Category: Elections

If you listen to the current President of the United States of America, the Press is the enemy of the people, spreading “fake news”. That does not surprise me  any more. But I learned  early on how that plays out. I grew up in Nazi Germany. When the National Socialists took over the government in 1933, the first thing they did was to shut down all opposition  papers to prevent them from spreading “Jewish lies”.

Beginning in January of 1945, however, three months before the end of the war in Europe, the American army reached Aachen and started the first post-war German newspaper.

The Army, incidentally, lost twenty thousand men in the struggle to get there.  The absurdity is that those twenty thousand American citizens died fighting an enemy whose enemy was, as we now hear, the same as theirs, the free Press.  That of course was a year before the current leader of this Nation was born and, if we stretch it a little, he can be excused for not knowing that in those days the American military administration was so old-fashioned that they actually thought the re-establishment of a free press was vital to the reeducation of us Germans.

But wait!  I am both, one of those reeducated Germans as well as an American citizen. I am confused now. Which is the America we are making great again?

© 2018 by Herbert H. Hoffman

I don’t know how many reputable philosophers are on record as having said that the universe and even life itself are essentially absurd. The Bavarians, a sturdy tribe of Germans settled around the city of Munich, the city of beer where I once used to live, sum it up in one of their pithy sayings: “Saufst, schtirbscht; saufst net, schtirbscht ah!” It is hard to be so succinct in English but a reasonable translation would be “Drink too much you die, for shame; don’t drink at all, die all the same.”
Beer drinking is not one of the things that are foremost in my thoughts. But I also run into such absurdities in other contexts. The economy came to mind, the marketplace. There is no such thing as a perpetuum mobile. To keep things moving requires that you put something in. If everything stopped at the status quo antes there would be nothing to sell or buy. We would all be dead. Just losers, no winners.

If you are in commerce and you have something to sell you must find a way to attract buyers. And if you want more than a hand to mouth break-even existence you need many more buyers in order to buy more things to sell to even more buyers. It is a veritable chain reaction until we run into limits. Now we have a dilemma: everything we buy creates waste, pollutes, or harms us in other ways and we would want to cut back, not consume so much. But suppliers can’t survive unless we consume stuff. Most of us grew up believing that there are no limits. The power companies, for example, helped us to think of more ways to use more of the energy they sold. I remember a Southern California Gas Company presentation of the then new icemaker refrigerator where the young lady presenter showed us novel ways to use ice cubes. Put them in drinks; use them for compresses if you burn yourself; give them to houseplants for easy watering, and so on. More consumption was thought to be good for the economy.

Today, though, the limits are obvious. The power company now offers us advice on how to save on energy, i.e. to save money by saving energy. It’s a noble thing to do, of course, but it strikes me as absurd when a supplier urges consumers to consume less. Ultimately, of course, this hurts the supplier. Business shrinks. Employees become surplus humanity on food stamps. We are sorry for those workers and start looking for scapegoats. At election time voters prefer politician who promise to save their jobs. As if any politician had the slightest idea how to do that. The more efficient we become the worse it gets. Should a factory now scrap their robot machinery and hire people instead? They cannot afford people unless they outsource to a poorer country where labor is cheap. But that is not what angry voters want. They want their own old jobs back. And those jobs do not exist any more. The economy, I say, is absurd.

I take a pill every evening. It controls my symptoms. I buy refills every month. It is an ideal situation for the supplier. But I, the patient, would like a pill that cures me, that leaves me with no more symptoms to control. It would be ideal for me but counterproductive for the producer of my trusty daily pill, obviously.

When I am sick I see my doctor. Sick people are the stock in trade of physicians and hospitals. Healthy people less so. We all deserve praise for professing to embrace the idea of preventive medicine. But what if we all turned out to be perfectly healthy tomorrow morning? All of us, except the few that get involved in accidents. They will not generate enough income for more than a few doctors and one hospital per town. I see a paradox in that. Physicians do not know yet how to make us all well. But should they find a way, their own existence would be endangered. Some dilemma.
On the other hand, it has all happened before. When the automobile made the horse obsolete all drovers, farriers, and horse traders lost their jobs. Even the horse butchers of Paris slowly disappeared. I remember two of them on rue Chappe in the 18th arrondissement. In the late Forties one still had a shop sign in the form of a horse’s head, a tête de cheval, signifying the nature of his business. Most of these shops are gone now. Their supply of merchandise has dwindled, and so have the customers. But as far as I have been able to determine life goes on. A few doors down the street from where the horse head used to hang you find today the busy Cafe de Chappe. Prominently displayed on the menu the owner lists his Steak à Cheval, a very common item in Parisian brasseries consisting of an egg straddling a ground beef patty “like a rider on a horse.” I am not sure but I think he meant this as a joke. I have convinced myself that, while sad, it is a hopeful sign that most young people cannot possibly ‘get’ this splendid pun. As it did on rue Chappe, life goes on everywhere, at least in the short run. Was not Charles Darwin in the 1830’s worried about Thomas Malthus’ prediction, namely that there was no room for more people? And is it not now two hundred years later? And isn’t Malthus just about the last thing we worry about in our day to day lives? Bless Alfred E. Neuman and his dictum: “What — Me Worry?”. Yes, that’s us. I suspect that there is method in Mad.

(c)2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman
Picture credit: clipart

The 1880’ies are often called the Golden Age. In Russia, unfortunately, these years were characterized by massive Church-inspired pogroms, events at which pious churchgoers, walking behind their priest in procession, would still yell “Kill the Jews”, and mean it.

Emma Lazarus, a minor American writer and poet intent on helping the oppressed, believed that she spoke in the name of all Americans when she wrote The New Colossus. Later, when the Statue of liberty was erected, her words found their way to the wall of the foundation structure.

Now, a hundred years later, Liberty Enlightening The World by Bartholdi is said to be the best known public sculpture in America. Lazarus’ sonnet contains probably the best known line of American poetry: “Give me your tired, you poor, your huddled masses”. Maybe the words once meant what they said. America had a big heart then. Alas, America’s heart has shrunk a bit. Those words sound hollow these days. Do we not have enough trouble with unemployment, automation, outsourcing, social security, health insurance, etc.? We need the housekeepers’, waiters’, gardeners’, and field workers’ jobs for our own people, now essentially blocked from getting into those lucrative manual labor careers. We cannot take on the problems of other nations’ poor as well.

America for Americans is a more honest slogan than ‘Send us your poor’. And if honesty matters we ought to bring Emma’s words up to date lest any newcomers visiting the statue of Liberty misunderstand what we are about. Here is one attempt:

Take back your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
They should breathe free, live without fear.
But please,
Not here.

(c) 2017 by Herbert H Hoffman Picture credit: whc.unesco.org