Master of the Senate

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I’m about halfway through Master of the Senate, part three of Robert Caro’s wonderful, epic biography of Lyndon Johnson. Caro’s been writing this biography for more than 30 years, ever since he finished The Power Broker (which itself is one of the best American biographies ever written). The first part came out in 1982, the second in 1990, the third in 2002, and the fourth and final volume, covering Johnson’s vice-presidency and presidency, will supposedly come out in 2012 or 2013, but who knows.

Master of the Senate, covering Johnson’s twelve years as a U.S. senator, is terrific. The first 100 pages are a wonderful capsule history of the United States Senate and tell you everything you need to know about why health care reform has had such a rough time this past year. In part, that’s why I finally decided to start reading the book last month. I’d been meaning to do so for years, and during the week before Christmas I spotted it in a bookstore and decided that given everything going on, now was an appropriate time to pick it up.

As Caro points out, the Senate was meant to be undemocratic. The Framers preached representative government, but they were wary of the masses. The Senate would serve to cool the popular passions and allow for deliberation and debate, unlike the rambunctious House. The Framers accomplished this in part by making the Senate an undemocratically apportioned body, where every state gets two senators no matter how big the state’s population. (This was also a compromise to get the South to hop on board, of course.) They also created a small number of senators, as opposed to the crowded House of Representatives: with only two senators per state, every member of the Senate is important.

And they granted senators six-year terms, longer than presidents or congressmen would get.

And there’s a very important point about those six-year terms: the Constitution provides that those terms are staggered. This is a subtle but powerful characteristic of the Senate that we often forget. Caro quotes a scholar:

It was so arranged that while the House of Representatives would be subject to total overturn every two years, and the Presidency every four, the Senate, as a Senate, could never be repudiated. It was fixed, through the staggered-term principle, so that only a third of the total membership would be up for re-election every two years. It is therefore literally not possible for the voters ever to get at anything approaching a majority of the members of the Institution at any one time.

I think this observation is brilliant.

Grafted onto this original undemocratic structure were certain rules and traditions, such as unlimited debate; its cousin, the filibuster; and seniority. And don’t forget that until the early 20th century, senators were chosen not by the public but by state legislatures. And because we elected a president indirectly through the electoral college, the only body that was directly elected by the people was the House of Representatives.

I read part of Caro’s first book about LBJ, The Path to Power, a few years ago, but for some reason after about 250 pages I put it down and never got back to it. Master of the Senate stands on its own, though; you don’t need to read the first two volumes to get into it, because Caro summarizes Johnson’s life up to then.

Caro on Johnson is alternately exciting and frustrating and maddening. LBJ comes off as a master tactician — you can’t help but be awed by his audacity and brilliance in achieving power — but he also comes off as a Machiavellian asshole who is willing to ruin the careers (and lives) of perfectly innocent men in order to get where he wants to be. I don’t really enjoy reading about people who aren’t likable, so it’s depressing at times. But if you have any interest in 20th century American history, or any interest in politics at all, this is an amazing book.

Global Competitiveness?

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This op-ed about American decline by the Times’s token conservative, Ross Douthat, bothers me — particularly this part:

[I]nstead of seeking a new post-Reagan consensus, the Obama Democrats are returning to their party’s long-running pursuit of European-style social democracy — by micromanaging industry, pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs, and binding the economy in a web of new taxes and regulations.

These policies may help smooth over the inequalities that have opened in our national life since the 1970s. But they threaten to cost America its position in the world along the way.

Social democracy has its benefits, but global competitiveness isn’t one of them.

Is he seriously arguing that America’s “position in the world,” its “global competitiveness,” is more important than the well-being of our citizens? Pundits are always saying that it’s deathly important that we not let other countries get ahead of us, without explaining why we should care. Is it really so crucial that we be Number One in the world? What’s wrong with just being happy?

Why do these people have to make everything a competition?

I seriously wonder whether I’m missing something, because I just don’t get it.

