An Open Letter to War on Christmas Conspiracy Theorists (reprise)

http://www.michaeladelberg.com/

This blog was originally published two years ago. It is being brought back at the request of a reader.

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The week after Thanksgiving, a few things reliably happen. Christmas music fills the radio; Christmas specials fill the TV; Christmas ads fill the newspaper; Christmas decorations light-up the neighborhood. And in recent years, amidst all the red and green, a few voices reliably complain that there is a “War on Christmas”.

Best I can tell, “War on Christmas” complaints are spawned from a handful of local controversies in which a school board bans the singing of Christmas songs in the elementary school, or a city council resolves to remove a manger from city hall’s front lawn. Then news-ish talk shows on cable TV (most famously Bill O’Reilly, but others too) point to these oddball controversies as proof that there is a “War on Christmas.” The charge is leveled loudly and often enough to achieve parity with fact. So now we have a War on Christmas.

Non-Christians, including yours truly, are mostly ambivalent to the small-town controversies about the Christmas carol and the manger. We don’t cheer when the manger is pulled down, and we don’t care whether or not our kids sing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in school. These things are small potatoes, and we understand that the majority culture is entitled to set the cultural agenda. We even patronize favorite pieces of Christmas culture: we stroll through Christmas light shows and happily watch the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, again and again.

The U.S. is now and has always been a Christian nation. All non-Christian religions put together claim less than 10% of Americans; another 10% or a bit more are atheist or ‘no preference’. That means that roughly 80% of Americans are Christian. Even nominal Christians who rarely attend church generally love Christmas. The huge majority of non-Christian Americans—whether Muslim, Jew, atheist, or whatever else—understand this. We don’t make waves.

With this in mind, let’s return to the “War on Christmas”. War, by its very definition, implies organized hostility by one group against another. I challenge anyone to find an organized movement to subvert the annual Christmas tsunami. Even the ACLU, the boogeyman of many a “War on Christmas” yarn, has defended the right of Christians to celebrate Christmas a half dozen times since 1999.[i]

If there has been a War on Christmas, it is the lamest offensive in the history of warfare. But don’t trust the word of this secular humanist, do the research yourself. Examine the TV Guide for the month of December and count the number of Christmas-related programs. On broadcast TV alone you will find dozens, and you will find dozens more if you include cable TV. Then examine the number of real cases in which Christmas symbols, carols, books, etc., were defiled or removed from a public setting. You will find only a handful of local provocations, half of which were reversed in short order.

This is no War on Christmas. There are only conspiracy-theorists with megaphones.

[i] For example: The ACLU of Rhode Island (2003) interceded on behalf of an interdenominational group of carolers who were told they could not sing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve to inmates at the women's prison in Cranston, Rhode Island. The ACLU of Virginia (1999) represented Rita Warren and her right to erect a crèche on Fairfax County government space that had been set aside as a public forum. The ACLU argued that restricting the use of the public forum to county residents only was an unreasonable restriction. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The ACLU of Massachusetts (1996) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts on behalf of two women who were fired for refusing, on religious grounds, to work at a racetrack on Christmas Day. The ACLU of Massachusetts (2003) intervened on behalf of a group of students at Westfield High School who were suspended for distributing candy canes and a religious message in school. The ACLU succeeded in having the suspensions revoked and filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit brought on behalf of the students against the school district. The ACLU of Massachusetts (2002) filed a brief supporting the right of the Church of the Good News to run ads criticizing the secularization of Christmas and promoting Christianity as the "one true religion." The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority had refused to allow the paid advertisements to be posted and refused to sell additional advertising space to the church.

An Open Letter to James Bond, Her Majesty's Secret Agent 007

www.michaeladelberg.com

This November, Skyfall, the 23^rd James Bond movie in forty years, will debut in half-filled theatres across the country. In some circles, the release of a new Bond film is still meaningful; I bet the Flat-Earth Society is ecstatic.

When Dr. No, the first Bond movie, was released in 1962, it was a sensation. The Bond franchise hit its stride two years later with the third Bond film, the imaginative and stylish Goldfinger. Bond movies were churned out reliably every second year after that. As a boy growing up in the 1970s, I remember the re-run of a Bond movie on television as a bond-ing experience for my family. It trumped normal family activities, and we’d watch it together in the family room.   

James Bond was different from other movie heroes. American heroes came out of the “noble savage” literary tradition: The gunfighter of the American Western (think John Wayne, Gary Cooper) and the gumshoe detective of the Gangster movies (think James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart) were plain-spoken, rough-edged, and working class.

Bond was everything that American movie heroes were not: He was sophisticated to the point of snobby (note his put down of the Beatles in Goldfinger), formal in his dress, subtle in his wordplay, and practiced in the exotic—from martial arts to Baccarat. Bond-movie gadgets and pyrotechnics advanced the state of the art for action films. While American movie heroes saved a family or a town from a gang of bad guys, James Bond saved the entire world from international syndicates of superstar evildoers. He didn’t just get “the girl” at the end of the movie, he got girls all through the movie. To a generation of filmgoers, men wanted to be James Bond and women wanted to be with James Bond. 

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then we know how influential Bond has been. 007 inspired hit television shows like The Man from the UNCLE, The Saint, and the Bond satire, Get Smart. Bond undergirded episodes of The Flintstones and the Beatles movie Help. Even a generation later, the Bond influence is seen in cartoons like Inspector Gadget and the Austin Powers movies.

But it isn’t 1964, or even 1994, anymore. Movie franchises like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Matrix, The Terminator, and Transformers have long since surpassed Bond-movie action sequences and cinematography. Simplistic heroes like Rambo have more testosterone than Bond; Harry Potter has better gadgets. 

And Bond’s endless string of woman conquests and non-Anglo villains may strike a new generation of moviegoers as sexist, ethnocentric, and a little creepy.  The most recent Bond films have attempted to update the franchise a bit—i.e., introducing a woman (Judy Dench) as Bond’s boss, Christopher Walken as a relatively recent villain. But even with a few concessions to modernity, the Bond movie remains largely formulaic and outdated to a new generation of moviegoers.

James Bond is the 2^nd largest grossing movie franchise of all time. Bond was the cat’s pajamas way back when. But even with a blonde-haired, beer-drinking, edgier James Bond (Daniel Craig), 007 belongs in the Old Spies home. Skyfall will get generate respectable gate receipts in the U.S. because there are still aging Baby Boomers buying movie tickets. But the Boomers are aging, 007’s days are numbered.

“Oh, James…” coo the Bond girls as they are swept away by his charm and mo-jo at the end of the film. But they never finish the thought. So I will. “Oh, James… you’re so 20^th Century.”  

An Open Letter to the F-Word

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Dear F-word,

You are the most vile term in the English language. We are supposed to be shocked and offended when we hear you. Careers can be trashed when a microphone catches a leader uttering your hideous four letters. Last year, Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz, was sacked after saying you in public; this past April, political commentator Bob Beckel blurted you out on camera and was put into pundit purgatory because of it.

Jesse Sheidlower, an editor for the Oxford English Dictionary, wrote a book about you (the word, not the deed). He suggests you came into the English language in the 1500s as fuccant, the Dutch derivation of a Latin word. At the time, you were regarded as so dirty that your letters only could be printed in code.

But few people know of Sheidlower’s research. Most people believe that you, dear F-word, began in England as a legal acronym. One acronym commonly offered is: Fornication Under Consent of the King. Noted linguists, Van Halen, titled an album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, playing up another acronym that supposedly speaks to your origin. Apparently, these acronym-based theories lodged in the collective consciousness after a 1970 Playboy article on the subject. Shocker: Heff wasn’t on the level when discussing the F-word.

Whatever your origin, outrage over the F-word is now soooo 20^th Century. Few people I know are offended when you are spoken. Yet the super-structure for F-word outrage still lingers in FCC fines, workplace anti-profanity rules, and finger wags from a host of decorum cops. Two generations after George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Cannot Say on Television” we still giggle like school kids every time the F-word slips from the tongue of a celebrity or politician. And we tsk, tsk Hollywood when an f-bomb sneaks into a PG movie.

We’ve developed a dozen pseudonyms for the F-word (hump, screw, etc) that we speak with little hesitation. But this leads us into an intellectual cul de sac: If a naughty word is naughty because it describes something naughty, then a pseudonym for the naughty term must be equally naughty. We learned this in third grade math (if 1 + 2 equals 3, then 2 + 1 must also equal 3).

There are plenty of words that we use today that were once taboo. “Hysteria” derives from a Greek word about women’s reproductive organs. It was once quite naughty. “Avocado” derives from an Indian word for testicles; it was a great insult. We vest words with meaning and we assign taboo to a few of them. As meanings evolve and some words lose taboo status, others gain it.

Gratuitous use of the F-word is offensive. It is offensive because it is boorish behavior from a speaker or writer seeking to bludgeon or shock his/her listeners. However, limited use of the f-word, whether to accurately describe a particular sexual act (Look at those two bunnies fuck like there’s no tomorrow.) or to amplify exclamation (Dude, this is the dumbest fucking blog ever.) is only as offensive as a particular listener or reader deems it.  

No word is intrinsically offensive. We decide when are offended.

Addendum: This past January, Modern Family, became the first pre-taped network television program to use the f-word without a bleep. There were protests (but less than might have been expected). The sun rose the next day. The episode re-aired recently. The sun rose again.

An Open Letter to NBC Regarding the Olympics

www.michaeladelberg.com

Every four years, smatterings of the world’s greatest athletes gather for the great spectacle of the Summer Olympics. I have no beef with the Olympics as an athletic event, but it is delusion to think they make for good television. What follows is my Olympic-sized list of gripes with the 2012 Summer Olympics as televised sport.

1.       Pomp & Circumstance: The opening and closing ceremonies offer 19^th Century grandeur to a 21^st Century viewership disinterested in ceremony.

2.       Sports We Never Watch: For a quadrennial moment, prime-time television features track & field, swimming, and bike racing. Separated from the Olympic brand, these same sports are relegated to the most remote reaches of television and no one complains.

3.       Sports that Aren’t Sports: Though the wisecracks they induce are entertaining, the Olympics include loopy events such as synchronized swimming and pentathlon. (Note: in this Olympiad, the pentathlon is updated to include a laser pistol. This must make it cool.)

4.       Human Interest Stories: Telecasts are crammed with athlete profiles--plucky boys and girls who saved their nickels to jump on a trampoline or play table tennis at the highest level of international competition.

5.       U.S.A., U.S.A, U.S.A: I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but U.S. broadcasters need to cut out the chest-bumping every time an American wins a medal. Sorry folks, it’s generally a better story when an athlete from a tiny, poor country wins a medal.

6.       Boris Johnson: The U.K. has an admirable leadership culture. Regardless of party or crisis, its leaders are composed and well-spoken. But the London Mayor is all bravado and insane haircut; let’s hope he’s an aberration. We’ve already seen too much of him.

7.       Celebrity Drop-Ins: I don’t care if Matt Damon or Madonna or Brangelina attend the Olympics or not, but some people do. So, show celebs on camera if you must, but keep the microphones away from them. The plugs for their latest television shows are gratuitous.

8.       Lame Scandals: Sorry folks. The Chinese badminton players tanking games to set up medal round seeding just doesn’t cut it as sports scandal. No telegenic victims, no drugs, no bling, no mug-shot. We have way more entertaining scandals in American professional sports.

9.      Less 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation: I don’t watch much television, but I try to watch NBC’s Thursday line-up. Bumping 30 Rock or Parks and Recreation—the two best sitcoms on network TV—is bad practice for a last-place network struggling to maintain loyal viewers.

10.   Bob Costas: Costas is a smart guy. He was a good sports broadcaster. Then someone appointed him sports-pundit/genius. Now he’s Frank Deford without the street cred. Brent Musburger and Bryant Gumbel were good sports broadcasters who started acting like they were bigger than the sports they covered. They fell from grace. Costas should fall too.   

As sport, the Olympics are cool. It’s good that the world’s athletes get together every four years. The vast majority of the athletes are wonderful, dedicated people. The host city benefits from the tourism and commercial spin-offs from the games. But none of this makes the Olympics good television. On any given evening, some cable station is re-running Apollo XIII or The Thirty Year Old Virgin; I’ll take either over diving or rowing, much less archery or badminton.

An Open Letter to the American Reader

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Hey You, American Reader. Psst… Lean forward... I have a secret to tell you. This is the golden age of the American book.

Stop laughing. I’m serious.

Yes, I am very familiar with the pessimistic critiques. Andrew Delbanco’s “The Decline and Fall of American Literature” in the New York Review of Books a decade ago popularized the hand-wringing. More recently, the Wall Street Journal revived the discussion with a provocative op-ed titled “What Killed American Lit?” No less a literary luminary than Gore Vidal has offered: “The future is dark for literature. Certainly the young in general are not going to take up reading when they have such easy alternatives as television, movies, and rock.” Indeed, we all grumble about lacking time to curl up with a good book; book reading is out of sync with modernity’s need for compartmentalized activities like Net surfing.

Nonetheless, a dispassionate look at the American reader suggests a healthier picture. First, contrary to widely held assumptions, Americans are reading more than in the past. Gallup reports that 47% of Americans are reading a book, up from 37% in 1990 and 23% in 1957. To meet this market, an estimated 320,000 books were published in the U.S. last year (60,000 were novels). The gross quantity of literary content has never been higher, and we have record numbers of writers with advanced degrees and training; the law of probability tells us that there must be excellent books out there.    

The problem then, my dear American reader, is not that you lack excellent books. The problem is that you lack the time to enjoy them, and you lack the ability to sift through the junk and find the best work. Fortunately, there are emerging solutions to both problems.

Shorter Books for Busier People: Book length has grown and shrunk over the centuries; there is no ideal length for a novel. In the 1800s and early 1900s, when authors catered to a small, but dominant leisure class, novels ballooned in size to 200,000 words. Victorian authors like Dickens were serialized in magazines and paid by the word. We came to accept a correlation between excellence and length. But this is nonsense: It is harder to write a 50,000 word novel than an 80,000 word novel. My own experience proves this. Two of my three books were three hundred flabby pages in early drafts. Knowing my reader would benefit from a shorter and cheaper book, I hacked away and reimagined the manuscripts—dropping entire chapters and tightening plot lines for a cleaner read. My latest book, The Razing of Tinton Falls (about the destruction of a village during the American Revolution, as witnessed by diverse, opposing narrators) weighs in at a trim 160 pages. The two best books I’ve read in the last year, Marc Schuster’s The Grievers and Michel Stone’s The Iguana Tree, are 360 pages between them.  

Easy Access to the Best Content: There is amazing writing out there, but it can be hard to find. The Internet is a good thing, but it hides great content within a forest of mediocrity. Past arbiters of good taste (i.e., The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books) don’t even try to keep up with the small and alternative presses that are publishing the most interesting books. Fortunately, the Internet provides useful filters for the resourceful reader. Excellent content filters include: RealClear.com for journalism, ReadIt.com for blogs, and book reviewers like Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and The New York Journal of Books (disclosure: I review fiction for the NYJB). Unlike book reviews on Amazon or Good Reads, where the reviewers are often biased and untrained, these professional sites provide measured reviews from well-trained/credentialed reviewers and they cover much more than traditional magazines.

So, American Reader, do not despair. Authors are adapting to your needs with shorter, tighter books, and reliable filters are emerging to guide you to the best writing. Don’t be discouraged, enjoy this Golden Age.

www.michaeladelberg.com

An Open Letter to the Snakehead (a.k.a. Fishzilla, a.k.a. Frankenfish)

Dear Snakehead,

You’ve got a pretty spooky name for a fish. In your native East Asia you are called Channa. Recently you’ve picked up some event spookier names: National Geographic calls you Fishzilla and the Sci-Fi Network has taunted you as Frankenfish. Your supra-invasive-species status was cemented in the American imagination a decade ago via appearances on hit television shows like The Sopranos, CSI and The Office.

In 2002, you caused a media firestorm when you showed up in a pond in Crofton, Maryland. I read stories about your amazing abilities to spread stream to stream by slithering across land and breathing air. Lacking North American predators and breeding several times year, there was widespread fear that you would displace native fish species and make a mess out of the already-teetering Chesapeake watershed.

The National Fish and Wildlife Service issued Public Service Announcements about the threat you posed to native species. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources declared war on you, instructing fishermen “who catch the Northern Snakehead fish to kill these fish, keep them, and notify DNR immediately.” Even today, educational materials about the threat you pose are hard to miss in any Maryland or area National Park. More recently, Virginia’s joined the crusade too. Sorry, Fishzilla, you are public enemy #1 in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Now, a decade after your introduction into the region’s ecosystem, you have been found in other Maryland and northern Virginia ponds and streams. Just a few weeks ago, a mature female of your species was caught in the Potomac River facing Washington, DC. Frankenfish is menacing the nation’s capital. Reportedly, you’ve been found north of Great Falls, which suggests you might be the first fish species to swim up the powerful falls.

Nonetheless, there appears to be huge disconnect between the real Snakehead and the Fishzilla attributes assigned to you. It turns out that your reported abilities to slither long distances overland were vastly exaggerated. It also turns out that native fish species do not necessarily wither away when you show up. A decade after your introduction into the Chesapeake watershed, Snakehead appearances are still rarities and native fish populations are holding steady. Perhaps one day you will out-compete these native species, but there is no evidence that is happening currently. 

And here’s a kicker: it turns out that you’re delicious. Across East Asia, massive aqua-culture farms raise hundreds of thousands of Snakeheads each year for human consumption. Singapore alone imported 1,200 tons of Snakehead last year. In Washington, DC, some high-end restaurants have started serving you and Maryland State Parks now serve you for free at special events. Soon enough, the American angler and diner will be the most effective checks on your expansion.

Humans have an unfortunate history of upsetting the ecological apple cart by introducing non-native species, intentionally or unintentionally, into fragile ecosystems. In some cases this has produced awful results (two current examples: the Kudzu vine choking out trees across the American South, Zebra Mussels fouling water pipes and drainage systems through the Midwest). These are real problems, and American tax payers now spend tens of millions of dollars annually combatting these invaders.

However, there is often a disconnect between the feared problem caused by the invading species and the real one. As a boy, I remember stories of how the Gypsy Moth caterpillar would soon despoil our forests, and remember having to stay inside one day a year while helicopters rained insecticide from the sky to check their growth. But now, two generations after their introduction, the Gypsy Moth is just another leaf-eating insect. It is a pest among other pests, not more than that.

So, Mr. Snakehead or Fishzilla or Frankenfish, I wish you nothing but bad luck as you slither toward a permanent foothold in American waters. If I get the chance, I will kill you and eat you—but, despite your spooky nicknames, you don’t scare me very much.

Bon appetite, my fair Snakehead

An Open Letter to the Dollar Bill, the Penny, and All the Dead Presidents on U.S. Money

www.michaeladelberg.com

Dear Dead Presidents,

I am a fan, but your time is nearly up.

In an interesting experiment, a journalist recently attempted to go an entire year without using cash. With the exception of using dollars for the babysitter and a few mass transit tickets, he was able to pull it off. Admittedly, this might have been more difficult for him had he lived in a rural part of country or worked manual labor, but the point of his one year experiment should not be missed: cash is becoming unnecessary.

Op-ed pages periodically argue one point or another about U.S. money: Should we get rid of the penny? Should we convert the dollar bill to a coin? Proponents of doing these things make reasonable arguments. There is a significant "cost" to money--printing it, distributing it, enforcing its value, stopping counterfeiters, etc. Switching from paper money to coins saves money (i.e., a Wake Forest University study predicts the U.S. would save $150M annually if we replaced the dollar bill with a coin) and eliminating a coin saves even more money (i.e., economist Robert Whaples projects that the U.S. would save $300M annually by eliminating the penny). But these moves are small ball. Imagine the massive savings if we phased out currency altogether.

There are fears, some legit, some not, about moving to a swipe card based economy. Certainly, too many Americans borrow irresponsibly and accrue debts through credit cards. Credit card fraud is a booming criminal activity. Fortunately, these problems are largely correctible. Market forces and regulation can drive us to a point when card owners feel pain for irresponsible borrowing, and card issuers feel pain for offering credit irresponsibly.

As a past victim of credit card fraud, I know it's a big deal. But if we'd all be a little better about protecting our personal information and resetting our passwords, most of it is preventable. Our children will accept as a fact of life that passwords need to be complex and changed regularly. Algorhythm-based password scramblers will eventually make this all a lot easier.

The greatest fear about an e-based monetary system concerns privacy. Libertarians extoll the virtues of cash is because it doesn't let "big brother" track our every economic activity. But most of us already conduct most of our business via credit card, we are already voluntarily feeding big brother plenty of potential information. Fact is that there are pretty good protections against our financial information being shared without our consent and those protections will likely only become stronger in the future.

And we like "big brother" when he catches that our credit card has been compromised, shuts it down (with our consent), and tells us we're off the hook for the bogus charges. Big brother need not be a bad guy. Big brother has captured terrorists through financial monitoring and frozen the assets of thousands of other bad people. Meanwhile, big brotherless cash remains the medium of criminals--from sophisticated international types down to street thugs. Illegal activity is the largest remaining cash-dominated sector of economy.

Cell phones, pay pal, and credit cards are creating a new way to transact business. Already, most of the people who read this blog prefer to buy gas and groceries with a credit card. Cashless e-commerce now commands nearly one fourth of our holiday shopping. The end of cash is not science fiction or Gingrichy futurism--it's already happening. We just haven't had much of a public discussion about it yet.

Currency was a fantastic innovation a few thousand years ago. It facilitated trade by creating a commonly accepted measure of value, far more convenient than endlessly negotiating how many fish should be traded for clay pot or young goat. It is hard to imagine the onset of the industrial revolution or capitalism without currency. But like sailing ships or the film camera, great innovations can still become obsolescent.

I am just barely old enough to remember a black and white television. My children are barely old enough to remember phones with chords. My grandkids will be just barely be old enough to remember the cash register.

Sorry Dead Presidents. Don't take it personally, but we don't really need you anymore.

