- The Rough Road ReviewInterrogatories

A Moral Values Test

Here is a simple test of your moral values. This test only has one question, but by giving it some serious thought and giving an honest answer you will be able to ascertain where you stand morally. The test features a fictional situation, where you will have to make a decision one way or the other.

You're in Thailand during the tsunami. There is great chaos going on and you are on high ground but surrounded by rising water. You are an Associated Press photographer and you are in the middle of this great disaster. The situation is nearly hopeless. You're trying to shoot very impressive photos. There are houses afloat around people are disappearing into the water. Nature is showing all its awesome power.

Suddenly you see a man in the water - he is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken away by the masses of water and mud. You move closer. Somehow the man looks familiar. Suddenly you know who it is - it's George W. Bush!

At the same time you notice that the raging waters are about to take him away, forever. You have two options. You can save him or you can take the best photo of your life. You can't do both. You can either save the life of George W. Bush, or you can shoot a Pulitzer Prize winning photo, a unique photo chronicling one of the world's most powerful men in a battle against the power of nature itself.

Here's the question (please give an honest answer):

Would you select color film, or instead go for the simplicity of classic black and white?

Ask Dr. Dick

Q. Dear Dr. Dick: Some people feel that the press and media coverage of Ronald Reagan’s untimely death was excessive. What’s your take on this?

A. The press and media were accused of underplaying the arrest of Michael Jackson and the amatory problems of Bill Clinton. They couldn’t let that happen again.

Q. Ronald Reagan is said to have been the greatest president since Millard Fillmore. What’s your take on this?

A. That’s probably excessive. I would say he was the greatest president since Warren G. Harding.

Q. It’s said that Ronald Reagan made us feel good about ourselves again. Why had our spirits slumped before he came along?

A. Remember that when Ronald Reagan was elected president anti-depressants were in their infancy. Also he brought long naps back to the White House. It is said that a well-rested president leads a happy country. Jimmy Carter never napped; he was a sleepless worrier who was once attacked by a rabbit while swimming, which most of the country found deeply unsettling. This led Carter to say that the country was in a malaise, which got him in trouble all over again.

Q. Ronald Reagan once co-starred with a chimpanzee. Do you believe that this affected his presidency?

A. It may explain Ed Meese and Oliver North.

Q. Ronald Reagan was said to have been a cockeyed optimist. Did this affect his presidency?

A. It may explain his selecting a member of the Bush family as his vice president.

Q. Ronald Reagan once said “It’s morning in America.” Was this his most memorable saying?

A. I prefer his response to questions about Iran-Contra: “I can’t remember.”

Q. Could you compare the Iran-Contra affair with Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

A. Ronald Reagan forgot all about the details of the Iran Contra affair. You better believe he wouldn’t have forgotten Monica.

Q. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were very close. How do you explain this?

A. It was the fancy English accent, and she was a real fox.

Q. How do you account for Reagan’s invasion of Grenada.

A. Where the hell are those Weapons of Mass Destruction, anyway?

Q. How will Reagan go down in history?

A. He’ll go down alright.

Here’s a question for Congresswoman Heather Wilson, who has made clear her strong support for George Bush’s “gay marriage” proposal: Lesbian woman marries gay man; they adopt a couple of kids and (presumably) live happily every after. Is that “gay marriage?” Just thought we’d ask.

Is the proposal to create a new “Placitas County” a serious proposal, and how should thoughtful persons respond to it? So far, the proposal seems not to have been taken very seriously, at least not by political decision-makers. The Sandoval County Commission has refused even to discuss it, let alone give it serious consideration. Most people seem to be puzzled by it. They see the vivid green signs that have appeared along route 165 in recent months, show some curiosity, then dismiss the idea as a crackpot fantasy.

It is not that. The draft document entitled “A Proposal to Create Placitas County,” compiled by Dr. Charles Mellon, a community activist who has been a frequent candidate for public office in this area, is a clearly-written, low-key, straightforward, and competently-researched piece of work that lays out the case for a new county about as well as it could be done.

The proposed new county would comprise all of the present Sandoval county east of I-25—232 square miles, with a (growing) population of about 5,000 people. This would make it one of the four or five smaller counties in the state, reducing the size of the present county by a little over six per cent. Sandoval County is the largest of the 33 New Mexico counties, larger than either of the two smallest states in the Union, Delaware and Rhode Island.