Sadness

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I don’t know whether I’m more susceptible to sadness than other people or whether I just don’t deal with sadness well when it happens. Either way, I always find this to be one of the saddest times of the year. It’s not just that I’m back at work after taking off the week of Christmas and New Year’s. It’s that the entire holiday season has ended. Most of November and December is filled with with Christmas lights, and holiday music, and holiday parties, and then suddenly… it’s January and it all disappears. I’ve always wondered why people have to take down their Christmas lights and decorations right when we’re entering the depths and darkness of winter. It makes it so much worse.

What made yesterday even harder was that I was tired all day. On Saturday night I had a little gathering to belatedly celebrate my birthday, which was nice and cozy — a small group of us sitting at a banquette in a bar. But for some reason I slept horribly when we got home. I tossed and turned all night. So yesterday I was not only depressed but also exhausted. We didn’t do much in the afternoon, and then I took a nap around 4:00, and when I woke up it was dark out. And it was about 19 degrees outside. I felt like I had wasted the last day of my vacation.

I salvaged the evening a bit. I took a shower and got dressed and went out for a quick walk up Broadway to try and shake off the melancholy and torpor, stopping briefly in a small bookstore and then picking up a few groceries on the way home. Then Matt and I ordered in dinner and watched some Sunday night TV together; Fox’s Sunday night animation lineup is always good for some laughs.

I’m still very sleepy today, which is bringing me down. But I’m trying to remember to focus on the present instead of mourning the past or worrying about the future, and to feel gratitude for good experiences. For instance, the five days we spent with Matt’s family in the Chattanooga exurbs last week were really lovely and relaxing, especially the day we visited Lookout Mountain and Signal Mountain and the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel. I know that the future, too, contains good experiences that I can’t foresee, and I will try to appreciate them when they happen, and to be thankful for them.

When I was 18, my family visited Israel. At the Western Wall in Jerusalem, it’s customary to write a prayer on a piece of paper and stick it in the cracks of the wall. Before we went to the wall, I ripped a page out of my diary — which was my own special and sacred book — and wrote a short note to God. Instead of asking for something specific, I just asked for happiness. What I have always wanted more than anything in the world is just to be happy.

My New Year’s resolution for 2010 is to try to be happier, even in moments of sadness.

Happy New Year

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Happy 2010!

I don’t have much to say today. I just wanted to make a blog post with today’s date on it.

I’m not sure whether I’m going to call 2010 “twenty-ten” or “two thousand ten.” I prefer the former, but I have to get used to it. Of course, some people have their opinions.

And even if it doesn’t take hold next year, I think it will in the next couple of years. And I wonder: once people get used to saying “twenty-thirteen” and “twenty-twenty-one” and so on, will they start referring to the years of the decade just ended in the same way? Will they start referring to 2001 as “twenty-oh-one,” and so on? And when they watch news reports of people referring to it as “two thousand one,” will that sound quaint?

By the way, are we in the teens now? Or the tens? Or the tweens? I think we’re in the “twenty-tens” (2010s) but also in the teens.

See, everyone was so focused on the first decade of the millennium that they forgot to think about the second decade.

Anyway — happy 2010.

End of the Decade

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So today is the last day of the decade. Today is December 31, 2009.

I was looking at my old diaries this morning. I’ve kept a diary on and off since I was 13, and I wrote diary entries at the end of the last two decades:

And now I’m ending this decade with a blog entry.

It’s weird to think that this is the tenth anniversary of the turn of the millennium. We’re already ten years into the new century. An entire decade of kids has grown up without that lifelong anticipation of the millennium that we all felt when we were growing up. They have always lived in the 21st century. It’s nothing special to them. We are really living in the future now.

Think back ten years ago today. December 31, 1999. Wasn’t that the creepiest date ever? Growing up, December 31, 1999 was always the date in science fiction movies when the world ended, when scary prophecies came true. On December 31, 1999, the sky was supposed to turn red and the oceans were supposed to boil and the giant bird-monsters from hell were supposed to come and take us away.

What happened instead? It was just another day. The sun rose like it always did, and the laws of physics did not crumble. I woke up in the apartment where I was living in Princeton, New Jersey, and watched TV much of the morning and afternoon. The news was reporting Boris Yeltsin’s surprise resignation, putting Vladimir Putin in charge of Russia. Peter Jennings, R.I.P., was hosting the millennium festivities on ABC in a 23-hour marathon. I didn’t have many friends at the time — I had just moved back to the NY/NJ area from Virginia a few months before — so in the evening I drove to my parents’ house, where my parents threw a New Year’s Eve dinner party. At midnight we all stood around the TV and watched the ecstatic mayhem in Times Square. I couldn’t believe it: It’s the year 2000. We are living in the year 2000.

Ten years have gone by since that night. And they have flown by way too quickly for me.

I was too young to appreciate the end of the 1970s. As for the 1980s, they were the decade I grew up — from kindergarten through high school. The 1990s: they were high school, college, law school, the beginnings of adult life — but mostly the University of Virginia.

What have the 2000s been?

For me the 2000s have been about New York, and about Matt. Matt and I met in late 2003 and have been together ever since. In 2000 I moved to Jersey City and began developing my Manhattan social life, and in the middle of the decade I finally moved here. In the future, when I think about a typical moment of my life back in the aughts, I will probably picture me and Matt, perhaps on a night in 2005, eating dinner together in front of the TV, back in our old apartment on West 8th Street. Perhaps we’re watching “Lost.” An image of domestic coziness.

In the 2000s I’ve had my blog. (So have a lot of us.)

In the 2000s I’ve worked for a family friend, then had a one-year law clerkship, then worked as a lawyer for the state of New Jersey for several years, then gone to work in my current job.

I have spent the 2000s paying off my student loan. My first payment was due in December 1999, and I am getting close to paying it off completely.

My last three living grandparents died in the last decade. (My dad’s parents both lived into their 90s, which gives me hope for my genes.) My family has also seen a new generation born: I became an uncle last month, and my niece could live to see the turn of the next century.

A decade ago I wrote the following:

A new decade lies ahead — the 00’s — and what will my life be like on December 31, 2009? What will I go through, learn, achieve, who will I meet, where will I go by the time I’m 36? I’ll see. I hope it doesn’t come too soon. It’s 3653 days away.

I haven’t achieved as much as I thought. In fact, I don’t feel like I’ve achieved much of anything at all. I haven’t written any books, I don’t seem to be moving along any sort of trajectory or career path. I do read a lot, but I don’t do anything with what I read. In many ways I feel like I’ve wasted the last ten years, and that scares me, because what if another decade goes by and I’m saying the same thing?

On the other hand, I’m in a loving relationship — it’s not perfect, but we have a lot of love — and I’m financially more secure than I was ten years ago. I’m not rich and we don’t own property, but ten years ago I had that daunting student loan ahead of me and I was working two jobs despite having finished law school.

So on balance I’m better off than I was.

And so another decade is over, its memories calcified as The Past. Events fixed, unchangeable, only to be thought about, talked about, read about, perhaps one day virtually experienced on a holodeck. The 2000s are History.

I wonder what the world will be like on December 31, 2019?

I guess we’ll find out in ten years.

And so we keep going.

Thirty-Six

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Today’s my birthday.

I’m celebrating it in the suburbs of Chattanooga, Tennessee. We’ve been visiting Matt’s parents here for the last few days. This is the first birthday I have ever spent in Tennessee, and I think that’s kind of cool — birthdays tend to run together year after year, so when you vary the routine a bit, it makes things more memorable.

I’m 36, and I wouldn’t say I’m thrilled about that. But there’s nothing I can do about it, really, except forget how old I am. Someone in my chorus was surprised a few months ago to find out how old I was. He’d thought I was about his age, which was 25. God bless him. May my youthful looks long continue.

Maybe it comes from eating a lot of oatmeal. Or maybe shorter people look younger. Or maybe I just act immature?

Anyway, 36 is a multi-factorial year (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, 36), so today I can divide up my life in numerous ways. Fourths, sixths, twelfths, et cetera.

