Archive for January, 2007

~By Tom (tet)

In this third part, I want to get down to the nuts and bolts of the interaction within our family. It might be helpful for the reader to go back to the article I wrote two weeks ago about why the communes in the past failed. By contrasting, it may be possible to determine why we’re still together.

Finances

We’re run as a true communist entity (in other words, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”) This, of course, only works within a group that is truly dedicated to the continued survival of the group as a whole, as well as having a deep-seated moral belief in fairness and equality. These necessary qualities are, as I have mentioned earlier, one of the main reasons that communism is limited in size for a working arrangement, since the more people you have within the commune, the more likely you are going to have someone who is only going to pay lip-service to the concepts.

Each of us is able to have some personal property–computers, automobiles, business inventory (as well as personal luxuries). We are each required, for the most part, to pay for those items individually, although high-cost auto repairs are sometimes shared by the household as an entity, since all benefit from the convenience of the car working.

Each of us has an income. The amount of money needed for each individual as spending money has been calculated and agreed on by both the individual and the family as a whole.

In my case, for example, I take home $1400+ each two weeks after contributing to retirement and paying taxes. I require about $250 in spending money for that same period. In addition, I have a credit card that I use for luxury items, a car payment and the co-payment on my half-dozen prescriptions (these all total about $625 per month). All of these are deduced from my net income. The remainder of the money goes to the house fund to pay mortgage and taxes, put into savings for home repair and buy food and household items.

This calculation is repeated for the other members of the household. If someone is between jobs or if their business is hitting a slow month, they can withdraw enough from the household funds to make sure their needs are met.

Decision Making

By and large, the major decisions of the household are made by consensus. Our evening meals double as business meetings. Each member is free to bring up anything that they feel requires a decision on the part of the whole. Debate is free-wheeling, with the one major rule that yelling is not allowed at the table. This is strictly enforced.

All decisions MUST be unanimous. The result of this rule is that only those things that really are required are done. In addition, it prevents the formation of blocs, which occur in democratically-run communes. It also prevents one person from becoming a despot and forcing the others to go along with their plans exclusively, since even one dissident is sufficient to prevent something from occuring. Compromise is the order of the day, since everyone that cares has to have something to please them in the finished product.

In some cases, some members of the household really do not want to deal with the day-to-day operations of the family. The household budgeting, for example, has been delegated to myself and the Elderwife. We still report to the rest of the family at regular intervals about the state of the finances and major expenditures, but the mechanics are done by only a couple of us. The same goes with the handyman-type jobs–Sean, Cheron and the Elderwife generally will work on those things.

Again, this structure, while more robust than other models, is still fragile in the face of real evil. It is essential that individuals planning a group-living situation be as picky as possible to “weed out” potential troublemakers.

Delegation of Responsibility

We’ve generally attempted to insure that everyone contributes to the necessary activities to keep the household running smoothly. As a rule of thumb, the more financial contribution an individual makes, the less they are required to do day-to-day chores around the house. Generally, the people living in an area are required to keep the area at a state of cleanliness that is acceptible to them.

This *has* run into some difficulty with the common areas because of differences in ambition and standards. This has led to the requirement that shoes not be worn in the upstairs common areas (to reduce the need for vacuuming) and that a list of kitchen chores (cooking/dishwashing/shopping/cleaning) and those that do them is decided each week at the evening meal.

My health has prevented me in the past from doing a lot of physical work around the house. (Currently, I clean the catboxes on a daily basis and do about 80% of the laundry work.) I expect that as I recover and have more time after retirement that my role will expand in the maintenance of the place.

Interaction with Society

As I have said before, you survive by staying *off* Jerry Springer. We’ve successfully dealt with various government agencies as a group, but we do not flaunt our status to much of anyone. Each of us have made decisions as to who knows of our family structure–for example, all of my co-workers, friends and my mother knows of our living arrangements (although mother’s a little hazy on the sex thing.)

We regularly entertain and are planning monthly pot-lucks for our friends this year. We also have a yearly weekend-long party called kittencon and a Yule open house in December. (I also get a retirement party this year–hurrah!)

