Saturday, December 9, 2023

Jesus the Anointed

 

Just a bit of trivia today from some research I was doing this week in my editing of an article for BYU Studies. In the course of looking into the “name” Jesus Christ, I came upon an interesting blog post1 by Dr. B. Brandon Scott, the Darbeth Distinguished Professor of New Testament Emeritus at the Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.

With all the emphasis on using the full name of the Church because it includes the name of the Savior, we sometimes forget that Jesus’s name was not Jesus Christ. Jesus (Yeshua) is the only name he went by during his lifetime. He was often referred to by various titles or descriptors, the most common being probably “the Christ,” as in Matthew 16:16, where Peter, in response to Jesus’s question “Whom say ye that I am?” declared, “Thou art the Christ.”

“Christ” has a fascinating history, though, which Dr. Scott traces briefly in his blog post. “The Greek word ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ (CHRISTOS) translates the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ, (māšīyaḥ), anglicized as Messiah, which means ‘anointed with oil.’ Hebrew kings, prophets, and priests were anointed with oil. Messiah became a word for ‘the king,’ and in later Hebrew traditions it designated the king to come who will save conquered Israel.” So our English words Messiah and Christ are synonymous, both referring to one who has been anointed with oil.

Dr. Scott goes on to explain, “In Greek christos means ‘oil’ or ‘oiled’ or ‘covered in oil.’ Anointing in the Greek world was associated with bathing and athletics, not kings.” Which makes CHRISTOS an unusual choice as a Greek translation for the Hebrew term referring to the anointing of kings and prophets. Scott claims that without understanding Judaism, non-Jewish converts would therefore have regarded Paul’s use of the Greek term as mostly nonsensical.

The designation stuck, though, and when the term moved to Latin in the early church, “the translators decided not to translate christos, but to transliterate it as Christus, indicating they think it is a proper name or title. Translation involves finding a word in the target language with the same or similar meaning as the originating language. Transliteration involves transposing the letters of the original into the corresponding letters of the target language.” This results in a new term in the target language, one that has no real meaning other than what has been assigned it.

An example might be the German automobile name Volkswagen. We all know what a Volkswagen is, but the name means nothing to those who do not speak German. Having served a mission in Germany and having graduated with a degree in what Mark Twain called “the awful German language,” I know that Volkswagen is more than a company name. It means “people’s carriage (or coach).” And if you understand the company’s origin, you also know it was founded by the government of Germany in 1937. In other words, it was Hitler’s effort to produce a “people’s car.”

The Latin transliteration Christus was then transliterated into other languages, such as the English Christ. We now use this term as if it were a surname, and most people don’t understand either that it is a title or what that title means.

Ironically, if we look at the original name of the Church when it was founded in 1830, the name of the Church did not include the name of the Savior at all. D&C 20:1 reads: The rise of the Church of Christ in these latter days . . .” And so it was known for the first four years. Then, in 1834, a conference of elders, presided over by Joseph Smith, changed the name to the Church of the Latter Day Saints, removing even Jesus’s title from the name.

This was apparently unsatisfactory, however, for Joseph and other Church leaders began using a combination of the 1830 name and the 1834 name: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” Finally, on April 26, 1838, Joseph received a revelation in which the Lord specified the name of the Church. The editors of the Joseph Smith Papers put it this way: “The [April 26, 1838] revelation sanctioned the name of the church that JS [Joseph Smith] and others had recently begun to us: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.”2 The hyphen and lowercase “d” came later. For a thorough history of the development of the name of the Church, please see the Shane Goodwin article we published in BYU Studies Quarterly in 2019.3

As with pretty much everything in life, this name issue is more complicated than it appears at first glance. I’ll have more to say about Book of Mormon implications in the future, but the fact that Nephi’s brother Jacob declares more than 500 years before Jesus was born “that Christfor last night the angel spake unto me that this should be his nameshould come among the Jews” (2 Ne. 10:3) is rather problematic on several levels. This statement is either anachronistic or it tells us something about the translation process. That’s all I’ll say for now, but the history of the title/name Christ raises all sorts of significant questions.

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1. B. Brandon Scott, The Origin of the Word “Christ,” https://earlychristiantexts.com/the-origin-of-the-word-christ/.

2. “Journal, March–September 1838,” in Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839, ed. Dean C. Jessee and others, Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2008), 230, accessed July 19, 2019, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-march-september-1838/18/#historical-intro.

3. K. Shane Goodwin, “The History of the Name of the Savior’s Church: A Collaborative and Revelatory Process,” BYU Studies Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2019): 441.

Thursday, October 26, 2023

What Is the GOP and Where Is It Going?

 

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been treated to a circus in the House of Representatives, which, as the saying goes, is an insult to the circus. The circus, of course, is a lot better organized than the Republican caucus. But what Speaker Roulette has revealed is the numerous divisions in the GOP. As the events unfolded, a significant split appeared between the MAGA faction and the traditionalists. I don’t call them moderates, because there is no such animal as a moderate in today’s GOP. But several of the older, more senior members of the caucus refused to support legislative arsonist Jim Jordan. This split may have been more personal than ideological, however, since the traditionalists all later fell in line behind election denier and extremist Mike Johnson, who, from all reports, is just a kinder, gentler version of Jordan.

For a while it appeared that the traditionalists might just accept the Democrats’ offer to put a more moderate and reasonable Speaker in place who would allow bipartisan legislation to reach the floor. But that was apparently a bridge too far for even the old guard. So, given who is in control of the party at this point, I fully expect the House Republicans to make impossible demands, pass message bills that have no chance of getting through the Senate or a presidential veto, and shut down the government.

One thing is certain, however, and that is the fact that the Republican Party is not interested in governing. They are genetically wired to hate the very government they seek to “lead.” They are interested in power only, not in any good they might accomplish with that power. Consequently, the GOP is much more adept at being the minority party, where they don’t actually have to lead or deal with complex issues. Asking them to compromise and pass legislation that, while imperfect, would actually benefit the majority of America is too much.

Most Republicans in Congress are more interested in playing to the base and getting their faces on Fox News than in doing their job. And what is that job? Compromise. That is the nature of our constitutional republic. America does not have a parliamentary system, in which the team that wins the most seats gets to also pick the governing executive and implement their policies unimpeded. Our Founders instead established a government that, by design, requires the parties to work together to a degree, especially when power is divided as it is now, with one party controlling the White House and the Senate and the other party controlling the House.

Kevin McCarthy lost his gavel, ironically, because he understood this. He avoided a default on the debt and avoided a government shutdown because he understood that he couldn’t just make one-sided demands and expect both the Senate and President Biden to cave. The Democrats and McCarthy both knew that if there was a government shutdown, most Americans would rightly blame the Republicans. But there is a small (or maybe large) contingent of Republicans in the House who don’t understand our government. Compromise is not in their vocabulary. So they forced McCarthy out. Of course they tried to blame it on the Democrats because none of them voted to save McCarthy, but McCarthy had given them no reason to support him.

And this was McCarthy’s main weakness. Nobody could trust him. After January 6, 2001, for instance, McCarthy correctly blamed Trump for the insurrection. But then he reversed himself, crawled to Mar-a-Lago, and kissed Trump’s ring. This is symbolic of his entire speakership. Once the GOP gained the majority in the House, it took 15 votes before McCarthy finally made enough concessions to the extremists in his party that they would allow him to squeak into the Speaker’s office. But he broke his promises to them when he made two deals with the Democrats to keep the government running. Then, trying to make the extremists happy, he went back on much of what he had promised Biden and the Democrats, including allowing the “Freedom” Caucus to open impeachment hearings on Biden without any substantial evidence. So, McCarthy is not a figure to pity. He deserved what he got.

And so did the Republican Party. The circus that followed demonstrated to all America just how broken the GOP is and just how unfit Republicans are to hold any sort of power. To their credit, the traditionalists did not hand the Speaker’s gavel to Jim Jordan, one of the most corrupt politicians we’ve seen in ages. But they also didn’t have enough support to make anyone Speaker who was not an extremist and election denier. So we now have Mike Johnson, and I really have few doubts about what we are about to endure. If he tries to keep the government from shutting down, which he can’t do without compromising and without Democratic votes, he will go the way of McCarthy. But if he does shut the government down by making impossible demands, the GOP will get most of the blame for the significant damage they will inflict on individual Americans and on the government. He’s really in an impossible position. So, good luck, Mike.

What the Republican Party needs to do is figure out what it really is. Right now, it has no clue. Mitt Romney has expressed a few opinions in his new biography. According to his biographer, McKay Coppins, Romney told him that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” This should come as no surprise, since a majority of the party still believes Trump won the last election and does not think he has committed any crimes. The Republican Party, by and large, is so addicted to disinformation, conspiracy theories, and corruption that they have no use for the Constitution.

What are we to make of a party consisting largely of white evangelical christians (yes, I lowercased that intentionally) who, when polled, think that a serial adulterer, confessed sexual predator, business fraud, insurrectionist, and amoral narcissist is a religious man? What sort of people enjoy listening for hours to a rambling, intellectual pygmy who alternates between bragging about himself and telling lies about pretty much everyone not named Trump? Trump’s popularity among Latter-day Saints is thankfully lower than it is among Evangelicals, but it is still way too high, especially among LDS legislators, who had the gall to censure Mitt Romney for voting his conscience, a concept they are apparently unacquainted with.