If getting older is no fun, at least I can always console myself with math.

2009 in Books

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For the last few years I’ve been keeping a list of the books I read. (Here’s last year’s list.) What strikes me about 2009 is the number of just plain big books I’ve read. In the winter was The President’s House: A History, by William Seale. In the spring there was Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, by Rick Perlstein. In the summer, inspired by the anniversary of Apollo 11, I read This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, by William E. Burrows. And in the fall I read Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson.

By far, my favorite book this year was The President’s House. I have rarely become so immersed in a book as I did in this one. In two volumes, it’s an incredibly leisurely stroll through 200 years of White House history, from the building of the house up through the present day. Along the way you meet all the presidential families who have lived there, and some of their long-serving aides. You live through weddings, deaths, funeral processions, wars. You experience the fire set by the British in 1814, the Lincolns’ life during the Civil War, the installation of gas lamps and then electricity, the utter reimagining of the house by Theodore Roosevelt, the creation of the West and East Wings and the Oval Office, the destruction of the Oval Office by fire in 1929 and its rebuilding, the complete gutting of the White House by Harry Truman so that a steel skeleton could replace the crumbling infrastructure and the two sub-basements could be added, and the postwar decades. The book is a presidential history, a social and cultural history, and an architectural history. It was a very special reading experience for me and I was sad when it ended. I feel like I know the White House much more intimately than I ever did. I fantasize about taking up residence in one of the several bedroom suites on the third floor (which you can’t really see from the outside, since it’s hidden by the parapets), hanging out up there in the solarium or the music room on a snowy day.

Anyway, here’s the complete list of books I’ve read this year, in chronological order:

The President’s House: A History, William Seale (2 vols.)

On Being a Therapist, Jeffrey A. Kottler

The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem (started)

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein

Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, David Greenberg

Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, Will Bunch

Reagan’s Disciple: George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy, Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon

Sandra Day O’Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice, Joan Biskupic

The American Supreme Court, Robert G. McCloskey (started)

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, William E. Burrows

The Fabric of the Heavens: The Development of Astronomy and Dynamics, Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, Peter Watson

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, David D. Burns

Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Vincent Bugliosi

Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Vincent Bugliosi (a third of it)

The Man Who Folded Himself, David Gerrold

Here’s to more happy reading in 2010.

Health Care

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Health care reform has me dejected, but this bill needs to pass. We can’t “kill the bill.”

I’m annoyed at Obama for not risking political capital to fight for what he believes in. More importantly, I have nothing but contempt for Harry Reid. I blame Reid for this fiasco more than Obama. If not for this ridiculous notion that any bill needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, we would have a much better health care bill today. The idea that Democrats are being allowed to threaten to filibuster their own party’s legislation is absurd. Are you kidding me? The way I see it: you want to filibuster your own party’s legislation? You want to pull that kind of shit? Fine, then you’re getting stripped of all your committee chairmanships and any other special perks you get from being a member of the majority party. I’d rather have 53 Democratic senators led by the ass-kicking Lyndon Johnson than a 60-member majority led by Harry Reid, that milquetoast fuckwad. Any time Reid opens his mouth I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him awake. He practically whispers in front of the microphone. He barely looks at the camera. He’d lose a fight against a ham sandwich. You could run him over with a tricycle. The guy has less charisma than John Kerry. He has negative charisma.

Fortunately, he’s up for re-election next year and he’ll probably lose. Since it’s unlikely the Democrats will lose their majority next year, we’ll probably have a new Democratic majority leader in the next Congress. But by that point it will be too late to put together a better health care plan.

