danajohnhill.org

Michael Jackson is dead tonight.

Nobody born after 1984 can appreciate how big a star he was.  No pop culture figure can ever match the Beatles and Elvis for sheer overwhelming fame.  But if you lived during the early 1980s, Michael Jackson was the star.  When I was little, every kid had Thriller, and listened to it over and over again.  A new Michael Jackson video on MTV generated tremendous interest.  Kids at my school wore leather jackets with tons of zippers and tried to moon walk.  He was ultra-famous.

But, of course, he could never duplicate the success of Thriller.  Even if he continued to sell well through the rest of the 1980s, everyone compared his later work to Thriller or Off the Wall, and the comparisons were never favorable.  Combine that with his increasingly erratic behavior and freakish appearance, and before long Michael Jackson seemed like a sad carnival act.  While he had once been the one everyone wanted to emulate, he wound up being tabloid fodder.  A lot of it he brought on himself.  Some of it may have been unfair.  But, by the mid-1990s you could have queried a hundred Americans and not found anyone who’d claim to be a Michael Jackson fan.  “Thriller was good”, they’d say, “but that guy’s messed up”.

We live in a different age.  Everything is incredibly segmented now.  There isn’t just one MTV anymore to claim the attention of the young.  The 1980s saw the rise of some remarkable superstars, but the conditions that created those stars don’t exist any more.  Set aside the sham marriages, plastic surgery, baby-dangling, accusations of molestation, and all the other bizarre and disturbing behavior and rumors, and think back to the years 1983-1985.  There was nobody bigger than Michael Jackson.  And no athlete, movie star or singer will probably ever be that famous again.

Robert Kagan has a column in the Washington Post today criticizing President Obama for not publicly encouraging the supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who have been in the streets of Tehran for days now, protesting the results of the (almost certainly rigged) recent election.  Kagan argues that Obama’s Iran strategy, which, in stark contrast to Bush’s policy, involves direct talks with the government there, means that the president wants the protesters to give up, and for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to simply be acknowledged as the winner, fraud or no fraud.

This is patently absurd.  I can almost guarantee you that the Obama administration would have very much preferred a Mousavi victory.  But what good would it do to trumpet that preference at this point?  None.  The United States has no ability whatever to demand a recount or a do-over.  And to officially declare that Ahmadinejad is a cheater will only make things worse for us if the forces within Iran–the only ones who can do anything to change this–do not succeed in overturning the sham election.  What chance would we have to discourage the pursuit of nuclear weapons by Iran if their president thinks we’re against him personally.

As always, an argument as foolish as Kagan’s comes complete with an intentional misinterpretation of history:

Supporters of President Obama, who until very recently had railed against the Bush administration’s “freedom agenda” and who insisted on a new “realism,” have suddenly found themselves rooting for freedom and democracy in Iran.

Supporters of President Obama–let’s say liberals in general–didn’t ever oppose “freedom and democracy”.  They opposed the military invasion of a sovereign nation that had no weapons of mass destruction or connection to 9/11 at a time we were fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and could not afford to redirect those resources.

Liberals are not contradicting themselves as Kagan would like you to believe.  He’s lying, and I’m sure he knows it.  In any case, I shouldn’t expect any better from the man who co-founded the Project for the New American Century, and who pals around with Bill Kristol.

When we bought this house in 2005, we also began procuring the tools and paraphernalia associated with home ownership and gardening.  Among these were loppers, shears, and pruners.  I remember being very particular about what I bought.  I wanted tools that were manufactured in the United States.  I sometimes had to go out of my way to find them: Home Depot for the shears, Target for the pruners, Wal-Mart for the rake, George’s Hardware for the machete.  But, in the end, I got all American-made tools.

I was in Lowe’s last weekend, and on my way through the garden department I came across a display of Fiskars tools.  They made my loppers, pruners, and shears.  If I had considered adding more Fiskars equipment to my collection, I won’t anymore: all their products are now made in China.  Just to check and make sure I wasn’t mis-remembering what I bought, I went home to check.  Sure enough, each piece is stamped “Made in USA”.

This situation troubles me deeply.  It means that there was once a factory somewhere in the United States, where people like you or me were employed, where people had healthcare and retirement benefits, where people enjoyed company picnics and softball games.  One morning, a mid-level manager probably received a memo from the factory owner–who probably received a memo from Fiskars–stating that the plant was being shut-down so production could be moved off-shore, where labor costs a small fraction of what it does in America.  The mid-level manager probably went out on the floor that afternoon and told everyone that they’d better start looking for work somewhere else.  Some of the lucky ones may have found jobs quickly.  But I suspect many others didn’t, and shortly thereafter lost their health insurance, and maybe their cars and homes.  Their town, if it is small enough, sees some people move away, while the ones who stay have a lower standard of living.  Property values drop, and so does tax revenue.  Schools get worse, and the next generation has fewer opportunities to make something of themselves.  Crime goes up.  So does the divorce rate.

What is it worth to prevent this?  About $2.00, apparently.  That’s the difference between what I paid for my made in USA pruners and the ones now made in China.

The United States’ trade deficit is astonishing (something like $800 billion).  If you believe the Milton Friedman-types, all this is good, since it means the dollar is strong, and that consumers are able to buy more things at lower prices.  To the first point I respond: that’s nice when I travel overseas, but I’m not in the business of trading currency, and, even if I were, I wouldn’t be betting on the dollar, since we owe China trillions, and by any standard our CAB looks pretty bad.  As to the second point: low prices are nice, but what you don’t see printed on the price tag is what I wrote above – the death of manufacturing in America.

We can deceive ourselves into thinking that we have it good, when we go to Wal-Mart and find aisle after aisle of cheap, made in China merchandise.  But if things go on like this, there will come a day when retail, hospitality, and other service  jobs are the only thing left for people without a college degree.  The middle class will disappear.

On Fresh Air today (Memorial Day), Terry Gross replayed a March 3 interview with Donovan Campbell, who served two tours of duty in Iraq and another in Afghanistan.  He has written a book describing his experiences there, and on the show he read a bit from the book, and talked at length about what it was like to lead men in the difficult street fights that have been the hallmark of the war in Iraq.

What was immediately clear in the interview is how extraordinary Lieutenant Campbell is.  Not many people would leave Princeton to join the Marines.  Modest and amazingly articulate, he recounted the challenges he and his men faced, and, through the interview, it became quite evident that intelligence, sound judgment and a strong moral compass abound in this man.  On top of that, of course, is tremendous courage.

Knowing that men like Donovan Campbell exist–and have positions of responsibility–is reassuring.

I can, at last, declare unlibelously that Phil Spector has murdered both music and people.