The Spot-On Political and Socioeconomic Analysis of Dr. Seuss

For some reason that I can’t figure out, most Americans don’t like to think of the rest of the world as a context in which the United States exists as one among 193 (or 203[1]) sovereign nation states.  Or, when that majority of Americans do consider the rest of the world, it is usually done by looking down Uncle Sam’s long nose and declaring that the United States is the greatest country in the world.

This arrogant, kingly attitude is reminiscent of that of Yertle the Turtle[2].  If your parents didn’t read Dr. Seuss to you, or if you haven’t read Dr. Seuss to your own children, then let me remind you that Yertle the Turtle was the king of the pond, that is, the king of all the other turtles in the pond.  And his vanity and self-conception were such that he decided he needed a throne other than the stone upon which he habitually sat, and from which he hoped to sit high enough to survey all that was beneath him, all that was his.

“I’m ruler,” said Yertle, “of all that I see.

But I don’t see enough.  That’s the trouble with me…

If I could sit high, how much greater I’d be!

What a king!  I’d be ruler of all I could see!”

So Yertle obliged the other turtles in the pond to climb on top of one another’s backs and in this way those he ruled over lifted him higher and higher, until he could see almost a mile.

“I’m Yertle the Turtle!  Oh, marvelous me!

For I am the ruler of all that I see!”

Unfortunately, there was one turtle who stood on the stone that was Yertle’s former throne, and all of the other turtles stood upon this turtle’s back.  And because it was such hard work for this turtle—whose name was Mack—to support all that weight and glory, he dared to complain.

“I’ve pains in my back and my shoulders and knees.

How long must we stand here, Your Majesty, please?”

But this legitimate complaint only enraged Yertle, who demanded that even more turtles be piled on Mac’s back so that he, Yertle, could stand even higher—high enough to see forty miles away.

But down at the bottom of that stack of turtles Mack, who didn’t like to complain, felt obliged to speak up for his comrades.

“I know, up on top you are seeing great sights,

But down at the bottom we, too, should have rights.

We turtles can’t stand it.  Our shells will all crack!

Besides we need food.  We are starving!” groaned Mack.

But this temerity only enraged Yertle further, and he told Mack to shut up and declared,

“I rule from the clouds!  Over land!  Over sea!

There’s nothing, no, NOTHING, that’s higher than me!”

And that’s when Yertle saw the moon.  And, flabbergasted that anything should be higher than he was, demanded still more turtles, so that his throne could be raised higher and higher.  And once Yertle had managed to stand upon the backs of hundreds and perhaps even thousands of turtles, Mack burped—he couldn’t help it—and that burp shook the throne, and Yertle the Turtle came tumbling down.  So that nowadays Yertle the Turtle is king of nothing but the mud.

Dr. Seuss published this fable in 1958, during one of the darkest periods of the Cold War.  The condemnation of political tyranny is obvious, and spot-on, but the socioeconomic critique is no less incisive or accurate.

It was an editorial in the Spanish daily El País that made me think of Yertle the Turtle.  Many Americans have heard the often repeated comment (on Fox News in particular) that the top 1% of Americans pay about 40% of all income tax receipts[3]. 

I doubt many Americans are aware of the fact that, about twenty years after Dr. Seuss published this story, the top 1% of the American population brought home just 9% of the nation’s income.  By 2009, that same 1% of the American population was bringing home 24% of the nation’s income.

This statistic alone places the United States among Third World countries, defined in part by an undue concentration of wealth and income in the hands of relatively few people.  If we use a Gini coefficient, just one of several widely employed statistical measures for inequality of income distribution, the U.S. ranks midway between the most egalitarian societies (Sweden or Denmark) and the least egalitarian society, that of Namibia, where half of the population lives below the international poverty line[4].

But even worse than this single fact is the trend.  The Gini coefficient was first applied in 1967, and since 1968 (when the U.S. coefficient was 38.6) income inequality in the United States has steadily grown greater (46.8 in 2009; compared to 23 in Sweden, 24.7 in Denmark, and 70 in Namibia).

Economists feel at ease among such statistics, and even they can pick and choose which ‘facts’ they will present in their research and writings.  But at least they are guided, in most cases, by a relatively scientific criteria, whereas those who bandy these numbers about—usually politicians and their supporters or detractors—are not.

My point is, a sound statistical argument, based on hard data, can be made to suggest that the United States of America is not by any means the single greatest country in the world.  And when it comes to income and wealth distribution, the U.S. ranks closer to the bottom than to the top.

But despite these ‘facts,’ and despite the positive correlation noted in a number of economic studies between a Democratic White House and less income inequality (or at least a slower growth in that inequality), Americans—or at least those among them who make the most noise—tend to associate the political left in the United States with less than satisfactory economic performance, and sometimes even disaster[5].

