Gladys Knight at the Soul Train Awards

Remembering the great Junior Walker

Christmas, 2011

Lincoln on labor

Says Brown University's Ted Widmer: "If his earlier comments on the balanced budget held out inspiration for today’s Tea Party, here was some red meat for Occupy Wall Street."

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital, producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation.”

Davis had made the contest personal; now Lincoln answered in a deeply personal way; not by attacking Davis, but by remembering his own poverty. If we can wonder why this Southern-born politician developed such a powerful hostility to slavery, we need only listen to him on the value of working for oneself:

“Many independent men everywhere in these States, a few years back in their lives, were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all — gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty — none less inclined to take, or touch, aught which they have not honestly earned.”

Character problem

The speech President Kennedy never gave

November 22, 1963, as reported by Tom Wicker, who left us today:

The speech Mr. Kennedy never delivered at the Merchandise Mart luncheon contained a passage commenting on a recent preoccupation of his, and a subject of much interest in this city, where right-wing conservatism is the rule rather than the exception.

Voices are being heard in the land, he said, "voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness."

The speech went on: "At a time when the national debt is steadily being reduced in terms of its burden on our economy, they see that debt as the greatest threat to our security. At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.

"We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will 'talk sense to the American people.' But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense."

Income inequality

Isn't it remarkable that this most striking trend is barely reported?  It would have been in any other country that had a functioning news media.

It isn't hyperbole to talk about a Reagan Revolution. Beginning with him, the Republican Party has used either majority or filibuster power to systematically transfer wealth from the middle class to not really 3,000,000 but more like about 10,000 Americans.

That is surely a policy triumph, but it's nothing compared to the public relations triumph: no one even knows it happened. And even those who do can't imagine to what degree.

Picture of the day

"Mitt Romney's money shot." Photograph provided to the Boston Globe by Bain Capital.

Coming soon to a theater near you

I hope.

No gays, please, we're Indian

Remarkable news from India:

India's health minister has outraged activists by calling homosexuality a "disease" and "completely unnatural" during a conference on HIV/AIDS.

Ghulam Nabi Azad told the conference Monday that it was unfortunate that homosexuality has come to India. He echoed a common refrain in this conservative country that homosexual sex is a Western import.

Gay sex was illegal in India until 2009 when the Delhi High Court struck down the law that made sex between people of the same gender punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Roughly 2.5 million Indians have HIV, making it the country with the largest number of people living with the disease in Asia.

I had always assumed, like so many who are familiar with this sacred country, that there was no sex in India at all, even though sometimes its demographic growth would occasion a crisis of faith. Perhaps this is the Lord's true miracle: that He is able to multiply India's population as He once did the loaves and the fishes, with no assistance from its chaste people.

Today JUSIPER bows in humility before India, its incorruptible elected representatives and a millenarian tradition of religious pluralism tempered by colonial remnants that enable all faiths to unite in such unqualified wisdom.