Meltdowns financial and physical: does global warming cause human blindness?

It’s a tough world. It’s always been a tough world. It’s tough for the plants and animals whose DNA has them programmed to just survive and propagate – it is, quite literally (as well as figuratively) a jungle out there.  And for people? Biologically also animals, we are special. Not special in the religious way (created on the seventh day, for example, in the Judeo-Christian myth, or in any other creation myth). Not special in the pseudo-scientific model that has people as the final, ultimate, and perhaps inevitable, outcome of evolution. That story is put to rest very articulately by the late Stephen Jay Gould in his wonderful book, “A Full House”.

Gould disproves directionality in evolution, observing that evolution is a response to local conditions. The fossil record shows a moderately evolved species (say jellyfish) are just as likely to evolve to less complex as more complex in response to those conditions. “Man” is not the inevitable result of directional evolution, but a small branch – a very small twig – on the evolutionary tree. If the “big bang” were to occur again, the unique sequence of events that led to the evolution of man would be extraordinarily unlikely to be repeated. It is, Gould says, not the Age of Man, but rather the Age of Bacteria. And, in terms of biomass and ability to survive, it has always been the Age of Bacteria.

But people are special. Their massive brains and opposable thumbs have led them to achieve things no other species has approached. Not as strong or fast as many others, not able to fly like birds, with senses that are dull even compared to household pets, they have changed the face of the earth, and changed it in incredible, wonderful and scary ways. People are special.

One way that they are special is in their self-consciousness. We know we are going to die. Other animals see death, even see the death of their loved ones, but they don’t know that they are going to die. Maybe at the end, but they do not understand it and its inevitability the way that we do.

The other way we are special is in our ability – and our realization – of destroying the earth. Beyond clearing forests for fields, beyond paving over the land, beyond causing the extinction of other species, we have, through the very industries that we are proud of, poisoned the earth, polluted the earth, led to such warming that the polar ice caps are melting and the snows of Kilimanjaro are only a winter phenomenon. People act, essentially, as a cancer on the earth, feeding on it, growing, and finally destroying the host.

Yes, it’s always been a tough world, for people too. The pestilences and plagues, for time immemorial, that have killed huge parts of our population. The oppression of people by other people, by the rich and their minions from feudal times to the present, when armies exist at least as often to suppress domestic populations as to fight foreign enemies. And, of course, it is the poor of both countries who are slaughtered while the wealthy do business with each other.

It is not so long ago that the “Doomsday Clock”, maintained by the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was created in 1947 early in the cold war, and set at 7 minutes to midnight. Or when, in 2007, other threats such as climate change were added to the calculations which, in January 2012, had the time at 5 minutes to midnight. The threat of climate change grows, as rapacious people and the corporations they lead caused the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. It has continued to cause suffering, joblessness, and homelessness – and perhaps hopelessness – for huge numbers of people while those “masters of the universe” are well back on their feet, thank you.

So why do some many people support policies of repression and austerity? How can we have an entire major political party wedded to a “trickle down” that does not trickle? Probably these folks don’t think so much about such issues but are more focused on the social issues referred to by Thomas Frank (“What’s the matter with Kansas?”, 2004)  such as gay marriage and abortion, primacy of religion, of “freedom” meaning no restrictions on guns, meaning I am free to do whatever I want to do, including to restrict your freedom. This, of course, comes from fear. Fear of the truly powerful, sometimes, but guided by the powerful, through their control of media and their money, into fear of things that cannot as easily be controlled.

We could reverse Citizen’s United, and we could have public funding of elections. We could tax capital gains as income, and limit to exorbitant profits being made by the wealthy. We could have universal health care, and quality education for all, and guarantee the basic rights called for in the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights. It would not be so hard if there were the political will.

But it is harder to guarantee that no one will start a nuclear war just as we couldn’t stop the attacks on the World Trade Center. And it is really a lot harder to stop global warming. It is scary, with record warm winters and hot summers, of tornados in February and more fires in the summers every year. This, says environmental author and leader of www.350.org Bill McKibben, is what the global warming, in its early stages,looks like. (“While Colorado burns, Washington fiddles”, Guardian UK, June 30 2012).

Harder but not impossible. But harder every year. And harder as we focus on the economic crises brought on by the venality of the wealthiest and abetted by the politicians in their control. Maybe it is doomsday. Maybe it is the apocalypse. Maybe the turn to the right is an effort to blindly deny what we, not God, have wrought.

Warren Zevon, and the 7 Deadly Sins

Yesterday, sitting in our lake cabin with the wind blowing strongly (not “fiercely”, exactly; that is for winter!) outside, Pat decided to put on some music using “Pandora” on the computer. “What did I want to hear?” she asked. “The Warren Zevon channel,” I answered immediately, wondering if there was such a thing. Turns out she got one; as anyone who uses Pandora knows it wasn’t all Warren Zevon, but they do a good job of figuring out that if you like him, you’ll probably like some stuff from The Band, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Dire Straits. I did.

I like Warren Zevon’s music, and am sad that he died a number of years ago so that there will be no more. The stories about really bad people like “Excitable Boy”, “Werewolves of London” and “Mr. Bad Example”; the political/social/antiwar commentaries like “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”, “Leave My Monkey Alone”, “The Factory” and (combining both) “Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner”; the “feature story” commentaries like “Boom Boom Mancini”; the commentaries on the celebrity scene like “Even a Dog Can Shake Hands”, “Detox Mansion”, and the wonderful “Trouble Waiting to Happen”. And many, many others. I can’t figure which is my favorite (luckily there is no reason to choose), but I also really like the contrasting beautiful love songs: “Reconsider Me”, “El amor de mi vida”, and poignantly released after his death, “Keep Me in Your Heart for a While”. I admit that the last, posthumous, album, “The Wind”, is strongly tied for me to the death of my son Matt, which was less than a year before Zevon’s own, and its release.

One of the songs that they played was in fact “Mr. Bad Example”, and it stayed in my head all night; I woke thinking about it, in particular the “seven deadly sins” with which Mr. Example is “very well-acquainted”; he mentions “greed” and that he has “no time for sloth”, but doesn’t list them all, so I kept trying to think of them. I knew I knew them (Dante, for one source; also the film “Seven”) but could only get Pride, Envy, Lust, Wrath, Greed, and Sloth. I left out Gluttony because I had lumped in my mind with Greed; in fact it occurred to me that Greed as in Avarice should be a separate one from Gluttony, although they have much in common.

So I started thinking about the ones that weren’t there, like Hate and Fear. Heck, this is all Christian theology, about which I know little and am committed to none. Hate is a big one, and I’m not even begin to go into all the evil things that have come from or been motivated by Hate. Almost as many as by the religious beliefs of Those Who Know. I recently saw a comment from on a blog about abortion who shared with us “I think the Creator would not want us to kill one of his creations.” I really thank him for his opinion on what the Creator thinks – not. Who cares? Well, those who are harmed or killed by folks that Know. While I’m sure (or hope!) this guy is not going around killing people, committing acts of terrorism, conducting Crusades, those all come from that same Certainty.

OK, fear is not really a sin (as far as I know), but really a lot of the bad in the world – including a lot of Wrath and Envy and Lust, as well as Hate – arises from Fear, transformed by the magic (from sports, about which I know more) of “the best defense is a good offense.” Fear of the Other is pretty common among Those Who Know. As a society, we could use a little less fear, and have a lot less to fear. And less Hate, and less Wrath, and sure as heck less Pride and Greed.

One of Zevon’s many iconic songs, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”, is of course sadly ironic now. RIP Warren.

And Matt. We love you and miss you.

********************************************************

And, for those not so familiar with Zevon, here are the lyrics to the refrain from “El Amor”, kind of bittersweet (“if only I could meet you”) which I have as my ringtone when Pat calls:

Tu eres el amor de mi vida

Si solo te pudierá encontrar

Con todo el corazón te diriga

Tu eres mi amor, de verdad.

Confessions of an Opera Lightweight

The gorgeous new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts opened this year in Kansas City, and it is spectacular. Striking from the outside, it houses two concert halls, the Muriel Kauffman Auditorium and Helzberg Hall. It cements Kansas City’s position as at least a second-level cultural venue. The funding wa all private, and fortunately secured before the recession hit, or it never would have happened. This year, for its first season in Kauffman, the Lyric Opera planned a gala season. We renewed our season tickets, although for the same cost as our row 8 in the left orchestra in the old Lyric Theatre, we are now in the balcony of the Kauffman Auditorium, on the left. First row of the balcony, to be sure, but not as good as the second row would be; the guard rail which curves in front of us slices the left-hand third of the stage off unless you lean way forward.

For its first opera, the Lyric chose Puccini’s Turandot, mostly famous for the aria “Nessun Dorma”, popularized by Luciano Pavarotti. I have read and am told that it was grand grand opera, with elaborate expensive staging; quite the production. I had to read and be told about it because we were out of town that week, and gave our tickets away. The next opera was apparently a significant change, Mozart’s Cosi fan tutti, in a modern setting. Unfortunately, despite Mozart’s music, we found the plot thin; indeed, found it kind of boring, and left after the first act. 0.5 for 2.

For its third opera, the Lyric did a new version of John Adams’ 1987 opera Nixon in China. If you have never heard of it (as I hadn’t) you might think “Really? They make operas about that? I thought they were all old and in Italian!” Well, no. Some are new, and some are in English. As well as in German (like some Mozart – not Cosi or the wonderful Don Giovanni which are in Italian, but like the tremendously fun Magic Flute), French (Carmen) and other languages. Nixon is grand. And the music is impressive. But not to my taste. Kind of atonal. Like a lot (but not all) modern opera. I didn’t enjoy it, though I was able to appreciate that the music was impressive.

For me, kind of like Wagner. Grand, impressive music that might be fine to listen to in a concert if you like that sort of thing, but not exactly melodic. I like melodies. I like Italian opera – Verdi, Puccini, especially. When we used to live in Evanston there was a coffeehouse called “The Verdi and Puccini Opera Café” because the owner was also a fan. It was fun; a limited menu, but great pastries, and the waitstaff were all voice students from Northwestern. Every hour or so, they’d roll out a piano and two or three of them would sing, an aria or two each. Sometimes a duet. Not only Verdi and Puccini, but pretty much melodic songs. Not a Wagner in the bunch, nor any Schubert lieder or other art songs (which I also do not like); I assume the “art” is in the challenge to the singer, and I am equally sure that there are many people, maybe even some who are not music experts, who enjoy listening to them, but I am not one. I mean, I do like opera; we have had subscriptions to the Chicago Lyric when we lived there and to the Austin Opera when we lived in San Antonio (San Antonio didn’t have an opera company, but I liked to say we had season tickets to it – which meant we went to the one performance each year done by the New York City Opera traveling company!)

I don’t mean to be hard to please, but we also left after the first act of Nixon. Despite the fact that the plot involved real events that actually happened in my lifetime and the characters were real people (Nixon, Pat Nixon, Kissinger, Mao, Zhou Enlai) the plot was just as boring as a lot of the old operas that are about myths, heros, kings, and other stuff. I am a fan of democracy and regular people, so the Greek model of making stories about larger-than-life heros puts me off; however, I am willing to put up with operas about these kings and dukes and  if I like the melodic arias. Not, however, Wagner, and not Nixon.  This will not make my “fave” list of American operas in English, which, by the way, do exist. There are even many that are not atonal and are melodic and fun; Bernstein’s, for example, especially Candide. And Kurt Weill’s Down in the Valley, another one about regular people. Or Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

I might have like the spectacle of Turandot if we had been able to see it; I did like the spectacle of Aïda (Verdi) when they did it a couple of years ago, and it is Puccini. However, it is one of my least favorite Puccini, and it is about kings and princesses and heroes. The opera I really like most, mostly because it is just full of lovely melodies but also because it is about regular people, is La Boheme (Puccini). Once we even saw it done at Northwestern, and it was really fun because it was the only time I saw it when the singers were about the actual ages of the characters they were portraying.

So I am looking forward to the last opera of the season, which will be XX. More melody, I expect. And, while I like Verdi, especially La Traviata, and Mozart, especially Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro and I like Puccini, the fact is that Madama Butterfly is getting old, and Turandot is mostly boring. And most of them are about heroes and kings and dukes.

Maybe I should just stick to La Boheme.

Spring in Kansas City: Really nice, but what does it mean long term?

“It’s February, and spring has finally come to San Antonio.”

Reading these words in the Sierra Club newsletter in 1997, during a March (it came a month late) in which spring had definitely not yet come to Chicago, we had to laugh. Although we found, when we moved to San Antonio that year, that spring not only came in February, but that it was not always clear that there was a winter between fall and spring. The trees had not yet finished losing their leaves when the new buds appeared. Spring, in whatever month, is a great season, and we enjoyed it in San Antonio as we looked forward, with less than excitement, to May, when temperatures would start to hit 90, or June when they went to 100, not likely to come persistently below until October. Still, we thought, better than a Chicago winter.