That’s about it. The floor is open for more questions, which I will try to answer to the best of my ability.

Tom

My first DI column of the semester is up today. It’s my response to the State of the Union address: “Let’s talk about clapping and call it news: One columnist’s reaction to the President’s biggest speech of the year and why it’s just not newsworthy.” Enjoy.

The closest thing to a surprise was President Bush hinting at an apology, and asserting that the buck stops with him. Somehow, it’s more comforting when Harry Truman says it. Here is the transcript. If you read it aloud twice, you’ll already be delivering it better than the President did.

From listening to the end, it’s clear the President can do one thing right – he certainly can hire a speech writer. The last few sections were both Presidential, and user proof:

In these dangerous times, the United States is blessed to have extraordinary and selfless men and women willing to step forward and defend us. These young Americans understand that our cause in Iraq is noble and necessary – and that the advance of freedom is the calling of our time. They serve far from their families, who make the quiet sacrifices of lonely holidays and empty chairs at the dinner table. They have watched their comrades give their lives to ensure our liberty. We mourn the loss of every fallen American – and we owe it to them to build a future worthy of their sacrifice.

Fellow citizens: The year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve. It can be tempting to think that America can put aside the burdens of freedom. Yet times of testing reveal the character of a nation. And throughout our history, Americans have always defied the pessimists and seen our faith in freedom redeemed. Now America is engaged in a new struggle that will set the course for a new century. We can and we will prevail.

We go forward with trust that the author of liberty will guide us through these trying hours. Thank you and good night.

Nothing is more important than finishing strong. Notice that pretty much all of the words Bush regularly screws up, like sectarian, were pulled out of this section. My guess is after a few trial runs they had to do some adjusting.

“Quiet sacrifices” + “empty chairs” = beautiful imagery

A speech like this probably goes through at least 15-20 drafts. How many of them do you think mentioned the execution of Saddam Hussein? How many times do you think they had to rework the “where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.” This is just a half step from a non-apology-apology. It’s probably quite a bit farther than our President wanted to go, and I’d bet someone had to convince him that he isn’t really saying that he was actually wrong, just that if we did something wrong, he’s the boss.

Had he come out with a big time mea culpa, I think he would get a bigger numbers bump. He also should have tried a little harder to at least appear bipartisan. Meeting with Joe Lieberman doesn’t get it done.

Here’s what Senator Durbin had to say.

***Update*** Former Senator John Edwards has taken to calling the 20,000 troop escalation lunacy the “McCain Doctrine.”

I apologize that the comments are no longer with this post. Due to some technical problems with the blog I had to repost the entry without the original comments.

You might have heard that the Chicago Bears recently won the NFC Championship for the first time since the ridiculous and violent ‘85 Bears team. You may have also heard that nearly every analyst in the country picked the Saints to beat us. In other words, we were supposed to get our asses kicked. The first graphic shows that all eight ESPN “experts” (as Brian Urlacher would later call them with “air quotes”) picked the Saints to win. The only person at ESPN with confidence in da Bears was the ESPN Accuscore Game Forecast: A fricken computer. ESPN also conducted an online poll asking the nation which team they thought would win the game. Nearly 70% of fans from the peanut gallery picked the Saints. The only State in the Union with faith in da Bears was Illinois itself, with a vote that was statistically the inverse of the nation’s. Keep in mind that during the regular season the Bears had the best NFC record at 13-3, while the Saints had the second best NFC record at 10-6.

Relax, I know this isn’t a sports blog and I know that most of you nerds are too in love with CSPN to turn to ESPN (I’m guilty of the same). So here’s my spin on things:

Hope permeates sports. When the Bears had won the game I was pensive and invigorated. I know it’s silly to admit that a football game could transfer its sentiments to my professional and political hopes, but it did. Many of us, many of the people who read this blog, are the underdogs. Many of the people who read and contribute to this blog have big hopes and dreams for themselves: Congressman, wealth, speech writer, Nobel economist, etc. But the problem is that we’re from Illinois…the University of Illinois, one of those dreaded and pathetic public schools. We are not from Harvard or Yale, and so our hopes are incongruent with our reality. Right?