An Open Letter to George Washington (and Happy President's Day)

www.michaeladelberg.com

Dear George,

I wish you a belated happy birthday.

As a boy, I thought the world of you. Your birthday meant a day off school. You looked cool in that general’s uniform.

To most Americans today, you’re cartoon character: you sell cars, you’re a comic prop on Family Guy. You’ve slipped to the second tier of American luminaries: Kennedy was cute, FDR was compassionate, Lincoln was quotable. You’re the unsmiling guy with wide hips.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve read hundreds of pages of your Revolutionary War correspondence and Presidential papers. So I think I know you pretty well. You were not ideological—you handled problems pragmatically. You spoke directly and respected others, good traits, but also ordinary—hardly the stuff of heroes.

Despite this and your modestly, I hope you’ll indulge me as I argue why you are probably the greatest of all American heroes and one of the great heroes of world history.

Twice, as the victorious general of the Revolutionary War and again as the first President of a new republic, the only effective checks on your power were those you imposed upon yourself. When the Continental Congress could not pay, arm, or clothe your men—you didn’t go home or march on Philadelphia. You maintained discipline in the ranks and waited for the day when civil government might do better. At the end of the war, when subordinates dangled schemes of using the Army as a springboard to extra-constitutional power, you quickly dismissed all overtures. As President, you established precedents for limited executive power, neutrality in foreign affairs, and an orderly transition of power. When you retired, you avoided Monday morning quarterbacking, even when baited.

You certainly were not perfect. As a general, you lost more battles than you won. Your drive to instill European drills into the Continental Army probably exacerbated some of the early defeats. As President, you gave your ambitious Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, too much rope (i.e., letting him raise an army to crush the so-called Whiskey Rebels).

But the circumstances under which you operated were incredibly difficult. Today, we lampoon bureaucracy and complain of the checks that create gridlock in government. But you operated in a normless world in which your decisions were frequently high-risk and unprecedented. And you navigated this dangerous world without a bureaucracy or well established to checks to prevent abuses of power. Yet you were so honest and decent that you never trumped the fragile constitution or feathered your nest. How many of us would be so pure?

The new American Republic was made of tissue paper: saddled with massive debts, disputed and insecure borders, and terrible inter-state conflicts. The Founding Fathers championed republican government, but also thought republics were inherently short-lived. Jefferson believed that all governments inevitably became tyrannical; he suggested that a Revolution every couple of generations was necessary. Against this backdrop, you calmly argued that a republic could last as long as its leaders respected their constitution—and then governed accordingly.

There is a long list of leaders--Napoleon, Mao, Tito, Castro, Mugabe, and many others—who accomplished remarkable things at the head revolutionary armies and then throttled their nations with absolutism and abuses of power. Sadly, it is the norm in world history.

We should all take this simple test: list the Revolutionary leaders who successfully toppled the previous government and then took power: put a check next to those leaders who ruled without personal aggrandizement, put a second check next to those who willingly walked away from power without setting up a son or crony. The leaders who get two checks next to their names are the true heroes. How many can you name?

It takes a great leader to lead a revolutionary army to victory. It takes a greater person to subjugate himself (or herself) to civil authority. Ceding power gracefully and voluntarily may be the rarest (and perhaps greatest) human trait.

So many times you could have taken advantage of your celebrity and the weak institutions around you—and you never did. The stability and success of the American experiment owes more to your example than anyone else.

Thanks George.

An Open Letter to Tim Tebow

www.michaeladelberg.com

Dear Tim,

Congratulations on turning the Denver Broncos from a losing team to a winning team. And, on behalf of a blogosphere and media that are inordinately focused on you, please accept our apology.

Like many, I’m not convinced that you ever will be a great NFL quarterback. The foundation skill of a quarterback is the ability to throw an accurate pass consistently, and that appears to be your greatest weakness (at least in comparison to the NFL’s better quarterbacks). Let’s face it. Your passing has not been great, even in several of your wins.

However, it’s shameful that you have become such a lightning rod for criticism. Most young quarterbacks struggle with accuracy. ESPN’s Merrill Hodge and CBS’s Boomer Esiason, to name just two, have criticized you particularly bluntly. Hodge has ripped you several times. One of his quips: “It’s embarrassing to think the Broncos could win with Tebow.” Esiason said of you: “He can't play. He can't throw… He's not an NFL quarterback right now." Yet no other young quarterback incurs this kind of harsh criticism on national television. Other young quarterbacks are treated like, well, young quarterbacks.

Whatever your weaknesses, clearly your team is better off with you at quarterback than Kyle Orton (the man you replaced). At least up to now, your option-plays and scrambling have compensated for your deficits as a classic pocket-passer. Most important, your below-average team has gone 5-1 since you’ve taken over. Will that continue? Probably not, but your team would not have gone 5-1 over the last six games if your predecessor remained at quarterback.

So, if you’ve improved your team, why are so many people taking so many shots at you? First, you are a former-Heisman Trophy Winner (awarded to College Football’s top player) and some extra attention will inevitably follow any winner of that award. But the larger reason for all the attention comes from an infatuation many have with your personal life. For better or worse, you became a lightning rod a couple of years ago when a pro-life commercial featuring you aired during the Super Bowl. And since then, you have continued to be linked with conservative Christian causes.

Most recently, former NFL Quarterback Jake Plummer said this about you: “I think that when he accepts the fact that we know that he loves Jesus Christ, then I think I’ll like him a little better. I don’t hate him because of that, I just would rather not have to hear that every single time he takes a good snap or makes a good handoff.” Plummer spoke what many have been afraid to say: they wish you’d shelve what they perceive as aggressive Christian-conservatism. Many find your frequent and fervent expressions of faith uncomfortable.

The intersection of sport, religion, and politics has long been uneasy. Today, we remember Mohammad Ali favorably, but while Ali always had his fans, he was the most hated man in American sports in the 1960s for his embrace of Islam and refusal to serve in Vietnam. In some ways, Tim, you’ve become the funhouse-mirror version of Ali—as much of a lightning rod, but from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

America learned to love Ali. He was the greatest fighter of his era and his political and religious views became more comfortable with repeated exposure. Similarly, America has split over you, Tim. But the nation will love you, if you do, indeed, become a great quarterback. I have my doubts about whether this can happen, but I sincerely wish you the best of luck. Your religious and political views are far from mine, but you seem like a decent, hard-working young man and, to the best of my knowledge, you’ve never harmed anyone on or off the football field.

More than anything, I think we should just stop talking about you so much. From now on, I will just enjoy watching your improbable winning streak and unorthodox twist on NFL quarterbacking.

An Open Letter to the Cookie Monster (a.k.a. the Veggie Monster)

www.michaeladelberg.com

Dear Cookie,

I hope it is okay if I call you Cookie; Mr. Monster seems so formal.

I grew up with you and remember thinking your cookie binges were among the Sesame Street’s better bits. My boys didn’t watch much Sesame Street, but I still pay attention to you and the other Muppets because you’ve become so deeply ingrained in modern Americana.

A couple of years ago, there was a big stink made about you changing your name from the Cookie Monster to the Veggie Monster, and changing the focus of your mojo from cookies to veggies. Talk radio loved the topic and people said amusing and terrible things about your bosses at Sesame Street.

Many people, including me, derided you and your bosses for wild-eyed political correctness (truth be told, your eyes are pretty wild). A national petition drive protested your conversion, calling it “political correctness gone one step to far.” Many signed a particular version of the petition that specifically denounced your embrace of “the vegan agenda.” The petitioners called for a boycott of Sesame Street.

