KATRINA CONCERNS

(1) Yesterday's news told us that New Orleans did an absolutely splendid job of evacuating the 80% of its population who could drive themselves out. What we didn't learn until tonight's news is that they made absolutely no provision whatever for evacuating those who were too old, too disabled, or too poor to own or drive cars. In my religious tradition, this is the kind of sin for which Sodom and Gomorrah got wiped out. It needs to be denounced in Congress and from every pulpit in the country.

(2) Reconstructing the Gulf Coast would be a whole lot easier if they had a functioning National Guard doing what it's supposed to be doing at home instead of trying to keep order in Iraq. But then, the wildfire season out West would have done a lot less damage if they'd had the National Guard on the job, too.

ODD LOTS #5 WINNER!

And the prize goes once again to Jon, who identified Cole Porter, David Dellinger, Jody Foster, and George Bush (along with Jonathan Edwards and Samuel F.S. Morse) as Yale graduates all.

So now let's look at a really odd lot, for #6: George H.W. Bush, Meir Kahane, and Julia Child.

WHAT'S IN A NAME? NOT MUCH.

It used to be that an organization, or a business, or a product, would be named after the person who invented it, or ran it, or established it, or would include something about what the product was or what it was supposed to do. It would, in the immortal journalism-school terms, tell the consumer who, what, when, where, or why. Like Swift and Company (the meat processors, established by the Swift family.) Or U.S. Steel (an American company that manufactured steel.) Or Commonwealth Edison (an electric utility--after Thomas Edison, who invented the electrical grid.) Or Southern Bell Telephone (named after Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, and operating in the Southern U.S.) Or the Chicago Board of Education (which ran the public school system of the city of Chicago.) United Airlines was presumably an airline composed of two or more smaller airlines which had at some time united.

Swift is now Esmark. Commonwealth Edison is now owned by something called Exelon. Southern Bell, which now owns phone companies all over the US, is SBC. The Chicago Board of Ed now calls itself CPS, which presumably stands for Chicago Public Schools, but is supposed to be used in the singular, as in "CPS has issued its budget for the next fiscal year..." (They has?) United Airlines became Allegis for a while, but Allegis is now a corporation that deals in employee recruitment, HR software, and all kinds of other stuff having nothing whatever to do with flying. And, the only one of the lot that makes any kind of sense, though presumably by accident, US Steel has now become USX at the same time that most of its steelworkers have become X-workers.

The renaming craze probably started when the original names started to seem too limited. The founding family no longer had anything to do with the business, or a regional business went nationwide, or conglomeration and buyouts brought various different kinds of businesses under one umbrella. And the people doing the naming generally had nothing much to do with the making or purveying of any particular commodity or service; they just needed something to put on the stock market listings so investors would know what to buy. (Although, interestingly enough, at least one investment expert advises us not to buy any stock in a company whose name doesn't tell you what it does.)

Apparently corporate naming is now big business (see Ruth Shalit's article on the subject in http://salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print.html). I remember many years ago when I worked in a collective that ran a countercultural newspaper (named, by the way, Chutzpah.) This was well before the days of word processing. In order to prepare copy for the printer, we had to type it up, and then copyedit it. That process involved cutting out the wrong or misspelled words or phrases with a razor blade and pasting in the corrections. The stuff we cut out lay scattered all over the floor until we finished the copy and sent it to the printer. Then we swept the floor. In the dustpan lay a vast assemblage of randomly assorted tiny words and phrases, just begging to be made into a surrealist poem. Something like "Untied...crobar..formicated...allis...knew." I mention this because the current name game seems to work the same way, only with syllables instead of words. "A...quent...X....fram" and so on. For more information, you may also want to look at http://www.snarkhunting.com/--"Snark Hunting, the naming and branding blog." (Now there's a name I can relate to!)

The problem, of course, is that names that don't mean anything are really hard to recognize or remember. I just finished taking an online survey about cell phone services that asked how many cell phone service names I could remember. Well, there's the one I use, and there's the one I used before that. And maybe a couple of other names. So much for brand name recognition. I don't even remember the brand names of the ones that do really clever advertising. I remember the ads, but not the brands. And I'm a word buff, probably better at remembering this sort of thing than most consumers.

Yet another problem is that in a climate of constant changes in corporate ownership, you not only have to remember the current brand name, you have to follow it through its succession of owners. My bank, which has had our family's account for over twenty years, has been through five changes of name and ownership during that time. All of my utility companies have changed names at least once each since we moved into Chicago.