Knowing this, knowing that I am not at one of the top ten law schools in the country inspires me in a way that would not be true if comfort and certainty laced my path. Just as Urlacher wants to tear someone’s head off when he is doubted, so too I want the chance to cut someone with a tongue sharpened by logic. America created the underdog. I can think of few historic instances of an underdog turned victor until the absurd American victory over the British. We rarely appreciate how likely we were to lose the Revolutionary War. America proved that David versus Goliath was now possible. We made social mobility, peasant to President, possible. America, da Bears and myself seem to fit into one seamless picture of inspiration churning from the doubts of others and from the probabilities of the reality that ought to govern. I hope that you feel the same.

All the underdogs, with coals burning in their chests, say the same thing:

“Fuck off, I’m a bad motherfucker, and I’m about to show you why.”

Nick Cohen of The Observer has written a book about the failings of the far left in its foreign policy called What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way. There is an excerpt of it here, and another one here. It is an unrelenting and eloquent call for certain segments of the left to take account for their hypocrisy. In the same way Andrew Sullivan, a conservative, flawlessly points out the double standards and failings of the right, Cohen, a liberal, does the same for the left.

First, he recounts the way the left would weep over Saddam Hussein’s crimes right up until the moment Western military powers stood up in resistance to them:

The apparently sincere commitment to help Iraqis vanished the moment Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and became America’s enemy. At the time, I didn’t think about where the left was going. I could denounce the hypocrisy of a West which made excuses for Saddam one minute and called him a ‘new Hitler’ the next, but I didn’t dwell on the equal and opposite hypocrisy of a left which called Saddam a ‘new Hitler’ one minute and excused him the next. All liberals and leftists remained good people in my mind. Asking hard questions about any of them risked giving aid and comfort to the Conservative enemy and disturbing my own certainties. I would have gone on anti-war demonstrations when the fighting began in 1991, but the sight of Arabs walking around London with badges saying ‘Free Kuwait’ stopped me. When they asked why it was right to allow Saddam to keep Kuwaitis as his subjects, a part of me conceded that they had a point.

Then he jumps forward to the current Iraq war as the hypocrisy continued:

I waited for a majority of the liberal left to offer qualified support for a new Iraq, and I kept on waiting, because it never happened – not just in Britain, but also in the United States, in Europe, in India, in South America, in South Africa … in every part of the world where there was a recognisable liberal left. They didn’t think again when thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered by ‘insurgents’ from the Baath party, which wanted to re-establish the dictatorship, and from al-Qaeda, which wanted a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals. They didn’t think again when Iraqis defied the death threats and went to vote on new constitutions and governments. Eventually, I grew tired of waiting for a change that was never going to come and resolved to find out what had happened to a left whose benevolence I had taken for granted.

Then comes the knock-out passage in which he goes beyond Iraq and spells out the deeper sickness that has insinuated itself into much of the left:

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can’t those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

They’re good questions, and it’s exactly what makes me squeamish about today’s liberalism.

I’ve spoken quite highly of Barack Obama on this blog and elsewhere, but if any Democrat wants to seal up my vote right now, he or she will assure me not only of a commitment to the withdrawal of troops from Iraq (a policy I agree with), but a commitment to ensure a significant presence in Iraq in the form of massive amounts of foreign aid and diplomatic assistance. Too much of the rhetoric from Democratic presidential contenders sounds like abandonment of Iraqis and of the decidedly liberal cause of developing a thriving democracy there. While all of them eagerly (and rightfully) point out that there is no military solution to the ongoing struggles in Iraq, none of them are particularly eager to suggest that there is a non-military solution other than shoving everything off onto the nascent Iraqi government, which isn’t a solution at all. Most importantly, there continues to be an absence in the Democratic Party of a leading figure who believes in both the importance and the possibility of transforming the Middle East.

As each of the Democratic presidential contenders flesh out the details of their respective Iraq policies, I wait and hope for one of them to drop the hypocrisy Cohen so accurately illuminates and pick up the mantle of true liberalism.