Peggy Noonan, the Tea Party and the Establishment

I suspect that Peggy Noonan is being over-optimistic in her praise of the Tea Party in today's Wall Street Journal:

The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration's spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: "We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!" They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.

Sounds nice -- the Tea Party has helped the GOP see the error of its ways! -- but who will the Tea Party actually push to power in Congress next month? In all likelihood, um, John Boehner. He voted, of course, for the Bush Administration's unfunded Medicare drug plan -- probably the best example of the GOP's shamelessness about deficit spending -- and he shows every sign of being a servant of big business and other special interests that Tea Partiers supposedly disdain. And he's using that power to co-opt the supposedly pure Tea Party candidates before they even face election:

One tea-party-backed candidate to get Boehner's help is Steve Stivers, a former state legislator and lobbyist for Ohio's Bank One who has accused his Democratic opponent of supporting "taxpayer-funded bonuses given to failed Wall Street executives." Stivers's spokesman, John Damschroder, said he thinks the $14,000 was given - mostly before the state primary election - because "speaker-to-be Boehner knows how critical Ohio is to control of the House."

Boehner also has given $14,000 to Ohio candidate James Renacci, a former mayor, car dealer and nursing home operator who has attacked his Democratic opponent for having "lobbyist friends" and for attracting support from "special interests." Renacci spokesman James Slepian called the money "a vote of confidence" and a reflection of the importance that Boehner attaches to the race as a step toward Republican control of the House.

So it's difficult to buy the Tea Party of a vanguard of ideologically-cleansing purity within the GOP. It's returning to power the exact same people who ran Congress during the 1990s and most of the last decade. This revolution feels awfully stale.

Time To Slash Defense Spending?

As politicians promise to start cutting spending in Washington after this fall's elections, there's growing talk -- even among some Republicans -- that it's perhaps time to cut defense spending. That has, predictably, generated a backlash within the GOP. Ben and I tackle the topic in our column for Scripps Howard this week. Here's my take:

Yes, America can and should significantly cut its military budget.

Our military isn't built just to defend America and its interests, but to bestride the world like a colossus: There are significant deployments of U.S. troops and personnel in Europe and Asia, and commands charged with readiness to project American military power on the remaining inhabited continents. This has had benefits -- we've helped keep the peace in Europe, by and large, for more than 60 years, which is an extraordinary accomplishment.

But American taxpayers continue to pay dearly for the privilege of maintaining the most awesome military in world history: the base defense budget for 2010 is $533.8 billion -- and that's before costs for "overseas contingency operations" in Iraq and Afghanistan are added to the bottom line.

The result? The United States on its own spends about half the world's total defense budget -- 46.5 percent of the planetary total. The next closest competitor, China, spends 6.6 percent. We're overdoing it.

This moment of history -- a "unipolar" moment with a single dominant military power in the world -- is an aberration. It is already passing, with the rise of China. We cannot afford to sustain it, which is what defense hawks would have us do.

And it hasn't necessarily made us safer: Osama bin Laden went to war against the United States in part because of U.S. troop deployments to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Sometimes being the biggest just makes you the biggest target.

Even Republicans -- some of them, anyway -- are starting to recognize the dangers. We should not bankrupt this and future generations in pursuit of unsustainable world dominance. If it is time to start cutting government spending, the Pentagon's budget should be on the chopping block along with everybody else's.

Bag O' Books: Paul Auster's "City of Glass"

Three thoughts about Paul Auster's "City of Glass":

* This is the first novel - a novella, really - in the so-called "New York Trilogy," and that name is apt. It's a cliche to say that "the city is a character" in the book; it's also, perhaps, imprecise. Instead, it's fair to say this book cannot exist apart from the city. Specific streets and neighborhoods and even Mookie Wilson's early reign with the Mets are all integral to the story.

* Though ostensibly a detective story, "City of Glass" is a meditation on language itself. And Auster brings a nice sense of play to the proceedings -- not just in the meta sense of placing a writer named "Paul Auster" near the center of the action, but in his use of names ("Max Work," "Peter Stillman") and in considering the many ways that individual words can take on multiple meanings. This sounds like heavy, sloglike reading but it's not: It is a pleasure.

