Hi. I am French-Canadian-Italian American. I live in the melting pot, where every color blends to enrich the collective tapestry. But color still seems to stain the individual.
Barack Obama is a living example of American color-sensitivity. We always believed that someday a black man would be elected President and that that occurrence would enforce our lauded ideals of equality. That black man just had to be one of the brightest men in his generation with a top-notch campaign team, following on the administration of one who may be easily be one of the farthest below average intellects to be found among the white elite class with the irony found only in real life. Oh, and Obama's blackness is first-generation African American, not the blackness of the descendants of people who carried the shame of slavery. That stain will remain through centuries, it seems. (Sorry, Jesse Jackson.)
French-Canadians and Italians, among emigrants of many other nationalities, flooded into America in the early 20th century. They lived in cultural enclaves which nurtured their entry into a new society. Many of them did jobs that native-borns didn't want; they were poorly paid. Though they probably did not suffer the inequalities of being black in America, neither were they white. This country has been ruled by Anglo-Americans for most of its existence, and those of Mediterranean complexion or the Catholic faith were not accepted to that strata of seraphim. I am off-white.
There are so many colors of American (something the producers of American cheese don't seem to have realized). These past few years I have listened to American accents fall from the lips of brown-skinned people from countries new to American emigration, and felt a tiny thrill that these people are American, new threads in a fading tapestry. Their blood will invigorate a breed which has seen many generations of close intermingling.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Hammer of the Infants
Without doing any research other than what I've heard on NPR all week, this is the basic information I would like to comment on: Henry Paulsen and Timothy Geitner have between them given AIG $170 billion from Treasury; the employment contracts of a number of AIG employees include year-end bonuses totaling something like $164 million; these contracts are bound by law to be completed; some of these employees work in the Financial Products division that wrote the innovative policies which lost so much money for the company after the recent downturn in the housing market; one thousand millions is equal to one billion. After a few calculations, I find that AIG is paying out .0968%, or roughly .1% of the money it received from the federal government in employee bonuses.
Now, I'm not sure if Congress has yet passed a bill discussed this week taxing 90% of the bonuses of a select group of people, but there certainly seems to be widespread support for such a bill, judging from the wrathful geyser of threats and "suggestions" from members of Congress that the employees in question hang themselves, fall on their swords, etc. Instead of questioning where the majority of the bailout money ($350 billion+) has gone to, our elected and constantly-vying-for-re-election Congress has decided to focus its attention on a speck of dust on the foot of the elephant which threatens to uproot the national economy. They will pursue the question of whether this despoilment is removed with all the tenacity of people who are used to spending unimaginable quantities of other people's money, some of whom are not yet born, and then congratulating themselves for their own swift and decisive actions on national television.
Do you think this is what the people we like to call our forefathers envisioned as they dumped bales of British tea into Boston Harbor? Were they not protesting their own victimization at the hands of a monarch determined to make a select segment of his subjects pay for the actions of the state, i.e. the recent war with the French? What strange irony that this nation, in what we like to think of as its ripe maturity, will become the taxing tyrant we once despised.
This uproar is as rich as the one a few months ago when the heads of American auto flew to Washington in their corporate jets. Since they fly everywhere else in their corporate jets, and have done so for years unquestioned, Congressional outrage at their doing so during a financial crisis seems trivial. No one wanted to address the issue of whether the auto companies were too large, too powerful, too wasteful, until it came to their symbolic use of corporate jets. It seems to me that if Congress has a problem with the way things are done in Detroit, that body certainly has some dictatorial power these days to change those things. I wonder if it will.
When did our Congress become the last and highest court of all things American? I thought we already had one of those, proscribed in the constitution. To my chagrin, I find that the forefathers aforementioned included in that document a power of Congress "to constitute tribunals inferior to the supreme Court", so I guess that gives Congress the leeway to interrogate suspected Communists and regulate Terry Schiavo's machine-assisted life, among a multitude of other things they choose to involve themselves in.
Now, I'm not sure if Congress has yet passed a bill discussed this week taxing 90% of the bonuses of a select group of people, but there certainly seems to be widespread support for such a bill, judging from the wrathful geyser of threats and "suggestions" from members of Congress that the employees in question hang themselves, fall on their swords, etc. Instead of questioning where the majority of the bailout money ($350 billion+) has gone to, our elected and constantly-vying-for-re-election Congress has decided to focus its attention on a speck of dust on the foot of the elephant which threatens to uproot the national economy. They will pursue the question of whether this despoilment is removed with all the tenacity of people who are used to spending unimaginable quantities of other people's money, some of whom are not yet born, and then congratulating themselves for their own swift and decisive actions on national television.
Do you think this is what the people we like to call our forefathers envisioned as they dumped bales of British tea into Boston Harbor? Were they not protesting their own victimization at the hands of a monarch determined to make a select segment of his subjects pay for the actions of the state, i.e. the recent war with the French? What strange irony that this nation, in what we like to think of as its ripe maturity, will become the taxing tyrant we once despised.
This uproar is as rich as the one a few months ago when the heads of American auto flew to Washington in their corporate jets. Since they fly everywhere else in their corporate jets, and have done so for years unquestioned, Congressional outrage at their doing so during a financial crisis seems trivial. No one wanted to address the issue of whether the auto companies were too large, too powerful, too wasteful, until it came to their symbolic use of corporate jets. It seems to me that if Congress has a problem with the way things are done in Detroit, that body certainly has some dictatorial power these days to change those things. I wonder if it will.
When did our Congress become the last and highest court of all things American? I thought we already had one of those, proscribed in the constitution. To my chagrin, I find that the forefathers aforementioned included in that document a power of Congress "to constitute tribunals inferior to the supreme Court", so I guess that gives Congress the leeway to interrogate suspected Communists and regulate Terry Schiavo's machine-assisted life, among a multitude of other things they choose to involve themselves in.
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