Politics Is Just Another Sport

A lot of people like to say that politics is a lot like sports. I mostly agree. It is like a sport. But, since I like to quibble about things, here’s a question for you.

Which sport?

Baseball is America’s game, but football has the Dallas Cowboys, which is America’s Team. Soccer is America’s fastest-growing sport, auto racing has America’s most passionate fans. And so it goes. Starting to sound like politics already - which candidate is the best, which one has the most passionate followers, which one has the best chance to win?

And the parallels don’t stop there. We ask which sport is America’s game, but we also argue about how to decide it.

America’s game would be the most popular, of course. But, popular for who? 

Football argues that it has the biggest tv ratings and the biggest average crowd size for its 16 regular season games. But baseball says a lot more people will see a game over its162 game regular season. Besides, while most baseball stadiums have a lot fewer seats, those seats are filled a lot more often.

Then there’s the question of participation. How many people actually play those sports? Volleyball is really popular as a pick-up game, and in some places Bocci has a big following. They even opened a summer league a few years ago in Southampton.

Should we only count games played by adults? That would leave out a lot of college football players, and all the high school baseball and football games. But counting teens, or counting everyone playing a sport, opens the door to bowling and a lot more soccer. How about martial arts and badminton which are - by some surveys - the 10th most popular sports in the nation. Yes, surveys can disagree.

But, let’s get back to the point. Oh, sorry, I haven’t made the point yet.

The reason politics is like sports is the fans. Yes, the fans who develop a blind loyalty to a team - win or lose, even over decades - but who have the unpredictable habit of turning rabid every so often and demanding the coach be fired, the owner sell the franchise or - when real money is on the line - vote against a bond issue that would allow the team’s stadium to be expanded.

Yep, just like politics. The support from your base is loud and proud and colorful, right up to the day when the fans desert in droves and demand that the team owners should be dumped as well. Kind of like the French Revolution. Long live the KIng!

In our modern times, fans just vote with their wallets. Ticket sales go down. Way down. They also vote with their feet, and walk away from the games.

Which brings us to our nation’s current political fiasco.

The fans of our President are still loud, at least at his rallies, and the political machinery of the Republican Party is solidly behind him, paying the small price of opposing everything they stood for over the past few decades…things like state’s rights, the rule of law and opposition to the growing national debt.

Soon we may get to see some Supreme Court justices who only got their job by manipulating the nominating system rule on whether the abuse of political power is illegal, or unconstitutional, or whatever word the lawyers think fits best. Should be interesting.

And, you will see some Republicans walking. Walking away from the polls on Election Day, walking away from the party when it asks for campaign donations, and walking away from their elected jobs in Washington when they begin to think they will soon be in the minority party and lose all those lovely perks.

Oh, wait. That’s already happening.

The Debate - Some Random Thoughts.

Well, everybody got it wrong.

The candidates, the moderators, the invisible man who gave a pathetic talk to a friendly Republican audience at the same time as the debate in a vain effort to try hog the stage. They all missed the point.

And, maybe, the government and, maybe, us.

Bold talk, you say, in an outraged tone. What point? You ask it quizzically.

Well, here it is. We are a democracy, we have a government. We are, at heart, a nation of laws and processes.

Not a nation of kings or despots. At least, not. Yet. But…

Let’s imagine a world where one man, just one man, has the power to decide which laws to pass and which policies to put into effect over things like foreign trade and health care.

(For my readers in other countries, some of which have had women as their chief executive, you can imagine one woman doing that too. Examples upon request. You can start with the original Queen Elizabeth, or better still Catherine the Great.)

Well, we do have just one man in the Senate who has ruled that we shall have no laws to control guns and prevent mass shootings, and we have the same man deciding who will or will not be seated on the Supreme Court. Kinda close.

Then we have a man in the White House deciding, all by himself, how our water and air should be polluted, how our alliances and trade agreements should be kept or broken, and how to respond when he is told Greenland is not for sale.

(I thought he could have just offered a trade. I’ll give you Hawaii for it. After all, they have a lot of bad people from different races living there, and they gave Obama a fake birth certificate, something Greenlanders would never do.)

