Warm greetings from the Northland

Originally published in the
Reader Weekly
December 2, 2004

To hug or not to hug: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The clings and squeezes of joyous greeters,
Or to hold arms against a sea of babbles
And by opposing end them?  To lie, to shriek.

Customs of greeting and congratulations vary across the world from a cursory acknowledgment of the presence of others to an effusive extravaganza of hugging and kissing.  And, of course, the customs vary within the U.S. among families and other social groups, and even among individuals in a family or a group.

I reflected about hugging as our family gathered for Thanksgiving and I saw the photo of President Bush kissing Condoleezza Rice on the cheek to congratulate her on her nomination as Secretary of State.  I thought it was a bit condescending but I will say no more; I’m not Karl Rove.

Hand-shaking on first meeting others has been a custom in Europe and America for a long time.  Some insist on a firm handshake with a direct look in the eye, others give a limp hand and look elsewhere.  In the recent BBC “David Copperfield”, Uriah Heep not only gave a limp handshake and looked “humble”, but people wiped their hands after shaking his.

Once Americans are familiar with one another, they generally don’t shake hands daily with the same people.  On the other hand, the French shake hands on first meeting colleagues each day.  I remember being at a French company in one group approaching another group in the hallway.  People started shaking hands with the members of the other group.  One man who had already seen me that day started to shake my hand but quickly withdrew it, saying “Déja vu (already seen).”

If Americans see an acquaintance outside of work, many shake hands on meeting.  For example, people who work together and don’t shake hands each day may do so when they meet at church.

Other than business situations, hand shaking by women has changed almost exclusively to hugs, hugs even for introductions to women or men.  About the time I was married, hugging seemed to done only among relatives – women hugged women, women hugged men, and men shook hands with men.

I know I shook hands with my dad and stepfather, my grandfather, my brother, and my father-in-law; and I hugged my wife, mother, mother-in-law, and sisters-in-law.  Of course, I hugged my wife, and after forty-four years each hug seems more precious.

On the other hand, I dreaded seeing my mother because of her extremely emotional hugs.  We moved to Europe when I was thirty and stayed six years; I came back to the U.S. only once in that time.  Whenever I visited my mother after our return she would run out of the house wailing and hug me as if I been lost and gone forever. I finally had to ask her to calm down, and she did so reluctantly, making snide comments each time we met again.

I started seeing more hugs when women’s sports became more popular.  The enthusiasm of the sports victory seemed to carry over to other victories or moments of pride.  Women giving certificates or awards to other women didn’t shake hands anymore, they gave hugs.  Then hugging became the standard greeting between women, sometimes even of the remotest acquaintance.

Now some women hug on the slightest pretext – do something moderately well and you are hugged, make a big or small mistake and you are hugged, have an unhappy event in your life and you are hugged, have a happy event in your life and you are hugged.  Generally these women hug other women on these occasions but rarely other men.  I may think this because I seem to be mostly in groups that are predominantly women.  Hm!  Women in their sixties and older don’t seem to hug as much as women in their fifties or younger.

At some time or other, many women all but stopped shaking hands with men, they hugged them.  Two or more couples get together, the men shake hands with one another and the women hug everyone.  Now this is where the fun begins.  Just how do you hug someone of the opposite sex?

Some people bend at the waist, put one arm over the shoulder of the other, and briefly touch cheeks.  It seems more like a formality than any friendly interest in the other person.  Other people stand tall, put both arms around the other and squeeze chest to chest.  I often wonder if some women are oblivious to what they are doing or if they are sending a message that I’m not getting.

No, I’m not a grouch about people’s enthusiasm for others.  I’m not going to be cold to others who want to hug me as a greeting; I will continue to be reluctant to initiate it.  On the other hand, I will initiate hugs in certain circumstances.  When someone has done a good job and I am standing close, I will stand beside him or her and give a one-hand hug to his or her far shoulder.  If someone has a setback or is exhausted from some task, I will put his or her head on my shoulder and put both arms around his or her back.  I will give back rubs whenever needed and when my hands can still knead.

Excuse me, my wife just came home and I want to give her a good hug.

©2004, 2007 Melvyn D. Magree

Elections are not won!

They are given away!

Today’s Star Tribune had a good example of this in an article about the 3rd Congressional District of Minnesota  It was a chart in the printed edition showing voting results for the last 4 biennial elections.  it is a tally of percentage votes for president, Congress, statehouse, and governor.  The percentage of Democratic votes is up in Presidential election years and down in off-years.