Which is why, as disappointed I am in the Senate bill as it now stands, I’m more annoyed with people on the left who say we need to “kill the bill.” If we don’t pass a bill now, we won’t have this chance for another 15-20 years. And there are some great things in this bill. For starters, under this bill, 30 million more Americans will have health insurance. Some people on the left are saying that because there’s no public option, it will be a windfall to the insurance companies. Um, no it won’t. In return for being paid premiums, the insurance companies will have to provide health insurance to people. It seems like many lefties aren’t thinking clearly — they’re beholden to the notion that anything corporate is evil, that health insurance companies are the spawn of hell. They’re more interested in punishing insurance companies than in helping millions of Americans get health insurance. They think that if insurance companies benefit, that must mean that everyone else loses. But be real. Just because you hate insurance companies, doesn’t mean they are evil. The world is not in line with your emotional reality. It’s really immature to see the world through the eyes of Michael Moore. I don’t like it when right-wingers see the world as black and white, and I don’t like it when left-wingers do so either.

It’s the Nader voters all over again.

Furthermore, one of the problems with our health insurance system is that lots of healthy people don’t buy insurance, meaning that the risk pool is smaller and somewhat skewed toward the unhealthy. A bigger risk pool is better, because it results in lower premiums for everyone. And the risk pools will increase by 30 million people.

Even if these numbers are off and it’s just 20 million more people with health insurance, that’s still phenomenal, and it’s the greatest progress in health care that we’ve had in more than 40 years.

I also read something that said under the current bill, insurance companies will be able to charge older people three times as much as younger people, and OMG how horrible that would be. Um, as opposed to now, when there is no limit on what they can charge?

So, yes, this bill could have been a lot better, and it’s Obama’s fault as well as Reid’s, as well as the fault of every senator who opposes a public option and a Medicare buy-in. (It’s also the Republicans’ fault, of course, but that goes without saying.)

But there’s lots of great stuff in this bill. It needs to pass. In the early 1970s, the Democrats scrapped a health care deal with Richard Nixon because it wasn’t good enough for them, and what did they get for it? Nothing.

If they don’t pass this bill now, there won’t be another chance for years.

Primal Scream Politics

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“It’s times like these when the difference between political activism and self-expression and primal scream therapy become really apparent. Politics isn’t easy. Political change isn’t easy. It includes tons of reverses and inevitably involves not getting a lot of what you wanted, at least not at first. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to agree on policy or priorities. People don’t agree on things. That’s life. But that’s different from cashing out of the process if you don’t get just what you want.”

— Josh Marshall

I’m really annoyed by people who say Obama is “just like Bush” or isn’t the leftist we elected. That’s an incredibly naive and simplistic view. First of all, Obama never put himself forth as a leftist. But more importantly, being president of the United States is really an impossible job. The public expects you to change the world with a wave of your hand, but the only real power the Constitution gives you is the power of persuasion. You have no concrete way to make Congress pass laws; you can only try and convince them to do it. (This list of presidential paradoxes is worth reading.) Granted, if you are talented enough a populist, you have more leverage, but even so, there’s no guarantee that this will work.

The Constitution discusses the Congress before it discusses the presidency. (Literally, Congress had to come first; the first act after the Constitution was ratified was for Americans to elect a Congress, because Washington couldn’t assume the presidency until after Congress had certified his election.) Not only that, but it divides Congress into two bodies. Not only that, but one of those bodies isn’t even apportioned democratically. So right off the bat, even if everything is working well, our system of government is constitutionally set up to make change difficult. Throw in the spineless Harry Reid, the incorrect notion that the Constitution requires a 60-vote majority to pass legislation, and the cult the Republican party has become, and it’s a miracle that health care legislation has gotten as far as it has.

The problem is that if Obama tries to explain this to the American people, he’ll come off looking weak, because we like our presidents to seem strong. (We invest the presidency with monarchical trappings: the White House, Air Force One, “Hail to the Chief.”)

If only he could argue that terrorists were trying to deny us single-payer health care.

Politics is not primal scream therapy. The last decade would have turned out much differently if a bunch of Florida Naderites had sucked it up and voted for Gore. And don’t even get me started on the teapartiers.

Politics isn’t about magic ponies. Don’t drop out of the process just because you don’t get what you want.