The use of naming rights as a tool of corporate marketing on one side and institutional fund-raising on the other raises another set of questions. What are the sports stadiums and other public buildings going to do when the corporations to whom they have sold naming rights change their names, or go out of business entirely? The United Center (Chicago's sports stadium named by United Airlines) is likely to be in hot water soon, if United Airlines does not survive its current bankruptcy. Will United Cellular Field (a baseball field formerly named for Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox) have to change its name if United Cellular gets bought out or conglomerated into something else? Apparently the issue has not arisen yet, but it is obviously only a matter of time.

All of these problems are, I think, only a specialized subset of a much larger issue--the erosion of meaning in all kinds of language. More about this later.

On Privilege

Every now and then somebody points out that, by comparison with the citizens of Haiti and many African countries, poor people living in the United States are “wealthy”, or “privileged.” “Lucky,” at any rate. In terms of the bare numbers, that’s mostly true. Poor people living in the US live longer. They eat more, and better. The chances of their children living to adulthood are greater. The chances of poor American women surviving childbirth are a lot better. They have easy access to clean drinking water. Mostly they have indoor plumbing, and electricity. Their per capita income is higher. They have more education, and are more likely to be literate.

Does that mean, as many of the people purveying this information seem to imply, that the poor people living in America should quit complaining and accept their lot?

For that matter, the struggling middle class in this country is privileged in relation to the poor who inhabit the same country. They are healthier, live longer, get more and better education, live in better housing, have more access to leisure activities. Does that mean that they should stop complaining about the high cost of college education and health care?

I think the answer to both sets of questions is no. While I have no great sympathy for people whose most serious worry is what the stock market is going to do to their investments, or what an untrained yard man is going to do to their rosebushes, I think there are different kinds of privilege.

I think there are privileges everybody should have, and privileges nobody should have. Those of us who have the former should be doing what we can to extend them to everybody else, but we shouldn’t feel guilty about having them ourselves. A decent diet, access to good health care, clean drinking water, a reliable income, a job that doesn’t endanger the worker’s life or health, good education, decent housing—these are privileges everybody should have.

But excess wealth—more than what it takes to provide those necessary privileges—is a privilege nobody should have. So are most of the things that excess wealth will buy. For an able-bodied healthy person, being waited on hand and foot is a privilege nobody should have. For any human being, the right to control the lives of people with less money is a privilege nobody should have.

What about the right to be free from the hassles of ordinary life? Well, on that issue, reasonable people can differ, I suppose. Should the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court have to wait in line at the grocery store? Doesn’t he—or she—have more important things to do with that time? My personal answer would be no. It may actually be more important for the people whose decisions determine the lives of millions of their fellow citizens to share at least some of the hassles of the everyday lives of those citizens. Because in all likelihood, if the Chief Justice doesn’t know what that life is like, nobody is about to tell him. That’s the trouble with being important—if you don’t know what you need to know, most people will be afraid to tell you.

In fact, one of the major privileges nobody should have is the right to be ignorant of the circumstances of the lives of people different from oneself.

Odd Lot #4 Winner

Jon does it again! A. Conan Doyle, Salvador Allende, and William Carlos Williams were all doctors, along with (as Jon points out) Bill Frist and Howard Dean. (And Abby Bartlett, for that matter.)

So here's odd lot #5: David Dellinger, Cole Porter, George Bush, and Jody Foster.

A PLEA FOR PURPLE

No, not just because I wear a lot of it. Which I do partly because it suits my blonde coloring, and partly in memory of my great-aunt who also wore a lot of purple and was one of the coolest people I have ever known. At age 85, she still had 110% of her marbles, and served as the part-time city clerk of a smallish Ohio town. She was a Republican, but she never had any use for Nixon, who she firmly believed had trashed the local party organizations. She kept up with everything. She eventually retired from public office, and died in her 90s. And in a way, my relationship with her is a good metaphor for possible resolutions of the Red/Blue divide.

She was a good Catholic, and, had she lived long enough to hear about the abortion controversy, would probably have identified herself as “pro-life.” She was an active woman, deeply involved in public life, and probably thought of herself as a first-wave feminist. She certainly approved of my having graduated from an Ivy League college and become a college teacher. (That was before I went to law school.)

