension of the temporary tax breaks for those making more than $250,000 per year.
• While many Americans bemoan the many “failures” of education in this country, an overwhelming majority think their own children are getting or had a fine education in their public schools.

These facts form the basis for action by school boards and calls to action to residents of the school district.

I want to recommend the following actions to school board members. Some provide immediate funds to staunch the bleeding, while others can help to build towards a more permanent financing solution. 

1. Immediately raise school taxes, even if it’s a temporary move.

Most school districts have taxing authority, often over real estate.  The rationale for increasing the millage or other taxes is straight-forward: Everyone is paying less than they should in federal taxes now and we need this money to educate our children.  To make the tax increase fair, school districts could consider a number of ideas: in many school districts it might be possible to exempt retired people with houses under a certain value from the additional amounts or to add a tier of additional taxes on those properties worth more than a certain value.

Raising taxes in the current environment will take a lot of courage.  In many school districts, there are sure to be recall campaigns, financed by those who have abdicated their responsibility for educating all our children in return for a few, or many, pieces of silver.  But I would hope that voters whose children’s lives are improved by the increased millage will offset the “taxes are always too high” bunch. 

2. Close down all charter schools that do not perform better than the public school.

That will mean closing down most charter schools, since all studies show that most charter schools underperform both in the classroom and on standardized tests. Charter schools take money from public schools, much of which is turned into profit for the charter school operator.  By returning charter school students to the public school classrooms, the public schools can put this “profit” back to work to educate children.

3. Make sure the voters know whose fault it is.

School boards (perhaps jointly with teachers unions) should send to all voters a monthly update of the following lists:

• State and federal legislators and announced candidates who have voted to cut education or proposed such cuts.
• State and federal legislators and announced candidates who are voting to cut taxes or to continue temporary tax cuts or who support such moves.

People need to know just who it is who continues to transfer wealth from the poor and the middle class up the ladder to the wealthy by extending a three-decades-old low-tax regime while demanding draconian cuts to education (and to alternative energy, infrastructure improvements, the elderly and health care).

Most school districts have a public relations budget.  I recommend that over the short term, most of it be dedicated to a campaign that communicates one message: “We need to raise federal income taxes to support the education of our children.”

The last election saw right-wingers who want to lower taxes more and cut funds for public education sweep into office, but they didn’t win because an overwhelming majority of Americans agree with their views.  They won because their voters went to the polls and those who would prefer a more equitable distribution of the wealth in the United States stayed home. 

The right-wingers were, of course, aided in the last election by the mainstream news media, which consistently framed issues in conservative terms, gave far more coverage to Republican candidates and events and kept hidden key facts that might have energized Democratic, young and minority voters to come to the polls. But school districts can speak directly to voters, with notes to parents, the monthly newsletter, the district website and school meetings.  Moreover, school districts are too big to ignore in the local news media.  School districts can build a let’s raise taxes to where they once were so we can educate our children message into everything they send the media, from the announcement of how the kids did on standardized tests to the cute feature on careers day.

It’s time for school boards to take a stand in favor of the constituency they are supposed to represent: the youth of America (as Casey Stengel used to say).  Those who say that the school boards in fact represent the entire community have said the same thing because the school board’s charge from the community is to ensure quality and cost-effective education.  It is the fervent and ethical pursuit of that mission that school boards owe to their communities.  The special interest group that school boards represent are not those who want a low-tax regime or selfish, but the children in the district.  That representation demands that school boards take a stand today for higher taxes.

Torture supporters keep repeating the big lie that torture helped to find Osama bin Laden not just to re-spark the debate on the value of torture, but also to twist its terms in a way that assumes that it’s legal.  Which it isn’t.

The latest torturista to make the false claim that torture led to the identification of ObL’s location is former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum.

The story starts in the middle of last week, when John McCain wrote an OpEd piece in the Washington Post saying that torture had nothing to do with finding ObL.  The next day on the floor of the Senate, McCain condemned former U.S. Attorney General Mike Mukasey for promoting the false view that torture helped to get the terrorist.

This morning’s news now brings Santorum’s absurd claim that McCain doesn’t know anything about torture.   Santorum embarrassed himself to no end by proposing that he, who never served a day in the military and specialized in domestic issues as a Senator, knows more about torture than long-time member of the Senate Arms Service Committee  John McCain, who suffered 5 1/2 long years as a prisoner of the Vietnamese and may have himself been a victim of torture. 

Santorum looked foolish, to be sure, but he accomplished his objective: to keep the idea that torture works in the mainstream media. 