But what are we to make of this year in Kansas City? Kansas City is never as cold in the winter as Chicago, but this year it is San Antonio. We have had hardly any weeks this winter where the temperature didn’t go above 40 at least some of the time, and much of it has been above 50. For the last few weeks it has been above 60, and this week 3 days of over 80. And this was before St. Patrick’s Day! Everything is in bloom: magnolias are already losing their flowers; the fruit trees such as apple and especially the Bradford pears are in magnificent bloom. There are daffodils all over, and the little groundcover wildflowers, the clover and violets, are all visible. It is March, and spring has come full-bore to Kansas City. The beautiful redbuds that mean “spring” in this city are already in bloom.

 We just hope there is no freeze, to wipe it out. In Chicago sometimes there would be a few warm days in April, followed by a frost that killed all the buds, and Kansas City is certainly known to have its share of ice storms. Still, this is not a freakish few warm days; this is the reasonable follow-up to a winter that normally belongs several climate zones south of here.

And that, of course, is a concern. I am not complaining about not having had a chance to use the new snow boots I bought on sale in Winter Park, CO, last summer, nor to be without icy winds in my face. Winds, on the other hand, we have; it is Kansas. The days of 40 degrees felt frigid with the wind, and when it first was in the 60s, we went out lightly jacketed to freeze in the breeze. But with 80, it’s, well, 80, so you really need a gale to make it less than pleasant.

And gales we have had.  A couple of weeks ago there were dozens of tornadoes in the Southeast US. In February. There were some last year, but this year was worse. New York had major snowstorms, and there were hurricanes. There has hardly been a month without a big weather disaster. Yes, there are tornadoes and hurricanes and snowstorms every year, but for the last several years they are becoming more common more freakish, and more regular; so much so that the freakish is not so freakish anymore. But tell that to folks in Joplin, MO, or the smaller cities that have been devasted by tornadoes and other weather events.

Amazingly, there are still climate change deniers. Some have harped on the phrase “global warming” – which it is over the long term – when the weather change has led to colder weather with more snow in the winter. They can’t argue that what we have in Kansas City – and all over the Midwest, where the temperatures are higher, and planting zones have moved north (we brought crepe myrtles in pots from San Antonio 10 years ago; despite being uncommon then they survived the winter with good mulching and are now doing well; turns out they have become common in KC nurseries now).

So I look out the window at the flowering trees, rub my eyes from early tree allergies, enjoy the warmth, and worry about the future of the planet.

Woody, Arlo, and me

In 1967, when I was in college, I spent the summer working as a “gateman” at the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. There were 6 of us with this job description, and 2 of us worked days and 4 of us worked nights; we rotated doing 2 weeks of nights and then a week of days. Both had their perks. Nights, 4pm to (more or less) midnight, were less real work; we handed out the tickets to those people who lined up for them, let people out and back in at the intermission, and put up the seats in the outdoor theater at the end of the performance. Not too hard, and we got to watch the plays – many times. I saw, for example (not all in ’67, I worked there ’68 as well) young Sam Waterston as Prince Hal, Stacy Keach as both Falstaff and Peer Gynt, Martin Sheen as Romeo; some folks who were more famous in other arenas too.  Judy Collins as Anitra in Peer Gynt, and Tom Tryon, then an actor but later more well-known as a novelist, as someone (?Hotspur? Maybe not.)

The “perk” was being able to hold tickets for friends and relations to pick up at the box office without waiting in line. It was the first time that I ever had any such clout, and it felt good. I also felt a little conflicted; I liked the fact that people were supposed to line up for the free tickets, and approved of the fact that it rewarded folks with more time than money. After all, everything else rewarded more money. It still does, and I don’t think there are many other venues where the reverse is true anymore. But I could do favors for my parents, or friends who were working for not much and thus had little time or money. I was getting what seemed like good pay; $4/hour, which, in 1967 for a college student, was not at all bad. The minimum wage in NYC at that time was $1.50 (I looked it up!).