* That makes it sound too hoity-toity. What is lovely, also, about Auster's writing is its rootedness in the physical world: Not just New York, but in the smaller crevices of life -- the reality of notebooks and pens and apartments and tables and plastic phones and more. You can almost hold Auster's world in your hands; you can certainly hold it in your mind. And that's a pretty fair accomplishment.

Finally: You should never judge a book by its cover, but the Art Spiegelman cover to my paperback copy of the book -- bound together with the other volumes in the trilogy -- is astounding, and conveys the art and play to be found within.

Football is Dying. Maybe It Deserves To.

The NFL has spent this week being shocked -- shocked! -- that the violent game it promotes is, well, violent. The league has spent this week levying fines against particularly egregious hits from last weekend's games, but as Pittsburgh Steeler lineback James Harrison and Miami Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder have pointed out, in their various ways, football is game of hitting, and hitting hard: You're supposed to hit the ball-carrier as hard as you can to bring him down; the carrier tries to hit you as hard as he can so that he can stay on his feet and keep going. It's rough business, and there's growing evidence that it destroys the bodies and minds of the people who play the game.

I don't really watch games anymore -- it makes me a bit queasy to cheer on people in the process of hurting themselves and each other -- though I still check in from time to time on the progress of the Kansas City Chiefs: a lifetime of fandom is hard to put away. But today -- October 21 -- feels like it might be a quiet watershed day in the demise of football.

Today's New York Times:

Helmets both new and used are not — and have never been — formally tested against the forces believed to cause concussions. The industry, which receives no governmental or other independent oversight, requires helmets for players of all ages to withstand only the extremely high-level force that would otherwise fracture skulls.

Moreover, used helmets worn by the vast majority of young players encountered stark lapses in the industry’s few safety procedures. Some of the businesses that recondition helmets ignored testing rules, performed the tests incorrectly or returned helmets that were still in poor condition. More than 100,000 children are wearing helmets too old to provide adequate protection — and perhaps half a million more are wearing potentially unsafe helmets that require critical examination, according to interviews with experts and industry data.

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

The risk of playing football at all levels was driven home over the weekend when a Rutgers University player was paralyzed from the neck down in a game Saturday. It's become clear the way the game is played and officiated must be altered. The unacceptable alternative is to be resigned to more and more players joining the casualty lists.

A recent Harris Interactive poll shows most Americans don't enjoy seeing football players get hurt. They want changes to helmets and other equipment to be made, and they believe players who cause head injuries should be hit with penalties, up to and including suspension.

Blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Samori (his son) didn't play football this year. He wants to go back. We can't, in any good conscience, send him back.

It is, simply, becoming less reputable to cheer on the sport that's literally killing and crippling players before their time. And parents like Coates are taking their kids out of the game. We've already determined that our son will never get our permission to play tackle football. Support for the game is slowly beginning to dry up, because it will never be possible to make the game safe enough without fundamentally altering its character.

That's not to say it will ever completely die. People love sports, and many people love violent sports. But it seems possible to me that the NFL and college football will begin to recede in popularity, something equivalent to the moneymaking-but-still-backwater provinces of pay-per-view (like boxing and ultimate fighting) or minor cable channels (like hockey). And that's fine by me.

The Top Baseball Moments of My Life

I'm not a die-hard baseball fan. But as I sit here tonight wondering if Joe Blanton has what it takes to help the Phillies get back to the World Series (meh) I realize that I actually have a number of fond baseball memories. The best...

* THE ROYALS WIN THE 1985 WORLD SERIES: I don't want to hear your nonsense about Don Denkinger, ok? George Brett, Bret Saberhagen, Steve Balboni, Fred* Frank White: Those were my guys. It was the first time in my youth that I discovered a team with "Kansas" in the name could win something big. I thought we lost everything.

*Fred was a Royals broadcaster. My mistake.

* GEORGE BRETT HITS A HOME RUN IN GAME THREE OF THE 1980 WORLD SERIES: I was 7 years old. I remember nothing else about this game -- the Royals won, but lost the Series -- except that Brett hit a home run and I was sent to bed. And my dad, who got off work at a meat-packing plant at midnight, came home, woke me up and took me to an all-night cafe so I could tell him about it.

* THE 1991 WORLD SERIES: I loved that two "worst to first" teams -- the Atlanta Braves and Minnesota Twins -- played in it. But my fondest memory of it is that Game 6 was played while my family was at Lake Tenkiller in Oklahoma, celebrating my grandparents 40th anniversary. We sat around a fire and listened to the game on the radio; my grandfather was a Braves fan from constant Superstation exposure. It remains the reason I prefer baseball on the radio to baseball on television.