Other than Santorum, up to this point, the only people to say that torture led to the capture of ObL 1) were part of the torture bureaucracy; 2) have been out of a position to know for years; and 3) have not seen the current evidence first-hand.   Santorum does share characteristic 2 and 3 with the likes of Dick Cheney, Mike Mukasey, John Yoo and Peter King.

So let’s be clear: All the evidence that has been released shows no connection between our torture and the identification of ObL. 

All the people who have looked at the evidence say that there is no link.

On one side we have this mass of evidence and on the other side the ostensibly lame attempts by the opposition to claim a little credit for what they could not do despite their torture, illegal rendition and the establishment of a worldwide gulag of prisons.  

Yes, to the average person, those supporters of the torture-found-ObL theories look pretty ridiculous, and especially Santorum.

But look what they have accomplished: the debate on torture is alive again and the issue at hand is: does it work or not.

The issue should never be “Does torture work or not?” (By the way, it doesn’t.)  Torture was and is illegal in the United States and goes against our basic humanistic principles as a country.  We do not argue about the efficacy of killing men who don’t pay alimony and child support and then giving their estates to their ex-wives.  And we don’t argue about the efficacy of selling our children to institutions of higher learning when they turn 12 to work as day laborers in return for a free education and emancipation at the age of 25.  Even if these policies did work, we wouldn’t implement them because they break our laws.  And torture breaks our laws and our shared convictions, as well.

As a society, we can not avoid being dragged into a battle with the torture-found-ObL crowd, because if we are silent, the lie passes.  In his recent comments, John McCain has not forgotten to stress that torture is wrong and illegal.  I don’t like most of his politics, but I salute the old soldier for reminding us that we shouldn’t shift the debate to “does it work or doesn’t it.” Because it doesn’t matter. It just ain’t right.

One of the major themes in the news lately has been the sex life of Republican candidates for President.  Will Newt Gingrich’s standing with “values” voters suffer because he was “dating” his current wife while his then-wife was recovering from an illness in the hospital, or will his current wife be an asset to him?   And what will the voters think about Mitch Daniels, whose wife left him with the kids for two years to shack up with another man?

I for one never cared about Clinton’s peccadilloes and I don’t care about what Gingrich, Daniels, Nikki Haley (who has been accused of getting around a bit), Donald Trump, or any other Republican candidate does in his or her private life.  And I don’t care what Democratic candidates do, either.

There are, however, two exceptions:

1. When candidates condemn what they themselves are doing, as Senator Larry “Wide Stance” Craig did by condemning homosexuality while trolling airport men’s rooms for quickie gay sex.  As most of us know, Newty dallied while condemning President Clinton for his liaison with Monica Lewinsky.
2. When the private actions suggest a pattern of wrong-doing that goes beyond adultery, such as sexual harassment, nonconsensual sex, pedophilia or, as in the case of Senator John Ensign, bribery.

As an adjunct to this “live and let live” philosophy, I am also not ready to condemn the adulterer who lies about his or her adultery, as long as there is no proof that he or she lied about anything else.  Just as you can’t score a home run without touching home plate, most adultery involves lying.  The “act” of lying is part of the “sin” of adultery, and not a separate sin. 

It would be great if all our politicians and public figures were saints, but they’re not.  Who is any of us to define sainthood for other people anyway?  And no one can get inside a couple’s marriage and really know what it’s like in there.

I would rather see the news media focus our attention on these factors:

• The candidates’ past actions in elected office and past record of accomplishments and stands on issues.
• What the candidate is currently advocating.
• How often the candidate follows the line of his or her party and if that party line conforms to what you want.

The news media does a disservice to the voters by wasting time on speculation about the private lives of any candidate, again, unless that candidate’s private life involves illegal activity or demonstrates hypocrisy. 

First, my reaction to the breaking news:  I’m delighted that we caught Osama bin Laden, but dismayed that our troops killed him.  He should have lived to stand trial and after conviction, been sentenced to rot away his years in solitary confinement.  The images of people celebrating his death were quite disturbing to me.  No man’s death should please anyone.  In a humanitarian world, one without war, the world we hope to build—in this future world, the true enemy is death against which all men and women will fight together as brothers and sisters.  Didn’t bin Laden gleefully celebrate the destruction of 9/11?  Let’s despise Osama bin Laden and celebrate his capture, but let’s not stoop one nanometer to his level by applauding his death.  