In a democratic system of one man—or one woman—equals one vote (which is not the same as the electoral college that elects the president of the United States), every man or woman has a right to choose and determine for themselves whether or not they are interested in a more egalitarian society.  When I look at the United States I witness an almost blind disregard, and even disdain, for a social value that is shared by the majority of the 6,000,000 people in the world who are, in most ways, most like us:  the Europeans.  This, coupled with the American dismissal of European thought and opinion, a relatively recent phenomenon, makes me wonder what will happen in the States when Mack burps again.

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[1] Including states that claim sovereignty and have control over part of or all of their claimed territories, but due to disputes over their legitimacy, do not have normal diplomatic relations with the majority of sovereign states and are not members of the United Nations:  Abkhazia, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, Northern Cyprus, Palestine, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Somaliland, South Ossetia, Taiwan and Transnistria.

[2] Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories, Dr. Seuss (Random House)

[3] According to the National Taxpayers Union it was 38.02% of Federal Personal Income Tax revenues in 2008.  But the people who repeat this statistic as if it were a mantra never mention the relative contributions—the percentage of adjusted gross income—paid by this top 1% of the population, as compared, say, the bottom 50%  (which contributed a mere 2.7% of Federal Personal Income Tax revenues in 2008, but no doubt paid a larger percentage of their adjusted gross income in taxes!).

[4] On $1.00 to $1.25 per day.

[5] And this when the two greatest economic depressions—or recessions—in living memory occurred under the watch of Republican leadership:  that of Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush.

What Does Roy Lichtenstein Have to do with the Cholera Epidemic in Haiti?

There were a pair of headlines in El País this morning, arranged opposite each other, in separate columns, and each was accompanied by an image (http://www.elpais.com/ ).

One headline reads ‘La epidemia de cólera se extiende con mayor virulencia por Haití,’ or ‘The Cholera Epidemic Continues to Spread Throughout Haiti with Greater Virulence.’  It is accompanied by a cropped photograph of a boy who might be eight or nine years old, with a drip in his arm, lying on a long table in a make-shift clinic, somewhere in Haiti.  Beside the boy is another, even smaller child, who lies on his back with his arms open and his feet dangling off the edge of the same bench.  You can see the smaller child’s hands and still-sandaled feet, but the rest of his body, including his face, is covered with a white sheet.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/ultima/semana/Haiti/especialmente/cruenta/eleva/643/muertos/colera/elpepuint/20101111elpepuint_1/Tes

Beside that photograph and headline there is a cropped photograph of the painting (or print?) by Roy Lichtenstein called Ohhh Alright, which sold recently for a phenomenal sum of money at a an auction organized by Christie’s in New York.  The headline reads, ‘Lluvia de millones para grandes iconos ‘pop art,’ or ‘Rain of Millions for the Great Icons of Pop Art.’

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/Grandes/iconos/pop/art/subasta/Nueva/York/elpepucul/20101111elpepucul_1/Tes

I wonder:  was this juxtaposition done on purpose; and if so, for which purpose?  Was it cynical irony on the part of the layout team, or did they fail to see the implications:  the ‘rain’ of millions of Euros for dubious works of ‘art’ (€27,500,000, or $37,675,000 for the Lichtenstein) side by side with an AP photograph of a child—only one of the 643 dead so far—who was not saved from the ravages of cholera, and probably died as a result of dehydration, something that can be dealt with effectively if the child is treated on time with a cheap rehydration formula (effective homemade solutions can be made out of salt, sugar and clean water).

According to UNICEF—though no one disputes this sad fact—dehydration, often caused by either cholera or rotavirus, is the second leading cause of death among children under the age of five.  There can be little doubt that it is the most treatable of all the causes of death among children.

Without begrudging the new owner of the Lichtenstein his work of art, we might nonetheless wonder—again—why it is so damn hard to provide clean drinking water (just one means of avoiding a cholera epidemic) to poor people around the world.

Without questioning the hierarchy of values and commitments to such ideals as not only a free market—¡which rarely exists anywhere save in theory!—but an absolutely unfettered market for goods like the Lichtenstein, we might nonetheless wonder why some small share of the excess in our free market economies can’t go to projects which would effectively provide the millions of people throughout the world who live without the comfort, convenience and safety of being able to open a faucet to obtain clean drinking water, with the right to do so.

Maybe the intention of those who placed these incongruous images side by side was precisely to get us to think about this.  If so, here are a couple of useful links which can aid and direct our thought.

ReydrationProject:    http://www.rehydrate.org/index.html

International Action Clean Water in Haiti:  http://www.haitiwater.org/

There is considerable debate concerning the long term usefulness of providing aid in the form of charitable donations, given some of the secondary effects related to dependency.  But there can be little doubt about the need for resources—such as wells and pumps and pipes and so on—which ultimately require some expenditure.  Personally I think that all of  us who can afford to do so should give 0.7% of our annual gross income or annual expenditures to those development projects which we can identify with.  This was the millennium goal set by the UN in 1970, and it was meant to be applied to its member states.  For all of those who disdain or merely distrust the government and wish to see it play a smaller role in our lives, I urge you to take it upon yourself to do something like this, rather than waiting for the government you elected to do so.

Millennium Project:  http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/press/07.htm

Finally, just in case there is any doubt, I am entirely in favor of supporting the arts!  So if you don’t want your 0.7% to go to development projects, you could always donate that money to a library, theatre, or artistic organization. 

And in the meantime, if you need any books, this is the best place to shop, with free delivery within the U.S. and the cheapest international rates I have found anywhere ($3.97), including a five cents surcharge for CO2 emissions.  Each purchase from Betterworld contains a donation, on their part, to world literacy programs.

http://www.betterworldbooks.com/

When the Exceptional Becomes Commonplace

As an unintended sequel to Robert Antelme’s The Human Race—which Marguerite Duras mentions towards the end of the first part of her book, the part that deals with waiting for Antelme to come back, his return, battle against death and slow convalescence (during which she tells him she wants the divorce, because she wants to have a child with Antelme’s best friend, Dionys Mascolo)—The War is superb, since it allows the reader to witness not only what happened after Antelme shared that cigarette with the Russian inmate in the quarantine barracks at Dachau, but to see what Antelme looked like—the impression he made—upon others who had known and loved him before he had been arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald in the first place (the place and time at which The Human Race begins)[1].

But the second part of Duras’s narrative is no less fascinating, as it deals with the period during which Antelme was still held in Fresnes, before being deported to Germany.  He was arrested on the 1^st of June, 1944, and less than a week later the Allies had successfully disembarked at Normandy, and began fighting their way east.  Duras’s portrait of the French Gestapo agent who arrested her husband, and was the first man to interrogate him (with his fists and shoes and a cudgel, no doubt, among other persuasive means), is remarkable, as this man is obviously attracted to her, and yet sufficiently a gentleman to refrain from asking to come up after escorting her to the building she lived in, alone now, after one of their daily meetings—because Morland (alias François Mitterrand), who was the head of Duras’s resistance group, insisted that she not lose contact with the man she calls Pierre Rabier, for obvious reasons, while she too had a personal motive in maintaining this contact, since it provided her with a tenuous link with her husband, whom she was never allowed to see.

On pages 76 to 78 Duras describes the way this Gestapo agent appeared in the street soon after she had first met him in the police building on Rue des Saussaies, just when she was acting as a liaison between two members of the Resistance who did not know each other.  Rabier notices her and snaps his fingers when he says her name, calling her to him.  She has already made contact with one of her comrades, and is casually speaking to him, but she obeys Rabier’s call, all the while worrying that the other man she is supposed to meet might think the Gestapo agent is the resistance man he is supposed to rendezvous with, and come over and shake his hand.

What happened in France during the war was in many ways unique.  Unlike the Dutch, who not only surrendered immediately to the Germans, but also became aligned with them in many ways—with hundreds if not thousands of Dutchmen volunteering to join the German forces—France was split in two and occupied in the north, while the south remained under the viceroy-style rule of Marshal Pétain.  In addition, the country was full of refugees from all over Europe, including thousands of Spaniards with experience of fighting the Nazis.  These men (and women) formed the backbone of the spontaneous guerilla resistance movement known as the maquis.  Meanwhile, and throughout France, most people—most Frenchmen and women—either collaborated with the German occupiers or the French Vichy regime in one way or another, or became members of the various and diverse underground resistance movements, in one capacity or another.  In this way French society, which was already deeply split along class lines, became schizophrenic as well.

And in this way—as throughout all of Europe at that time—common people, ordinary people, normal men and women, and even children, just like those you would see anywhere, those all around you right now, your friends and neighbors, the guy in the bank, the woman in line at the green grocers, all ended up doing—and suffering—the most uncommon, incredible and abnormal things:  becoming spies, runners, informers, turncoats, saboteurs, mistresses to the occupiers and masters of the conquered, soldiers, torturers, assassins and their victims—all for the duration of the war.

Courage and cowardice at this time became less exceptional and more clearly defined, perhaps, and heroes and villains mushroomed everywhere—if only because each individual was forced to decide, and those decisions always implied stark consequences.

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[1] See ‘What It Really Means to Be Human’ (1/11/2010) for a review of The Human Race.