Until recently, I assumed your conversion was complete. The Cookie Monster—impulsive, tubby and lovable like the rest of us—was dead, replaced by a Veggie Monster alter ego. I called your transformation into the Veggie Monster “the most uncool re-branding in America since New Coke.”

Then a young parent who watches Sesame Street with her child set me straight. You were indeed still the Cookie Monster: you still speak like a caveman and you still gobble down plates of cookies. But you now call cookies a “sometime food” and appear in sketches that remind children about the value of eating other foods, including vegetables.

To quiet the controversy, you made several appearances on television—including interviews with Martha Stewart and Matt Lauer—where you re-affirmed your Cookie Monster identity and love of cookies. But you also explained that you now believe cookies are a “sometime food.” With self-deprecation, you told Stephen Colbert that you consider yourself “the Robert Downey of cookies.” You noted that despite charges to the contrary, you never planned to change your name or appearance. But you hoped people would understand if, going forward, you sometimes did more than just wolf down plates of cookies.

Despite your efforts to dispel the rumors about your name change, I missed your appearances and assumed for the last two years that you had indeed changed to the Veggie Monster. I continued to offer you up as an example of the excesses of political correctness.

So, Cookie, I hope you will accept my apology. Indeed, you are not and never were the Veggie Monster. I promise to never again offer you up as an example of political correctness run amok. Instead I will point to your non-transformation as another example of a silly rumor that got legs and somehow became accepted as fact.

An Open Letter to Followers of the Jerry Lewis vs. the Muscular Dystrophy Association Controversy

www.michaeladelberg.comm

Happy, well-adjusted people probably missed it, but this year, for the first time since before I was born in 1967, Jerry Lewis didn’t host the Jerry Lewis Telethon over Labor Day weekend. Age and changing demographics caught up with Lewis—and his on-air performance and relationship with the Muscular Dystrophy Association decayed in recent years. 2011 was supposed to be Lewis’s last year hosting the telethon—then he was summarily fired by the MDA a month ago. Both parties remain mum about what happened. In the absence of information, the Internet is full of theories. Supermarket tabloids love the story, as do certain Cable TV news-talk shows.

Whatever was actually spoken between the MDA and Lewis is irrelevant to the underlying reason that Lewis was fired: With apologies for being so blunt, most Jerry Lewis fans are dead or dying—and they’re no longer writing checks. People my age and younger know Jerry Lewis mostly as “that old guy who hosts that telethon no one watches.” Some also know him as that guy with the “Jerry’s Kids” rap that portrays people with MDA as victims. The pity-pitch seems out of touch with modern sensibilities that focus on the empowerment of people with diseases.

But even if Lewis’s fossilized celebrity and condescending schtick were magically fixed, it would not reverse the larger problem. The Jerry Lewis Telethon—in which Jerry once sang, wept, and sprayed seltzer bottles for 2,356 straight hours without so much as a bathroom break—is withering. This year, it’s down to six hours.

Blame the demise on Cable TV. As a boy, I remember watching the Jerry Lewis telethon because there was no alternative. There were only a handful of television stations and holiday weekend programming was awful. The telethon was awful too, but it held its own in a weak field. Now the telethon competes with Facebook, big time sports, high-rated television programs, and popular movies perennially re-run on basic cable. (Can you find a moment in which the Godfather or one of the Star Wars movies are not being re-run?) The modern audience won’t watch the has-been (Celine Dion) and never-was (J-Lo) lounge acts that headline the telethon. Lewis’s inability to connect with younger viewers compounds the problem. Modern viewers have choices, and they’re not choosing the telethon.

In a perfect world, the MDA would have phased-out Jerry Lewis in the same manner that ABC is phasing out Dick Clark from its New Year’s Eve program. That young Potsie Weber (Ryan Seacrest) who now anchors the ABC broadcast is as squeaky-clean, cute, and smooth as Clark was 50 years ago. But ABC understands that nothing would look worse than summarily dismissing Clark, always a company-guy. Clark deserves a graceful exit and ABC is giving him one.

And that’s probably where things went wrong with Lewis. Whatever his assets, Lewis was not a company guy. In the old days, Lewis was the telethon, and the MDA had to lick his boots in exchange for the star-power and sweat he gave them each year. But Lewis’s intemperate moments, on-air gaffes, and fading celebrity changed the equation. The MDA might be a non-profit devoted to a good cause, but it is run like a business, and there is no business case for keeping Lewis around.

With or without Lewis, the days of the marathon telethon are numbered. The telethon raised $50 million a year, but mostly through corporate philanthropy that will continue as long as the MDA supplies a photo-op for the giant check. This could be handled via 30-minute infomercial. Muscular Dystrophy is a significant disease, a degenerative genetic condition without a cure. I hope the MDA will maintain its donor base in the future, but the odds are slim that they’ll ever duplicate the exposure that the telethon brought in its hey-day.

As for Lewis, over the last fifty years, he spearheaded efforts that raised $1.6 billion to battle muscular dystrophy, and he deserves to be ranked among the giants of modern philanthropy. His motives were pure, even if his behavior was curious these last few years. I wish him happiness and camera shyness in his retirement.

An Open Letter to Workaholics

www.michaeladelberg.com

We work very hard convincing ourselves that we work very hard. We tell ourselves we are a nation of workaholics. And we tell ourselves workaholism is very bad. I beg to differ.

[Important disclaimer before proceeding: This blog speaks to college-educated Americans in professional jobs, and is not meant to speak to the tens of millions of Americans in more difficult circumstances.]

First, we are not workaholics. True, we have less vacation time than our social-democrat friends in Western Europe; true that inventions like the Blackberry have expanded the reach of the office into our evenings and weekends. But we still manage to watch more television, patronize more sporting events, and attend more movies than nearly anyone. Evenings and weekends used to be for second incomes or urgent domestic responsibilities; now they’re for shuttling kids to electives, Facebook, and American Idol. I don’t begrudge time spent on these things, but if a few hours are lost to working late on a proposal, or if one of Junior’s piano lessons is missed because of a call with the CEO, it is hardly oppression. Our grandparents worked hard manual-labor jobs that mangled their limbs and shortened their lives. We work in air conditioned offices where the greatest occupational hazard is a big butt.

Second, our work is not bad—for those of us with advanced degrees, it is the golden age of work. Our bosses are generally nice and flex-time/flex-place policies give us choices. More important, work itself is more empowered—IT advances have freed us from typewriters, carbon paper and adding machines. While we all have our favorite peeve about computers, they multiply our productivity and creativity. When we work late, it is rarely based on a command from the boss, but because we have a genuine interest doing a good job and we find our work interesting. We are the products of the first generation of parents who told their children “be what you want to be” and then wrote checks to enable it. At no time in human history has such a large cohort of people had the luxury of selecting their vocational track.

Yet the workaholic is a scourge. In the movies and TV, the workaholic is reduced to one of two caricatures: the amoral climber (i.e., Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, Jason Alexander in Pretty Woman), or the nearly-irredeemable protagonist awaiting rebirth (i.e., Charlie Sheen in Wall Street, Nicholas Cage in The Family Man). We love slackers: Harold & Kumar, Mr. Deeds, Norm from Cheers, and pretty much every character from any Jud Apatow movie. Working hard for your employer is uncool, perhaps even a moral defect.