The theory is that none of those things should be done without the consent of Congress - not just one leader, but the whole body. If the system is so broken that one man can stop the actions of a majority of the nation, then it’s time to take to the streets, or maybe just stop funding government entirely until democracy comes back. No crying about things and saying you can’t do anything. Do something!

Which gets me to the point. Every candidate at the debate, at some point, was asked “what’s your plan” for gun control, or for health care, or for dealing with the national debt. (OK, not really. But they should have been asked.)

The right answer, which no one gave, was “I’d like to do this, but any plan like this has to be approved by Congress, and I expect it will be changed when all of those people in the House and the Senate debate it and find ways to make it better.”

The commentators got it wrong by focusing on the proposed plans and their differences, and ignoring the process that would turn any plan into reality. How about asking “Why do you think this would get through Congress?”

The candidates spent a lot of their time talking about what they would do - which is appropriate, after all - and almost none of it about how their ideas would impact other people. Think about it.

Most of the debate over health care could be eliminated if some candidate would simply say “We will provide health care for everyone, and you are all free to get supplemental policies to cover other things. The cost of that new insurance would be  lot less than it is now, because all the basic care is covered by the government.

Then we could talk about things like preventive health care, dental coverage, drug costs and all the other things that would be good to have.

And, oh yes, when all of the candidates were asked why they were the best person to deal with mass shootings and with foreign trade and with health care and with the ever-growing national debt (I know, not really that one), they might have said “No one on this stage is the best one to do everything, and how I would solve a problem might not be the best for the whole nation. We are a democracy, after all.”

Let’s not forget that. Maybe we could all remember it for the next debate.

Reparations

I’ve been thinking lately about reparations for blacks in the United States, a hot-button subject that will likely keep coming up for the rest of my life, my children’s lives and their children’s lives.

It is a nearly-unsolvable issue, one that keeps getting more and more complicated as time passes. And, many people have decided to simply leave it for someone else to solve. You know, like our changing climate.

So, why am I adding my two cents?

Well, every topical issue that comes up lately seems to go away before I can finish writing about it. Tariffs are on and then off and then on again. Russia tests a hypersonic missile, then we test one that just breaks the non-proliferation treaty we said was already broken. North Korea fires off a new flurry of missiles, then sends President Trump a Hallmark friendship card.

Or the economy is on the verge of collapse again. Or going into a mild recession. But not for everybody. So, who? And, until we know, why worry?

See what I mean? The issue of reparations will be around for a long, long time. More than enough time for this blog to still be relevant. I can catch some of the rapidly-changing stuff later on.

And one more thing. I an finding that my blogs have gotten a little preachy, a lot more like a term paper than an opinion, and - frankly - rather predictable. You know, you mention a subject and you know what I will say about it before I say it.

So, let me do one last, long, preachy and maybe boring blog, then I will revert to the sparkling, witty and a bit shallow blogs that we had so much fun with before,

I picked reparations as a subject because it is important and because it meets my test for one of the biggest challenges facing humanity, big issues that people have never really been able to deal with. They are, of course, sex and race. And reparations touches on them both.

 To get to the point quickly - and I will just as quickly go back to my normal rambling - the issue of reparations could be solved relatively fairly and relatively quickly if we all agreed just what people mean when they talk about it. But, everyone has their own idea, and as usual our common language serves to keep us apart instead of getting us together.

Let the ramble begin!

There are only a few kinds of reparations. The simplest to understand is a car crash. You hit my car. It is your fault. You pay to fix my damages. That is a reparation.

Or, you are a successful businessman. You bribe some politicians to change the local zoning so that your competitor has to spend a half million dollars just to meet the new town code, and they are forced to close. It all comes to light three years later. She sues you for the loss of her business, and a jury comes up with some cash value they think is appropriate. That, too, is a reparation.

Or you and your allies go to war with another nation and its allies. You lose, and the winners force you to pay for all the costs of the war.

That would be a big reparation. It’s happened many times over the centuries. Heck, we can probably find some people arguing that those lovely lands on the French side of the English Channel are really British possessions. You know, the “Let’s make Britain great again” crowd.

And let’s not get into the big related subject of colonization. Or whether women have been treated worse than men, and deserve a larger reparation.

Let’s simply start by looking at one of the world’s biggest reparations, and what came of it. It happened after the end of World War I, a war where - until the United States was finally dragged into it - our nation wasn’t sure which side we wanted to support.

Anyway, after they lost, the Central Powers were forced to make payments in cash or in land to the winners. Smaller nations like Turkey and Bulgaria had so little money that their reparations were cancelled. Germany got the big bill - 132 billion gold marks, worth about $33 billion in our currency.

Payment got complicated, since the Central Powers had to issue three sets of bonds to start payments, only two of which mandated unconditional payment. The total reparation was later reduced, but not enough.

Germany’s economy was crippled. Young men who were 8 years old when the war started were nearly 30 when their nation went in to a deep recession. Businesses failed and jobs were scarce, and a man named Adolph Hitler came to power on a wave of economic resentment. Of course, he blamed the Jews for all of Germany’s problems.

The common theme is that reparations are imposed by a winner. Often after war, sometimes in a court. And, rarest of all, by social pressure.

Which gets us back to where we started. Should the United States pay reparations to the dependents of slaves, or to blacks in general, or is there a third alternative?

In fact, there is. Not a perfect one, of course, but something that gives us a guideline to what reparations should be and what they should do. It happened in South Africa in 1994, after the government collapsed under international and internal pressures that forced the end of Apartheid.

Apartheid was a system of blatant racial discrimination by a tiny white minority that held most of the land, most of the money, most of the resources and all of the power in South Africa.

The country was so broken that its government gave up. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, became President and spent the next six years trying to deal with the legacy of Apartheid - the bitterness, the hatred, the pent-up demands for revenge.

What that nation got was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which did an imperfect job of trying to right the nation’s past wrongs. Part of the work involved helping individuals. Another part involved public acknowledgment of past wrongdoings. Very few people whose suffering had gone on for generations ended up getting any money.

How it happened is a long and complex story, of hopes that were dashed and efforts that broke apart on the hard rocks of reality. Who would be helped and how to do it was debated over and over, as well as little things like who should be taxed to pay for the benefits, and how much of the country’s budget should be used, when there were so many other pressing needs to be met.

Ultimately, as more and more people demanded aid, the country set up a scale of who would be helped first. It also had to decide what to do about its infrastructure - build paved roads in poor black areas, improve schools, see that adequate health care was available, address the yawning gap between the life expectancy of blacks and whites. 

By the time it was all settled, few people qualified for direct reparation payments, and the money - originally set at the median income of the nation - had dropped so far that proposed payments were close to the poverty level.

The lesson that comes through for me is that reparations can’t go to people who died many years ago, and shouldn’t just be given out to anyone who asks for it. And it’s tough for any individual to prove in court they were harmed by a racist society.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t take big, costly steps to fix the problems that are the legacy of inequality. You can easily look at roads, and see how the ones in poor areas are rarely repaired, while the ones in wealthy areas get repaved regularly. It’s tougher to look at the nation’s education system and see whereto inequalities exist.

Or, just start simple. Who still needs clean water and adequate hospitals and fire protection? How many millions of dollars are spent each year to deal with beach erosion, compared to how much is spent to lower the infant mortality rate, which is outrageously high in poor and minority communities.

‘sIf you need some kind of light to burn at the end of the particular tunnel, it is this. When you have a society that had - deliberately or accidentally - destroyed families for generations by denying one ethnic group good schools, good jobs, and the ability to accumulate wealth by making it difficult to buy housing you have a multi-headed problem that it will cost a lot to fix.

And the longer you wait, the more expensive it will get.

You know, like climate change.

Footnote - Lovell Fernandez, a professor of law at the University of Western Cape, provided a good overview of South Africa’s reparations struggle in his paper on Reparations Policy in South Africa about 20 years ago. Makes interesting reading.