This morning, I was reading Jonathan Chait about, The Obamacare Opposite-of-a-Train-Wreck Scenario. In it, he argued that even though next year’s implementation of Obama will likely have problems, these will be trumped by the fact that many millions of people will finally get health insurance. For a man who is too often mired in the middle, he is very blunt, “To the extent that the implementation brouhaha comes into any focus, it will shine a light on those people’s struggle to get needed help from the government. Republicans aren’t trying to get those people better help. They’re trying to screw them.”

As usual, I got to thinking about this. I remembered all of the brouhaha from conservatives about immigration reform. “We will be creating 11 million citizens who will all vote Democratic!” (Well, I guess they would say, “Democrat.”) I understand the concern and I’ve even argued that Republicans should not be fore immigration reform, given that they are unwilling to do anything else to court the immigrant vote. Maybe the Republicans are doing the same kind of calculation with Obamacare.

What am I thinking? We know that poor people don’t live as long as rich people. Part of that has to be due to the lack of good healthcare throughout their lives. By providing health insurance to everyone, the poor will live longer. The poor are overwhelmingly liberal. Therefore, Obamacare will make more liberals!

I know this sounds fanciful. And in truth, it is possible that the Republicans have not thought of this. There are, after all, a lot of reasons they hate Obamacare. The most fundamental one is that they think that the poor are morally inferior and they don’t believe in helping them at all. But Obamacare is clearly a good political strategy for the Democrats and poison for the Republicans.

The essayist and playwright Joseph Addison was born on this day back in 1672. King of Hawaii Kamehameha I was born in 1738. Writer and feminist Judith Sargent Murray was born in 1751. French Realist painter Jules Breton was born in 1827. American portrait painter Cecilia Beaux was born in 1855. Theo Van Gogh was born in 1857. The great painter Romaine Brooks was born in 1874. Jack Paar was born in 1918. Pacifica Radio founder Lewis Hill was born in 1919. And there are more, but I’m tired.

Judy Collins is 74 today. Rita Coolidge is 68. Director John Woo is 67. Unconscious plagiarizing songwriter Ray Parker Jr is 59. And director Wes Anderson is 44.

The day, however, belongs to one of my favorite novelists, Joseph Heller, who was born on this day back in 1923. Most people know him for Catch-22, but he was so much more. In fact, for those wanting to start reading him, I recommend avoiding Catch-22. I don’t say this because it is bad; it isn’t; it is fantastic. But there are so many characters and the plot moves along so fast that it is hard to figure out what’s going on. As I recall, I read the first 100 pages four times before I continued. I think his easiest novel is Something Happened. In addition to everything else, it is laugh-out-loud funny most of the way through. Of course, Heller was usually very funny, even when writing about King David. Anyway, if you haven’t read him, you are missing out.

Happy birthday Joseph Heller!

I just watched Selling God, ironically by Carl Christman. It is an amusing look at religion (primarily Christianity) as a product. What I think is particularly interesting about the film is that it really isn’t anti-religious. Over half of the interviews are with Christians of one form or another. Instead, the film is aggressively anti-fundamentalist. And it is liberal; one of the interviewees is Noam Chomsky. Basically, you aren’t going to see this film screened at a Baptist or Catholic gathering, but the Unitarians will doubtless combine it with a pot luck and have a great old time.

It is shocking how effective Selling God is. There is a repeated parody of a QVC ad for faith-based “Surpise Product” that is going to make your life better. It’s retail value is $666, but you can have it (if you act now) for only $499.99 (plus $9.95 for shipping and handling). If the product doesn’t work, it must be because you don’t have enough faith. This is the biggest problem with faith-based solutions. It is nowhere better seen than in AA, which offers almost nothing to people and then blames them when they don’t stay sober. It’s a tautology: working the program is how you stay sober, but if you don’t stay sober you weren’t working the program. So if drunks[1] don’t already feel bad enough, now they feel worse that they can’t make the magic incantations of AA work for them.

This gets to a fundamental innovation of modern religions: prayer versus magic. In older religions, priests offered magic, “I’ll cast a spell and the drought will end!” The problem is that you can tell if the spell worked or not. Prayer is so much better for religious elites. Now they can tell the flock, “Pray to God. If you do it right, you will be rewarded. If you aren’t rewarded, you must have done it wrong.” Thus, religions went from “let’s kill the incompetent priest for his crumby magic” to “I’m a terrible human being who God hates.” Is it any wonder that religion is so associated with guilt?