Which was the good part about working days. It was much harder work than nights, as the two of us had to clean up the theater. As an outdoor venue, there was a lot of trash and it was hard, dirty work. On the other hand, there was no supervisor and we got paid for 8 hours even when we finished in 3 or4. Of course, in those days folks could smoke in theaters (even indoor ones) so a lot of what we had to pick up was cigarette butts, and I noticed that folks smoking regular cigarettes (say, Camels, or Marlboros) would have several butts at their seats, while those smoking the relatively new “low tar” cigarettes seemed to smoke a pack or more. I was ready to do a commercial: “I pick up all the garbage at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and I find more ‘True’ cigarette butts than any other brand. So – be cultured! Smoke ‘True’!” The reality was, as I knew from trying them, that it was hard to draw any smoke through the complex ‘True’ filters, so probably folks got not satisfaction from them, which is why they smoked more of them.

Anyway, that summer my parents took a vacation in their motor home with my younger sisters and drove up to Provincetown on Cape Cod. I told them I’d hitchhike up for the weekend and did; take the “Number 6” train to the last stop, Pelham Parkway, climb the fence on to the New England Thruway, and stick out your thumb. I didn’t get rides as easily as my friends who were young women, but this time it worked well. And we had a good weekend, and my parents paid for me to fly back (Provincetown to Boston Airways up and down, good thing as the weather was terrible, then the Eastern Shuttle back to LaGuardia. And the Q-33 bus to Roosevelt-Jackson to get the subway).

While we were there, we saw that Arlo Guthrie was playing at a coffeehouse, so we decided to go see him. Arlo was at that time just Woody Guthrie’s son, and also the son of Marjorie Mazia, who my sister (I think) and certainly friends took dance lessons from. It was afternoon, and the coffeehouse wasn’t too crowded, and we sat there as this young man sang, in particular a long and complicated story-song (not too common back in ’67) that went on and on, involving a restaurant, garbage, an arrest, and a Selective Service induction physical (yes, Virginia, there was a draft and a war on at the time!). That fall, his first album was released with that song, “Alice’s Restaurant”, as the title track. (By the way, when we heard him he sang, referring to himself, "the All-American boy from Coney Island"; on the record it has "New York City".)

I thought about this last night when Pat and I attended the Woody Guthrie Centennial Concert in Tulsa, OK, where the new Woody Guthrie Museum will be housed, not far from his birthplace in Okemah. It was an excellent concert; Arlo performed, along with John Mellencamp, Roseanne Cash, Jackson Browne, and a bunch of groups I knew less well (some of them from Oklahoma, but apparently popular, like Flaming Lips and HANSON).  Arlo’s sister Nora, who has maintained the archives and organized the concert was there (but not performing), but his son and grandson did perform with him. Yes, that tall, stocking-capped guitarist was his grandson – and I think he is only a year older than me! Heck, my friend Stefanie went to his bar mitzvah! So I have seen Arlo early in his career, and late (hopefully not at the end, but at least as the grandfather of a full-grown adult musician!) Tempus fugit.

What was a little disappointing about the concert, in addition to the entirely white audience, was the ratio of male to female performers. I mentioned Roseanne Cash. That was it. Including supporting performers. She played with her guitarist husband John Leventhal, and every member of every band was male. I mean, it was sponsored by the GRAMMY Museum, so maybe not totally progressive, but it was a Woody Guthrie memorial, and this was pretty amazing. I bought a CD, not of the concert, but of songs that consist of lyrics that Woody wrote and different artists put music to and recorded, none as good as the whole ‘Mermaid Avenue’ CD by Billy Bragg and Wilco, and ONE is by a woman, Ani DiFranco. It is depressing that even when lauding a real progressive (a conference that we missed during the day yesterday included talks on Oklahoma’s “different shades of Red”, from being a populist “red” state to a Republican “red” state”) we see such a lack of female performers. On top of having seen the film “Miss Representation” recently (highly recommended) it is incredible that so little net gain seems to have occurred in the media in the 40 years of the “second wave of feminism”.

But the music was good, the exhibit currently at the Gilcrease Museum was excellent, and it was a fun, 4.5 hour drive each way to Tulsa, with a nice stay in a Courtyard by Marriott that is a converted office building downtown. Maybe we’ll go back again.