What would the elections been like if all those stay-away Democrats had shown up?  They certainly helped Republicans win.

The only way
To throw your vote away
Is to stay away.

If you don’t show up because you don’t like Hilary Clinton, you might help elect Donald Trump.  Just like the stay-aways in Florida helped elect George Bush in 2000.

Quote of the day: Why Democrats don’t win more often.

"Democrats have traditionally led in voter registration efforts, but have a harder time getting their voters to actually come out to the polls. There's a big factor in this election that could help there: Trump.”

- Daily Kos, 2016-05-13

It was the stay-at-home Democrats in Florida that gave Bush the election, not Ralph Nader.

Remember my mantra: The only way you throw your vote away is when you stay away.

Be Counted! We the People Are Counting on You!

Election day is next Tuesday.  Are you registered?  Have you made your picks?  Please remember to show up.  Without your vote, the candidates you favor least have a better chance of winning.

I’m serious.  Time and time again, candidates have won in a “landslide” because far too many people didn’t show up.  In 1980 many media outlets reported that Ronald Reagan won over Jimmy Carter in a “landslide”.  The “real’ winner was “none of the above”!  Ronald Reagan came in a distant second with 27% of the eligible voters; 47% didn’t bother to show up.

In many ways 2000 was a ridiculous election.  Because of the electoral college system, George Bush won with 47.9% of the votes compared to Al Gore’s 48%.  Some people claim that Ralph Nader gave the election to Bush.  Would those who voted for Nader have voted at all?  Bush had 537 votes over Gore; 2,912,790 to 2,912,253.  Nader had over 90,000 votes, a tiny count compared to the no-shows.

Drat!  For years I’ve depended on the Election Project at George Mason University for turnout figures.  It is no longer available, and even many of the cached pages are no longer available.

According to the Florida Secretary of State’s office, turnout in 1980 was 70.1%.  That is, over 2.6 million registered voters didn’t bother to show up.  The de facto “none of the above” certainly swamped Nader votes.  We really don’t know if the Nader voters would have voted for Bush or Gore or stayed home.

Ah! I just dug deeper and Prof. Michael McDonald has taken his Election Project to the University of Florida.  See www.electproject.org.  McDonald claims that over four million eligible Florida voters didn’t show up (he’s counting eligible rather than registered).  Both Bush and Gore came in a distant second to “I don’t give a damn.”  That’s a helluva way to run a country.

Are you following the polls?  I say don’t bother because polls don’t determine elections.  You showing up can turn polls on their head.  Think about the 1948 post-election headline: “Dewey wins!”  The papers rushed to publish based on a telephone poll showing Dewey ahead.  However, the pollsters didn’t compensate for many Democratic voters not having telephones.

Even polls that claim to call people on landlines and cellphones may be missing an important clue.  Many people have caller ID; if they don’t know the caller, they don’t answer.  Have you seen any polls that mention the no response rate?

Another classic example of polls really missing the mark was the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial election.  The polls had Skip Humphrey in the lead, Norm Coleman second, and Jesse Ventura last.  The results were Jesse Ventura winning, Norm Coleman second, and Skip Humphrey last.  I think that Jesse Ventura’s complaint about the auto-emission testing stations and the high taxes on his fancy cars resonated with a lot of drivers.  You can rest assured that somebody didn’t design their poll well.

Many rightfully complain about all the money in politics.  But the high spenders don’t always win.  Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, former CEOs of major tech companies, spent oodles of their own money to run for office in California,  Neither was elected.

Big spenders who lose are not confined to either party.  I had the pages up the other day which gave the spending by each party in the Presidential elections.  Surprise, the bigger spender wasn’t always the Republican candidate.  And when the bigger spender was a Democrat, he didn’t always win the general election, hanging chads or not.

A practice that has really gotten worse in recent years is the attack ads.  Candidate Joe will raise your taxes even mo’.  Candidate Tom doesn’t beat the drum for the military enough.  Candidate Bill didn’t spend enough on infra-structure (never mind that he did vote for a ten percent increase).  The silliest I’ve seen is that Al Franken voted with the President 85% of the time.  Duh!  When Bush was President, how often did Republican members of Congress vote with the President?  I would hope it was not 100% but definitely between 75% and 90%.