Selling God focuses on this aspect of religion, because it is a big part of the concept of religion as commodity. Except that just like the tired platitudes of AA, religion offers nothing but a context in which God is thanked for anything good that happens and you are blamed for anything bad. A good example of this is some video from The 700 Club, where Pat Robertson tells the TV audience that some fungal infection is going away. Of course, fungal infections do go away. And of the millions of viewers, some will see an infection go away, praise God for it, and (Hopefully!) send a check to Stage Craft Pat.

But like I said, the film is not anti-religious. Many people say nice things about religion. Even I think of checking out the local Unitarians. Churches can serve important social functions. My resistance to going to a Baptist church isn’t so much the religion, but the people. I don’t think they would accept me. They certainly wouldn’t accept my beliefs given that theirs are ossified dogma.

There were a couple of quotations in the film that stood out to me. The first was Romans 7:15. It is Paul going on about what a sinner he is, and it is hilarious. But I wondered if it wasn’t just the translation. So I went and looked it up in the New American Standard Bible, which is generally considered to be the closest to the original Greek. And it is just as bad there:

When I do what I do not want to do why is it what I want that I do not want when what I want is the thing that is wanted by those who want what is not really what I want? And God said unto me, thou giveth me a headache. I want to think that the Bible is very much like The Illiad, but the truth is that much of it is not written that well.

The other quotation was from Martin Luther King:

And that’s a good summation of Selling God. Religion that brings people together, that cares about others, and that opens minds, is a good thing. Unfortunately, such is a very unusual religion.

[1] What’s the difference between an alcoholic and a drunk? Drunks don’t have to go to the meetings.

I caught just a couple of minutes of Fox News and Charles Krauthammer was talking about how legalistic the White House was being about the suspected chemical weapons use by Syria. So far as I could tell, his argument was that this is a war zone so we don’t have time to be careful. That makes sense for people who are in the war: when the mustard gas comes, you put on the mask, you don’t do tests to see if it is really sulfur mustard rather than just the result of a Wienermobile crash. But, as usual with conservatives in general and Krauthammer in particular, he’s making a false analogy. The question is whether we should go to war based upon potentially bad information.

This is the time when someone says, “Just like in Iraq!” But that isn’t really true. In fact, this is an issue that makes me really mad. It was clear that there was nothing to the whole rush to war in Iraq. And I get angry especially at Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry who claim they were misled. Please! True, the Republicans got the ball rolling, but by the end, both sides voted for it because they didn’t want to miss out on the glory of being for another bloody good war like Persian Gulf.

Today in Syria, we really don’t know what’s going on. And let’s face it, wars where one or both sides are behaving badly are not rare. What is Krauthammer worried about? That this great opportunity is going to pass us by? That would be like George Clooney feeling like he has to fuck a supermodel before she changes her mind. There are plenty of supermodels for George and plenty of wars for us.

But I understand why Fox News and all the other conservatives want us to jump into a new war. In almost all cases, the more we know, the less we will want to go to war. So it’s important for us to go to war quickly, knowing as little as possible. One thing is for sure: by the time the war is over, nearly everyone, including most of the conservatives, will think it was a mistake. But just like that last batch of buffalo wings that gave you heartburn so bad you wanted to die, they claim this war will be different. But it won’t be different. And we at least need to understand why we are going to war. I would hate to see us do it because the Syrian resistance finessed us into it.

Afterword

Charles Krauthammer is generally more nuansed than his conservative allies. But in the lead up to the Iraq War, he wrote the following in Jewish World Review, “Hawks favor war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is reckless, tyrannical and instinctively aggressive, and that if he comes into possession of nuclear weapons in addition to the weapons of mass destruction he already has [No amount of being wrong ever hurts a pundit!], he is likely to use them or share them with terrorists. The threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is intolerable—and must be preempted.” He goes on to say that he sides with them. This is a supposedly serious foreign policy thinker! The argument that any despot would take his hard-won weapons and share them with terrorists is ridiculous. This is the kind of argument you make when you just really want to go to war. And apparently, Krauthammer always really wants to go to war. (Well, not him personally. He was sadly paralyzed in an auto accident as a young man. But apparently, no argument is too specious to justify having the same thing happen to more young men in every war opportunity Krauthammer notices.)

