Opening the Locke box

Chevreh, Reebyata, As part of my committment to open rubyjewsday to respectful discussion between myself and interlocutors in the Russian community and beyond, I have asked my friend Locke to respond to my posting about the late, great Boris Yeltsin. Locke has done that and more in a thoughtful article you can read after the jump. The author is a prominent member of the Russian community who prefers to post under the pseudonym Locke on this blog, so I honor his desire to remain anonymous while sharing with us some provocative ideas. Now class, please ponder his words well, because I will respond to him in several days and then there will be snap exam to see if you all have been paying attention.

I think I am a liberal. Really. I look on Wikipedia and I find the
following:

"Liberalism refers to a broad array of related doctrines, ideologies,
philosophical views, and political traditions which advocate individual
liberty.[1] Liberalism has its roots in the Western Age of Enlightenment,
but the term has taken on different meanings in different time periods.

Broadly speaking, liberalism emphasizes individual rights. It seeks a
society characterized by freedom of thought for individuals, limitations
on power (especially of government and religion), the rule of law, the
free exchange of ideas, a market economy that supports free private
enterprise, and a transparent system of government in which the rights of
all citizens are protected.[2] In modern society, liberals favor a liberal
democracy with open and fair elections, where all citizens have equal
rights by law and an equal opportunity to succeed.[3]"

So far so good. This is liberalism as seen by the original Locke, by
Presidents Jefferson and Washington and Lincoln and the first Roosevelt
from the Pro position, and by Governor Wallace and Senator Thurmond from
the Con. This is my liberalism. Affirmative action and school busing are
quite thoroughly anti-liberal: once you trample the rights of one concrete
individual in search of the nebulous concept of social justice, you
redefine liberalism into something it is not. You might say I have a
conservative view of liberalism: I want to conserve classical liberalism
that informed the idea of the land of opportunity. Social justice, the
keystone of "new liberalism", reminds me of a tailor who made all the
underwear with room for one testicle after proving, mathematically, that
that's how many the average American has.

Most traditionally "liberal" institutions have decidedly counter-liberal
effects. Labor unions limit upward mobility of their own members by
collective bargaining, and in union shops nonmembers need not apply.
Public schools inculcate political correctitude in much the same way by
much the same people who in the past burned heretics at the stake. Equal
Rights Amendment, a classic liberal idea, went down in flames because of
the dent it would have put in the huge advantage women have in such areas
as marital law, "rape shield" law, and domestic violence laws --
advantages promulgated by "new liberal" legislation. In socialized
medicine, the issue gets complicated further: the single biggest obstacle
to universal affordable quality care is -- surprize! -- individual
freedom: because it is also freedom to break your neck on a motorcycle,
acquire AIDS (or transmit it) by the myriad ways that can be done, or eat
yourself into a triple bypass. So a society that is serious about
universal health care will have to find some means to keep one
irresponsible individual from consuming the resources that would have paid
for thousands of vaccinations -- again, anathema to a classical liberal.

So here we come back to the Russian debacle. Was it a failure of
capitalism? I think not. Capitalism, in its purest sense, is private
ownership of means of production. Well, the late Soviet period was a time
of near-bankruptcy of the public ownership of means of production -- and
what kept it partly afloat was private CONTROL of means of production that
were nominally public. Privatization was a desperate attempt to forestall
the impending collapse of the entire national economy by infusing it with
individual responsibility, flexibility, accountability, motivation, drive,
courage, reward -- yes, freedom to succeed and its inseparable twin,
freedom to fail. The failure was a failure to recognize how much of the
above qualities were present in the Russian people -- and how concentrated
they were in how few individuals. It was a failure of the liberal idea
that every individual is sacred, doomed by the masses who saw themselves
as just that, masses, faceless herds shepherded by the few individuals
carrying the whip and the carrot v sil'nyx rukax. And what is the social
theory that gauges people according to what herd they belong to? Right.
Social liberalism. Don't think so? What do you think the Bakke case was
about? Has any "Womyn's" group ever lost a discrimination case? Do you
remember the way congressional districts got jerrymandered to screw Steve
Solarz out of his constituency? Remember Hymietown? All "new liberal"
creations; all milestones in the creation of a mob from former
individuals.

So here it is. Shortish, it ain't, but misunderstood it should not be.
Were I a wordsmith for a living it might scan better, but still and all,
not bad, I hope, for a second language.

Continued...

An invitation to Locke

Dear Locke,
In your response to my piece on Yeltsin, you ask me to try to look at the Yeltsin era through "Russian eyes" and understand that the failures "were not so muchy of Reaganomics as of the rosy-glasses liberalism." Nu, if you have the time and inclination, send me a shortish essay to my e-mail walterruby@gmail.com explicating that viewpoint a little deeper. I'll put it on rubyjewsday as a guest essay and then respond. I think it would be an instructive exchange.
Best, Walter

Continued...

Boris Nikolaiovich Yeltsin

As someone who had a ringside seat for the collapse of the Soviet Union-serving as correspondent for the Jerusalem Post and Maariv in Moscow from early 1990 until mid-1992--I remember Boris Yeltsin when he was not considered a drunken clown, but as a brave, resourceful and inspiring political leader who broke with the corrupt Communist elite to become the avenging angel of the long-suffering Russian people. I was in Moscow for the sublime three days in August 1991 when Yeltsin stood atop the tank and faced down the enemies of human freedom, inspiring thousands of other Muscovites at a critical moment to rise above their very justifiable fear and demand an end to a horrible system. As one middle-aged woman told me that day as the tanks drew closer and closer to the barricaded White House and a repeat of the massacre of Tienemen Square 1989 seemed likely; "I cant leave here and go home to safety right now even though I know my life may be at risk because I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I gave in again and allowed these fuckers to do to my children what they did to myself and my husband."So the big question is this; what happened to the inspiring leader of 1991 to reduce him within several years to a sick joke; a drunken bufoon seemingly intent on destroying the very vision of Russian democracy he had brought briefly, shimmeringly to life? I think I know the answer; Boris Yeltsin's heart was broken by the results of his government's disastrous free-market policies of the first year of his rule of independent Russia and after the bloodletting he ordered around the White House (Parliament) in 1994, he was a broken man who turned to drink to drown out the anguish he was feeling. Yeltsin was sold a bill of goods; namely, the free-market fantasies of the Russian democrats who he trusted and empowered. They believed that democracy and capitalism are identical and all that needed to be done was to open Russia to the free market and everything would proceed beautifully. So Yeltsin's Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar tried that in the early months of 1992, with every citizen being given a chunk of the former Soviet state to do with as they wanted--mainly to quickly sell off to the bigger fish for a few hundred rapidly diminishing rubles, and within less than a year, Gaidar and company had allowed most of the resources of the state to be accumulated in the hands of a few ruthless 'oligarchs', while the vast majority of Russians sank into abject poverty. Within a year or two, Yeltsin was hated by the very masses who had once adored him.

Then came the events of 1994, when he used violence to stand down his parliamentary opposition, the disastrous first invasion of Chechnya and the 1996 elections, which he bought with the support of the oligarchs. Yeltsin ought to have resigned before going through with any of these actions, which were all in direct violation of the humane and democratic values he championed against Gorbachev and the harder-line Communist Party hierarchy from 1987-1991. Unfortunately, Yeltsin allowed himself to be convinced that he had to stay in power to prevent the return of the self-same nomenklatura and had to use every possible means to do so. Through all of that, Yeltsin corroded the meaning of democracy to the point that the vast majority of Russians came to hate the very word and were glad to turn themselves over to the updated totalitarianism of Putin.

The problem, in my mind, was less with Yeltsin personally than with the illusions of the Russian democrats of the Gorbachev era; among them many of the bravest and purest human beings I ever had the privelege to meet. Brave and pure, but deeply deluded. Their fatal flaw was that in their just hatred of everything related to the Soviet system, they assumed that the seeming opposite of the Soviet system--i.e. pure capitalism--must be the answer. In those years, I had discussions with many of these people---some Jewish or part-Jewish and others ethnic Russians--who were leading demostrations demanding the end of Communist Party rule and the creation of genuine democracy. Few of these people at that point had ever travelled outside the Soviet bloc and their vision of America was literally Reagan's rhapsody of a shining city on a hill. I hated to be the bearer of bad news, but was frequently forced into that role, feeling compelled to acknowledge that Reagan-era America was hardly a paragon of justice and freedom; that, yes, as Soviet propaganda said, we DID have serious problems related to race, poverty and social dysfunction in America, that we DID have whole areas like the South Bronx that looked a lot like Berlin after World War II, that, in my mind, the Reaganites were reversing many of the gains built up over generations in America since the progressive era by breaking unions, eviserating needed government programs and starting a process of huge tax cuts for the rich which was greatly increasing the gap between rich and poor in our country. When I would say these things, my Russian interlocutors would seem at first bewildered and then turn away from me with the apparent conviction that I was one of those deluded, self-hating Westerners who for mystifying reasons didnt understand what a paradise I was priveleged to live in.

And sure, they were right in their main conviction; the American system, despite all its flaws, WAS much better than the Soviet one both in terms of allowing human freedom and in providing a decent standard of living. But what they didnt understand was that what made the American system, and even more so, the European social democracies, work, was precisely that they were NOT pure capitalism, but because a certain level of social protection had been built into it over the the decades, minumum wage, social security, unemployment insurance, unions, and so much more. Without all of that, without the willingness of the system to bend for its own good, we might have had a socialist revolution of our own back in the 1930's. But the Reagan era was a time of the rhetoric of unalloyed capitalism and because Reagan had called the Soviet Union an "evil empire", he was a hero to dissidents and democrats in Moscow.

So the leaders of Democratic Russia sought to create pure capitalism in Russia in 1992, and they ended up re-creating the robber baron era in America before the dawn of the progressive era, when most of the resources of the country were in the hands of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Henry Ford and a few others. They were given the chance to use Russia as a laboratory for this wildly misgotten social experiment because of the popularity of Yeltsin--the muzhik, the man of the people, who had been convinced by Gaidar and the others that it would work--and within a few months, they ended up impovershing millions and, in the process, destroying Yeltsin. He saw how quickly his popularity among the masses turned to disillusion and contempt toward him, and he was contemplated that he had sanctioned the process and was responsible for the result, something inside him snapped. He had spent his life as a Communist, was converted late in life to capitalism, came to power on the capitalist wave, and was destroyed politically and emotionally when it abruptly receded. He had staked everything on the capitalist way; when it clearly screwed Russia and the common people, he was demoralized and turned to drink.

But I honor the man who I saw standing on that tank that day; the man who summoned first in thousands and then in millions for a fleeting time the belief that despite its 1000 years of despotism, Russia was not fated to remain a shithole, that Russians were full human beings with the power to transform their own lives and the society in which they lived. If I die tomorrow, I will remember the experience of witnessing that uprising as an enormous privilege, a deeply spiritual experience, which showed me the transcendant possibilities of the human spirit. The Yeltsin Revolution came apart within a year or two on its own contradictions; but it happened and it was a shining moment like 1789, 1848, 1905, 1968 etc, which in the long run helps move the human race toward a happier future where people can live more fulfilling and purposeful lives. Boris Nikolaiovich Yeltsin, z"l, you may be a prophet without honor today, but at a critical moment, you grabbed history by the horns and thrust it boldly in a new and better direction. Few are privileged to play such a role, and whatever came later, your greatness at that moment can never be tarnished.