Now we return you to your regular programming:

We’re used to hearing and reading lies from the right wing, such as the lie that gutting job-creating programs to cut taxes on the wealthy creates jobs.  Or the lie that providing unemployment benefits for too many weeks will lead to people staying at home instead of looking for work.  Or how about the lie that government never does anything as well as the private sector can do it, or that charter schools lead to better educational outcomes.

We’re also used to stupid statements from the right, such as the many factual errors of Sarah Palin or the absurd exaggerations of Michelle Bachman.  Or how about the Florida Tea-partite politico who said that 90% of Planned Parenthood’s work involves abortions.  

But Tom Corbett, newly elected governor of Pennsylvania, concocted an especially unheady brew of lying and ignorance late last week with his solution to the budget problems facing Pennsylvania’s public universities.  His idea is for the state schools to earn money by allowing companies to drill for natural gas below campus.

Let’s start with the lying part that underlies the idea:  The primary reason that Pennsylvania institutions of higher education face a critical funding shortfall is because Corbett’s new budget hacks $2.0 billion in state support to education and cuts aid to colleges and universities by 50%.  Corbett tells us that cutting aid to education is the best way to solve the budget crisis and free businesses to forge Pennsylvania’s economic future in an increasingly globalized and knowledge-thirsty world.   These cuts make little sense to anyone who has one or more child in college.

Corbett’s other lie that lurks behind his advice to public universities is his insistence that gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale becomes deregulated and remains relatively untaxed.  The lie of course is that the current price of oil and the impending shortage of the stuff isn’t enough to interest gas drillers in the Marcellus Shale.  We also have to let them sully the environment and not pay their fair share in taxes.

So after having had a major hand in creating the problem—immediate and critical budget shortfall—the Governor proposes his unshackled Marcellus behemoth as the savior.

Only one problem, and here’s where Tommy Boy’s ignorance comes into play: Under current law, none of the royalties from drilling on campus property would go to the universities.  The royalties would all go directly to Pennsylvania’s Oil and Gas Lease Fund.  In other words, Tommy Boy’s plan would provide no help to the colleges and universities now scrambling to pay for teachers, equipment, staff and building maintenance.

I imagine, though, that Corbett’s idea delights his true constituency, the oil and gas companies that see the Marcellus Shale as a potential goldmine, especially if they can drill everywhere (like on the many campuses of college-rich western Pennsylvania), with little regulation and a light tax burden.

No wonder that surveys show that Corbett’s popularity has plummeted since he took office. He was elected to create jobs, but instead cares more about ramming through the right-wing soak-everyone-but-the-rich-and-poison-the-environment agenda. Like Tea-partites and their fellow travelers everywhere, his brand of lies and ignorance plays well until people actually see it in action.

It all seems so trivial, the growing focus of our mass culture on the upcoming wedding of a young man of fairly middling accomplishments who represents one of the most odious ideas ever invented by humans-that some people are inherently better than others.  Yet so far, it’s been relatively easy to ignore the royal hubbub.   

Yes, there are a large number of TV new programs and entertainments dedicated to the royal wedding.  Yes, even the New York Times is increasing its coverage of the upcoming nuptials.  But we easily can skip over those articles, flip away when the nightly news starts to gush over Kate’s dress and bridesmaids, and completely ignore the specials.

But what is increasingly impossible to do is ignore celebrity culture, which seeps into every crack and corner of mass communications nowadays. 

My on-the-fly definition of celebrity culture is the preoccupation with the lives and activities of actors, popular singers, other entertainers, very rich people and those who happen to gain notoriety on TV or the Internet.  Reporting on celebrity culture drives out other news.  Charitable causes and social trends are advanced or retarded based on their relationship to celebrities; e.g., when Angelina Jolie gets involved in a cause, that cause suddenly becomes news.   And when a wide range of publications, including Parade, Cosmopolitan, AARP, People and even The Times and The Wall Street Journal cover a trend, cause or nonprofit organization, they often do so through the eyes of the celebrities who have become involved.

Key to understanding the pernicious influence of celebrity culture is to examine that part of celebrity lives that mass culture covers: the stories primarily show these people living the “jet set” life of what Thorsten Veblen once called conspicuous consumption.  We are not only are told to value the celebrity over the person who has actually accomplished something of worth, we are directed to what is most admirable about the celebrity-the fact that he or she is able and ready to spend so much more than we can on goods and services.

Perhaps one of the worst effects of celebrity culture is that it establishes celebrities—again, primarily entertainers, rich folk and lucky do-nothings such as characters on “Jersey Shore”—as the aspirational heroes and heroines of the culture, the people that we are teaching both our children and our adults to admire most, respect most and most want to emulate.  I don’t think I have to spend any time demonstrating that it’s bad for society when everyone wants to grow up to be Kim Kardashian or Charlie Sheen instead of the paleontologist Tim Flannery or Hikaru Nakamura, a 23-year-old who is currently the best U.S. chess player.