Gertrude Stein lover (There’s lots of there there!) Alice B. Toklas was born on this day in 1877. Actor Eve Arden was born in 1908. Grandpa Munster actor, Al Lewis was born in 1923. Johnny Horton was born in 1925. And actor Jill Clayburgh was born in 1944.

Cloris Leachman is 87 today. Willie Nelson is 80. Ringworld author Larry Niven is 75. Rocky’s brother-in-law, Burt Young is 73. And Kirsten Dunst is 31.

By many lengths, the day belongs to arguably the greatest mathematician of all time, Carl Friedrich Gauss, or as we know him, Gauss. He was born in 1777. According to historian Eric Temple Bell (who is not above criticism, but still), if Gauss had published all of his discoveries when he made them, it would have advanced mathematics 50 years ahead of where it is. It is hard to overstate his importance. There is basically no field of math in which you won’t come upon his work.

Happy birthday Gauss!

Stephen Fry tells the story of his close encounter with the Mormon Church.

The Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma was born in 1848 on this day. The great French mathematician Henri Poincare was born in 1854. Publisher William Randolph Hearst was born in 1863. The Dutch artist and print maker Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman was born in 1882. Japanese Emperor Hirohito was born in 1901. The great director Fred Zinnemann was born in 1907. And French comedic director Gerard Oury was born in 1919.

Rod McKuen is 80 today. Conman Bernie Madoff is 75. Jerry Seinfeld is 59. Daniel Day-Lewis is 56. Michelle Pfeiffer is 55. Rapper Master P is 46. Tennis player Andre Agassi and actor Uma Thurman are 43.

Although I could easily have given the day to Poincare, how could I when Duke Ellington was born on this day in 1899? Now, in general, I don’t like big bands. They tend to homogenize jazz. But Ellington’s was one of a few exceptions to this. You would never mistake him for Glenn Miller. (Even though he wasn’t bad at all!) Here is Duke Ellington with his band doing his composition “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”:

And here is the Duke Ellington Trio doing the great Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train”:

I just caught a few minutes of Martin Bashir on MSNBC. He had a small panel and they were discussing the air traffic fix to the Sequester debacle. And man, aren’t those Republicans bad! They’re willing to let old folk go hungry but spring into action when it comes to their own comfort. Apparently, the Democrats have nothing to do with this. The 45 Republicans in the Senate were able to get the bill passed without Democratic help and Obama’s intention to sign the bill into law is due to the incredible ventriloquism of the Republican Party!

During the segment, there was a clip of Jay Carney castigating the Republicans. At no point did he add the truth, “Of course the president is going to sign the bill.” Don’t think Obama has no choice. He could hold a press conference and tell the people, “I have always been in favor of shared sacrifice. This bill is not shared sacrifice. I can’t help the more affluent among us avoid inconvenience while requiring poor children and the elderly to suffer. I cannot sign this bill.” But of course he will sign the bill because his idea of shared sacrifice has always been that the rich make a mess and the poor clean it up. Balance!

My more pragmatic colleagues will counter that Obama is in a political bind because the people blame the Republicans and him equally for the flight delays. And this is kind of true, as The Hill just reported. But flight delays are something that, as I said, mostly affect the more affluent. Thus, any poll is going to be skewed. Actually, the numbers don’t look bad at all. Who do the people blame? Republicans: 34%; Obama: 32%; Neither/Don’t Know: 34%. That 32% is the Republican base. If you asked Americans who was to blame for the Boston Marathon bombing, most would say the Tsarnaev brothers, but 32% would say Obama.

If the approach to the Sequester is going to be, “Let’s do what we can,” then why don’t we just repeal all the defense cuts? I’m sure the Republicans would vote for that too. But the Democrats will not do that. They know that such an approach is just giving the Republicans everything they want and getting nothing in return. Thus, carving out the air traffic exception to the Sequester is a joint project between the Republicans and the Democrats. And shame on MSNBC for pretending otherwise. They are looking more and more like Fox News.