The credibility of the proposal is enhanced by Mellon’s refusal to make any grandiose claims for what the new country might achieve. In a section entitled “Why We Need a Placitas County,” he argues, in summary, that Placitas is unique in the low-density manner in which it has been developed; that it faces consequently unique problems; that it may be underserved by present county services; that its unique problems should be addressed by those who are most affected; and that, because of its relatively low density, county government “is the preferred form of government for our area.”

With the exception, perhaps, of the level-of-services argument, all of these seem to be unexceptionable. Placitas is different, demographically and in terms of its housing stock. By and large, the residents of Placitas play little part in the governance of the county. It has been years since a Placitano served on the county commission--(Pete Salazar, who lives in Homesteads, at least a decade ago). For the most part, the interests of the area have been represented to the county by the major area land developers, whose interests may or may not correspond to the citizenry in general (although these are the same developers who are responsible for the low density development that make the area unique.)

County officials insist that Placitas is not an underserved area, that the value of the services we receive is greater than the taxes we pay. Rio Rancho, because of its greater density, is far and away the largest source of county revenues. (If this is true, then the short shrift given the proposal by the County Commission seems curious. If Placitas is such a burden, then why not unload it?)

But of course this is unlikely to occur without an enormous effort. State law provides for the creation of a new counties through an act of the state legislature, and provides for a transitional interval during which appointed “commissioners” would supervise the extrication of Placitas records from the present county’s records- a tedious process, one would think. Once this is achieved, new county officers would be elected and the new government established.

It’s as simple, and as complex, as that, with the emphasis on the complexity. All in all, it appears to be an overwhelming prospect, full of unpredictable contingencies. Who pays for the transition, for example? And are there no economies of scale in the present county structure? Aren’t local taxes bound to increase substantially, especially since almost all taxable property in the new county would be residential? Mellon and his colleagues don’t really succeed in answering such questions..

If there are problems in representation, in land use planning, in water conservation, couldn’t these better be addressed through some kind of sub-county, or special district, arrangement, in which Placitas, as defined, is delegated certain decision-making powers to address and decide designated issues and even, in some cases, levy taxes for purposes such as libraries, parks and recreation, professionalized fire-fighting capability, etc. This would seem to be preferable to taking on the huge burden, and all the intimidating unknowns, involved in becoming “Placitas County.

But Mellon should be credited with raising these serious issues in a responsible and careful manner. —RH

How do Senator Pete Domenici and Congressperson Heather Wilson get away with presenting themselves to their constituents as moderates, rather than as the hard-nosed right wing ideological partisans and cynical political operatives that they actually are? One reason, of course, is The Albuquerque Journal, which persists in concealing their actual records from public view, while playing up their purported responsibility for the large and small chunks of pork that find their way to New Mexico via the federal government.

Rare is the week without pictures of one or both of them illustrating stories on this or that piece of porcine legislation. Not everything can be hidden, of course: The Journal does publish their recorded up-or-down votes on major pieces of legislation. What it fails to do is to report on their committee work in shaping legislation, or their relationships with lobbyists. It is in congressional committees that the important decisions get made, and where the lobbyists’ payoffs are rewarded.

Senator Domenici, for example, chaired the senate committee that shaped the special-interest bonanza called the energy bill and he co-chaired the conference committee that gave it its final form, a committee from which key Democrats were excluded. This bill has been at least temporarily blocked, but only by a two-vote margin. The bill is a symphony of subsidies to the energy industry—oil, gas, and coal. As noted in a recent article reprinted in The Journal (but which excluded any mention of Senator Domenici’s key role in developing the bill) : “The centerpiece of the bill is a $16 billion package of tax breaks and production subsidies designed to further rig the market to favor well-connected energy producers, all of which enjoy plenty of federal handouts at the expense of others.” Columnist Molly Ivins, in combing through the 1,700 page bill, found (among many other outrageous payoffs) “a $2.5 billion tax break for ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and ChevronTexaco to write off the cost of exploring for oil on our public lands and off our coasts.”