* PHILLIES WIN THE 2008 WORLD SERIES: I'd only moved to town a few months earlier. But the victory celebration on Broad Street was something to behold. Even if I did end up getting shoved by a riot cop.

* BOSTON RED SOX COME FROM 3-1 TO WIN THE 2004 ALCS: It was the previous year, when Red Sox and the Cubs both appeared to be on the verge of reversing their curses in the playoffs, that brought me back to baseball after a sustained absence. But this series was thrilling. I sat with friends at the Red Lion bar in Lawrence, KS to watch the final games. I'm a sucker for the underdog, even if the underdog has a higher payroll than every team but the Yankees -- because, well, I hate the Yankees.

* VISITING OLD YANKEE STADIUM, 2004: I may hate the Yankees, but I appreciate baseball history. So on a vacation trip to New York I spent $100 for a ticket about 15 rows above the third base line. Walking into the park felt like a cinematic experience. I even rooted for the Yankees that night. Bernie Williams won the game -- and the AL East -- with a walkoff homerun against the Twins. And as the crowd exited to the sounds of Sinatra singing "New York, New York," a chant went up: "Boston Sucks! Boston Sucks!" It was everything I could've hoped for.

* MY FIRST BASEBALL GAME AFTER SEPTEMBER 11. It was a Friday night home game for the Royals, sometime in the next few weeks. Friday night games always concluded with a fireworks exhibition: This one was set to Elvis singing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" with George W. Bush quotes interspersed into the audio. The combination of Elvis, Bush and explosions in the sky -- and the way it whipped the crowd into a frenzy -- made me think that maybe the War on Terror was going to bring out some very weird sides to the American character.

* THE DIAMONDBACKS WIN THE 2001 WORLD SERIES: Also related to September 11. I was walking the streets of New York, near Ground Zero, right after the Yankees had lost the Series. I'd spent the day immersed in the odors of the still-burning towers -- the flames went on for weeks -- and felt, well, sick of what humanity could do to itself. Then I heard a horn honk. A limo driver rolled down his window to show his Diamondbacks cap to a couple of cops. They cursed at him; he smiled and drove away. And that's when I realized that New York would survive and thrive.

* BILL BUCKNER'S BLOWN GROUND BALL: I rooted for the Mets that year. I'm a sucker for the underdog.

Stacy Lipson, Michael Smerconish and the Problem of Bullying

An old high school friend of mine sent me a Facebook message recently. Following her recent 20th reunion, she told me, a small group of people had gone into Wichita to have a few drinks together; that group included T, a man who had made my junior high years miserable with an unending procession of physical bullying. Even reading his name years later filled me with anger and a kind of dread.

Simply put: I still hate that guy. Even though a generation has passed.

My friend understood. She told me the topic of T's bullying had come up over drinks: I wasn't, it turned out, his only victim. And it turned out that T, a little older and wiser, had some regrets. "He said he hadn't thought of himself as a bully but now, looking back..." my friend wrote. "Anyway he seems like a decent guy now, really."

That is, I guess, a relatively happy epilogue to my childhood angst. But we're in a media moment that is focused on bullying because, well, not everybody makes it to the epilogue. It's a moment that caused Stacy Lipson, a great Philadelphia writer and one of my Tweeps, to reflect on her own childhood experience of victimization:

You may think you understand. But you don’t. You can’t understand unless you’ve experienced it. And if you have experienced it, you know how it feels. The anxiety, fear, and sadness that seem to be a part of your daily experience. The wish that some day, not too far off, the abuse would stop. The wish to be someone else.

I don’t like to talk about what happened to me as a child. I never thought I would need to. But I think it’s important for parents to realize that bullying is an epidemic. It’s not going to go away anytime soon, and once one child starts, the rest can join in. It’s time to do something. Children need to realize the power behind their words and actions, and parents need to make sure that their children are listening. Hard.

Of course, everybody knows that bullying is wrong. Which is why I've been stewing over Michael Smerconish's Sunday commentary in the Inky which strikes what I'd (probably unfairly) call an "objectively pro-bullying" tone. It's not that Smerconish favors beating up weak kids; he just wants to know what the big deal is.