Tucson and the birds

I am sitting in my sister and brother-in-law’s living room in Tucson watching the birds. The south-facing wall is almost all glass, and faces a walled courtyard filled with trees and bird feeders. Most of the trees are sparse because it is winter, and some, like the mesquite, are desert plants with small leaves anyway. It makes it easy to see the birds that gather in it, some of which I can identify from my years here: the red-chested house finch, whose name always struck me as too plan for such a pretty bird, its yellow cousin the goldfinches, the mourning doves whose heads are too small for their bodies. There are also a variety of sparrows, hummingbirds, a Gila woodpecker rocking the hummingbird feeder to slosh the liquid so it can get at it, some Gambel’s quail (blue-ish, so prettier than many varieties, with a distinct hanging topknot) who manage to get far enough off the ground to walk on top of the wall and access the feeder from the mesquite branch that serves as a bridge, and the occasional phainopepla, pyrroluxia, or cardinal (Tucson is one of the few areas that have both cardinals and pyrroluxia).

In contrast to the stark mesquite, there is a mock orange tree in the corner, lushly covered in dark green leaves and gaudily decorated with the oranges. Mock oranges survive well in the desert, and are often used as ornamentals. When I lived here there was a real orange tree in my backyard, planted in a raised bed built from bricks about two feet high. The first year, there were no fruits, so we watered it the second year. To our pleasure a number of real, tasty oranges were produced. The third year saw a profusion of small green oranges promising a bumper crop. Until, one day, my four year old son and his buddy appeared at the back door, all four of their hands proudly full of the small green fruits they had picked. It was just a little challenge to smile broadly and accept this gift with the enthusiasm with which it was offered, and to, in a really positive tone, suggest that next year it might be fun to let them grow even bigger before picking them! Of course, next year we were living in Chicago, and there were no orange trees of any variety.

This particular mock orange, apparently, was planted by a previous owner who had plans to graft multiple different citrus branches so that the one tree could bear oranges, grapefruit, lemon and lime. It never happened, but it is lucky for the birds that it is there, for it offers cover when (presumably) a hawk is spotted. Suddenly the mesquite is almost bare of birds, a little while later the leaves of the orange tree flutter as dozens of birds leave its cover to resume their feeding. The danger is, momentarily, past, but is ever present. Yesterday we sighted a Cooper’s hawk skimming down the road in front of their house only a few feet off the ground, presumably searching for ground squirrels or other rodents rather than birds on that trip, but quite capable of feeding on smaller birds. Last week, my sister took a photo of a hawk sitting in her back yard, quietly munching a dove, and unperturbed by her presence as she approached close to get a good picture. I have chosen to not include it in respect of the squeamish, but have attached another of a hawk perched on a

fountain in front of the house in the same yard I am watching.

There is a loud harsh machine sound that comes from behind me to the left, in the vicinity of the fireplace. It lasts several seconds and then stops. I wonder what machinery out in that direction, toward the driveway, has briefly clicked on, and then off. It happens again, grating and definitely mechanical, and then again. It isn’t the furnace coming on and off, though it sounds a little like that; it is in the wrong direction and is too brief. Perhaps there is a water heater out there? In these climates they are often outside the house in a little shed, but it doesn’t sound like one. Is there something a trash pickup truck might do that could make such a noise? It happens once more and then it is gone. Another mystery.

Until, just a few minutes later, my sister appears in her bathrobe (did I mention it was early morning?)

I ask her and she tells me that it is the Gila woodpecker trying to feed from the metal chimney. She notes it frequently alarms visitors. Ah. I note that it is not in the front yard any more. Mystery solved. Except the one about why the woodpecker has not yet figured out that there are no grubs to be had from the chimney. Better it should keep rocking the hummingbird feeder to slosh up the sugar water!

When do people doing bad things become bad people?

On a recent Saturday morning, at 7:15am, a car driving down my road swerved across the sidewalk and took out part of the chain link fence in front of one house and most of the white picket fence of the next house. I saw it when I was walking the dogs not much later; the policewoman was just arriving on the scene, and the owners of the house were standing in their little front yard still agape. “It sounded like an explosion,” the woman said, and I’ll bet that it did. The front gate was across the street and down about 20 yards.

It wasn’t a tragic event; no one was killed or even hurt. Still, it was pretty scary looking. Not only will it be a big job to fix, it emphasized their vulnerability. It is a little house with a little front yard; the damage extended to within 6 feet of their front door, much less than the distance that the car was off the street where it should have been. “I imagine alcohol was involved,” I observed somewhat inanely to the policewoman, who responded “Yes, still from Friday night.” She was not much less inane, asking the homeowners if they had gotten the license number. If they were not in bed, they were having breakfast at the back of the house; the car didn’t stay around.