Similarly, Heather Wilson was a member of the House Committee that put together the new Medicare Drug Benefit bill, which is in reality a not very subtle attempt to undermine Medicare by subsidizing HMOs to “cherry pick” low risk Medicare recipients, thus leaving the high-cost elders to Medicare, driving up Medicare’s costs, and making the program less competitive; and which, among other features, forbids the government to use its leverage to lower drug prices for seniors. As a Boston University School of Public Health report notes, over 60 per cent of the costs of this bill will end up as enhanced drug company profits. The pharmaceutical industry already enjoys the highest level of profitability of any major American industry. Like the energy bill, this one must be read to be believed. It is not what it appears to be; its major beneficiaries are not older people but drug companies and other medical industries.

These are basically corrupt pieces of legislation, payoffs to industries that have contributed millions of dollars to key members of congress, and which maintain huge lobbying armies in Washington. If the production of these legislative monstrosities is what you voted for in the last election—well, you got what you voted for.

If you want to know what the payoffs are for this kind of service to oil companies and pharmaceutical companies, take a look at the elegant and costly pieces of campaign literature Heather Wilson has been mailing to constituents recently. Somebody paid for those fancy mailings, folks, and you can be sure it didn’t come out of the Congressperson’s paycheck.

There are Hummers in our midst, and Escalantes and Navigators, huge, lumbering sixty-thousand-dollar eight-miles-per-gallon eight-foot-tall behemoths of the highway, bulling their way up and down good old Route 165. What’s with these vehicles, anyway? What purpose do they serve, other than as massive tax write-offs? What kind of people own these intimidating assault vehicles? Arnold Scwarzenegger out there in California owns five Hummers. Or is it six? Why? Then the answer came to me—in a flash. Of course. They’re like Arnold’s overdeveloped pecs and abs. They serve no purpose whatever. They’re a way of showing off, a type of senseless muscular display, fully-inflated biceps of the highway, steroidal cocked fists of consumerist intimidation. “Hey. Look at me, you little four-cylinder ninety seven pound weaklings. Pull over and clear the way-- I’m Mr. America, Mr. World, Mr. Universe. I can hurt you but you can’t hurt me.” RH

Does Governor Richardson really expect to solve the “truancy problem” by punishing the parents of truants? Or by taking away the drivers’ licenses of chronic truants? Or by conducting truancy sweeps? It won’t work, guv. It’s been tried, over and over again, and it won’t work. It’s based on a false premise. Or several false premises. Tough guy techniques don’t work in education. “To New Mexico kids,” the governor writes, “my message is clear: You can’t learn if you don’t show up. “ It’s just not true that you can’t learn if you don’t show up. Of course you can. People learn all the time outside of school, even the governor. Schools teach school stuff; the world teaches worldly stuff. Very few parents are indifferent to their children’s welfare. Parents should be free to judge that there may be times in a youngster’s life when other things are more important than school, including removing their kids from school when they think it’s damaging to them, or when there’s something better to do. Education should not be confused with schooling. We do that all the time in this country. My wife, in her former marriage, took her two young boys, six and eight, on a two year tour of Latin America in a specially-outfitted Toyota Land Cruiser. They traveled from New England to Tierra del Fuego, camping out along the way. They were “taught” only what the world around them offered. Their schooling didn’t miss a beat. One of those kids is now head of the Romance languages department in a top Massachusetts boarding school; the other has a PhD in geography and runs a program in upstate New York. Older kids in particular who don’t go to school are disenchanted with school, perhaps because it has taught them what failures they are. Why would they stay away if they thought it was worth their while? While it may be true that some truancy is a form of “bad behavior,” even those who prefer the streets or a dead-end job to school are sending a powerful message about the meaninglessness of school to them. And cause-and -effect relationships in this respect are very complex. When there is truancy, you can approach the problem by threatening students (and parents) or by spending time, money, and intellectual resources in making school attractive to everybody. Threatening is a lot easier, of course, and makes for better politics. But it won’t solve the problem, if there is one. RH