I agree with President Biden that there are a good many Republicans who do not agree with Trump and his MAGA fanatics. But among those who have any government power, who beyond Mitt Romney has the courage to speak up and oppose him? Where is that sort of courage? I just don’t see it. And sadly, I don’t see it among the other four members of Utah’s congressional delegation. All three remaining House members (Chris Stewart’s seat is empty until the special election next month) voted for Jim Jordan to be Speaker, for heaven’s sake. And Mike Lee is lost in space.

So, what will become of the GOP? I can only hope that Trump leads the party off the cliff in 2024, losing not only the presidency but both houses of Congress. If so, this may be the only way for the GOP to break free from Trumpism. But the Republican Party’s problems were not started by Trump. They have been off track for 40 years. Trump just took them where they were already heading but got them there faster. So, will a massive loss in 2024 cause introspection and a change of course? I’m sorry, but I really can’t imagine this happening. I’m afraid the only redemption for conservatives is to start a new party and leave the rotting carcass of the GOP to the MAGAts.

Thursday, October 5, 2023

Dealing with the Debt

 

Because Kevin McCarthy finally ignored the extremists in his party, we narrowly (and temporarily) averted another government shutdown, which Trump was pushing and the far-right wingnuts in the GOP were hoping forTrump for purely selfish reasons, the arsonists in the House for poorly reasoned ideological reasons. But the deal McCarthy struck with the Democrats bought us only 45 days. Sometime in mid-November we will undoubtedly be subjected to the threat of a shutdown once more. McCarthy knew that most Americans would blame the Republicans for a shutdown, rightly so, and so he did what he had to, and it cost him his job, but the budget mess is really a bipartisan act of irresponsibility. Even though the GOP is more at fault for our budgetary troubles, both parties are responsible for the massive debt we are accumulating.

Before I make some sensible (but not painless) suggestions on how to get the debt under control, let me first make a point about the national debt that most Americans don’t understand. Yes, $33 trillion is a lot of money, but it must be viewed in context. As a percentage of GDP, U.S. debt stands at an estimated 127 percent. This debt ratio is high by historical standards. Before the Bush tax cuts of 2001, for instance, the debt ratio was 33.27 percent of GDP and dropping. In 2001, the ratio jumped to 52.44 percent and has been steadily increasing ever since. The Trump tax cuts only accelerated the trend. And the pandemic caused a massive jump in the debt ratio, from 99.06 percent in 2019 to 126.23 percent in 2020. It dropped to 120.37 percent in 2021 but has been climbing the past two years.

By contrast, let’s look at some other countries. In 2021, Japan’s debt ratio was 217.61 percent, and the U.K.’s was 186.48. France’s ratio was just behind ours at 116.55 percent. Germany’s was only 68.62 percent, Canada’s was 64.04 percent, and Switzerland’s was a paltry 20.3 percent. So, a large debt ratio doesn’t necessarily mean the country is going to go bankrupt. We don’t hear about much handwringing in Japan. Maybe they understand something we don’t.  Also, the interest payments on U.S. debt are still a lot smaller as a percentage of GDP than my family’s mortgage payments were as a percentage of our family income (before we paid the loan off). And the difference between national debt and a family’s mortgage is that the mortgage has to be paid off, but national debt doesn’t. It just gets rolled over.

Economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman points out that U.S. debt was about 100 percent of GDP after World War II. So, how did we pay it off? “We didn’t,” writes Krugman. “John F. Kennedy entered the White House with federal debt roughly the same as it was on V-J Day. Why, then, wasn’t the 1960 election dominated by questions of how to pay off the national debt? Because while the dollar value of debt hadn’t gone down, economic growth and modest inflation meant that the ratio of debt to G.D.P. had fallen by half.” He makes the same point about England’s debt after the Napoleonic Wars. The British debt was about 184 percent of GDP. How did Britain pay off this debt? Well, it didn’t. The debt shrank relative to GDP as the British economy grew. So those who are up in arms about the debt right now (but didn’t seem to care about it at all when Trump was president) are being disingenuous, to put it kindly.

Still, the course we are on now is not one we ought to continue. We need to reduce the annual deficit for our long-term economic welfare. Notice I didn’t say anything about balancing the budget. That isn’t going to happen, nor is it necessary. Uninformed people, like my Representative, John Curtis, who compare the national budget to a family budget are comparing apples and kumquats. These are two entirely different sorts of budgets. And those same people usually argue for slashing spending without raising taxes, which would create all sorts of problems.

The Republicans have basically painted themselves into a corner on cutting Medicare and Social Security, which would hurt some of their most loyal supporters, and they are unwilling to cut military spending, which leaves them trying to squeeze blood out of a rock, threatening to make massive cuts to nondefense discretionary spending. But the nondefense discretionary portion of the budget amounts to only 14.5 percent of the total budget. Even if you cut this amount in half, in 2022 it would decrease spending by only $455 billion. And the effects would be devastating.

Slashing discretionary government spending, even if you include defense spending, would produce ruinous ripple effects across the economy. Many government workers would be laid off, and businesses that depend on those workers’ purchases or on direct government purchases would suffer. This could throw the economy into recession, which would create a downward spiral, affecting all corners of the economy, including a reduction in tax revenue. Aid to the most vulnerable would have to increase, unless you just want to see innocent people suffer.

So, you can’t really put a dent in the deficit without cutting Medicare and Social Security. The problem with this is that the Baby Boom generationmy generationis reaching age 65 at the rate of 10,000 individuals per day. Yes, per day. So cutting mandatory spendingwhich includes not only Medicare and Social Security, but also Medicaid, income security programs, student loans, and $520 billion of things like veterans benefits and federal civilian and military retirement benefitsis going to be very difficult, if not impossible in the next decade or more.

In short, getting the budget under control cannot involve only spending cuts. This Republican fantasy doesn’t pass the simple arithmetic test. But the Republicans are still stuck in the swamp of Reagan supply-side lunacy. For 40-odd years, they have been determined to shrink government and cut taxes. All that this has accomplished is to balloon the debt and create obscene inequality, where the wealthy make off like bandits while the middle class shrinks and the poor suffer. In other words, we need to seriously increase revenues. One small way to do this is to fund the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats (like Donald Trump). But, of course, the GOP is trying to defund the IRS and protect wealthy criminals.

But let’s look at a little history. Currently, our top marginal tax ratemeaning the rate high earners pay on any income that falls in the top tax bracketis 37 percent. By historical standards, this is very low. At the end of World War II, for instance, the top rate was 94 percent. This rate was in effect for 1944 and 1945. In 1946, the top rate dropped to 86.45 percent. It dropped again slightly for the next three years, then jumped to 91 percent for one year. In 1952, the rate increased to 92 percent; then in 1954 it dropped back to 91 percent, where it stayed for ten years. In 1964, it dropped to 77 percent. For 13 of the next 16 years, it was 70 percent. Then Ronald Reagan was elected. In 1982, because of the GOP’s misplaced belief in supply-side economics, Congress dropped the top rate to 50 percent, where it stayed until 1987, when it dropped again to 38.5 percent. In 1988, the rate dropped to a modern low, 28 percent. Three years later, it increased to 31 percent, and two years after that it increased to 39.6 percent. The Bush tax cuts dropped the top rate to 35 percent. These cuts expired in 2014, so the rate went back up to 39.6 percent. The Trump tax cuts dropped the top rate to 37 percent, where it has stayed. As mentioned above, this rate, along with cuts in the capital gains tax rate, allowed the wealthy to accumulate obscene amounts of money.

To put this in some sort of international context, let’s compare U.S. taxes to those of other developed countries. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is a group of 38 member nations that describes itself as a forum committed to democracy and market economy. These countries are considered “developed” nations. The OECD publishes statistics about each member country, including total tax revenue (federal, state, and local) as a percentage of GDP. The numbers are instructive.

The United States, for example, is very low on this list, with only Chile, Costa Rica, Ireland, Mexico, and Turkey collecting a lower percentage of GDP in taxes. The U.S. rate is 26.58 percent (2021 being the most recent year for which statistics are available). The average rate for all 38 OECD countries is 34.11 percent, 7.53 percent higher than the U.S. If you look at just those countries that are considered America’s peer nations (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K), their tax receipts weigh in at an average of 37.63 percent of GDP, 11.05 percent higher than the U.S.

In other words, by any international standard, the U.S. is severely undertaxed, despite what you will hear from right-wing politicians, who are still living Reagan’s supply-side fantasy. If we were to tax at the OECD average rate, our federal, state, and local governments would have had an additional $1.76 trillion to spend in 2021. If we were to tax at the rate of our peer nations, we would have had an additional $2.58 trillion in 2021. Either figure would be enough to create a budget surplus and have plenty left over to invest in infrastructure, pay public school teachers decent wages, do more to combat global warming, and much, much more. Perhaps it would also encourage us to adopt universal health care, which would actually save us money in the long run, since we pay double for health care what most other developed countries payand they provide health care for all their citizens, something the GOP will not allow America to do because it’s “too expensive” and it’s “socialism.”

Increasing taxes, mainly on the wealthy, would need to be implemented gradually, and it would perhaps cause a decrease in the demand for certain products and services, primarily those purchased by the wealthy, but this economic impact would certainly be offset by investments in the lower and middle classes, where the multiplier effect would stretch the economic impact of those extra tax revenues.

Another source of revenue is corporate taxes, and again the U.S. lags the field here. On average, OECD countries collect corporate taxes to the tune of 9.8 percent of GDP. The United States collects only 6 percent. Again, this includes federal, state, and local taxes. In 2022, the federal government collected only $425 billion in corporate income taxes. When divided into total corporate profits for the year of $3.523 trillion, that gives us an effective tax rate of 12 percent. When divided into GDP, it amounts to only 1.8 percent. Corporations used to be chartered by government to serve public purposes. Over the years, they have turned into instruments for funneling wealth into the hands of the already wealthy. When you consider that the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans owned 89 percent of all U.S. stocks in 2021 and the bottom 90 percent held about 11 percent, you can see how corporate profits primarily benefit the already wealthy, which increases the concentration of wealth year by year. Increasing corporate taxation would help level the playing field as well as help pay down our national debt.

But, as I indicated above, getting the budget under control has to be a two-pronged effort. We do need to rein in some government spending, and we do need to reform both Medicare and Social Security. The first thing we should do is means text both programs. By this I mean making sure that the benefits go only to those who really need them. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, for instance, should not be on Medicare or be receiving monthly Social Security checks. Where the cutoff would be is a matter for politicians to haggle over, but there are many in this country who simply don’t need a social safety net. The second thing we should do is remove the cap on income that is taxed for Social Security and Medicare. Currently, that amount is $160,200. Any income earned above that figure is not taxed. If we would tax all income, our Social Security and Medicare funds would not be in trouble. And since most income earned by the wealthy does not come in the form of a paycheck, we should also levy a tax on capital gains that would help support these two programs for our senior citizens, too many of whom have not been paid well enough to have saved sufficient funds for retirement.

For too long, Republicans have been dishonest about the effects of tax cuts and the insistence that we can slash government spending without causing severe economic turmoil. On the other hand, Democrats have also been unrealistic in their insistence on refusing to reform Social Security and Medicare and too dogmatic about not trimming discretionary spending. And both parties need to face the music on defense spending. We have the best military in the world, but it is also bloated and inefficient in many ways. We spend more on defense than the next ten countries combined (or 13, depending on which statistics you use). To automatically increase military spending every year, even in times of peace, is unwise and unnecessary.

In short, the debt is not a problem we can’t fix. Some of my solutions are not painless, but they are also not unreasonable. We just have to demand more of our elected leaders and stop listening to disinformation.

Monday, September 4, 2023

My Odd Book Habit

As I’ve mentioned here before, I love books, and I prefer the printed kind to ebooks, although I do read books occasionally on my iPad. Lately, though, things have gotten a little out of control. A couple of months ago, I counted and was mildly surprised to learn that I was reading eight books at the same time. And that didn’t count the issue of Dialogue I was reading while I shaved in the mornings or the issue of the Journal of Mormon History I was reading during lunch at work. I was reading two books at work to give me a break from editing. One was Christopher Blythe’s fine volume Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse, which I finished last month. The other was a book by one of our BYU Studies authors, Greg Dundas. I’m still enjoying his Explaining Mormonism: A Believing Skeptic’s Guide to the Latter-day Saint Worldview. My only complaint about his book is the subtitle. Compared to the questions I have in my own head, he’s not really a skeptic, but what I would consider a true believer. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting book.

That means I was reading six books simultaneously at home. This requires a little unpacking. Two of the books are on my iPad, and I read them only Tuesday and Thursday mornings while I’m logging miles on the elliptical in the basement. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I get my exercise on the basketball court, with a group that is kind enough to still let me play at my age. These two early-morning ebooks are the Maxwell Institute’s Early Christians and the University of Utah Press publication Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity. The other four books I was reading mostly in the evening. I was slowly working my way through Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Houseful of Women, which I also finished last month.

The other three were books that, for various reasons, I couldn’t read more than a couple of pages in without putting them down. One is a book by Swedish-American physicist and cosmologist Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. This book was recommended to me by a reader of my Dialogue essay on cosmology. It is a fascinating book, but it is about twelve stories over my head. I understand maybe a tenth of what I’m reading, so after wading through a couple of pages, my brain is on overload. The second is one I picked up after Stephen Cranney mentioned it in a blog post on Times and Seasons. It is titled Confessions of a Sociopath and is written by a Latter-day Saint law professor (pseudonym M. E. Thomas) who takes great joy in describing her amoral approach to life. Some curious readers have figured out what her real name is and have posted it online, but it’s not really relevant to what I’m writing about here. I’ll finish this book eventually, but after a couple of pages I get tired of the author’s narcissism and braggadocio. The earlier chapters about her childhood and how she navigates being an active member of the Church without any apparent conscience or moral center were more interesting than her later chapters about how she finds great satisfaction in using and destroying people. All that matters to her is her own superiority. It’s kind of like listening to Donald Trump for more than a minute. The final book is The Catcher in the Rye, which I also finished last month and which was certainly more attention-grabbing than either of the two books just mentioned. But still, reading the ramblings of a depressed, judgmental teenager who smokes a lot while wandering around New York City is not exactly like reading David Baldacci or John Grisham. A page-turner it ain’t.

Catcher, though, is part of my attempt to make up for a gap in my education when I was young. Somehow I made it through high school and six years of college without reading a lot of books considered classics. So, in the recent past I’ve read books like The Road by Cormac McCarthy (which, by the way, was a fascinating read) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (which was not). And here I must disappoint anyone who loves the whale book. As a three-time novelist and a thirty-year editor, reading Moby Dick was unexpectedly agonizing. I know it’s supposed to be great literature, but I have never read an author who tortures the English language or bores his readers quite like Melville. Yes, I now know more about sperm whales than anyone other than a whaler or a cetologist has any right to know, but for heaven’s sake, the white whale doesn’t even show up in the story until page 552. And the climax of this story is largely underwhelming. Sorry for disparaging what some people regard as the greatest book they have ever read, but for me it was pure misery. It took me years to finish it, and at the end, I can’t say I’m glad I read it.

I can’t say the same thing, however, for the book I started once I’d finished Catcher in the Rye. When I want to read an excellent writer, I pick up a Scott Turow novel. I’m slowly working my way through his legal sagas of the fictitious Kindle County and its fascinating inhabitants. Turow’s descriptions are superb, but it is how he delves into the souls and personalities of his characters that sets him apart from the aforementioned Grishams and Baldaccis of the literary world. His plots are intricate and his characters complex, and these two primary elements of literature weave together to create satisfying stories that reflect so much of real life that they very well could be. Because his characters are wonderfully flawed, his stories often include, shall we say, the darker aspects of mortality that Mormon fiction too often avoids. In other words, his stories are definitely R-rated. But then, so is life.

I have a list of books I intend to get to eventually, but for now I think I’d better keep my reading to a more manageable six simultaneous volumes. Maybe next spring when I retire, I’ll have more time to expand my smorgasbord of books. Or maybe I’ll even try writing another novel. We’ll see.


Thursday, August 10, 2023

American Exceptionalism—Excessive Death

 

The New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells published a newsletter1 this week about excessive death in America. He cites, among various sources, a paper titled “Missing Americans: Early Death in the United States19332021” by a team of mortality researchers. The data presented is both thorough and sobering. It shows that America is indeed exceptional, but in a manner no country would boast about.

The researchers compare mortality rates in America with the rates of our economic peers. After World War II, American death rates were lower than the other countries because many of them were still recovering from the war. In the 1960s and ’70s, there was relative parity, but beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. mortality rate began climbing relative to other developed nations. By 2000, about 400,000 more Americans were dying each year, and by 2010, it was nearly 500,000. In 2019, 622,000 more Americans died than would have if our death rate were similar to that of our peer nations. The pandemic, of course, widened the gap between the U.S. and the other countries. In 2020 and 2021, we had over a million unnecessary deaths each year. The researchers call these people “missing Americans,” individuals who wouldn’t have died if America could match the health outcomes of other advanced nations.

Wallace-Wells explores the reasons for this huge disparity. He mentions the “deaths of despair” among middle-aged white men, gun violence, drug overdoses, maternal mortality, and juvenile deaths, all problems that other nations don’t experience to nearly the degree that we do. For example, in 2020, the European Union, with a population of 440 million, experienced 5,800 total overdose deaths, while the U.S., with only three-quarters the population, reported 68,000 deaths, and that figure rose to 80,000 in 2021 and 107,000 in 2022.

Gun deaths, of course, are even more horrendous. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the U.S. has 22 times as many gun homicides as the European Union. In 2021, the Economist, where my son is a researcher, reported 26,000 murders in the United States, compared with just 300 in Italy.

And we’re not just exceptionally violent. We’re exceptionally reckless. In 2021, the rate of car crashes in the U.S. were four times as high as in Germany. We had 5,000 workplace accidents, compared with just 123 in England. We were twice as likely to die in fires as Western Europeans and twice as likely to drown as the Dutch. Our cancer survival rates are the best in the world but we are twice as likely to have diabetes as the French and twice as likely to be obese as people in other OECD countries. Our maternal mortality rate is more than three times as high other wealthy nations.

Statistics show that our life expectancy trails almost all other advanced countries, and sometimes we think this is all about older citizens. But part of our life expectancy woes is due to deaths of young and middle-aged citizens. In 2019, for instance, the U.S. had almost twice as many deaths of kids under 15 than in similar countries. And we had 170,000 deaths among those between ages 15 and 44; if our rates were similar to other countries, we would have 100,000 fewer deaths.

Then there is Covid. Americans have died at a much higher rate than citizens of other countries. This is due to the strong anti-masking, anti-vaxxing sentiment that came from the politicizing of a public health crisis, something that didn’t happen in most other countries. Wallace-Wells points out that even though Covid is not entirely behind us (I caught it again two weeks ago), we are slowly returning to normal, but as he puts it, “It is worth remembering just what a return to normal means in this country: more than half a million extra deaths every single year and getting worse.”

One question we need to ask is why U.S. death rates started rising relative to other countries in the 1980s. A good possibility is the Reagan tax cuts and the implementation of supply-side economics, which planted the U.S. on a path of rapidly increasing inequality. As the lower levels of society (in terms of wealth) got left further and further behind, millions of Americans were without health insurance and therefore received inadequate care compared to all other advanced countries (and most Third World countries), where universal health care was the rule. Health costs in America also skyrocketed. In 1980, for instance, the average American spent $1,099 on health care. By 1995, that figure was $3,810. And costs have continued to rise far faster than inflation. In 2020, the average health-care cost per person in the U.S. was $12,530. Many people avoid going to the doctor or delay treatment for serious ailments because they either have no insurance or inadequate insurance. This certainly factors heavily in the excess deaths we experience in America.

The point of all this data is to show that America has some significant problems, many of them systemic, but many also due to our inability to learn from either our own mistakes or from other countries, who are outperforming us in so many ways. There are easy solutions to gun violence, for instance, and our health-care system is a total mess. We could improve our health outcomes drastically and cut our health-care spending perhaps in half just by adopting any of twenty health-care systems that have been proven effective in other countries.

Part of our problem is the fear of “socialism” that Republicans have drummed into their voters’ heads over the years. But socialism is not communism, and it offers better outcomes in so many ways than our blind devotion to our flawed version of capitalism. Government is not the enemy. It is our tool to serve our needs. The Republican hatred of government results not only in incompetent and ineffective government when the GOP is in control but also in shackled government when the GOP is the obstructionist opposition party. And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Republicans are now making global warming a culture-war issue rather than a scientific issue to be dealt with in reasonable ways. How many people will die from climate-related disasters in coming years?

In so many ways, as I’ve explained on this blog before, the GOP is the pro-death party. It is only the GOP that is preventing us from adopting sensible policies that would prevent the huge difference between U.S. deaths and those in our peer nations. Oh, and did I mention that death rates are higher in red states than in blue states? This is a result not just of policies but of individual beliefs and attitudes. Republicans have boasted often about American exceptionalism, but as the data presented by Wallace-Wells indicate, our exceptionalism is nothing to write home about.

_____________

1. See David Wallace-Wells, “Why Is America Such a Deadly Place?” August 9, 2023, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/opinion/mortality-rate-pandemic.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20230810&instance_id=99719&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=93058658&segment_id=141618&te=1&user_id=b82adcd02b2fec762995462844df3be5.

Saturday, July 22, 2023

Authoritarianism, American Style

 

As I’ve pointed out before on this blog, almost every business is an authoritarian organization. From small sole proprietorships to the largest multinational corporations, businesses are almost exclusively authoritarian in nature, and come in a variety of forms. We have businesses that we might describe as monarchies, or oligarchies, or plutocracies, or dictatorships, or totalitarian regimes, or banana republics, or blundering bureaucracies, or theocracies. Unfortunately, we also have fake republics and pseudodemocracies. But very, very few businesses in the United States could be considered economic democratic republics. In essence, at our founding, we enthroned freedom and democracy in our political sphere, but we allowed authoritarian institutions to thrive in our economic sphere. The inevitable result is that the authoritarianism in our economy has now quite effectively undermined the freedom and democracy of our political system. Monied interests have polluted our politics to a high degree.

And now the MAGA core of the Republican Party, which has long been the party of corporate power, has fully and openly embraced authoritarian rule. As historian Heather Cox Richardson put it in the July 17, 2023, edition of her “Letters from an American” email:

“A story in the New York Times today by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman outlined how former president Donald Trump and his allies are planning to create a dictatorship if voters return him to power in 2024. The article talks about how Trump and his loyalists plan to ‘centralize more power in the Oval Office’ by ‘increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.’ 

“They plan to take control over independent government agencies and get rid of the nonpartisan civil service, purging all but Trump loyalists from the U.S. intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the Defense Department. They plan to start ‘impounding funds,’ that is, ignoring programs Congress has funded if those programs aren’t in line with Trump’s policies.

“‘What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,’ said Russell T. Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and who now advises the right-wing House Freedom Caucus. They envision a ‘president’ who cannot be checked by the Congress or the courts.

“Trump’s desire to grab the mechanics of our government and become a dictator is not new; both scholars and journalists have called it out since the early years of his administration. What is new here is the willingness of so-called establishment Republicans to support this authoritarian power grab.”

Now, none of this should surprise us. The party that has long favored putting a “businessman” in the White House finally settled upon the most authoritarian of businessmenDonald Trump, who has been singularly focused on tearing down the institutions of democracy. Why? Because democracy is what prevents him from exercising his authoritarian inclinations. As Cox puts it, “All the institutions of democracy are designed to support the tenets of democracy.” Trump and his followers undermine these institutions by claiming that they are specifically weaponized against them. And yes, in a sense they are, because these institutions are designed to rein in unaccountable power and quash corruption. But now the Republican Party, especially certain members and leaders in the House of Representatives, are falling in line behind Trump’s outrageous claims. To hear Kevin McCarthy and his right-wing extremist colleague tell it, the investigations by the FBI and the Department of Justice into Donald Trump’s crimes is the political “weaponization” of those institutions. But it was Trump as president who weaponized the Department of Justice against his opponents. Trump’s modus operandi has always been to accuse those who oppose him of the very crimes and misdeeds he is guilty of. He turns morality on its head. And so the “law and order party” is now determined to prevent the democratic institutions tasked with preserving law and order from doing their job. Such is the predicament we find ourselves in.

For many years, the Republican Party, rather than pursuing serious policies to help ordinary Americans, has framed itself as the anti-Democratic party. It has been far more effective as the obstructionist opposition and has been almost perfectly impotent when in power and tasked with the duties of governing. But since Trump took control, the GOP has become the anti-democratic party, fighting democracy wherever it dares show itself.

Republicans like to wrap themselves in the rhetoric of liberty, but it is a very strange form of liberty. It is liberty from government instead of liberty through government, which is what the Founders envisioneda government, as Lincoln later put it, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The current GOP hopes ironically to sever the people from the very government that can guarantee their freedoms, a government that exists to serve them, not the wealthy or the corporations that cannot bear to have government restrict their abuses.

And government is the only real tool the people have to counter the massive power accumulated by corporations and power-hungry individuals. To see how far the Republican Party has strayed from its roots, consider this statement by Teddy Roosevelt: “The people of the United States have but one instrument which they can efficiently use against the colossal combinations of businessand that instrument is the government of the United States. . . . Remember that it is absolutely impossible to limit the power of these great corporations whose enormous power constitutes so serious a problem in modern industrial life except by extending the power of the government. All that these great corporations ask is that the power of the government shall be limited. . . . There once was a time in history when the limitation of governmental power meant increasing liberty for the people. In the present day the limitation of governmental power, of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power” (address at the Coliseum, San Francisco, September 14, 1912).

It has been nearly 111 years since Roosevelt made that statement, but it is far more true today than it ever was in his day. Republicans decry “big government,” but what they really want is not small government but big government patterned after their authoritarian designs. They want government to interfere in people’s lives in specific ways but not in the schemes of corporations that dirty our air and water, produce dangerous products, underpay employees, and create unsafe work environments. They want a government that is large and powerful enough to go after Trump’s declared enemies while protecting him from the consequences of his own crimes.

If Trump wins the election and his sycophants are able to do what they are promising to do, we will be several steps closer to fascism on a scale our parents and grandparents would have found disgusting. Populism is often the road to authoritarianism, and that path is plain to see in conservative America today. At least for those who have eyes to see. Unfortunately, many Americans, including many Mormons, have been blinded by disinformation and have embraced the lies of a man who has no morals, no conscience, and no compassion for anyone but himself. Many of them yearn for an authoritarian leader who will tell them what they want to hear while enriching himself at the public’s expense and brazenly breaking the institutions that preserve freedom and democracy in America.

Monday, June 26, 2023

What the First Presidency Said without Saying It

 

A letter from the First Presidency dated June 1, 2023, was sent out to Church leaders in the United States. This letter was to be read in sacrament meetings across the country. Among other things, this letter admonished Church members “to spend the time to become informed about the issues and candidates[;] . . . study candidates carefully and vote for those who have demonstrated integrity, compassion, and service to others, regardless of party affiliation”; and understand that “merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on ‘tradition’ without careful study of candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy and inconsistent with revealed standards (see Doctrine and Covenants 98:10).”

D&C 98:10 says, “Wherefore, honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently, and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold; otherwise whatsoever is less than these cometh of evil.”

Now, because Church leaders want to preserve the organization’s tax-exempt status, they are unable to advise members to vote for a particular candidate or party or, more relevant to today’s circumstances, to not vote for a particular candidate or party. Nevertheless, for those who have ears to hear, this letter is about as blunt as anything you’ll ever see from the First Presidency about how to vote in coming elections.

So, let me translate the message of this letter for those who may not have been paying attention during the past six years. If you are to vote for a candidate for president of the United States who has demonstrated integrity, compassion, and service to others; if you are to vote for honest men and wise men; if you are to vote for someone who is not a threat to democracy, then YOU CANNOT VOTE FOR DONALD TRUMP. They couldn’t come right out and say this, of course. But in their pointed admonition, they defined Donald Trump completely out of the voting picture. Of course, died-in-the-wool Republicans will argue that all politicians are dishonest and corrupt. Well, to one degree or another, we all are. But Donald Trump and his followers, including Utah’s senior senator, Mike Lee, are in a league of their own. There is no real comparison. Voices from the left and the right have decried Trump’s absolute lack of any shred of morality and have warned about the danger he poses to our Constitution and our democratic republic.

The warning about voting straight ticket or according to “tradition” was aimed at the majority of Latter-day Saints, who are Republicans, many of whom are woefully uninformed about politics and government and vote “R” because Republicans are the anti-abortion party and they assume that no other issues are important. Or maybe just because they’ve always voted “R” and they assume GOP stands for God’s Only Party. The First Presidency just popped that balloon.

Well, LDS voters now have no excuse for being ignorant and uninformed. I fear, however, that there are still too many Mormons who are like the sister of a friend of ours. She is a died-in-the-wool Republican, but when asked what she thought about the January 6 insurrection, she said she had never heard of it. These kinds of voters are indeed “a threat to democracy.” They keep people in power who support a man who yearns for authoritarian rule, who has never seen a law or rule he felt applied to him, who cannot tell the truth about anything.

This letter is serious. I’ve never seen anything like this from the First Presidency. I know they are concerned. I suspect they wish they could come right out and tell the members to stop supporting Donald Trump and his enablers. But their hands are tied by other commitments. If the 2024 election were a normal election between, say Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the First Presidency would not (and did not) see any reason to issue a statement like the June 1 declaration. If it were an election between congressional candidates from traditional conservative and liberal parties, the First Presidency would remain silent. But because it is an election between a traditional Democratic party and a Republican party that has been almost completely corrupted by an evil, incompetent, and power-hungry man, this is not a normal election. Consequently, what we get instead of silence is a letter that tries to tell members that they need to change how they vote and whom they vote for without giving any specifics. But their intent is clear to anyone who has ears to hear.

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

The Republican Party's Real Game

 

If you are a conservative and are not wealthy and are supporting the Republican Party, you have been played. That is the primary lesson you should take from the ongoing debt ceiling “crisis.”

Oh, where to start? Let me begin by including a link to a guest editorial I had published last week in the Salt Lake Tribune. I began that editorial by mentioning my “correspondence” with my representative in Congress, John Curtis. I have been sending him messages on his website, encouraging him to support raising the debt ceiling without taking the U.S. economy hostage. He responds by emailing me form letters explaining why he supports demanding large spending cuts, or else. In one form letter, he used a common Republican analogy to justify this nonsense, comparing the federal budget to a family budget. You can read my response to this bit of absurdity in the editorial.

What I want to do with this post is examine the real priorities of the Republican Party and the dangerous game of deception they are playing. If you have been paying attention to the culture war the GOP has been waging, you might think that the gravest dangers to our nation are schools that teach the truth about racism, transgender girls playing sports, books that might make Puritans squeamish, and, well, Mickey Mouse.

The right-wing echo chamber is also making people deathly afraid of something they call the “woke mind virus,” whatever that is. We’re not really sure, because it can include everything from being concerned about an overheating planet and our unique American level of gun violence to being in favor of expanding, yes, wind power (see the state of Texas).

But these are merely deflections. They want to get their supporters all riled up about these culture war issues so that they won’t pay attention to how harmful real Republican priorities are to rank-and-file Republicans.

Fortunately, for the observant, the ongoing debt-ceiling debacle has torn away the shroud and revealed exactly what Republican priorities really are, and they haven’t changed in over 40 years. What did the Republicans demand, initially, in the legislation they passed to force negotiations over raising the debt ceiling? (And of course we don’t even need to mention that the debt was not an issue at all during the Trump presidency, when the GOP was more than happy to pass a senseless and unfunded tax cut that Trump’s own treasury department estimated would add $2.3 trillion to the debt over 10 years.) But let’s look at what the GOP legislation would have done.

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank summed it up, using Virginia representative Jen Kiggans (who voted for the legislation) as an example: “In Kiggans’s Virginia, the legislation she just backed would strip tax incentives that go to the likes of Dominion Energy, which is building a $9.8 billion offshore wind project in her district. She also voted to ax solar and electric-vehicle incentives for hundreds of thousands of Virginians, and tax breaks projected to bring $11.6 billion in clean-power investment to the commonwealth.

“In addition, the bill she supported sets spending targets that require an immediate 22 percent cut to all ‘non-defense discretionary spending’—that’s border security, the FBI, airport security, air traffic control, highways, agriculture programs, veterans’ health programs, food stamps, Medicaid, medical research, national parks and much more. If they want to cut less than 22 percent in some of those areas, they’ll have to cut more than 22 percent in others.

“According to an administration analysis of what the 22 percent cuts translate to, Kiggans is now on record supporting:

“Shutting down at least two air traffic control towers in Virginia.

“Jeopardizing outpatient medical care for 162,300 Virginia veterans.

“Throwing up to 175,000 Virginians off food stamps and ending food assistance for another 25,000 through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.

“Cutting or ending Pell Grants for 162,900 Virginia college students.

“Eliminating Head Start for 3,600 Virginia children and child care for another 1,300 children.

“Adding at least two months to wait times for Virginia seniors seeking assistance with Social Security and Medicare.

“Denying opioid treatment for more than 600 Virginians.

‘Ending 180 days of rail inspections per year and 1,350 fewer miles of track inspected.

“Kicking 13,400 Virginia families off rental assistance.”

Spending cuts look a little different when you get specific like Milbank did. These spending cuts would, of course, ripple through the economy, likely causing a severe recession.

Now, as I mention in my editorial, I’m fully in favor of getting our budget under control. But what does that mean? In my editorial, I cite an article posted on March 27, 2023, by the nonpartisan Center for American Progress. It is written by Bobby Kogan and is titled “Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio.”

The main gist of this article is that prior to the Bush tax cuts, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did projections of both federal revenues and expenses and projected that the debt ratio would decline indefinitely. “In other words, right up until before the Bush tax cuts were made permanent, the CBO was projecting that, even with an aging population and ever-growing health care costs, revenues were nonetheless expected to keep up with program costs.” Interestingly, since the Bush tax cuts, expenses have actually been lower than the CBO’s projections, but revenues have been far lower, so actually, the rising debt ratio is more than 100 percent due to the Bush and Trump tax cuts, not due to out-of-control spending.

The CAP article also has a chart showing the OECD countries’ taxes as a percentage of GDP, with the U.S. far below the OECD average. (I had an op-ed in the Trib a couple of years ago about this.) In short, the problem with the national debt is not spending; it is revenue. And since the Republicans absolutely refuse to increase taxes, even on the ultra-rich, it is easy to see what their real values and priorities are. The culture-war issues are just a smoke screen. What Republicans still want more than anything is to funnel as much money to the wealthy as possible. And the increasing inequality is utterly staggering.

Heather Cox Richardson, whose daily email you really ought to subscribe to (it’s free), included the following on May 23, 2023: “When Ronald Reagan called for tax cuts in 1980, he argued that tax cuts would concentrate money in private hands, enabling investors flush with cash to build the economy. That growth would keep tax revenues stable even with the lower rates. That was the argument, but it never came to pass. In fact, a 2022 study by political economists David Hope and Julian Limberg shows that ‘tax cuts for the rich . . . do not have any significant effect on economic growth or unemployment,’ but they do ‘lead to higher income inequality in both the short- and medium-term.’

“Indeed, Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price of the Economic Policy Institute, an independent, nonprofit think tank, noted in 2018 that 1% of all families in the U.S. take home 21 percent of all the income in the U.S., making 26.3 times more than the bottom 99%, whose average income is slightly more than $50,000 a year. On average in the U.S., someone would need an annual income of slightly more than $420,000 to be a member of that top 1%. In 2020, annual wages for the top 1% grew by 7.3% while those in the bottom 90% grew just 1.7%.

“A 2020 study by Carter C Price and Kathryn A. Edwards of the RAND Corporation showed that the changing economic distribution systems of the past forty years [since the Reagan tax cuts] have moved a staggering $50 trillion upward, out of the hands of the bottom 90% of Americans. (The national debt is currently about $31.5 trillion.)”

But Republicans are still determined to cut taxes on the wealthy, further accelerating the inequality and increasing the debt. As the CAP article points out, “Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) has also introduced legislation to make permanent President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, at a cost of roughly $2.6 trillion over the next decade.” So don’t be fooled when the Republicans feign concern for the national debt. What they really want is to further increase the wealth flowing to the top and to cut spending that benefits those at the bottom. Sadly, this includes a majority of the voters who keep them in power. If you are among that majority, all I can say is wise up. You’ve been played.

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

A Pitchers’ Duel That Will Never Be Equaled

 

Just for a change of pace from politics and religion, I want to reminisce in today’s post about what was probably the sports highlight of my life. It happened almost 53 years ago, in August 1970. I was a gangly 14-year-old, playing Little League baseball during the summer between 8th and 9th grade. This was in the days when baseball was the summer sport of choice (there was no such thing as youth soccer or lacrosse), and it was pretty competitive. My mom’s dad, Karl Storey, was the coach of my team, the North Ogden Dodgers, and had been for a few years. When your grandpa is your coach, you can play short stop, and you can bat third. Our pitcher for the previous years had been Brent Gray. But Brent got his growth spurt late, and by 1970 the hitters had outgrown him. I was just the opposite. I reached my peak height during 9th grade. So that summer I tried my hand at pitching, and it apparently went okay. I had an adequate fastball and a wicked curve.

I don’t remember much about the regular season, but we had a good team, so we ended up in the county playoffs at the end of the summer. Our first game was against the South Ogden Yankees. And what a game it was. I remember only vaguely how the game unfolded, but last week I rummaged around my basement and found the old scorebooks that I had inherited when Grandpa Storey died way back in 1991. I had looked at them a time or two over the years, but last week I wanted to reconstruct, as well as I could, the inning-by-inning battle.

I’ll spare you the boring details, but here’s a quick summary. The South Ogden pitcher, Mark Taylor, and I pitched our teams to a 0-0 tie after 14 innings, when the police came at 1 a.m. and told us to go home because the neighbors were complaining about the noise. This was a Monday evening that stretched into early Tuesday morning. We finished the game on another field on Tuesday afternoon. I still have the newspaper clipping from the Ogden Standard-Examiner, which my dad affectionately referred to as the Ogden Substandard-Exaggerator. He may have been onto something, because that newspaper clipping claims that I hit a home run in the 15th inning to win the game 1-0. But what actually happened is that my good friend Bruce Stone walked, stole second and third, and then came home on a wild pitch. We then held the Yankees scoreless in the bottom of the 15th. The newspaper also reported that I gave up only 1 hit and struck out 27, while Taylor gave up two hits and struck out 19. 

The scorebook is an imperfect record. I don’t know which player’s mom kept score, but she often wrote faintly, and she was less than thorough or accurate in her scorekeeping. She didn’t record balls and strikes, and sometimes she would circle 1B (the notation for a single) when the runner reached first base either by virtue of a walk or perhaps an error. I know this because sometimes 1B would be circled, but a large W would be written in the box (instead of circling BB for base on balls) to signify a walk. But as far as I with my magnifying glass could decipher her scorekeeping, this is what I concluded. I did indeed strike out 27 batters. The large K in the box is evident that many times. A handful of outs are a mystery, though. No evidence for how they happened. Taylor, on the other hand, was short-changed. It appears he fanned us 21 times, not 19. But I also walked 10 batters. Taylor had better control. He gave up 3 or 4 walks, including Bruce Stone in the top of the 15th inning. I definitely gave up 1 hit, but it could have been 2. The scorekeeper faintly crossed out 1B for another batter, but, as mentioned, that could have signified a walk or an error. Taylor, by the same accounting, might have given up as many as 5 hits, but maybe only 2.

My reason for wanting to reconstruct the game, though, was primarily to estimate how many pitches I threw. Since the scorekeeper did not track balls and strikes, I took a conservative approach and assumed I threw an average of 4 pitches for every strikeout (three strikes, one ball, and no foul balls after two strikes) and 5 pitches for each walk (four balls and a strike). The count was likely substantially higher than that. When the ball was put in play, resulting in either a hit, an error, or an out, I assumed I threw only 2 pitches to those batters. This very conservative counting of pitches yields a still mind-boggling total of 197 in those 15 innings.

The reason my title claims that this pitchers’ duel will never be equaled is that sometime between 1970 and now, Little League imposed pitch limits on young pitchers, for obvious reasons (and I’m Exhibit A in proving them right, but I’ll get to that shortly). Today, pitchers 13-16 years old are limited to 95 pitches per day. But if a pitcher throws over 66 pitches in a game, he must then have 4 days of rest. So I threw at least double the number of pitches a pitcher today would be allowed. And I did not have 4 days of rest. On Thursday of that week, I pitched another game, in the semifinals, against Washington Terrace. Regulation games were 5 innings, but the two teams were tied 4-4 at the end of the 5th inning. We finally prevailed in 7 innings, 7-4. I wasn’t nearly as sharp in that game, but neither was the other pitcher. Using my conservative assumptions, I calculated that I threw at least 84 pitches in that game (but probably many more).

And that’s not all. Two days later, on Saturday, we played a team from Roy for the county championship. It was close, but if memory serves, sometime in the third inning, I threw a pitch, and I was done. Based on later experience, I believe I partially tore my rotator cuff. Back then, we just said I “threw my arm out.” Whatever the diagnosis, I couldn’t lift my arm. Something tore. It eventually healed, and I went on to play a little high school baseball, even pitching some as a sophomore. The shoulder is okay now, but off and on it has given me some trouble. In that third game, I’m guessing I tossed about 30 more pitches before the arm gave out. As I recall, Grandpa stuck me out on second base, where I could underhand any throws to first base, and Brent Gray came in to pitch. We ended up losing 2-1. And it wasn’t Brent’s fault. I believe we were behind when I threw my arm out. But in a span of six days, I threw, at a minimum, somewhere in the neighborhood of 310 pitches (and that doesn’t count all the warmup tosses before each inning. In today’s world, that many pitches would be crazy. Back then, there were no limits, and I don’t blame Grandpa for letting me pitch that many innings. I felt fineuntil I didn’t. So, was it worth it? From my vantage point, almost 53 years later, I’d have to say, “Of course it was.”

That 15-inning game with perhaps 3 total hits, 1 fluke run, and 48 strikeouts was a pitchers’ duel to beat all pitchers’ duels, and nobody will ever equal it. It’s against the rules.

Friday, April 14, 2023

I'm a Mormon

 

I suppose I understand why President Nelson has placed such an emphasis on using the full name of the Church rather than the Mormon Church or even the LDS Church. But this creates some very awkward usage dilemmas. In many instances, there is just no convenient short term for either the Church or its members.

For me, in particular, I am uncomfortable calling myself a Saint, or even a Latter-day Saint. I know what the word saint means, and I don’t consider myself one. It’s something maybe to aspire to, but I am very uncomfortable calling myself a saint, capital or no capital.

Heck, I’m not even sure about the Latter-day part of it. The early Church members were convinced that the End was very near, even at the doors. They kept expecting the Second Coming at any minute. This apocalyptic mindset persisted into the early years of the twentieth century. My mom’s aunt, similar to many Church members, was promised in her patriarchal blessing in 1919 that “you shall obtain the special favor of the Lord and a double portion of his Holy Spirit shall be given you, and you shall have the privilege of witnessing building the New Jerusalem for the Saints of God.” Well, she died in 1987. It appears we’re now in the latter, latter, latter days, and it’s very uncertain how much longer they will last.

Even in my youth in the 1960s and ’70s we were taught that we were a special generation that came forth in the eleventh hour to prepare for the Second Coming. We were Saturday’s Warriors, by golly! Back then I was certain that the Lord would come by the year 2000. But here we are in 2023, and I fully expect to live another couple of decades and die before the great and dreadful day finally arrives.

But getting back to my dilemmaI really am uncomfortable referring to myself as a saint, or even a Saint. So what am I? Well, I’m a Mormon. And for over 60 years, that was just fine. The Church even had a big marketing campaign using the same terminology. But since President Nelson’s edict, the term Mormon has become a hiss and a byword. But why should we not use it when referring to ourselves? If we are to use the full name of the Church because not doing so would offend Jesus, and we are supposed to emphasize that it is his Church, then what do we call ourselves? Christians? No. That name is already taken. What about Latter-day Saints? That is part of the official name of the Church, but it doesn’t really draw attention to Jesus. So why not still call ourselves Mormons? It’s simple and straightforward, and most people know who the Mormons are, even if they don’t approve of us (see the recent Pew poll).

Well, it will be interesting to see if this name emphasis outlasts President Nelson. Time will tell. But in the meantime, I am going to go on calling myself a Mormon. It fits. I may not be a very good one, but it’s a name I’m proud to wear. So, like it or not, I’m a Mormon.

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Takagi on Latter-day Saints and Capitalism

 

The most recent issue of the Mormon Studies Review (vol. 10) contains a couple of articles on Mormons and capitalism, and I’d like to draw attention to one in particular. Shinji Takagi, a professor emeritus of economics at Osaka University, wrote an article that we published last year in BYU Studies Quarterly. It was a fascinating look at the Nephite monetary system. His MSR article is titled “Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist,” and it is one of the most brilliant articles I’ve read in a long time. Since access to MSR is restricted to subscribers or people like me who work for an organization that has privileges, I’m going to describe his argument in some detail here, hoping that this will encourage some of you to access his article.

Takagi explains that capitalism can take a variety of forms, but the variety that has dominated the United States in recent decades is “neoliberal capitalism, which calls for wholesale deregulation and privatization to minimize the government’s role.” The problem with neoliberal capitalism is that has caused income inequality to rise significantly, and it also “has exhibited a proclivity for economic crises and, given its focus on competitive individualism, an increasing incidence of mental health disorders.”

Takagi then contrasts this system with the egalitarian principles taught by Joseph Smith, which he quotes from the Doctrine and Covenants. “Despite scriptural pronouncements and a rich heritage of economic cooperation,” Takagi points out, “there is little trace of egalitarian philosophy in the practice of contemporary Mormonism.” The other article in MSR I referred to traces the history of how LDS thought on capitalism changed over time. Allison M. Kelley, in “Free Agency, Hard Work, and the Justification of Economic Inequality in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” also explains how Mormons justify their devotion to free-market capitalism. But back to Takagi. He argues that “capitalism’s indoctrination campaign has been so successful that many (including myself) find it difficult to liberate themselves from its spell, accepting as truth many unproven propositions, including the proposition that it is the only system capable of generating material progress.” He then tackles two primary types of capitalist arguments—philosophy (noneconomic) and efficiency (economic)—and shows that they cannot withstand scrutiny.

On the philosophical underpinnings of neoliberal capitalism, he raises four concerns. First, too many capitalists accept “the polarity of capitalism and socialism.” I’ve discussed in previous posts there are many types of capitalism, and there are also many manifestations of socialism, especially if you recognize that communism and socialism are not, in practice, the same system. Takagi’s second concern is that “many often confuse capitalism with a market economy.” He points out that markets have existed for millennia, but capitalism is a much more recent development, so we ought not equate these two ideas. His third concern is that “many conflate capitalism with modernity and progress.” This happens because early “capitalism in England proved more successful in producing material gains, which forced other countries to adopt capitalistic systems in order to compete.” But this doesn’t mean other systems couldn’t produce even better results. His fourth concern is that “economic liberalism . . . has gained a large following since the early nineteenth century.” Libertarian thinking has been very influential, but it has distinct downsides. Takagi says he has heard Latter-day Saints claim that capitalism is “the only economic system compatible with the divine plan. Individual liberty is important, but why would agency necessarily deny a role for the government?” It can be argued, based on the experience of more socialist countries (such as western Europe and Scandinavia), that freedom is enhanced by such things as “universal education, access to health care, and social protection.”

Takagi next examines the economic arguments for neoliberal capitalism. “A problem arises,” he says, “when one fails to understand that economics is an abstraction of reality.” Economic propositions are derived from assumptions, but these assumptions, such as perfect information and no transaction costs, “almost certainly do not hold in the real world.” Takagi argues that while economics assumes that humans will always act rationally, in reality people do not. For instance, many of us are prone to being altruistic. He also argues against the possibility of perfect information, which market functioning depends on. He uses the examples of health care and finance to demonstrate the need for government regulation of markets. The problem with libertarianism, as I’ve read elsewhere, is that it has never worked in real-world situations. As Takagi explains, “no market for health care would function without a credible mechanism for ensuring a minimum standard of qualification. Likewise, the capital market (where securities are traded) would remain underdeveloped without a credible mechanism to ascertain the creditworthiness of borrowers.”

So, the economic arguments for neoliberal capitalism also fail because the whole system is based on assumptions, theories, that do not hold in practice. “Concepts in economics are often metaphors and should not be taken literally, especially for public policy purposes.” Economics is useful to describe how people often behave, but “it is not meant to prescribe how people should behave.”

The upshot of Takagi’s critique is that Latter-day Saints need to reconsider their devotion to capitalism, something that early Church leaders (and scripture) specifically condemned. This is especially true for supporters of neoliberal capitalism (primarily Republicans), who are supporting a form of capitalism that not only attempts to exclude government oversight of capitalist markets but also directly contradicts numerous passages in the Doctrine and Covenants by spreading the awful social disease of wealth inequality. As Takagi concludes, “Free-market capitalism with private charity does not do the job. Collective action is required to create a more just society in which there is no poverty and everyone thus has freedom and an opportunity to pursue happiness.”

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

I Don’t Believe in Faith Crises

 

Frankly, I don’t even know what “faith crisis” means. I understand that people stop believing certain things. I understand that they get disillusioned. I understand that they choose to leave the Church for a variety of reasons. But I don’t understand faith crisis. I keep wondering where the emergency is.

Let me start by saying that I am a very impatient person. If you’ve ever driven slowly in front of me, you’d know what I mean. I’m an insufferable perfectionist as a sports fan. I interrupt people when they’re talking. I don’t like walking slow. At almost 67 years young, I still run up stairs. I’m an editor, so inconsistencies grind on my nerves. And on and on. But for some reason, I have an enviable level of patience with the foibles and flaws of Mormonism. Yes, I find lots of things that I’m not happy about or that don’t make sense or that disappoint me (such as the Church’s recent fiasco over hiding its finances). But I am in no hurry to pack my bags and leave the Church. Let me try to explain why.

First, not much surprises me. I’ve been around the block a few times and have seen a lot of reality. And that reality includes both divine intervention and human imperfection. There’s not much about the Church’s history that is new to me. As editorial director at BYU Studies for almost 17 years, I have seen a lot. We don’t get to publish much of it, but I read a great deal—books, scholarly journals, blogs, news stories, whatever. I have no illusions about how humans can mess up God’s work, and how he can still bring about his own purposes, which sometimes are not at all what we think they are. But finding out something unsavory that happened over a hundred years ago does not provoke a crisis. Hopefully we can learn from our imperfect history and try to do better.

I worked in the bowels of the holy bureaucracy in Salt Lake City for seven and a half years and have now worked for almost 17 additional years on the periphery in Provo. I do Mormonism all day long, five days a week. Sometimes it’s aggravating. Long ago I wrote an essay for Dialogue titled “Why the True Church Cannot Be Perfect.” The primary point of the essay was that the Church isn’t perfect. The rest was to explain why it has to be so. That doesn’t mean the Church gets a free pass. It often damages people. But it’s what we have. It’s not just Jesus’s church. It’s also ours (you know, that “of Latter-day Saints” part), so I figure it’s up to us to try to make it work better. There’s no crisis about it. It’s imperfect. So what? Get over it and do what you can on the inside to improve it.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I find LDS theology quite lacking. There are gaping holes, inconsistencies, really bad assumptions, and folk beliefs that make no sense at all. But as I put it in my mission memoir, Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary,We Mormons like to think we have THE TRUTH, as if it were some rare diamond that only one church can possess, and if you have it, you have all of it. But truth is much more amorphous than we Mormons imagine. It is multifaceted, and nobody has all of it. The LDS Church grasps pieces of the truth, but some doctrines have shifted over time, some aren’t consistent with others, and some don’t hold up well under careful scrutiny. Still, all things considered, I think Joseph Smith tapped into a very productive vein of religious truth.” But he obviously didn’t have everything figured out, and we have made precious little progress (if any) over the past 193 years. We Latter-day Saints are a proud lot. We smugly assume that other churches know nothing about the hereafter, but if we are honest, we will admit that we know next to nothing. But does that constitute a crisis? No. We just need to acquire some humility and prepare ourselves for many surprises when we graduate from this mortal grade school and start the next phase of our long education.

Above all else, the Church is not an organizational chart. It is people. And people are imperfect. Members, leaders, everybody. The Church has done a great disservice to itself and to its members by creating the illusion that leaders are infallible, that they’re always inspired. All this does is create unrealistic expectations. And I would guess that unrealistic expectations lie behind most of what people call faith crises. They have these expectations of perfection, so of course they are going to be disappointed. The solution if to ratchet down our expectations so that we don’t get blown out of the water by reality. But we need to recognize the difference between expectations and hopes. It is always good to hope for miracles, for blessings, for pleasant surprises. But we should be careful about what we expect. There is a very fine line between faith and expectation, especially when our expectations are based on the performance of fallible humans.

As I mentioned earlier, I have seen not just the imperfections of the Church and its leaders and members; I have also seen divine intervention, sometimes in strange and wonderful ways. And quite often that intervention doesn’t fit within the staid corporate structure of the Church. In fact, quite often the organization impedes divine intervention. When I was young and impressionable, God opened the heavens briefly to me two or three times in ways that were both breathtaking and perplexing. In later years, I have had a few quiet assurances that God is there, that he wants me to do certain things, and that he doesn’t want me to forsake my religious roots. “Be patient” is the message. Things will work out.

So I don’t understand Latter-day Saints who are in a great hurry to give up on something they could help improve and that just might improve them. I don’t understand people in self-constructed crisis. So what if our history is messy? So what if our leaders are human? So what if our theology is full of holes? So what if the organization is aggravating? So what if the Church is full of people who watch Fox News and think vaccines will kill you? Yes, there’s a lot to not like about Mormonism. But there’s a lot to like too. Am I a better person because of my membership in the Church? I would like to think so. Does the Church give me opportunities to improve myself? Of course. Are there good people in the Church who need my meager service? Sure. So where’s the crisis?


Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 17

 

The Isms

If you’ve been following this series of posts, you might be thinking I could go on forever about reasons for Latter-day Saints to give up on their association with the mess we call the Republican Party. And you might be right. But I’ll spare you. This will be the last post on this theme. And to close this series I will focus on a couple of ideas that Republicans generally do not understand but insist on using anyway to fuel their fires of disinformation. I’m talking about socialism and capitalism.

I’m sure you’re well aware of the GOP’s use of “socialism” as an all-purpose bogeyman to strike fear in the hearts of those inhabiting the right-wing echo chamber. To hear Republicans talk about socialism, you’d think that it is the most evil idea ever proposed by the left. In fact, they’ve gone so far as to suggest that the Democrats want to turn the United States into Cuba or Venezuela. Sometimes they hit closer the mark and try to scare people by claiming that the Democrats want to turn us into Scandinavia or Germany. To that scare tactic, I’ve asked before in this space, “What exactly scares you about Germany?” To put this all in some sort of realistic context, let me reuse a story I have told before.

One sunny afternoon in August 1984, my wife and I wandered the streets of East Berlin. We witnessed the somber, hopeless faces of the city’s few pedestrians. We marveled at the cheap-looking Trabants that motored loudly up and down the streets and farted foul fumes out of their tailpipes. We passed soldier after soldier, each fully armed, each exuding an almost tangible assurance that the Cold War was as real as any hot one. We watched people stand in lines a block long to buy produce. We tried to spend our allotted fifty Ostmarks in the city’s most prestigious department store but couldn’t find even a souvenir we wouldn’t have thrown away. We finally bought a cheap noodle press and a metric measuring cup. We ate at a cafeteria where the food tasted as unappetizing as it looked, then stopped at an ice cream parlor on Unter den Linden that was already out of practically everything on the menu by 4 p.m. By evening we were more than eager to return to the hustle and plenty of West Berlin. We left with most of our Eastern currency and absolutely no illusions about communism.

I can still remember later that evening visiting a little Slavic restaurant in a quiet corner of Neukölln and how ecstatic I was over a tossed salad with tomatoes and green peppers. “I could never get a salad like this in East Berlin!” I exulted. That one afternoon behind the Iron Curtain had made me see the world with new eyes. I marveled at how many stores and shops there were in the West, and at how fully stocked they were. In fact, because of that one afternoon, I can perhaps dimly imagine what the East Germans must have felt that November day five years later when the Wall came tumbling down. I can understand their desires for reunification and prosperity. I can understand their blind assumption that capitalism is right—because communism is definitely wrong.

I watched with intense interest during the latter part of 1989 as Eastern Europe retreated from communism and authoritarianism. Having spent the last four months of my mission in West Berlin, that one-time island of hope in a sea of despair, I was overwhelmed by what I witnessed on television on November 9, 1989—East and West Berliners dancing atop the Wall of Shame, holes being pounded in that concrete barrier by people wielding everything from sledge hammers to ice picks, the suddenly released floods of revolution flowing through those gaping holes like water through a burst dam, the giddy intoxication of reunion as long-oppressed East Germans clasped hands once again with their prosperous West German brothers and sisters.

And yet in the ensuing weeks and months, many in the East, not entirely convinced that materialism was more noble than poverty, criticized the masses, suggesting that they were motivated not by love of freedom, but by greed. Now, this was an ugly accusation, yet it is an accusation that all believing capitalists must repeatedly explain away. “Is it wrong to have enough to eat?” they exclaim incredulously, misunderstanding the accusation. “Is it wrong to be able to purchase a few luxuries? Is prosperity bad?” they mock. “It’s certainly not as bad as poverty!”

But the question is not whether wealth and prosperity are better or worse than poverty and destitution. The real question is whether our modern form of capitalism is right simply because communism is wrong. And, oddly, in all the celebrating over the demise of communism, few in the United States seemed willing to question the fundamental moral validity of America’s version of capitalism, which can more accurately be labeled corporate capitalism. Certainly communism and corporate capitalism are opposites. But two opposites can both be wrong. Just because stealing from the sick is detestable doesn’t make stealing from the healthy commendable. Stealing of any kind is wrong.

For some reason, though, the triumph of the democratic, capitalist West in the Cold War seems to have rendered this question immaterial. Of course capitalism is right, we naively boast. Freedom and democracy triumphed, didn’t they? Capitalism conquered Eastern Europe and even killed the Soviet Union. And capitalism is the economic manifestation of freedom and democracy, isn’t it? Isn’t the free-market system synonymous with freedom?

Perhaps, but only on a very superficial level. The simplistic nature of these questions can be illustrated by looking more carefully at the enduring conservative campaign in the United States against socialism. Republicans, who are religiously devoted to free markets, deregulation, corporate welfare, and tax cuts for the wealthy, have also sounded the warning cry against socialism, particularly any tampering with the health-care industry that approaches socialized medicine. How many times have we heard that socialism is evil, just one step, or perhaps even a half-step, away from communism?

But is socialism really just a half-step away from communism? Remember the contrast I drew between the scarcity of goods in East Berlin and their abundance in West Berlin, between the oppression in the East and the freedom in the West? Yes, this was a contrast between two opposing systems. But it was not a contrast between East Germany and America; it was a contrast between communist East Germany and socialist West Germany. West Germany in the 1980s was a solidly socialist country, with socialized medicine, high marginal tax rates, a statutory guarantee of four weeks’ paid vacation every year (compared with none in America), and a substantial social safety net. Yes, West Germany was a welfare state. It also had one of the strongest capitalist economies and highest standards of living in the world. It was strong enough to absorb the crumbling mess that was East Germany and still remain the strongest economy in Europe. And the fact that West Germany (now just Germany) has endured stably for almost eighty years since World War II as a socialist nation reveals the lie in conflating socialism and communism, as Republicans often do. Socialism is not a subtle opening for communism to step in and take over. It is a system that has proven both durable and successful—and compatible with democracy.

I’ve lived in Germany. I have friends there. They do not consider themselves deprived of freedom or democracy. They are prosperous. Their country has less income inequality than ours, and very little poverty. They would never trade their socialized medicine for the American health-care system (if we can call such chaos a system), for their system ranks higher in quality than ours while costing only half as much as a percentage of GDP. And now you can even get tomatoes and green peppers on your salad in East Berlin. Socialist East Berlin.

So, to return to the question I asked earlier, did freedom and democracy really win the Cold War? Or were they merely secondary issues in the real conflict? And anyway, does winning prove anything about rightness or wrongness?

Socialism and capitalism are not the monolithic entities that simpletons and dishonest politicians would paint them. We have socialism in the United States, and, as I pointed out in my last post, many Republicans would be very angry if their elected representatives tried to cut their Social Security checks or Medicare benefits. They would not appreciate Congress turning our interstate highways into toll roads. Nor would they like being required to send their kids to private schools. So socialism is here to stay. The only question is whether we are willing to allow socialism to expand optimally to fulfill functions that the market is ill-suited to perform, like providing health care.

We also have a particular form of capitalism in America that I refer to as corporate capitalism. I call it this because we accept a high level of corporate welfare in our economy. Corporations are definitely more important in America than individual citizens. Our system’s most significant feature is probably that we allow certain individuals and corporations to accumulate as much wealth as possible, while relegating millions of Americans to poverty and such low wages that they cannot afford food, shelter, and transportation. Germany has a form of capitalism (and socialism) that is very different in significant ways from what we experience here in America.

So, if you can accept that socialism is not the evil Republicans have portrayed it to be, and if you can accept that our form of capitalism is not ideal, then you should be suspicious of those who use these terms imprecisely for purely political ends. Of all the politicians in America, Bernie Sanders probably comes closest to what Latter-day Saints should expect from government. Yes, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist who is not afraid to tell the truth about what is wrong with America and what we should be doing to create a more humane and just society.

Well, I don’t know whether my arguments about the Republican Party’s fitness for Latter-day Saint participation will make any difference. But I feel that I have to do my part in trying to confront what I see as some dangerous political trends among Latter-day Saints. In many ways, the Constitution is indeed hanging by a thread. And many Latter-day Saints are rushing forward with scissors.