So this driver did a bad thing. It makes me want to say he (“he” because there is no gender-neutral pronoun, and it is epidemiologically more likely) was a bad person, but that is not necessarily true. Probably, given that it was early Saturday morning (or for some, very late Friday night!) alcohol was involved, but it didn’t have to be. He could have been texting while driving, and lost control on this curving road. That’s pretty common; in Kansas it is not even illegal (the texting-while-driving part, not the hit-and-run part), and done by many folks who would tut-tut and condemn drunken drivers. In either case the damage is the same. It could have been the first time anything like this happened to him, or he could be a regular offender. But how many times would he have to be irresponsible, drive drunk, cause property damage, kill someone, before he went from being someone who did bad things to being a bad person? I imagine that both philosophy and theology have much to say about this concept, but some of it must have to do with intentionality. I doubt that the driver was trying to take out the front yard of this house.

I have been thinking about the difference between committing bad acts and being a bad person lately, as a result of the discussions over whether to raise taxes on multi-millionaires and billionaires and huge businesses, on the financiers and bankers who caused the economic crisis and have been doing just fine, thank you, despite the destruction that they have caused. Their flacks, both in Congress and in the media (and now themselves) are angrily denouncing Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and other critics for criticizing them for being wealthy. Jamie Dimon, CEO of Chase, says “Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it.” He is quoted by Edward Murray in The Huffington Post, “Nobody hates the rich…but everybody hates the bad”. Murray takes on this very issue, noting that there is no objection to people being rich, but answering a square “YES!” to the question that he puts in the mouth of these billionaires "Is it too much to ask that everyone just sit down and be nice while we destroy the middle class?" In a reference to the fictional Henry Potter, the rich villain in “It’s a Wonderful Life”, Murray concludes that “…the Potters of the world aren't bad because they're rich. They're not bad because they're successful. They're bad because... they're just simply bad.”

I fear – and expect that Edward Murray would agree – that this is oversimplistic, or, more important, decreases the responsibility these folks have for their anti-social, destructive, selfish, and evil behavior by implying that they couldn’t help it because they are “bad”. There is a history in literature of evil rich people, who sometimes transform (Ebenezer Scrooge) and sometimes don’t (Henry Potter). Sometimes they are not “people” but non-people who it is easier to hate, and sometimes they transform (the Grinch) and sometimes they don’t (Sauron from “Lord of the Rings”). The comic books have a long history of often-deformed (maybe this is why they are bad) villains who we cannot imagine as anything but evil (Batman’s Joker and Penguin and the whole retinue of Dick Tracy’s Flattop and BB Eyes and The Brow), and we use aliens when we want to create bad guys who are really the “other”. And Nazis are always useful. The folks Murray writes about are certainly rich, but they show an amazingly antagonistic, selfish, non-caring attitude toward the rest of us. They are not the redeemed-becausethey-have-some-social-values rich such as FDR or the Kennedys or even Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. They are greedy pigs. They do lots and lots of bad things.

They are not bad because they are wealthy. They have done a lot of bad, non-productive things to get their wealth, these financiers. Far from being “job creators” (the Republican use of that term does not make it a synonym for “rich”) they are job destroyers, life destroyers. They do not manufacture or create, they manipulate money and people’s lives. Those are really bad things. What makes them seem like, maybe be, bad people is intentionality. They created nothing but wealth for themselves at the expense of everyone else, and they knew what they were doing. To say they are bad because they are bad implies that, like Sauron, they have no choice. They did. They could have been good people, or OK people, or reasonable people. But they weren’t and aren’t.

We call the house where the white picket fence was knocked down “Smokey’s house” because that is the name of the dog that lives there, a dog that ran around inside the small yard and barked at our dogs when we walked past. It will be a while before Smokey can be let out in that yard again because there is no longer a fence. But I’m pretty sure that the person who hit it, drunk or texting, was, while irresponsible and displaying poor or no judgment, not planning to destroy it. The financiers were planning to do what they did and remain unapologetic.

We should hate them and we should punish them. Not because they are wealthy, and not because they are “bad”. We should hate them and punish them because they did very bad things that have seriously and maybe permanently damaged the economies of the world and the lives of the people in it.

And they did it on purpose.