In his world, right made might. On doing good, Civilization stood.
. . . . .
Click pics to enhance text for reading.The Editors
Captain Bryce Lee (USN) on his 85th birthday.Billy Lee read a version of his poem, Warrior, to his father at his party. Bryce never said he liked it. The Billy Lee Editorial Board
Bryce Lee helped stand-up the National Security Agency in the 1950s when the agency helped track atom bomb materials and components loaded aboard foreign ships.
He played a prominent role during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he led an anti-submarine jet-helicopter squadron based near the confrontation.
Because of their sensitive nature, some of the Captain’s accomplishments will never be known outside of government.
Bryce spoke Russian and French. In his mind, integrity was the most important quality a person could have. He did well for a farm boy from Michigan.
Bryce Lee passed peacefully at home with family present a few days before his 91st birthday in 2011.
The Billy Lee Editorial Board
In his world, right made might. On doing good, Civilization stood.
In 1958 when I was a fourth grader our family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island where my dad was soon promoted to lead HS-11, one of the Navy jet-helicopter squadrons defending the east coast from attack by Russian submarines.
We moved to Quonset Point with some trepidation because Hoskins Park — the housing project for military families in those days (now sold, redeveloped, and renamed Wickford Point) — had a long waiting list; we didn’t know where we would live or if we could afford off-base housing.
As it turned out, we got a lucky break. A Navy Lieutenant — who was a Negro — moved his family into Hoskins Park. Some white officers found out and decided their families weren’t going to live in non-segregated housing. As a result, vacancies popped-up, and we got in; we moved-in next door to the Negro officer and his family.
In 1958, my family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island. Inexpensive on-base housing was overcrowded. We didn’t know where we would live, or if we could afford to live anywhere.
Lieutenant Brown, his wife and two daughters, lived in the two-story, condo-style apartment on the other side of a thin concrete wall from us.
Despite the custom that white and black families didn’t fraternize in those days, eventually I had encounters, conversations, and interactions with all the members of the Brown family.
Over time, I came to understand how traumatized they were, each in their own way, living in a country that, basically, isolated and mistreated them.
My parents accepted an invitation to the Brown’s for dinner — an event that had all the drama of the movie, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, released nine years later, in 1967.
One encounter involved my parents. The Browns invited them for dinner to get acquainted, and after agonizing about it, Mom and Dad accepted. I think Dad wanted to check them out; to make sure his kids would be “safe” living next door.
After the meal, Dad reported that the Lieutenant’s wife, Jean (Alston), was a good cook, but he couldn’t shake a queasy feeling in his stomach, which spoiled his appetite. He had never interacted with negroes, except servants(everyone called black people negroes in the 1950s); he certainly had not eaten food at the same table. And, unlike my dad, Mr. Brown was a graduate of the Naval Academy.
In that sense, the lieutenant kind of outranked him. According to dad, Academy graduates favored one another and worked hard to help each other achieve promotions. They put non-Academy graduates (like dad) to great disadvantage in the competition for rank, which was fierce inside the Navy.
A black Academy graduate presented a dilemma. Brown was a graduate of the elite Naval Academy with all its privileges and protections; at the same time, he belonged to a race that was, to put it politely, undervalued both by the Navy and the country at large. It was unfamiliar terrain for dad and made him uncomfortable. I remember my parents writing a thank-you note to the Brown’s for their hospitality but as far as I know, they didn’t return an invitation.
Another incident occurred a few weeks later that changed the way I thought about people and what they sometimes go through. It happened on a day when my fourth-grade teacher decided to punish me for violation of good-citizenship. I sassed her, she claimed, because I insisted — in a loud voice before classmates — she couldn’t tell me what to do!She wasn’t my parent!
In my mind, it made sense. To show how wrong I was, she kept me after school to clean the blackboard. She forced me to practice my reading. I left school an hour late.
When I arrived home, I saw Billie — Lieutenant Brown’s sixth-grade daughter — standing on her porch a few feet from ours, crying, and shifting back and forth on her feet in a puddle of — I took a second look to be sure — her own pee. I couldn’t believe it; I didn’t know what to say or do. I ran inside our condo to tell mom.
I wish I could say that Mom brought Billie into our place, helped her clean-up, and gave her a secure place to wait until her mom got home with a key. But mother did nothing like that. Instead, she became animated and began to marvel about how such an embarrassing calamity could befall a sweet girl like Billie. I became annoyed. Why didn’t she ask us? I interrupted. We would have let her use our bathroom!
Maybe she was afraid to ask, mom said. Maybe she was afraid we would say, no.
So afraid she let her stomach burst? I yelled.
1957. Daisy Bates tries to enter Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to rescue her and eight other students from angry whites. It was the following year that our family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island.
Some weeks after, I stood alone in the playground behind our building when Billie walked up. We didn’t speak but sat down together on the ground to draw pictures in the gray clay beneath us — clay the housing complex we shared was built on.
It didn’t seem right to sit with someone and not talk but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Billie was a couple of years older. We had little in common, it seemed. We concentrated for a while, in silence, on our art.