Continued...

more thoughts on Virginia Tech

The media coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre has been peurile and insipid beyond words. Either we are given mawkish coverage of the grieving process with endless sacharine valentines to the victims, or we are given an intense close up of the deeply sick mind of mass-murderer Cho Seung-Hui. Never mind that by doing so we are fulfilling Cho's fantasy that by killing as many people as possible alongside himself, he would achieve the attention he craved but couldn't get in life. Even worse, American society is sending a message to the many other disturbed young men who are obviously lurking out there that 'If you act out like Cho, you too can become famous, notorious for eternity'. The message we ought to be sending, the only real way we can ensure that the victims of this horror did not die in vain is exactly the message we are not sending; namely, getting that we are going to get serious as a society about keeping guns out of the hands of psychotics like Cho. read the following

for an understanding of how a sane society would behave. The sad truth is that we are an insane society; one that refuses to do what is necessary to protect our citizens from gun violence. Even the most feeble attempts in that direction are stopped by the gun lobby, in front of which politicians of all descriptions quake in fear.
The most fundamental obligation of a society is to accord the maximum security to its citizens; American society gives the clear message that 'gun rights' are more important than the right to be protected from crazed murderers with guns. How sick is that?

My friend Locke wrote in response to my last posting on this subject that the solution is to let more people carry guns into places they are presently banned--like on college campuses. He falls for the gun lobby conceit that a well-armed citizenry will always act responsibly, and if they must shoot, shoot straight. Does he think no one will shoot prematurely; that no 'normal person' with a gun will ever become angered, drunk or some combination of the two and lose control? I'd hate to see Brighton Beach in the early morning hours as people stagger out of the restaurants if everyone around was packing heat? It would be 'Shootout at the 'Haroshe Corral' or something like this. Presumably we are living in the 21st Century, not the era of cowboys and Indians. What Locke is apparently saying is forget about the police, everyone should carry a gun, shoot first and ask questions later. And that is going to make us safer? The purest madness...

Continued...

the need for gun control

It is sad beyond words that even in the wake of the horrible massacre at Virginia Tech University yesterday, only a few Democrats have summoned the political courage to call for reactiviating the struggle for gun control in this country--a sign of how totally we have fallen under the iron control of the gun lobby since the Columbinbe shootings back in 1999. Even though a majority of Americans continue to support sensible limitations on handguns, there is a strong feeling that Al Gore may have lost close states like Florida, Ohio, West Virginia and New Hampshire in 2000 (he would have been elected if he had won even one of them) because he backed gun control and thereby turned off numerous rural voters in those states. Even though gun advocates are fewer, they are far more fervrid in support of their cause.

Even assuming that is true and even assuming a similar political dynamic exists today, how pathetically timid and how irresponsible not to take up a cause that is literally about preserving American lives. It is revealing that the riots in France that went on for weeks in immigrant communities around the country in November 2005; riots which were quite violent and involved hundreds of injuries and arrests, only one person was killed. Why? Because unlike here, the French, like other Europeans, do not have easy access to firearms. Meanwhile, the murder rate in urban communities across America, including nearby places like Philadelphia and Newark continues to rise to new records. Why? Because of the self-same easy access to guns.

There are always going to be alienated and mentally ill individuals like the gunman in Blacksburg, Virginia. That is sadly true in every modern society, in Europe as well as the U.S. A few such people are always going to become angry and/or crazed enough to decide that not only do they want to end their own lives, but desire to lash out at society by taking as many possible innocent victims with them. But only here in the U.S. are such people able arm themselves to the hilt at will and then go out and carry out their sick ambition to slaughter scores of their fellow citizens before shooting themselves. Why the hell do we allow such carnage to continue?

For the President and Congress to refuse to push for gun control laws that would keep weapons out of the hands of maniacs like this one is absolutely to be complicit in the slaughter of innocent Americans. The killer in Virginia pulled the trigger--again and again---but it was our political elite that enabled him to do so. To hear George W. Bush, who ignored the pleas of police departments across the country and allowed some of the few laws preventing the sale of advanced weaponry and ammunition to expire a couple of years ago, now purporting to leading our nation's mourning for the innocent victims of Virginia Tech, is nothing short of nauseating. Bush might have saved these lives, and many others, if he had been willing to advocate the passage of sensible gun laws that would still have allowed law-abiding citizens to own rifles for hunting. He might have done that, but instead he consciously chose the path of political expediency and allowed those essential regulations to expire.

As is well known, Bush and the rest of the rest of the political and religious right-wing in this country, the people that too mnay in the Russian community embrace as political allies, label themselves as 'pro-life.' For them being 'pro-life' means endeavoring to prevent women from deciding themselves whether or not to bring to term fetuses inside their own bodies. Or it means fighting to save stem cell lines that, if instead used by science, might actually bring cures to hereditary diseases. So for these holier than thou, supposedly deeply religious moralists, upholding the sanctity of life means caring deeply for unborn fetuses and stem cell lines. Yet for Bush and company, being 'pro-life' has nothing at all to do with saving the lives of living and breathing Americans; has nothing at all to do with preventing students at Virginia Tech from being cut down in the prime of their lives by senseless gun violence. On that question, the 'pro-life' crowd supports the right of all Americans, including crazies like this one, to arm themselves to the teeth. In other words, the so-called 'pro life' crowd chooses death over life.

Shame on the Democrats, most of whom know better, for being too afraid of their own shadows to take up anew a cause that needs to be at the heart of any real 'pro-life' agenda--the cause of gun control. America's religious communities, including the Jewish community, needs to scream loud and clear for our political class to wake up, show some guts and pass some new gun control laws that can help prevent horrors like the Virginia Tech massacre from happening across America, again and again.

Continued...

resolution of prostate problems+Chernobyl story

Dear Friends, Sorry again for long absence. I know that I always come up with fancy excuses for not posting on RubyJewsday but this one is legit. Last Tuesday,I had a prostate operation known as a Transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) from a superb urologist named Dr. Simon Hall at Mt. Sinai Hospital, and now after several days in bed can report success in the art of peeing after more than a month of being able to do so only with the help of a catheter. Yes, I know there are probably readers out there shouting "Too much information!" and "uujay khvatit, ya eto nye hachoo znat" but hey, I feel like sharing, this is my soapbox and I'm feeling decent for the first time since February 27, when I had the prostate bioposy which unfortunately got infected and set off this whoile painful process. Anyway, I can pee again, and with an impressive stream that I haven't seen in several decades. More to the point, I'm alive, well and ready for the next challenge. I didn't totally collapse during the month I was sick, I actually wrote an article or two.

Here is one that appeared in this issue of the Jewish Week, about the unlikely alliance of Dr. Igor Branovan, Assemblyman Alec Brook-Krasny, with an important assist from power broker Gene Borsch, convincing the New York State Legislature and Gov. Spitzer to give $540,000 to allow members of the Russian community who mayy have been exposed to radiation during the 1986 Chernobyl incident to be screened for thyroid cancer.

Here is the article

The story is at once a noble humane gesture that is above reproach and an example of the community's new political power in the wake of B-K's election to the State Assembly--the first time New York State has funded a program aimed primarily at the Russian-speaking community. As Brook-Krasny points out in my article, the program will certainly save lives of people who might otherwise die of thyroid cancer if their cancer was not found in time, and, on that basis, it is almost impossible to criticize, which also makes the Russian communal establishment's pushing this as their first legislative priority as brilliant PR, brilliant politics, as well as an important humanitarian initiative. It is also undeniable that while not one penny of the $540,000 in state money will go to the mainly-Russian doctors who offer the screening, those doctors will enjoy a significant new revenue stream from the many people coming in for the screeing, or actually from their insurance companies, Medicaid and Medicare.

So some may ask whether this is something state government should be funding. Let me share here the response I received from Jeff Gordon, head of Gov. Spitzer's Budget Office when I raised that very question:

"The initiative you are referring to is an item that is for a legitimate public purpose that was negotiated with the legislature and will be paid for with resources they identified during negotiations. In his budget proposal, Governor Spitzer proposed reducing the growth of Medicaid spending in order to finance both expanded access to health care coverage for children and investments in primary and preventive health initiatives...A program like this is consistent with those objectives."

And this from the very same Spitzer who just a couple of months was insisting upon huge cuts in health care spending. And then the Russian community goes up to Albany, bends the very tough Spitzer and comes home with half a million dollars in NEW health care funding, and that is only for the first year--they will almost certainly ask for funding of this program for several years to come. A compelling blend of humanitarianism and VERY smart politics.

Continued...