Folded Man

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I keep forgetting to blog about this, but a couple of weeks ago I read a very short novel about time travel called The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold, who wrote the famous Star Trek episode about Tribbles. It’s 115 pages and is one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever read. Time travel is my favorite sci-fi genre, and this one covers all the bases and touches on all the philosophical implications of traveling through time. All in 115 pages.

Oh, and the main character has sex with himself.

It’s worth reading if you like time travel.

Or extreme sexual narcissism.

Actually, the sex is very tastefully done, and, come on, you know you’ve thought about it.

NY Mag on the Aughts

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This week’s New York magazine is all about the aughts — the decade we’ll be leaving at the end of the month. Although the cover story is too over-written for my taste, I really enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s piece on TV in the aughts; it’s highly perceptive in acknowledging how TV was changed by the auteur, by the DVR, and by the phenomenon of watching TV shows on DVD. (And I’d forgotten how The West Wing transformed itself from late-Clintonian liberal wish-fulfillment into a full-fledged life raft during the Bush years.)

The essays about books and movies are also great. I need to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again. And did Best in Show really only come out in 2000? I’d thought it was a late ’90s film.

There’s also a piece about what life was like in 1999. How innocent we were.

Thank you, Bill Baroni

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I went to law school with Bill Baroni. He graduated a year or two ahead of me. He didn’t know me, but I knew who he was. He was nicknamed “mayor of the law school,” because he was apparently a nice guy who seemed to know everybody. He was from New Jersey, and everybody said he would go into politics.

He did. He got elected to the New Jersey Assembly, and then he got elected to the New Jersey Senate. And now he’s on the New Jersey Senate Judiciary Committee.

Last night, the Judiciary Committee approved a bill to allow marriage equality in New Jersey, which allows it go to the full New Jersey Senate on Thursday.

The committee passed the bill 7-6. One Republican voted for the bill. That Republican was Bill Baroni. Had he voted against the bill, it would have died.

Senate passage is by no means guaranteed, but it has passed a crucial step with Bill Baroni’s help. I want to thank him for doing what is right. And I hope some of his fellow Republicans in the senate do the same thing on Thursday.

More about Bill here.

Back to the Future Score Release

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I received a real treat in the mail yesterday.

As some of you might know, Back to the Future is my favorite movie of all time. I fell in love with it at first sight in the movie theater in the summer of 1985. I was 11 years old and I went to see it with my best friend, and I was so tense during the climactic clocktower scene near the end of the movie that I literally chewed my plastic soda straw in two.

The film has a terrific score by Alan Silvestri, but the soundtrack album that came out in 1985 contains only two tracks of that score: the theme and an “overture,” which consists of several cues strung together to give a dramatic overview of the movie. The rest of the tracks are pop songs from the movie, like “The Power of Love.” It’s a fun album, but fans have wanted a release of the complete score for years. A bootleg of much of the score has been around for a while, but it’s of inferior quality and some things are missing.

BTTF Intrada releaseAnd then a couple of weeks ago, out of the blue, Intrada Records, a company specializing in movie and TV soundtracks, announced that it was releasing the complete score of the movie, made from the multi-track scoring session masters held by Universal Studios. It’s a 2-CD release: the first disc is the complete score, and the second disc is an earlier version of the score before changes were made. I ordered my copy and it arrived yesterday. In addition to the discs, it has a 24-page booklet with information about the movie, the music, and the recording, as well as several photo stills from the film.

I listened to the first disc yesterday and I was in heaven. It’s been almost a 25-year wait, and I’m so happy to have this now. Thanks, Intrada!

On the Other Hand

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This all happened so fast. Until a few hours ago, I didn’t even expect the state senate to vote on marriage equality this session. And then I glanced at the NYTimes.com late this morning and saw the surprising news that they’d be voting today. All the marriage equality proponents have been arguing that no matter how the senate voted, it would be progress if they at least held a vote.

And that’s true. Holding a vote and losing is better than not holding a vote at all. (I think.) Now every senator is on record with a position on marriage rights, so we know whom to target next time. The senate has broken the taboo against voting on it. Progress comes in slow steps — sometimes agonizingly slow steps.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.