Then, she looked up. She fixed her eyes on mine. I didn’t look away. I tried to hold her gaze. Finally, she whispered. She said simply, I hate being colored.
I felt the blood drain from my face. Hate was a bad word. We didn’t use the word hate in our family.
To hear Billie whisper, hate, about herself — hate about something she had no control over or responsibility for, which she couldn’t change, wish away, or escape — upended my internal world. In that moment, the ground shifted beneath my feet.
Somehow, hearing her speak those words — and the mental image I had created in my memory of the day she danced in a pool of her own urine — conflated in my mind. As Billie waded ankle-deep in her own bodily fluids, I heard her screaming. I hate being colored!!! I hate it!! I hate it!I hate it.
In my imagination, I took my place beside her. I raged against God and all the earth for making her colored; for allowing white people to be so insensitive, so mean, so un-caring, so ill-tempered, so prejudiced.
—————
Billie’s father supervised a motor-pool near, but outside, the Quonset Point military base. According to friends of my mom, he was some kind of gas-station attendant. One warm day, he saw me playing outside and asked if I wanted to take a ride with him in his new convertible. I said sure.
He said he wanted to show me something. He was in charge of something and wanted to show me what it was. He wanted to show me what he did.At his work.
I thought, this is a crazy request. After all, I didn’t know what my own dad did. He’d never taken me to work or showed me anything having to do with what he was about when he wasn’t home.
So, I climbed into Mr. Brown’s convertible, top down, and off we went. It turned out that he was good at small talk. I listened happily to his resonant voice and enjoyed the sun and warm breezes as we rambled along. We passed through some old guard shacks, a few barbed-wire-topped chain-link fences, and entered an area so remote and wild, it was hard to believe we were still in Rhode Island.
We drove through a dense grove of trees and up onto a hill. Mr. Brown slowed the car and stopped. The sun blazed into the open convertible. Look, he said. He frowned, then nudged my shoulder and pointed. Look down there.
There were more military vehicles under Navy Lieutenant Brown’s command than I imagined there were cars in the entire world. This photo of a military motor-pool in a western state reminds me of what I saw in Rhode Island.
Below us for as far as my eyes could see, in a valley that stretched to the very edge of Earth, sat thousands of green and gray trucks and jeeps; armored personnel carriers and tanks; military vehicles of every stripe and size, all neatly parked in long straight lines. As a naive fourth grader, I found the view hard to take in. There lay spread below us more vehicles than I imagined existed in the entire world.
It was the second time a member of the Brown family stunned me. I was speechless. Then I said, you’re in charge of all of those trucks? Navy Lieutenant Brown smiled, sadly, I thought, then looked at me like Billie had.
I am, he said.
Billy Lee
Editor’s Postscript: This story is grounded in the memories of a fourth grader of events that occurred almost sixty years ago. The make of Mr. Brown’s car and the nature of the installation visited may or may not be accurate.
After writing this article, Billy Lee learned that Mr. Brown, sadly, passed away on May 22, 2012, at age 85 from cancer. After reading old press releases, he discovered that historian Robert J. Schneller had published a book in 2005 about Mr. Brown’s experiences at the Naval Academy called Breaking the Color Barrier. In 1949, it turns out, Midshipman Brown became the school’s first black graduate.
Unknown to Billy Lee, Wesley Brown had become an historical figure. Billy Lee has asked the Editors to add biographical notes to his post.
In 1958, neither Billy Lee nor Mr. Brown’s neighbors knew that the young Naval officer owned the distinction of being the first black midshipman to graduate from the Naval Academy. In the racial climate of the 1950’s, an achievement like Mr. Brown’s would have been seen as the exception that proved the rule: Negroes were inferior. It would have been bad taste in polite society to call attention to Lieutenant Brown’s achievement.
None of Wesley’s neighbors, Billy Lee recalls, had any idea of the hell he went through to become a Naval officer. In any event, white people in 1958 were so blinded by racism that they would have thought, had they known: Wesley’s accomplishment was of no consequence; it was not worth mentioning or even thinking about.
It’s hard to believe now, but white Americans in 1958 didn’t know their country had a race problem.
Wesley Brown was the first black graduate of the Naval Academy. Because no white midshipmen would share a room with him, he lived alone during the four years it took to earn his engineering degree. When classmates blocked his admission to the academy choir, Wesley joined the cross-country track team where future President and upperclassman, Jimmy Carter, befriended him.
Wesley Brown became the first black American to survive the racial hazing at the Naval Academy and graduate. I knew him to be a happy person with a charitable attitude toward all people. He was a kind and gentle neighbor who, during the year of 1958, made me feel good each time I saw or spent time with him.
His wife, Jean (Alston), led our church choir and taught me to sing. We did a television show under her direction. His daughter, Willetta (Billie), transformed my view of the world with a single sentence. I read somewhere that Carol, the youngest daughter, did well in life.
After our families parted ways, Wesley’s family grew to include sons. