ON THE WAY OUT THE DOOR

Check out http://www.huffingtonpost.com for a nice spoof -- a Kenyan birth certificate for Newt Gingrich, with accompanying birther style paranoid argument as to why it might be real.

The troops are mobilizing to counter the thuggish Republican tactics at the town hall meetings. I have a good feeling about this fight. I think we are going to win. We won't get everything we want, but we knew that from the first day.

WE WILL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

This will be my last post until next week, as I am getting ready to fly to the West Coast to see my son, Patrick, his wife Diana Schneider, and my two grandchildren, Samuel [three and a half] and Athena [just turned one.] Samuel is now talking a blue streak, so I will for the first time be able to have a conversation with him.



Casting about for something to blog about as I go out the door, I came upon a story in today's NY TIMES, about an obviously very wealthy couple, Linda and Bryant Edwards, who have just renovated an apartment on the rue du Cloitre Notre Dame, on the Ile de la Cite. This caught my eye, because I know that little street very well. If you are standing in front of Notre Dame, with the hordes of tourists, looking up at the magnificent facade, rue du cloitre Notre Dame is just to your left, running along the north side of the cathedral. Until recently, this street was the home of Le Vieux Bistro, an unprepossessing little restaurant with the best boeuf Bourguignonne in the entire world. Now, alas, the restaurant has disappeared. The Edwards' apartment is on the first floor, which means one flight up, overlooking the lovely syacmore shaded park behind Notre Dame and a stone's throw from the little bridge that connects ile de la Cite with ile St. Louis.

The apartment is described in the story as 160 square meters, or 1723 square feet. That is vast as Paris apartments go -- about five times the size of our pied-a-terre across the river on the Left Bank. Of course, their apartment is in what is described as a 1905 Haussmann building, and ours is in a seventeenth century building looking out on an interior courtyard. But the Edwards' place is pretty obviously very classy.

All of this made me especially eager to get back to Paris. We will be leaving in just under four weeks, for a three week stay, coming back in time for me to begin lecturing on The Thought of Karl Marx in the Osher Lifelong Learning Program at Duke. Fortunately, I shall be able to continue blogging from Paris. One of the weird things ab out the web is that geographic distance has no significance. The chap who contacted me from Riga might just as well have been down the block. It is going to take a few years for this remarkable fact to percolate through our understanding of the world, but as it does, it will turn a great many things upside down, aesthetically, religiously, and socially, as well as politically.

So, to those of you who have found your way to this site, stay with me, and I shall be back on line next Tuesday. Meanwhile, contact Organize for America [http://www.mybarackobama.com, ]join up to go to a congressional town hall meeting in your district, and help to counterbalance the organized Republican thugs who are once again attempting to hijack democracy in America.

WOLFF WEIGHS IN ON THE BIRTHERS

I know, I know, everyone is doing it, even Chris Matthews, who has great fun waving copies of Obama's birth certificate in the faces of the crazies who agree to appear on his show. But I do write a blog, after all, so I feel a certain obligation. This will be a meta-comment [as we used to say in Philosophy, back in the old days.] It will actually be about the power of the internet, not about the controversy.

But first, since my readership is not only very small but also, I suspect rather elite, I had better explain what the controversy is, for those who have somehow managed to avoid it. A number of right wing loonies, terminally freaked out by the accession of Barack Obama to the presidency, have for a while now been claiming that he was not actually born in the United States, and therefore does not meet one of the Constitutional criteria for eligibility. This must not be confused with a quite different claim, which has not yet actually gained much attention, that Obama is not eligible to be President because he was not born in the "lower forty-eight." Those folks, whom I have dubbed "forty-eighters" or "mainlanders," have still not gotten over the inclusion of Alaska and Hawaii in the Union. But I digress.

The birther bubble has captured the paranoid fringe that seems now to constitute the mainstream of the Republican Party, with the result that a dozen Republican members of the House of Representatives have actually introduced a bill requiring all future candidates for the Presidency [no retroactivity there] to produce birth certificates.

About three days ago, a document surfaced on the Internet purporting to be a KENYAN birth certificate of Barack Obama. [Once again, I must assure my readers that I am not making this up. I am afraid this would be a difficult political environment for Jonathan Swift. He would be hard pressed, if he were alive today, to produce satires that could be counted on not to be taken seriously by a sizeable segment of his readership.]

The first thing that happened was that a number of knowledgeable private citizens went on line to point out a raft of impossibilities and inconsistencies in the supposed document, among which were the fact that the city in which Obama was said in the document to have been born was not a part of Kenya on the date listed on the document, and so forth.

But just yesterday, someone out there in cyberspace weighed in with an astonishing discovery that pretty well exposed and exploded the whole Kenyan birth certificate scam. Here is the essence of the discovery, as laid out Politijab, from which it was picked up by The Washington Independent, and from there appeared on Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish, the site where I encountered it:

One of my friends in the small community of Obama “birther”-debunkers passes on quite the discovery: a 1964 “certified copy of registration of birth” from Australia, easily available on Bomford.net, a genealogy site. There are striking similarities between this document and the one Orly Taitz is passing off as a “Kenyan birth certificate” for Barack Obama.

- The design is identical, down to the seal at the top and the classifications (”Christian name,” etc) used for identifying the baby.

- The “registrar” on the Bomford document is G.F. Lavender. On the Taitz document, it’s E.F. Lavender.

- The “district registrar” on the Bomford document is J.H. Miller. On the Taitz document, it’s M.H. Miller.

- The number of the book is identical on both documents: Book 44B, Page 5733.

What’s more likely — that two Kenyan bureaucrats shared last names with two Australian bureaucrats, and that the numbers on both certificates were identical? Or that someone used this document, available online for anyone who wanted to look, to forge the Obama “certificate?”

Think about it. In less than forty-eight hours, this extraordinarily obscure form is surfaced and shown to be the source of the phony birth certificate! It would have taken an old-fashioned researcher six months to find the Australian document, if indeed it was ever found.

All this put me in mind [for rather obscure reasons] of a book I read four or five years ago. When I thought of the book, I realized that I could not think of either the title or the author. So I went to Google and entered "jellybeans" and "wisdom," which were all I could recall from it. Instantaneously, in the very first position, up popped The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki which was indeed the book. Just to explain: Surowiecki begins with the charming fact that when a group of experts are asked to estimate the number of jellybeans in a very large jar [a favorite contest at State Fairs and such], it turns out that their estimates are much farther from the actual number than the average of all the guesses of ordinary folks who walk by the booth. This leads him to a general discussion of the many cases in which there is a collective wisdom in crowds that is equal to or superior to the expertise of the cognoscenti.

The collective knowledge of the uncounted millions of people who inhabit the web is vast, and the web serves as an extraordinarily efficient device for accessing and disseminating that knowledge.

VALUABLE LINK

No sooner did I post my little essay about newspapers, than my most loyal reader pointed me to an excellent article in the New York Review of Books by Michael Massing about the symbiotic relationshop between newspapers and bloggers. I strongly recommend it. Go to this site: http://www.nybooks.com and find the Massing article.

WHAT GOOD ARE THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA?

Now that I am a blogger, occupying a tiny corner in a backwater of the worldwide web, where the surf hardly ever reaches, I have, I figure, a responsibility to think deep thoughts about the future of newspapers. I have been a compulsive newspaper reader all my life, even though this little condominium in Chapel Hill is the first place I have ever lived where the NY TIMES actually gets delivered each morning. When I lived in Northampton, Massachusetts, I read the TIMES and the Boston GLOBE every morning, and the Daily Hampshire Gazette every afternoon [not a bad paper, actually -- during the Watergate-Nixon affair, it carried a very useful summary of what had happened since the big morning papers had come out.] In Paris, I have a go at reading LIBERATION, the socialist newspaper, though my French is not quite good enough to pick up the nuances, jokes, and allusions. One of my abiding disappointments with South Africa has been its lack of even halfway decent newspapers, save for the Daily Mail and Guardian, which is the voice of the White liberal English community [for many years, it carried Doonsebury regularly.]



The left blogosphere has been pretty hard on what is now universally referred to simply as the MSM. A good deal of this criticism is clearly warranted. Judith Miller's Iraq raportage for the TIMES was an embarrassment, and David Broder really is a horse's ass. What is more, though this is hardly a new development, newspapers are in a bad way financially, and a number of the best known papers are in danger of going under. [I first realized how parlous the finances of newspapers were when I read, some years ago, that the NY TIMES corporation makes most of its money from its ownership of lumber mills churning put the paper on which newspapers are printed. Talk about the tail wagging the dog!]



Fewer and fewer people, it seems, get such news as they absorb from newspapers. Young people in particular apparently get more of their news from the internet than from what are usually referred to as the print media, and an astonishing number of people actually cite Jon Stewart's Daily Show as their principal source of information about the larger world. So are the MSM simply passe, outmoded, no longer needed, like horses and buggies, neighborhood stables, iceboxes, and VCRs?



Let us approach an answer to this question by asking a different one: What do the people who write for newspapers do? We can distinguish four separate activities, with each of which we are all quite familiar.



The first thing they do is to serve as conduits for official announcements by governments and other bodies -- corporations, universities, NGO's, the military, and so forth. This is not a trivial or unimportant task. There is a vast flood of information coming from such organizations that the public has a need to know, or an interest in knowing. Newspapers publish that information, either verbatim or in a useful summary. When I think about how much information is actually available to us these days, I am reminded of a contrast that has long fascinated me between the task of historians writing about periods for which they have much too little information and historians writing about periods for which they have much too much information. When I was teaching European History at Harvard [this is half a century ago], I illustrated the contrast with the example of two great books: Henri Pirenne's Mohammed and Charlemagne, in which he set forth what came to be known as the Pirenne Thesis, and Georges Lefebvre's equally great Marxist history, La Revolution Francaise. Pirenne, in trying to ascertain what brought about the collapse of late Roman civilization into what is commonly referred to as The Middle Ages, had nothing but scraps and oddments of information out of which to construct his explanation -- a line in Gregory of Tours here, a handful of coins there. His job was like that of paleontologists who try to reconstruct an early hominid from a tooth, a rib, and a femur. Lefebvre, in contrast, was flooded with data. In the early period of the events of 1787 to '89, thousands of documents, known as cahiers [or "notebooks"] were sent from the provinces to Paris, detailing the concerns and complaints of lawyers, merchants, clergy, and functionaries. No historian could possibly read all of the cahiers, let alone make reference to them all in a work of historiography.



We are, today, in the situation of Lefebvre, not Pirenne. A mountain of documents and information is available to us, and we are forced to make selections before we can even begin to consider it. Think, for example, what an historian of the 12th century French economy could do with the equivalent of what is made available by the Bureau of Labor Statistics every year in just one book, the Statistical Abstract of the United States! Good reporters help us to sift through this information. Like historians, they exhibit their theoretical and ideological presuppositions in their choices of information. That is inevitable and necessary, hence not at all reprehensible. But without their help, we would be overwhelmed.



The second thing that people who write for newspapers do is to pull together information from many different sources, written and oral, into a coherent story on some subject of public importance -- charter schools, drug imports from Canada, the up-arming of HumVees used in Iraq, the decline in manufacturing in the MidWest, that sort of thing. The reporters who write these stories function, methodologically speaking, like historians. They have the advantage of being able to talk to people who are contemporaneous with, and involved in, the subject. They have the disadvantage of not being able to use materials that only become available long afterwards -- memoirs, letters, and so forth.



The third thing people who write for newspapers do is to ferret out information that someone is trying very hard to keep secret. This is what is usally described as "investigative reporting," and since 1973, every employee of every newspaper has secretely styled himself or herself the new Woodward and Bernstein. This is an activity utterly unlike that of the historian, involving as it inevitably does the making of complicated deals with people privy to the secrets.



The fourth thing that people who write for newspapers do is to offer their opinions on matters of public interest. They write opinion columns and op ed pieces, some of which, unfortunately, masquerade as raportage.



Well [nobody ever said I was short-winded!], the first of these four functions is now almost superceded by the possibility of putting all of the data on line. The Obama administration has begun to do this, and it is inevitible, I think, that in the next three to five years, virtually everything that is public will be accessible on the web. Newspapers are not a useful medium for the distribution of this information. One simple example is the daily stock price tables, which for as long as I can recall took up endless pages at the back of the NY TIMES, and now are simply available electronically.



The last function -- offering opinions -- has also been made otiose by the web. There are a few opinionators whose work is enormously valuable -- Frank Rich comes to mind -- but one of the marvelous revelations of the web is the existence out and around America of thousands of people whose opinions about current affairs are as penetrating, as trenchant, as knowledgeable, and as funny as those put out each day by the Press's paid pontificators. We don't need Thomas Friedman to tell us about the Middle East when we have Juan Cole. We don't need Cokie Roberts when we have Arianna Huffington. And we never needed William Kristol or David Brooks.



This leaves the second and third functions, which are really crucial to a modern participatory democracy. When I think of a newspaper, it is this sort of reporting that comes to mind. The in depth examination of the existence or non-existence of Iraqi nuclear weapons, the anatomization of the process of negotiation by which a health care reform bill is put together, the real inside truth of the mystery surrounding Sarah Palin's last pregnancy.



When I read this sort of story on line, on The Huffington Post or Talking Points Memo, it is almost always via a link to a story written by a newspaper reporter and first published in a newspaper. Frequently, the link is to the TIMES or the Washington Post. Once Sarah Palin became the story du jour, the websites all linked to stories in the Anchorage Daily News, in which reporters directly familiar with the Alaska scene did the legwork that produced the news.



Now, this sort of reporting is expensive. It takes time, and that means that one or many reporters must be given the days, sometimes even weeks or months, that are required to get the story. The websites I visit daily, fascinating as they are and impressive as their visuals may be, simply do not have the money to hire first-rate full-time reporters to work up these sorts of stories.



What to do? We all need the TIMES to go on paying its reporters, so that they can generate the valuable stories that Arianna Huffington and Josh Marshall can link to. But we are less and less inclined to buy the newspapers themselves, thereby generating the readership that supports the advertising revenue on which the papers survive.



One solution that has been floated is for what we now call newspapers to become providers of raportage, charging a fee for it to be reproduced. The physical newspaper might more or less disappear, but the invaluable reporting activities would continue. I do not know whether this arrangement is capable of generating the monies required to make the career of reporter an economically feasible option. Almost certainly, a movement in this direction would result in the springing up of a number of self-employed reporters who would attempt to generate their own fees for their stories. This is really a fascinating possibility, and might result in an efflorescence, rather than a decline, in first rate reporting.

Well, this has gone on much too long. If you have made it to this far, I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter.

SUNDAY MUSINGS

I find myself caught in the cross-currents of the wise advice given to me by my two sons. Two years ago, as I contemplated with apprehension my imminent retirement, I confessed to Patrick, my older son, that I was not certain how I could fill my days. I had been in school continuously, in one capacity or another, since 1936, when my parents enrolled me in the Sunnyside Progressive School, and I was not certain that there was life outside the academy. He suggested that I might try writing a blog, and with the help of Google, I launched The Philosopher's Stone. My younger son, Tobias, cautioned me that writing a blog could become all-consuming -- quite different from simply offering an opinion now and again in polite company. It seems they both were right. This little effort certainly soaks up the spare time, but it is relentless. Now that my readership has swelled, perhaps to as many as twenty friends and acquaintances. I experience what aesthetic theorists some years ago took to calling the "objective demand of the gestalt."


Having written yesterday about the play of competing interests in the writing of health care reform legislation, I think I should like today to say a few words about cooperation and collective undertakings. I shall begin with a wonderful little story that appeared in the NY TIMES five years ago. It seems that the sixteen violinists who made up the first violin section of the Beethoven Orchestra in Bonn were suing to earn more money because in most of the compositions selected by the conductor for performance, they played more notes than the wind and brass players, not to speak of the percussionists. [Honestly, I am not making this up. You can Google it.] The reporter, tongue firmly fixed in cheek, pointed out that oboists play more sustained notes, which ought to count for something. He concluded by predicting that the German audiences were likely to hear Brahms' Serenade No. 2 a good deal more often, it being a piece that Brahms scored for NO first violins. I am glad to report that the suit failed.


At the time, I was playing the viola regularly in an amateur string quartet that met weekly at the home of the now sadly departed Barbara Greenstein, second violin. The three other members of the quartet, with extraordinary patience and forebearance, permitted me to join them while I took weekly lessons and practiced feverishly until I was able to hold my own. We spent a cheerful quarter hour laughing about the story before returning to our Mozart.


Some while later, we decided to tackle the third Rasomouwsky quartet, Beethoven's Opus 59 No. 3. This was definitely at the outer edge of my abilities, so I took my viola and the music to Paris with me for a four week stay, and spent a week practicing each of the movements. The fourth movement of Opus 59, No. 3 is especially beloved by violists because it is in the form of a fugue in which the viola states the subject, playing gloriously all alone for ten whole measures. This is unheard of in quartet music, the viola usually being consigned to a subordinate status [rather like Nanki Poo, who masquarades as the second trombone in a traveling band to escape the loving attentions of Katisha.] Beethoven must have been in one of his manic phases when he wrote the quartet, because he gives as the tempo for the movement a quarter note = 162 -- which is to say, one hundred sixty-two quarter notes per minute. The only string quartet I have ever heard play the movement at this impossible speed is the Emerson, which is in general famous for playing everything very fast. At that speed, the music goes by so fast that you cannot actually listen to it. You must simply cringe in your chair and let it assault you.

Well, there was no question of my playing the damned thing at that speed, but with serious practice, I did get up above 100. When I got home, the quartet met, and at the start of the fourth movement [which starts attacca subito right after the third movement, so there is no pause to discuss tempi] I launched into my solo as fast as I could manage it. After a measure or two the others coughed politely and told me that they were not up to playing their parts at that speed. The over-achiever in me gloated secretly at having "won," but the musician in me, always struggling to get to the surface, recognized that winning was simply not part of the collaboration that constitutes quartet playing. Getting to the end of a movement first is an occasion for embarrassment, not congratulation.

You see, playing quartets is an inherently cooperative venture. The cooperation is not instrumental to the activity [if I may be permitted that word], it is essential to it. The collaborative character of the activity is part of the value of it. [This is one of the ways in which amateur chamber music differs from professional performance. For professionals, all that matters is the quality of the music produced. Cooperating with their fellow musicians, while usually instrumental to that end, is not at all an essential part of the experience.]

What has all of this to do with health care reform and American politics? Very simply, and far too briefly [I refer you to the last chapter of The Poverty of Liberalism for a fuller discussion], the American political system completely fails to make an important place for the ideals of comradeship, collective action, and the intrinsic value of shared commitment. To be sure, many people who become active in politics find these valuable experiences as they work to advance some agenda, but the genius of the American system is competition, not cooperation.

I think this is why I fell so completely in love with South Africa when I first went there in 1986, before liberation. In South Africa then, the instant I met someone, I knew that person was either my comrade or my enemy. The practice of calling one another comrades was not some automatic verbal tic, as in the great old Peter Sellars movie, I'm All Right, Jack. It was an expression of a living commitment to a collective undertaking whose value lay at least in part precisely in its collective form.

That is part of what I was trying to capture in my vision of a college as a community of shared responsibility. So, by all means, let us collect signatures and ring doorbells and contact our representatives and try to bring on them sufficient pressure to get a good health care bill. But let us also search for ways to build into our lives the ideal of comradeship that inspired the early Socialists, and still has the power to capture at least some hearts today.

THOUGHTS ON THE FIGHT FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM

I have just returned from collecting more signatures on a petition supporting Obama’s health care proposals, as well as on postcards to be hand delivered to our new, and wavering, senator, Kay Hagen. This time, I was stationed at the entrance to the Carrboro Farmer’s Market, which, like the public library, is a very productive site for garnering support for any sort of progressive cause. Would that the world were like the Carrboro Farmer’s Market! With the House having risen for the August recess, and the Senate about to do the same, this seems like a good time to take a deep breath and think yet again about the ugly legislative process. If nothing else, such reflection may guard me – and you too, I hope – against the ulcerative effects of the endless reports of Blue Dog Democratic opposition to a public option and Max Baucus’s Pharma-fueled efforts to dilute and slow down anything remotely resembling reform. [Baucus is the senior senator from Montana, a state that is fourth largest in area and forty-fourth in population. By way of comparison, Brooklyn has two and a half times as many people in it as all of Montana. Yet the genius of the American political system dictates that Baucus, not, let us say, Chuck Schumer, shall hold the fate of health care reform in his hands.]

As always, when confronted with a particularly distasteful bit of reality, I like to retreat for a bit to pure theory in order to clear my head. So let us remind ourselves of some simple truths, often forgotten, about competing theories of political democracy. We can then return to the disheartening spectacle to which we have been exposed these past weeks, and try to gain on it some perspective.

In the eighteenth century, when the structure of the American political system was put in place, there were two competing and absolutely incompatible theories of electoral democracy. The first, advanced by thinkers like Montesquieu and patterned on the newly emerging phenomenon of free market competition, understood the goal of the legislative process to be the resolution of competing interests through negotiation and bargaining. Guided by expectations like those to which Adam Smith gave voice in his famous metaphor of the invisible hand, these democratic theorists hoped that through the expression of private interests and the legislative resolution of the conflicts among those interests, an aggregated collective decision would emerge that constituted the public good. Despite Montesquieu’s role in advancing this conception of democracy, it was the English who most fervently championed it, and it was the rebellious English colonists in North America who enshrined the theory in the structure of the Republic they brought into existence.

There was, however, a competing conception of democracy, given its most brilliant expression in the writings of the Swiss philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, according to which the goal of the legislative process was to set aside private interests all together, and engage not in a negotiation, but rather in a deliberation about the nature of the General Good. Rousseau argued that a republic whose members sought merely to advance their private interests could not enact laws that commanded the respect and obedience of the public. Only those commands issuing from an assembly, all the members of which were aiming at the General Good, could rightly be given the honorific title of Laws.

It is obvious upon even the most superficial reflection that these two theories imply totally different, indeed, opposed standards of behavior for the men and women chosen to act as representatives of the sovereign people [for the theories agree that true sovereignty resides in the citizenry as a whole]. According to the first theory, the task of Representatives is to advance the private interests of those whom they represent. Representatives from farm states must, in order for the system to work, press for legislation that will benefit farmers. Representatives from heavily urban states must press for legislation to benefit city dwellers. And so forth. The purpose of elections is to give the citizens of any district an opportunity to choose a representative who will advance their interests, as they understand them [for the theory also asserts that we are, each of us, the best judge of our own interests.] There are massive practical problems in realizing this conception of democracy, of course, the most obvious of which is that those whose interests in a district are in a minority [even farm states have cities, after all] will find those interests without an effective voice in the legislature. [As I have argued, in In Defense of Anarchism, it is this problem that undermines any and every claim that a representative democracy can make to legitimacy. But that is for another day.] Nevertheless, through pressure brought by interest groups on elected representatives, and through the constant shifting of alliances among interest groups, some measure of genuine representation, it is argued, does happen.

According to the second, Rousseauean, theory of democracy, the responsibility of elected representatives is totally different. [Never mind here that Rousseau thought representative democracy to be no better than slavery.] In all his or her deliberations, a Representative or Senator must ask only “What legislation will advance the General Good?,” and never “What legislation will advance the interests of my constituents?”

Under ideal circumstances, representatives would be motivated solely by their fiduciary responsibility to advance the interests of their constituents, but of course the American political system is, in many ways, not ideal. Some of these ways were anticipated by the authors of the Constitution, and in fact counted upon by them. For example, the representatives are themselves individuals with private ambitions and interests, chief among which is to win re-election, and as campaigns become more expensive, they tilt ever farther in the direction of the interests of those constituents [or even non-constituents] who can contribute heavily to their campaign funds. A problem of a quite different sort is posed by the fact that some of the elected representatives actually have strongly held convictions about what is in the General Good, and quite mistakenly, although understandably, act on those convictions [the example of Arlen Specter demonstrates that not all elected representatives fall into this error.] A representative who votes for what he or she believes is right, rather than for what is in the expressed interest of his or her constituents, is like a lawyer with power of attorney to execute a real estate closing who decides that buying the property at the agreed upon price is not really in the best interest of the client, and invests the money in preferred stock instead. Grounds for disbarment, not for the encomium of “statesman.”

In a huge democracy like the United States, an enormous variety of private interests find representation in the legislative processes of the Congress. When Sheldon Whitehouse holds a whispered conversation with Orrin Hatch in the Senate cloakroom, it not a progressive Democrat and a reactionary Republican who are talking to one another, though that may appear to be what is happening. In reality, it is the people of Rhode Island who are bargaining with the people of Utah. The only available alternative to that bargaining is a war of all against all [which may, of course, on occasion be preferable, but not usually.]

To be sure, the bargaining process is distorted by the realities of American politics and by the structure and rules of the Senate. The practice of carrying out the writing of legislation in standing committees, and of assigning the chairmanships of those committees by seniority, results in such anomalies as the one we noted earlier, of Max Baucus, and through him, the people of Montana, exercising a disproportionate influence over the writing of health care legislation. Still and all, it is the same system that gives Barney Frank, and through him the people of Cape Cod, so disproportionate an influence over the writing of legislation to control the destructive greed of Wall Street.

Which brings me back to where I began this meditation, standing behind a table at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market. The Blue Dog Democrats [I will not even speak of the unspeakable Republicans] are, I suspect, accurate in their representation of the perceived and expressed interests of their constituents as the Black Caucus is in their representation of the perceived and expressed interests of theirs. I say “perceived and expressed” because the theory of democracy underlying the American system is not intended to make allowance for representatives who know better than their constituents do what is in their constituents’ true interests. That way lies Rousseau.

So if you hate the compromises and watering down of Obama’s already watered down proposals for health care reform, as do I, the only rational response is to mobilize popular support for acceptable reforms, and hope either that you are in an actual majority, or, if not, that you are in a better mobilized minority able to have a disproportionate influence on your representatives.

How can you do that? Simple. Go to http://www.mybarackobama.com, find your way to the nearest political action, and join it. In the words of the old union mantra, ORGANIZE