WRAPPING UP DECEMBER 2011
As is often the case, I’m ending both the month and the year with what the late great Rutland Herald columnist Charlie Spencer used to call “stray shots and short casts.”
Attitudes toward genetic modification of food crops may get a serious test as an untreatable fungus continues to attack Cavendish bananas, the variety we are used to buy in grocery stores. Efforts to develop a hybrid variety have all failed, but Australian biologist James Dale says he has created a resistant type in the laboratory. The issue often raised in regard to other genetic modifications, that the inserted genes could spread and contaminate other plants, doesn’t apply here, because bananas don’t have seeds (daughter plants, called “offsets,” are divided from the mother plant to produce new trees). But Dale can’t find anywhere to do a field trial of his variety, because of the prejudice against genetic modification. “Fear is winning,” he was quoted as saying in a recent issue of Organic Gardening. As an alternative, it’s possible that the fungus may be warded off by the heavy application of toxic chemicals, which wouldn’t be as bad for consumers as other chemical applications because bananas have a thick, relatively non-absorbent skin.
Today it’s bananas, tomorrow it may be some food crop even more critically important to feeding the world. Like any other stance, opposition to genetic modification should be done clearheadedly, with an understanding of costs and benefits.
What use is the government? Why do we need someone spending our money on things we don’t care about?
Here’s a good example. The great pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, known for his Emmy-winning TV series and his books, realized at one point that it would help immensely if the people who help parents bring up their children had better training in how to get concepts across without alienating the parents. For instance, Brazelton had found that when children were on the verge of some developmental milestone (taking the first step, beginning to speak, etc.) the parents would get disoriented and not use their parenting skills as effectively. Brazelton and his associated developed the Touchpoints course, which helps child care workers get parents through these difficult times. It was so successful that eventually there are now 130 Touchpoint community sites, all around the world.
Now a five-year, $6 million grant will enable the Touchpoints principles to help low-income families all over the country through the thousands of Head Start programs. Beyond the immediate effects on school-readiness and children’s eventual life choices, there is every possibility that the parents, when they are treated as partners rather than as people doing something wrong, will relate better to other professionals they encounter in their families’ lives.
This isn’t trying to cure poverty by throwing money around. It isn’t a grossly inefficient bureaucracy imposing burdensome rules. Rather, it’s a well-researched, experience-tested way of improving poor people’s lives at the most critical time, when they are very young. It’s stimulus that works. And it’s a better example of what government can and should do than lobbyist-powered initiatives like ethanol production. If there are problems with government programs, they should be fixed, rather than trying to “starve the beast” by slashing tax revenues. It’s an insult to America to suppose that we are incapable of changing what is inefficient or misdirected.
Like a lot of kids in the years before elementary school art teachers, I gave up on my ability to draw. I couldn’t get the figures in my drawings to look like real people, and I thought that was the whole point. So I’m stuck with the problem that I can dream in cartoons but I can’t draw them.
There used to be a branch of freelance writing called gagwriting where someone like me could send ideas to a comedian or cartoonist, and get paid if any were accepted. The suggestions were on file cards, so you could recirculate the ones not chosen, as the possible buyers expected you to do. There was even a gagwriter’s handbook, like the well-known Writer’s Market, where you could research the published creators’ styles and thematic needs.
At one point there was an Otter Valley faculty member who doubled as a cartoonist, and I used to send him ideas, just on a friendly basis with no expectation of being paid. But now I’m reduced to telling my wife what the Internal Cartoonist is doing.
The latest: North Korea’s pasty-faced, sourpussed new Great Leader is posing amidst a retinue of generals, ministers, and other highly placed figures. The title: Un Qualified.
Looking around the world at the courageous and determined protesters of Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and more, I wondered if there are Americans as adamant in the preservation of their liberties. Then I realized, yes, there is one group who have held firm in their convictions: the Super Rich. They are willing to stay on the sidelines while the country falls into ruin, just as long as it makes Barack Obama look bad. The 99 Percent movement has at last brought into public view how much we have drifted away from democracy into oligarchy (using such words of course marks me as an intellectual, and we know intellectuals are a particularly obnoxious variety of subhumans, who can be cheerfully disregarded since they don’t have enough Common Sense to be able to tie their own shoelaces).
No change under Obama? No ideas for job creation? Hah! Give him a filibuster-proof majority in both houses of Congress and then watch the fur fly. Voting him out of office would be like firing the manager of a baseball team whose owners had traded away all their star players to save on expenses and develop a financially stronger team.
We’re hearing a lot from Republican candidates about creating a society with equality of opportunity rather than a society of entitlements. While one ghetto remains, this is not a society with equality opportunity. While one impoverished rural school struggles to stay open, let alone excel, this is not a society with equality of opportunity. And for those of advancing age who no longer have the energy that must be combined with opportunity to create success, “entitlements” are the only hope.
The rich have always loved hard times, because that’s when you get to mop up the market share of the failed businesses and the property of the bankrupt. Then they can turn around and point to the miserable condition of those left behind by their times and say people that degenerate don’t deserve help. It’s an old trick, one that has worked decade after decade (remember Reagan’s “welfare queens”?). My biggest hope for the new year is that the American people will finally realize how badly they’ve been manipulated. take hold of the freedom to change things that their forbears created and fought to preserve, and insist on the force that got the Greatest Generation through the Depression and World War II—shared sacrifice.
Ed,
It was a pleasure to read your end of year musings. I'd stopped reading the Herald since they charge for on-line access, but now that I stumbled upon your blog I will use it as a portal to the pragmatic ramblings of my home state. Best of luck!
Posted by: Seth Hayden | January 09, 2012 at 11:33 PM