We can avoid many attack ads by not watching TV but they appear on billboards, in the newspapers and even on web pages.  I was surprised to see a silly attack ad on a web page against Stewart Mills who is running for Rick Nolan’s Congressional seat.  It was on a web site of a Wisconsin company!  The web knows whether you have been naughty or nice.

The purpose of attack ads is not to get you to vote for the attacker but to not show up at all.  Gosh!  I thought Sen. Foghorn was a great guy, but I guess I won’t bother showing up to vote for him this year.

So, what’s a poor confused citizen to do with all this obfuscation.

First, find all the neutral sources you can for information.  I know, there aren’t many of those.  About the best we can do is to read the candidates’ own statements in newspapers or on the web.

Second, show up and vote.  The only votes that don’t count are the votes not cast.

If you believe in democracy, you must be part of the demos, that is the people.

Mel hopes that he has to wait in line to vote.

This also appears in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/10/30/4267_be_counted_we_the_people_are_counting_on_you

A book review: Iran, A People Interrupted

Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-American professor of Iranian Studies, has written an interesting 200-year history of Iran, its culture, and its politics, both geo-political and internal. I find his writing in this book to be arrogant, opinionated, full of big words, extremely interesting, and very important. Sometimes I wondered if I would even finish it when I got lost in some of his concepts. But I read several pages most nights and made it through and I'm glad I did.

I will return it to the Duluth Public Library 2009-08-11. If you are interested in borrowing it, its call number is 955.05 D11i.

For starters about arrogance, he writes in his introduction:

"I promise you by the end of this book, you will know more about Iran than the U.S. Department of State, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and five other neocon think tanks–not to mention the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Islamic Culture in the Islamic Republic of Iran–all put together. I know things they do not know, or do not care to know, or would rather forget, or never learned, or would not tell you." (p. 11)

But considering the arrogance of the people in these institutions who pretend to understand a complex history and a complex people, I feel he is justified. Do I know more than they do after reading his book? In some respects, yes. I do know that war, torture, and execution are not going to do the Iranian people and a lot of other peoples any good. But many of the so-called experts think that these undemocratic and irreligious actions will bring greater glory for their causes.

As an example of the complexity that these experts do not understand, Dabashi writes:

"Iranian political history is a Trojan horse. Inside its belly is a hidden force never noted either for what it is or for its catalytic effect on that political history. The hidden force is the power of the imagination, the force of defiant intellect. Any attempt to reduce the cosmopolitan pluralism of Iranian political culture to an Islamist, nationalist, or socialist absolutism is at once analytically ludicrous and politically catastrophic. More than anything else, such lame and lazy reductionism distorts the inner grace and overriding power of a thriving culture that outsmarts its tyrant rulers and career opportunistic observers alike." (p. 125)

Geopolitics often damages the ships of the high and the mighty. With their grand designs treating others as mere pawns, they do not recognize that the pawns are icebergs. So it was with the U.S., first overthrowing an elected prime minister of Iran, then treating the Shah as a great ally, then using the Afghani resistance to fight the Soviets and to contain Iran, and finally then having the Afghani resistance turn against the U.S. and having the Iranian mullahcracy turn inward.

As part of this grand design of geopolitics, the high and the mighty indulge in demonizing those who oppose them, for example, George W. Bush and others calling any resistance to their grand design "the enemy". Is it any wonder that many of the rulers of Iran are paranoid about the U.S.? Especially when Bush included Iran in the "Axis of Evil". His and his advisors' ignorance of internal Iranian politics undercut reformers who had been making gains. Now these reformers were considered traitors.

BTW, Dabashi wrote this book in 2007, two years before the recent election in Iran. An election followed by the resistance of a culture that was often outsmarting its tyrant rulers.

Dabashi predicted the current turmoil as one of two possibilities of failure with the election of Ahmadinejad. "At worst, he will abuse the hopes and aspirations invested in him and resume an Islamic reign of terror over those young yuppie voters with their stylish hairdos, chic scarves, and sexy sunglasses–in which case he will turn them and their innocent semiotics of resistance into the real inheritors of the moral authority of Shi'ism. ... [Shi'ism] is alway on the side of the tyrannized and discredits those who are in power..." (pp. 233-234)

I have many more notes, but I'll finish with Dabashi's last sentence:

"...the only way that Americans can help promote democracy in Iran and anywhere else in the world is by first and foremost restoring and safeguarding it in their own country." (p. 263)

Whose independence from whom?

Do these statements apply to times, people, and places other than for which they were written?

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution...:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.


