Week of April 23, 2007

One of the distinctive features of the modern American right has been nostalgia for the late 19th century, with its minimal taxation, absence of regulation and reliance on faith-based charity rather than government social programs. Conservatives from Milton Friedman to Grover Norquist have portrayed the Gilded Age as a golden age, dismissing talk of the era’s injustice and cruelty as a left-wing myth.

Well, in at least one respect, everything old is new again. Income inequality — which began rising at the same time that modern conservatism began gaining political power — is now fully back to Gilded Age levels.

Consider a head-to-head comparison. We know what John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in Gilded Age America, made in 1894, because in 1895 he had to pay income taxes. (The next year, the Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional.) His return declared an income of $1.25 million, almost 7,000 times the average per capita income in the United States at the time.

But that makes him a mere piker by modern standards. Last year, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, James Simons, a hedge fund manager, took home $1.7 billion, more than 38,000 times the average income. Two other hedge fund managers also made more than $1 billion, and the top 25 combined made $14 billion.

Concentrated minds need to focus without interruption. When I used to tell my students that simple truth, I was often greeted with smirks and bewildered looks. Some had not even imagined reading a serious book in silence.

Quiet is also vital to contemplation, prayer, and worship. Churches should have signs that say (right after the admonition against beach apparel): “Be Still. Think. Listen. Pray.”

Silence is the enemy of everything superficial, stupid, and ugly.

This brings me to Boot’s Law of Disasters: disasters that are widely predicted don’t occur. To cite just two examples: Y2K and the bird flu. Both were expected to be catastrophes, but for this very reason they turned out to be pretty harmless. Their potential victims took the necessary steps to blunt their impact. At this point there may even be a few readers scratching their heads, trying to remember what Y2K was all about. Remember how all the world’s computers were supposed to stop functioning when 1999 ended and 2000 began? Didn’t happen, needless to say. And bird flu mainly has been killing birds. The real nightmares are those, like 9/11 or the Virginia Tech shooting, that no one expects.

U.S. officials who say there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Iraq since President Bush began sending more American troops into Baghdad aren't counting one of the main killers of Iraqi civilians.

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn't include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

David Halberstam was killed Monday night in a car wreck south of San Francisco. The headline on the website for ESPN, the US sports channel, read “Famed Sports Author Halberstam Dies in Car Crash.” Sports author? For another generation of Americans, the 73-year-old Halberstam, who did write several sports books later in life, was far better known for his reporting from Vietnam for the New York Times, starting in 1963.

How do you turn a former Nazi prosecutor into an opponent of Hitler's regime? It seems that Gunther Oettinger, the minister president of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, thought the death of former German politician Hans Filbinger at age 93 justified such historical revisionism. In a eulogy honoring Filbinger's life, Oettinger said:"Hans Filbinger was no National Socialist. On the contrary, he was an opponent of the Nazi regime. However, he was unable to evade the regime's tight control, as were millions of others."...

[Germans protested Oettinger's comments.] It is encouraging to see Germans of all political convictions rally together to oppose the rewriting of history. Oettinger tried to justify his speech by saying that cultural norms hold that when eulogizing someone, the positive aspects of the person's life should be highlighted. While this may be true for people outside the public limelight, it is not applicable to public figures, and it is certainly not permissible for politicians to whitewash or even erase the dark spots in a person's biography - even more so if these are marked by swastikas.

While it is regrettable that ministers of Oettinger's standing consider it"permissible" to make such statements today, viewing the past as water under the bridge, what should be remembered about this episode is not the view of one individual, but the great extent of public pressure brought to bear on him.