Wherefore doubt

Why would persons in power allow doubt to creep into their processes, especially when what we now know as spin can solve any problems of disbelief or incredulity? Defense Secretary Rumsfeld now admits Iraq will be a 'tough slog,' after months of rosey scenarios have left us all stranded in Baghdad, where daily attacks leave our young people killed and wounded, not to mention what's happening to the hundreds of Iraqis dying each month. This all has a certain reverberation with Robert McNamara, another Defense Secretary, circa 1967. The Secretary apparently expressed private doubts about the success of our mission in Vietnam, but it took him until 1995 to admit 'we were wrong, we were terribly wrong.' Of course doubt will not sell a candidate up for re-election and it will make the populace nervous. But guess what: if doubt or confusion fills the processes of a leader or a nation, then that's the way it is and must be acknowledged. It's called honesty and it has to do with democratic government. Leaders can be flawed, make mistakes, but it shouldn't take (as it did in Vietnam) many years of further war and death to allow leadership to forthrightly admit a wrong course, and try to correct it. There may be elements of modern life more important than re-election, though that may be very optimistic, given the stakes in our national life where winners seem to be the only relevant category when it comes to elections and sports. And yet, when leaders attempt to lie their way toanother term in office, or cover up a policy that is going nowhere, then we all lose. Paul Krugman suggests our time could use another FDR, a leader who could attempt to bind up the nation's many wounds with an openness and generosity for all. Why not another WPA for the many unemployed? Why not a sense of honest awareness of the confusions people are undergoing related to the post-9-11 world? We rarely even get a press conference from the current president. Let's have a national forum on what is really happening in the world-terrorism, economics, tax policy, military issues, and the future of American Democracy. In an open society, discussion and honest play of ideas should trump spin.

Question for the Bureau of the Census

Bureau of the Census, statistician for the Nation,
The clarity of your approach excites my admiration.
You’ve measured almost everything, reduced it to a number:
Murder, robbery, births and deaths, linseed oil and lumber,
Income, outgo, peanuts, popcorn, marriages, divorces,
Cattle, sheep and corn and hogs, and harvesters and horses,
Business units, industries, expenditures and Prices,
Churches, schools and health and wealth, all manner of devices;
What we eat and what we wear and where we live and go,
Assembled all in columns, facts and figures, row on row.
There it is for all to see, the things we do and own;
Statistically speaking, almost everything that’s known.
It’s all so simple, all so neat, so nicely summarized;
Multifarious activities categorically sized.
But all those charts and graphs and such, what do they signify?
They tell us where and what and when, why can’t they tell us why?

—Richard Hopkins

Why did the military planners think that destroying the infrastructure of Iraq through relentless, round-the-clock, shock-and-awe bombing would help us realize our ultimate objectives in that country (as imprecise as these seem to be)? It has made the stabilization of the country immeasurably more difficult, created a vengeful sense of rage among the people, and added billions of dollars to the ultimate costs of reconstruction, as well as killing eight-to-ten thousand innocent Iraqis. It will, of course, provide work for the Halliburtons and Bechtels and the packs of consultants that have flocked hungrily to Iraq since the war "ended" to cash in on its awful aftermath.

Why have we heard so little about the recent proposal, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and endorsed by over eight thousand physicians, including medical school deans, officers of various medical societies, and practicing doctors, favoring the establishment of a national single-payer health-care system? The system as proposed would be an extension of the present Medicare program, the amazingly efficient and effective program that guarantees health care to social security beneficiaries. Covering the entire population through the Medicare structure would add scale but not complexity to the program’s administration. The proposal notes that Medicare operates effectively with only a two per cent overhead factor, compared with the twenty five to thirty per cent skimmed off the top by health plans operated by insurance companies. What in the world are we waiting for?

And speaking of health care, why did the drafters of the prescription drug legislation pending in Congress completely ignore the success of the VA medical system in reducing drug costs for its clients through hard-nosed negotiations with the drug manufacturers. The New York Times reported on September 4:

"Wielding its power as one of the largest purchasers of medications in the United States, the VA has made it possible for millions of veterans to pay just $7 for up to a 30-day prescription. Thousands are signing up for the program every month. Yet for all its apparent success, lawmakers have disregarded the VA model, and others like it that use the government’s immense power to negotiate lower prices.”as they try to give older Americans relief from rising drug prices while reshaping how the elderly get medical services."

Ask Heather Wilson; she is a direct part of the process as a member of the House Commerce Committee.

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