He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

They are from the Declaration of Independence, 1776.

Are "Wars on..." successful?

First there was the "War on Crime" which had mixed results. Many Mafia leaders were caught and prosecuted, but crime is still a problem in many cities.

Then there was the "War on Drugs" which has filled many prisons. But drugs still come into the country and find buyers.

Now we have the "War on Terror". Some think it is succeeding: "We will keep the enemy on the run." (George W. Bush, October 19, 2006) Unfortunately, he thinks the enemy is in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is global and growing larger. In fact, the war in Iraq probably helped al Quaeda grow. See "Al Qaeda Strikes Back", Bruce Reidel, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007.

With the military already stretched thin, Bush is giving hints that he would like to attack Iran. Riedel writes that al Qaeda would like to see Bush attack Iran. Consider that the Iranian weapons found in Iraq may have been smuggled in by al Qaeda with the hope of proking the U.S. to attack Iran.

Would the U.S. leaving Iraq strengthen the terrorists' position or weaken it? If the U.S. leaves, Iran may come in to protect the Shia majority against the Sunni insurgents and the Sunni-based al Qaeda. A good general often lets somebody else do the fighting.

Astute analysis or lucky guess?

As the fiasco of the fired District Attorney unfolds and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales comes under increasing criticism from Republican Senators, I wonder if I was making a good prediction in my April Fool's column for the Reader Weekly, "Tomorrow's news you can use today" or just a lucky guess.

I started with the premise that Gonzales would resign rather than face a lot of questioning from the Senate or possible impeachment from the House. From there, the President's house of cards would collapse, leading to a surprise replacement for Bush.

I will say that the fruits of giving more allegiance to party than to the Constitution are starting to ripen.

Tectonic shift in politics coming?

Before I started writing blog entries today, I checked my friend Harry Welty's blog, http://www.lincolndemocrat.org

He had an interesting link to Andrew Sullivan's blog entry on "Why we went to war".

I thanked Harry for posting the link and replied:

Thanks for posting the link to “Why We Went to War”. I’ve long suspected that it was more “projection of power” than real defense. However, if it had been executed properly it might have worked. But then ideologues have an unrealistic view of their own capabilities. I think about Carl Becker’s assertion that Lincoln went to war not so much to quell a rebellion or to abolish slavery but to keep the power of the whole United States against depradations on a splintered America by European powers. See, “The United States: An Experiment in Democracy”. Sorry, I don’t have a page number.

I had also emailed him a link to David Brooks' column "No U-Turns", New York Times, March 29, 2007. Brooks said that the political environment is not for the rugged individualism of Goldwater and Reagan. He called it the "Liberty vs. Power paradigm". He wrote that the new paradigm is "security leads to freedom".

I sort of agree that Goldwater and Reagan aren't the future of the GOP but its a mystery to me how the party can recover from Bush,Cheney, Rove, Dobson and company.

I replied:

I think the only hope for politics is some new, grand coalition like I suggested in my April Fool Reader article. It doesn’t have to be Olympia Snowe, but somebody of stature who works on governance rather than power and posturing. Maybe Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas or Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. The latter can’t become President under the current rules, but he could be an enabler.

I did send webforms to Snow, Sebelius, and Schwazenegger with the link to my article and the hope that they would continue their work on the common ground.

Has George Bush made you safer?

We were considering a trip to visit friends and relatives in Cleveland, southeast Pennsylvania, the Washington DC area, and Arkansas, with stops at a few other places of interest in the South.

After reading Frank Rich's column on the Al Qaeda threat of a nuclear attack (New York Times, February 25, 2007), we have reconsidered our decision. We don't want to be anywhere near New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, or New Orleans, all potential targets because commerce, government, or shipping.

We, as a nation, have gotten ourselves into this mess because we elect politicians more on personality than substance, because we fall into the trap of wanting to be "strong on defense", and because we totally ignore diplomacy. How could diplomacy stop Al Qaeda? It won't directly, but it sure would garner us more allies and their resources to find and capture criminals like Al Qaeda.

Bush completely blew the struggle against the likes of Al Qaeda with his misdirected war in Iraq which increased the size of "The Enemy" without a commensurate increase in the size of "Our Allies".

Is there anything in Bush's malfeasance that is a high crime or misdemeanor that would be grounds for impeachment? We can't replace him with Cheney either. That leaves Nancy Pelosi, but I don't have any confidence in politicians who practice partisan politics rather than governance and statecraft.