My hunch is that the underlying behavior hasn't gotten any more vicious. Nor has the prevalence of bullying itself increased. Rather, the attention paid to it has.

I went to school with plenty of bad kids who picked on classmates. Today, kids like that have cell phones and Facebook at their disposal. Meanwhile, an increase in absentee parents means the bullies encounter less discipline at home.

And yes, an overeager media has oversaturated many a news cycle with coverage of the latest bullying case with tragic consequences. The result is both a hyperawareness of behavior that has always existed, and an ever-expanding list of what is classified as "bullying."

Yes, coverage of the subject is intense now and, yes, it will go away soon enough. But rather than treat this as a "teachable moment" -- say, how do we get kids and parents to clamp down on vicious and unacceptable behavior -- Smerconish would rather gripe about the spotlight. Maybe he thinks he's being contrarian. But in this case, he's sending the wrong message.

My own childhood experience colors much of my adulthood. My politics derive, in large part, from a hatred of bullies. (Let's just say that George W. Bush and his frathouse personality provoked something visceral in me.) I sometimes fear taking my toddler to the playground because of worries he might be bullied -- or, worse, that he'll end up a bully. And though I'm an exceptionally peaceful guy, I can lose my cool in a major way if I sense that somebody is running roughshod over another. I can see 40 from where I'm at, and yet my feeling is still very intense: I fucking hate bullies.

Stacy, bless her, has done a fine job of reminding us the pain bullies can cause, the lasting damage they do. Michael Smerconish just wants the story to go away.

Mark Boyle's World Without Money

There's something initally Waldenesque and seductive about Mark Boyle's vision of a world without money, but I'm not sure that it stands up to any kind of scrutiny. Boyle decided to test himself by living for a year without cash, and decided to keep on keepin' on after the year came and went.

What makes the whole endeavour seem a bit of a swindle, frankly, is that while he didn't himself use cash, his existence is made very possible by piggybacking off a world that does, in fact, use money as a way to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.

Boyle lives in rural England in a trailer he spotted on Freecycle.org. He feeds himself by growing everything from barley to potatoes, foraging wild edibles like berries and nettles, and occasionally dumpster-diving for luxuries like margarine and bread. He cooks with a wood stove fashioned from large restaurant olive cans; brushes his teeth with his own mixture of cuttlefish bones and fennel seed; and makes paper and ink from mushrooms. He barters labor for rent, Internet service, and whatever else he can't find, grow, or make.

I don't begrudge anybody who wants to escape the rat race, and more power to Boyle for making it happen for himself. But let him try his experiment in some part of the world where the people and the land are poor -- something actually closer to the moneyless society he favors. Guess I'm dubious that such an experiment would be successful; it's cash-based commerce that made Boyle's survival possible.

And it seems plain that, even allowing for the piggybacking on the existing cash economy, Boyle is still very much engaged in acts of commerce. I don't think he'd deny that; he apparently was an economics student at one point. But money is just a way of making the whole business of commerce more efficient. What's wrong with that?

Maybe this:

We couldn't move from what we are today to—even in 10 years' time—living completely moneyless. It's about moving away from complete dependency on money, which is a very insecure position to be in, anyway. You can't have all your eggs in one basket. As more and more people move away from one economic model to another economic model, then the market reacts to that in certain ways and people produce less. It's more about slow evolutionary process than a revolutionary process. And that's quite key to the whole thing. Our whole agricultural system is based on fossil fuels. Each gallon of fossil fuel is the same as 40 man-hours per week. That's a lot of extra man hours. And so if we're going to get back to a way of agriculture that doesn't involve oil, then people are going to have to transition away from some of the jobs that aren't necessary.

The problem, if I'm reading correctly, is that money is efficient. It makes it possible (in a roundabout way) accomplish a whole workweek's worth of tasks in the span of minutes. Sounds good, but as Boyle points out, that has some ripple effects that maybe aren't good for the environment.

Understood. And I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon. Boyle, however, is unlikely to convince many people that they should return to the Age of Bartering, where existence becomes more difficult and work more arduous. Who wants to live that way? Ascetics like Mark Boyle, I suppose. But environmentalists are never going to win the big fights if the rest of us think that Mark Boyle's vision is the one the rest of us should live by. There's a lot about the modern world to like. We just need to make it work better.