We’d all like a little more pay, vacation, job security and/or stability in the 401K. But let’s not lose sight of how lucky we are: we selected our professions, work in jobs that won’t harm us, and are increasingly free from the drudgery and discrimination that dominated the office just two generations ago. Especially at a time of economic insecurity, pause and reflect on your good job and the many good people without one. And don’t complain if you miss a few innings of the baseball game because of the memo you stayed late to draft.

Workaholics of the world unite, you have nothing to lose except your imaginary chains!

An Open Letter to Video Game-Loving Supreme Court Justices

www.michaeladelberg.com

Parents may soon consider June 27, 2011 one of the more important dates in recent history. On this day the Supreme Court struck down a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. The libertarian in me celebrated, the parent in me cringed. When the two clash, my libertarian ideals take a back seat to the realpolitik of parenting.

As someone in the process of raising three boys, I see the negative influence of violent video games. I will set aside the argument that there is a body of research linking anti-social behaviors in adults with repeated exposure to depictions of death and violence as children. I am no expert on this research and while it concerns me, that is someone else’s argument to make.

For me there are two big concerns with these games based on my experiences with them: First, the games I have seen—particularly the very popular Call of Duty game series—stupidly depict war by feeding players a steady diet of easy-to-kill enemies for graphic extermination. Boys chortle as they blast people to shreds. I understand that there are settings on some games to tone down the gore, but even the toned down versions do not change the central fact that the games are built around blowing people away. Second, too many boys patronize these games to the point of obsession, drowning out healthier activities such as sports, music, and reading. We decry that American children are growing dumber and fatter—video games are not the problem, but they contribute to the problem.

The logic behind the court’s decision is unconvincing. The majority opinion argues that children have always been exposed to violence, i.e., fairy tales like Hansel & Gretel are built around a manipulative witch trying lure and kill two little children. True enough, but there is a huge difference between storytelling and today’s video games where the storyline is repeated killing with automatic weapons. Certainly, watching dozens of bloody deaths (close-up on large flat screen TVs) is different than being told a story that includes gory details.

There is long-established precedent for protecting children from products that society considers harmful. Children cannot buy Penthouse, Marlboro’s, or Budweiser. Schools ban soda sales. The court’s decision seems to suggest that society, through the engine of the state (not the Federal government), cannot impose restrictions on violent video games that are consistent with those restrictions placed on other harmful products.

Like many, I am worried about the creeping nanny state and consider myself a pretty open-minded parent in terms of exposing my kids to different things. Fortunately, my children are rarely alone in the house so my wife and I can enforce moderation on the amount of time our boys spend with video games. But there are millions of single parent families in America and millions more with two parents working full-time. Moderation is not easily enforced in these settings.

Let’s face it, kids get hold of harmful products—cigarettes, liquor, porn, pot, etc. The California law was not going to create heaven-on-earth. But it was a law enacted through appropriate democratic processes because a majority in the State wanted to place some checks on a product widely believed to be harmful to children. The checks put in place were consistent with checks put in place for other harmful products. I can’t figure out why the Supreme Court believes that violent video games deserve protections not granted to other harmful products.

An Open Letter to Oprah Winfrey

www.michaeladelberg.com

Let’s get a few things straight: I don’t like your show. I don’t like the way you fawn over celebrity guests; I don’t like your calculated tear-jerker moments; I don’t like your self-help bromides or Peter Pan spirituality. I have never made it through a full hour of one of your shows, even when I was genuinely interested in your guest.

However, I understand that you’re a very big deal—the giant of day-time television—so I DVR-ed your finale and watched more than half of it, and then spent a good chunk of time reading about you. I think I now know enough to conclude something about you: You’ve been very good for America.

Here’s why:

In the 90s, television talk shows entered into an arms race to find the most dysfunctional guests and raunchiest topics. Today, we all know about Jerry Springer’s freak show, but easily forget that there was a time when more respectable programs, even you, the sainted Oprah, all lurched toward shows built around: “I slept with my sister’s fiancée” and “my husband’s beating my kid.” Television talk shows blurred the line between normal and deviant behavior and turned Schadenfreude into a ratings engine.

Then you pulled out of the arms race and went (relatively) high brow. You brought back long interviews with serious people, and introduced the nation to good books. To the degree you still dealt with tawdry and titillating topics, at least you frequently had real experts on your panels to balance the silliness with some adult conversation. You gambled that an increasingly well-educated daytime audience would reward you for going uptown while all your competitors wallowed in the mud. Your bet paid off and the sleaze bags went away or steered toward a more respectable course. Your impact on day-time television was hugely positive.

You certainly are not the first African American to attract white fans. By the time you came along in the 80s, white America had grown comfortable with African Americans as celebrity icons (i.e., Michael Jordan, Eddie Murphy). But their popularity came with an unstated quid pro quo—spare the rap about the “the black experience.” You, along with Denzel Washington, brought African-American stories into the whitest corners of America, and made those stories okay. Maya Angelou is the best known poet in America because of you; Toni Morrison is read by large white audiences because of you. The term “diversity” is now diluted to the point of triteness, but it can be argued that you’ve championed diversity (on more than just racial lines) in America in a more meaningful way than anyone since the 60s.

I understand that there’ve been some unpleasant episodes in your personal life. I don’t care. What I do care about is your affirming American story: pulling yourself up from poverty and becoming a billionaire on your talents and instincts. I also care about your remarkable record of philanthropy. I am fascinated by the essays about your importance and the terms you’ve inspired, i.e., the “Oprah Effect” and “the Secular Church of Oprah.”

I am not a fan, but I guess I can call myself an admirer.

An Open Letter to Bin Laden Death Revelers

www.michaeladelberg.com

On May 1st, the President announced that U.S. Navy Seals had landed deep inside Pakistan, penetrated an Islamist enclave in Abbotobad, and killed Osama Bin Laden. News of this announcement set off spontaneous celebrations. Jubilant crowds gathered at Ground Zero, outside the White House, and several college campuses chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Monday morning media coverage continued the theme: the death of the 9-11 instigator was a celebratory story and the spontaneous patriotic eruptions represented a “coming together” of Americans in these hyper-partisan times.

I don’t question the necessity of killing Bin Laden or downplay the tremendous bravery and skill of the Seals who carried out the mission. But there is something creepy about celebrating the death of a person—however evil his past acts. Watching crowds exult in the death of Bin Laden made me uneasy, even as I struggled to know why.

I searched for someone, anyone, who shared my unease with the way Bin Laden’s death was celebrated. To my surprise, I found only one prominent voice that shared my concern. On May 3rd, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi released the following statement regarding the death of Osama bin Laden:

Osama bin Laden, as we all know, bore the most serious responsibility for spreading divisions and hatred among populations, causing the deaths of innumerable people, and manipulating religions for this purpose. In the face of a man’s death, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibilities of each person before God and before men, and hopes and works so that every event may be the occasion for the further growth of peace and not of hatred. [bold face added]

The Vatican nailed it. Bin Laden was a warped man with an evil ideology. Sadly, killing him necessary. But this should be treated as a grim and solemn task, not celebrated as if our team just won Super Bowl.
A few pundits cautiously suggested that images of Americans partying on news of Bin Laden’s death could be used against us in the Mideast. Maybe this is true. But these pundits miss the point as much as the chanting crowds. The wrongness of celebrating the death of a person is not dictated by whether a foreign demagogue exploits the video.

Days after the Atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, the Japanese surrendered and the U.S. erupted in celebrations. We celebrated our victory in a war, the end of a long period of self-sacrifice, and, above all, we celebrated the cessation of killing. We didn’t celebrate the deaths that our superior war machine inflicted upon the enemy.