Today I want to explore one little cog in the celebrity culture machine—the list of birthdays that appear in the daily newspapers and elsewhere, and which a number of other periodicals use as filler at the front or back of publications or as regular features on websites.

Let’s start with AARP, the slick bi-monthly publication of the AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons), which gives financial, relationship, legal and other advice to those who belong to the organization, all 40 million or so of whom are 50 years of age or older.

AARP has a feature on its last page called “The Big 5-Oh,” which displays a large photo of a famous person turning 50 in the next two months and some short comments that take up the top two-thirds of the page.  In the bottom third are 6 more photos with short blurbs or people turning 50, 60, 70, 80 and sometimes even 90.

Here is a list of the 21 people featured in the first three issues of AARP in 2011 in alphabetical order.  I have put in bold, italics and underlining to indicate all the non-celebrities.  In the non-celebrity group I include athletes (not because I think we should focus more on them, but because very few of them ever become part of “celebrity culture,” that is, followed not for their accomplishments but because of their celebrity):

Alley, Kirstie (60)

Ann-Margret (70)

Boyle, Susan (50)

Channing, Carol (90)

Clooney, George (50)

Etheridge, Melissa (50)

Gretsky, Wayne (50)

Jones, James Earl (80)

Lopez, George (50)

Louis-Dreyfus, Julia (50)

Mays, Willie (80)

Murphy, Eddie (50)

Nimoy, Leonard (80)

Nolte, Nick (70)

O’Neal, Ryan (70)

Reed, Ralph (50)

Ride, Sally (60)

Russell, Kurt (60)

Sullenberger, Chelsey (6)

Thomas, Richard (60)

Will, George (70)

Only 6 out of 21 (or about 29%) are not actors or entertainers, and of those 6, two are athletes.  Of the remaining four, two are modern heroes: a former astronaut and the pilot who belly-landed a plane on the Hudson River.  BTW, the two political figures,  Ralph Reed and George Will, are of the extreme right, which may suggest that AARP, long a proponent of a humanitarian social net for senior and others and a big backer of health care reform, may be tacking rightward.

Note that there are no scientists, no historians, no chess players, no film directors (who after all create the films in which actors merely play a role), no Directors of the Centers for Disease Control or the National Labor Relations Board, no governors, no literary authors.

The daily newspaper is no better.  For decades, most dailies have had lists of birthdays of the day, which is typically supplied by the Associated Press wire service. 

Here’s who is on the AP birthday list today: “Movie director-writer Paul Mazursky is 81. Songwriter Jerry Leiber (LEE’-buhr) is 78. Actor Al Pacino is 71. Rock musician Stu Cook (Creedence Clearwater Revival) is 66. Singer Bjorn Ulvaeus (ABBA) is 66. Actress Talia Shire is 65. Actor Jeffrey DeMunn is 64. Rock musician Michael Brown (The Left Banke) is 62. Rock musician Steve Ferrone (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers) is 61. Country singer-songwriter Rob Crosby is 57. Actor Hank Azaria is 47. Rock singer Andy Bell (Erasure) is 47. Rock musician Eric Avery (Jane’s Addiction) is 46. Country musician Rory Feek (Joey + Rory) is 46. TV personality Jane Clayson is 44. Actress Renee Zellweger is 42. Actress Gina Torres is 42. Actor Jason Lee is 41. Actor Jason Wiles is 41. Actress Emily Bergl is 36. Actress Marguerite Moreau is 34. Singer Jacob Underwood is 31. Actress Sara Paxton is 23. Actress Allisyn Ashley Arm is 15.”

(I do admit that I got a little nostalgic twinge reading that it was the birthday of someone involved with the making of the 1966 pop hit, “Walk Away, Renee.”  After all, it is one of the dozen 45 RPM vinyl records that I still own.)

Of the 25 people on the list, the only non-actor, non-entertainer is the film director Paul Mazursky.  Among those left off AP’s list of April 25 birthdays were two other film directors, the former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl , the horribly right-wing yet significant propagandist Dinesh D’Souza and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn. 

This active crowding out of those who have real accomplishments is a small part of the larger imperatives of mass culture, which tell us to organize our emotional lives around commercial transactions, and not around achievement and service to others, and establishes as our role models those who are famous because they either represent or are extreme participants in mindless consumption.