We had, in short, a lot of common ground. And a few common enemies, like Nixon.

If liberals and conservatives would stop posturing and stereotyping, and shut up and listen to each other, we might find that we too have common ground and common enemies.

Most liberals looking for common ground with the Religious Right start out by discounting the culture wars as trivial in comparison with the economic disaster the Republican Party and its business supporters are visiting on working people. That disaster has to be attended to before it gets any worse. But we aren’t going to become a majority on that issue if we continue to alienate half the population by saying culture doesn’t matter. In fact, it does matter. There are aspects of the culture wars that liberals can join in, enthusiastically. Culture isn’t trivial, even in comparison to the bread-and-butter issues.

The most likely common enemy I can think of (but also the most powerful) is commercial culture. What people are fond of calling the media, and using the word as a singular. Grammatically, that’s an illiterate abomination, but it has a certain substantive validity, because the television, internet, radio, popular music, and popular press are a monolith in their dependence on advertising and the mentality of the advertisers.

The culture purveyed by the advertising-supported media is saturated with greed, violence, soulless sex, great special effects, and bad writing. My reasons, as a good card-carrying liberal, for despising it may be somewhat different from those of the Christian Right. I may be more dismayed by the violence, greed, and bad writing than by the sex. They may be more appalled by the fact that some of the soulless sex is between people of the same gender, and almost all of it is between people who are not married to each other. But probably, we are equally revolted by the prime-time ads for pharmaceutical treatments for erectile dysfunction and genital herpes. For different reasons, we are equally dismayed by fashions that make ten-year-old girls look like hookers. Why can’t we get together about this? Can you imagine the power such a combination could wield?

Once we take on the moguls of commercial culture, we can gain the courage and power to stand up for ourselves on the bread-and-butter issues that affect working people of any political stripe. The commercial culture vultures profit by dividing us into black and white, or red and blue—it makes more green for them. If we can talk to each other about the worst aspects of commercial culture, we can begin to remake a common culture and a common polity. Let’s make a beginning for the politics of purple.

ODD LOTS #3 WINNER

Congratulations! Jon has once again guessed the common element in our odd lot (Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy Day, Maria Montessori, and Loretta Young)--all were unwed mothers who "went on to do just fine thankyouverymuch."

So here's Odd Lot #4:

Salvador Allende (president of Chile) , A. Conan Doyle (mystery writer) , and William Carlos Williams (poet)

CINDY SHEEHAN ROCKS

I’ve been using that for my signature on e-mails over the last week or so. It’s a small enough thing to do to support the woman who is single-handedly calling the president to account for the tragic waste of the Iraq war. The 54% of the American public who think that war has been a mistake have been unable to accomplish anything like that.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that Bush has actually met with Ms. Sheehan and her supporters, much less admitted his mistakes. But at least somebody is publicly saying the emperor has no clothes, and getting serious attention from the mainstream media for doing it.

The president, of course, says we cannot leave Iraq now, before the job is done. That, he claims, would mean that Casey Sheehan and the other 1700 men and women who died there, would have died “for nothing.”

And therein lies a long long story.

Most people die for nothing. They die because a drunk driver crosses the median and crashes into their car. They die in convenience store robberies. They get shaken to death in infancy because they wouldn’t stop crying. They get beaten to death by husbands or boyfriends. Mostly they die of cancer, or heart attacks, or Alzheimer’s, or just plain old age.

To die for something is a rare privilege, usually purchased by pain and courage and, often, a lifelong struggle to live for something.

And dying for something doesn’t necessarily mean dying to purchase victory. Did the Spartans at Thermopylae die for nothing, getting wiped out by the Persians? Did the British at Dunkirk die for nothing, getting swept off the beaches of France by the Nazis? Did the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto die for nothing? Did Jan Palach, who died in the Soviet onslaught in Prague in 1968, die for nothing? Or the students in Tienanmen Square?

I hope not, because if only victory gives meaning to death, then by rights we should still be fighting the Trojan War, so that Hector and Patroclos will not have died for nothing.

But dying in service of one’s country, or one’s people, or anything larger than oneself, whether in victory or defeat, is still a death with meaning. And Casey Sheehan’s death has been given a remarkable meaning, not only by his own courage and devotion, but by his mother’s bravery in speaking truth to power. He needs no “victory” in Iraq to make his death mean something. All he needs is for the American people to be emboldened to refuse further participation in that war.