No one believes that Bin Laden’s death means victory in the war against terrorists. Sober analysts have stated for years that Bin Laden, largely because of U.S. efforts, was already cut-off from Islamist-fighters in hot-zones like Afghanistan and Yemen. His death might be a blow to the morale of our enemies, but Bin Laden’s death doesn’t alter the battlefield or Al Qaida’s desire to execute new acts of terror. The War on Terror is not over; celebration is premature.

Bottom line: We are, or at least should be, better than blood lust. Being the world’s cop is lonely work and there’s always some kook somewhere plotting our harm. As 9-11 proves, some of these kooks are very dangerous and they must be defeated. It is regrettable that we must engage in some ugliness in the pursuit of policies premised on advancing democracy and prosperity across the world. As Dwight Eisenhower once observed, “America is not good because we’re great, America is great because we’re good.”

But there is no goodness in celebrating a person’s death.

An Open Letter to James O'Keefe

www.michaeladelberg.com

Like most people, I first heard of you a year and a half ago when you and a colleague dressed up as an over-the-top pimp and prostitute and filmed ACORN community activists assisting you in navigating government paperwork. Your sting resulted in the loss of federal funding for that organization. I did a little more research on you, and laughed out loud at your tongue-in-cheek quest to have Lucky Charms removed from the Rutgers University cafeterias because of the derogatory Irish stereotype the cereal portrays. I heard tid bits about your subsequent stings of Planned Parenthood, the New Jersey teacher’s union, and Sen. Mary Landrieux. I compared you to Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat character, and defended you for merely “placing a mirror, and letting others embarrass themselves.” If there was a political motivation to where you placed that mirror, I was fine with that.
A few weeks ago, you seemingly hit the jackpot again. This time, you set up National Public Radio executives with a phony deep-pocketed Islamic group linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Your operatives met two NPR execs at a posh restaurant and recorded the execs over lunch. During the lunch, one of the NPR exec made statements that dissed the Tea Party and suggested liberals were better educated than conservatives. You published clips from the lunch to great media fanfare. The NPR exec was fired and NPR’s CEO resigned shortly thereafter. Your sting fueled a new round of calls to defund NPR and public television. (For the record, I like and support NPR, but believe the time has come for a gradual phase-out of federal funding.)
The ethics of sting operations are complicated. Clearly, they have a place when catching criminals. But sting tactics start getting icky when the victim is a middling person just doing his/her job (even in the service of an organization you might not like). It has been noted that journalists have codes of ethics that forbid your sting tactics; you respond by calling your operatives a “citizen journalists” not bound by that profession’s rules. This dodges the fundamental question of the ethics stinging ordinary people about their work, but, okay, let’s call this a gray area and move on.
What cannot be dodged is selective editing. Clearly the NPR execs said what they said. But they also said many other things, including statements that create a much more balanced portrayal of what transpired than your video clips suggest. Glenn Beck and former Bush White House official, Michael Gerson, hardly NPR apologists or liberals, have demonstrated that throughout the now infamous lunch, NPR officials also made pro-conservative statements, repudiated liberal bias, and often resisted when your operatives dangled a suggestive question. None of these moments made it into your edited video. There was not a continuous anti-conservative diatribe, just a handful of ill-considered statements amid many others. (To your credit, you have posted the entire unedited video on your website and invite viewers to reach their own conclusions.)
A few times in my career, I have given speeches or been interviewed by the press. Fortunately, I was never misquoted, but once I believe the reporter selected quotes to advance his agenda, knowingly creating a false impression of my general message. If someone speaks candidly for an hour, a clever observer can cherry-pick a handful of quotes to suggest something different from the speaker’s general message. This is why chastened politicians speak in dull, rehearsed sounds bites, rather than spontaneously. Fear of being selectively quoted deadens meaningful discussion.
This is not a partisan letter from a pissed off liberal. The absolute worst moment of the 2010 midterm elections was the “Taliban Dan” ad run by liberal Democrat Alan Grayson against Tea Party-Republican Dan Webster. In that ad, Grayson ran a statement by Webster about women needing to be subservient to men. Webster did make that statement, but within a larger discussion that specifically disavowed the sexism of the selected quote. Grayson never apologized and was rightly turned out of office.
As for your citizen journalist status, you are welcome to defend the ethics of your sting tactics—that’s a tough issue that can be argued either way. But when you selectively edit a long video down to titillating sound bites without acknowledging that the complete transcript tells a fuller story, you become a dishonest hypocrite behaving worse than anyone you’re exposing.

An Open Letter to "Tiger Mother" Bashers

Not since the furor over Charles Murray’s scandalous/scandalized The Bell Curve has a book struck such a raw nerve across America as Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Chua’s central thesis is that strict parenting, which she characterizes as Chinese or Asian, produces more accomplished children than more lenient western parenting techniques focused on self esteem.

Chua is either a savvy self-promoter or completely tone deaf (I suspect the former) and is largely responsible for the histrionics her book has inspired. Her provocative op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was full of unyielding statements, such as: "Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight A’s. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, ‘You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.’ By contrast, Western parents struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out."

The squall of reaction to Tiger Mother from upper-middle class America includes a Time Magazine cover story “Tiger Moms: Is Tough Parenting Really the Answer?” that calls the book, “Mommie Dearest for the age of the            memoir." Not to be out-done, the New York Times ran an op-ed column titled “Amy Chua is a Wimp.” Even venerable and literary Kirkus is running a tongue-in-cheek contest to title Tiger Mother’s sequel. (My entry is: Funeral Dirge of the Lemming Child.) The blogosphere is lit up with commentary about Chua, some mean and personal. In recent interviews, Chua expresses dismay at the level of animosity directed her way, and re-casts her book as a tribute to her parents rather than a swipe at western parenting. In making these claims, she sounds like a politician clarifying an awful gaffe—and deserves as much sympathy.

But aside from the messenger’s missteps, the Tiger Mother thesis deserves real attention. A recent study conducted in Hong Kong and California examined children as they: 1. Take a short exam, 2. Sit with their mothers and the graded exam in a break room, and 3. Re-take the exam. The study revealed that the American students improved slightly between the first and second exam; parental attention during the break was principally focused on telling the child what she/he did well. The Hong Kong students, however, improved markedly between the first and second exam; parental attention was focused on examining mistakes and assuring the child would not make the same mistakes again. Another study shows American adolescents are generally satisfied with high-average grades like B and B+, while children in Asian countries are rarely satisfied with equivalent grades.

These studies suggest that that biggest gap between the children of “Tiger Moms” and western parents is the level of expectation, and the parent’s willingness to be a tutor and taskmaster. Of course some American parents are certainly tigers in their own right, and I have seen a few Asian parents who are, frankly, pussycats; the Chinese vs. western dichotomy is overly simplistic. But there is a general consensus in this country about two things: 1. our children are, overall, not achieving academic excellence, and 2. our children, overall, spend too much time Facebooking, X-Boxing, MTV-ing, and hanging out at the mall—all activities that distract from academic excellence. Chua is probably right to suggest that the most-common ingredient in under-achieving American children is indulgent parenting.

A spank on the butt is now considered Neanderthal; parents assure that every child on every Little League team gets the same trophy; thirteen year olds have their own cell phones with unlimited texting accounts (of course, paid by their parents). Parenting is about trade-offs and too many parents of my generation have opted to treat their child’s material comfort and self-esteem as paramount. When our children bring home a D on a math test we rarely give up successive weeknights tutoring them and forcing them to study five times as hard for the next exam. Sometimes, we tell them that “Math is difficult” or, much worse, that a mediocre teacher has failed our little genius. I am no apologist for weak teachers—I hope Michelle Rhee’s tenure-yanking reforms catch on—but children spend less than 25% of the week in school (only 36 of 168 hours), and that leaves a ton of time for committed parents to fill in shortcomings at school. If a child is under-achieving, check the tiger-mother quotient of the parents before blaming the school.[i]

Amy Chua is not the wimp, we are.

---

[i] This presumes a two-parent family and stable home. Clearly, some parents are in a much tougher circumstances. This blogs responds to the educated, upper-middle class parents who’ve taken such umbrage with Chua’s thesis.

An Open Letter to 2nd Amendment Absolutists

www.michaeladelberg.com

I don’t know much about gun control as a public policy issue, so I will avoid stepping into that bucket. But it drives me crazy, especially in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, to hear gun-advocates portray the Founders of the Republic as fans of unrestricted gun ownership. Such statements are not well grounded in historical fact.  

When charged with governing, the Founders showed showed no sanctity to gun ownership . From its first days as a proto-national government, the 2nd Continental Congress advised States to disarm individuals suspected (but not convicted) of disloyalty and to impress the arms of those living in areas where arms might fall into British hands. George Washington’s first action of 1776 was a campaign to confiscate the private arms of the citizens in Queens Co., New York. Different local militias in New Jersey confiscated arms from African-Americans and inhabitants of the vulnerable shoreline.  These were not actions taken against a handful of traitors, but against large groups of people. The public's need to wage a war repeatedly trumped an individual's private property right to own a gun.

A decade later, as the Federalists attempted to make the Constitution more attractive to a skeptical public, they added a Bill of Rights (ten amendments to the Constitution) to lessen fears that the Constitution would become "an engine of tyranny". The Founders wrote the 2nd Amendment so that "a well regulated militia" (the key phrase in the 2nd Amendment), properly armed and governed by officers, would exist to resist potential federal encroachment. The 2^nd Amendment spoke to the Colonial experience of British soldiers forcing tax collection on localities that had no voice in the creation of the tax.

The Federalist Papers, written by the Founders to explain the benefits of the Constitution, discuss basic rights of American citizens: fair treatment before the law, the right to vote, freedom of religion and the press, etc. To the degree firearms are addressed, the Federalists speak to the right of Americans to organize into militias to resist federal encroachment. Federalist #29 declares “it is a matter of the utmost importance that a well-digested plan should be adopted for the proper establishment of the militia” and Federalist #46 discusses the strength of a militia "with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties." However, The Federalist Papers—85 essays and 200,000 words long—never speak to an individual’s right to own firearms.

Based on actions taken during their presidencies, Washington and Adams had no qualms with seizing private property for a perceived public good. Washington's confiscations of arms and property from the "Whiskey rebels" of Pennsylvania and Adams's impressments under the Alien and Sedition Acts demonstrate this. Even Jefferson, who counseled “the government is best that governs least,” opted to limit the 1^st Amendment when he championed "salutary coercion" of a press he believed overly partisan and irresponsible.

Though deeply suspicious of Federal over-reach, the Founders were not libertarians in any modern sense of the term, certainly not when governing. They supported a well regulated militia, but were ambivalent to private gun ownership when gun ownership ran up against a reasonable "public good" argument. Individual families often owned a rifle or two (the muzzle-loaded rifles of the day fired only one bullet and took two minutes to re-load) but it was the responsibility of local government to keep the really dangerous stuff—casks of gun powder, artillery, etc.—under guard in public magazines.

Even the most powerful men of the day did not keep private stores of dangerous weapons (with the exception of privateers battling foreign enemies at sea). Washington’s estate at Mt. Vernon, for example, had nothing more dangerous than a small number hunting rifles. People like John Hancock and Robert Morris purchased huge quantities of war materials, and then immediately turned them over to state and local governments.

When it comes to gun control, argue whatever position you want, but it is inconsistent with the historical record to believe that the Founders supported the private ownership of firearms capable of killing dozens of people.

An Open Letter to "War on Christmas" Conspiracy Theorists

http://www.michaeladelberg.com/

The week after Thanksgiving, a few things reliably happen. Christmas music fills the radio; Christmas specials fill the TV; Christmas ads fill the newspaper; Christmas decorations light-up the neighborhood. And in recent years, amidst all the red and green, a few voices reliably complain that there is a “War on Christmas”.

Best I can tell, “War on Christmas” complaints are spawned from a handful of local controversies in which a school board bans the singing of Christmas songs in the elementary school, or a city council resolves to remove a manger from city hall’s front lawn. Then news-ish talk shows on cable TV (most famously Bill O’Reilly, but others too) point to these oddball controversies as proof that there is a “War on Christmas.” The charge is leveled loudly and often enough to achieve parity with fact. So now we have a War on Christmas.

Non-Christians, including yours truly, are mostly ambivalent to the small-town controversies about the Christmas carol and the manger. We don’t cheer when the manger is pulled down, and we don’t care whether or not our kids sing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in school. These things are small potatoes, and we understand that the majority culture is entitled to set the cultural agenda. We even patronize favorite pieces of Christmas culture: we stroll through Christmas light shows and happily watch the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, again and again.

The U.S. is now and has always been a Christian nation. All non-Christian religions put together claim less than 10% of Americans; another 10% or so are atheist or ‘no preference’. That means that over 80% of Americans are Christian. Even nominal Christians who rarely attend church still love Christmas. The huge majority of non-Christian Americans—whether Muslim, Jew, atheist, or whatever else—understand this. We don’t make waves.

With this in mind, let’s return to the “War on Christmas”. War, by its very definition, implies organized hostility by one group against another. I challenge anyone to find an organized movement to subvert the annual Christmas tsunami. Even the ACLU, the boogeyman of many a “War on Christmas” yarn, has defended the right of Christians to celebrate Christmas a half dozen times since 1999.[i]

If there has been a War on Christmas, it is the lamest offensive in the history of warfare. But don’t trust the word of this secular humanist, do the research yourself. Examine the TV Guide for the month of December and count the number of Christmas-related programs. On broadcast TV alone you will find dozens, and you will find dozens more if you include cable TV. Then examine the number of real cases in which Christmas symbols, carols, books, etc., were defiled or removed from a public setting. You will find only a handful of local provocations, half of which were reversed in short order because of local outcry.

This is no War on Christmas. There are only conspiracy-theorists with megaphones. 

[i] For example:  The ACLU of Rhode Island (2003) interceded on behalf of an interdenominational group of carolers who were told they could not sing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve to inmates at the women's prison in Cranston, Rhode Island. The ACLU of Virginia (1999) represented Rita Warren and her right to erect a crèche on Fairfax County government space that had been set aside as a public forum. The ACLU argued that restricting the use of the public forum to county residents only was an unreasonable restriction. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The ACLU of Massachusetts (1996) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts on behalf of two women who were fired for refusing, on religious grounds, to work at a racetrack on Christmas Day. The ACLU of Massachusetts (2003) intervened on behalf of a group of students at Westfield High School who were suspended for distributing candy canes and a religious message in school. The ACLU succeeded in having the suspensions revoked and filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit brought on behalf of the students against the school district. The ACLU of Massachusetts (2002) filed a brief supporting the right of the Church of the Good News to run ads criticizing the secularization of Christmas and promoting Christianity as the "one true religion." The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority had refused to allow the paid advertisements to be posted and refused to sell additional advertising space to the church.

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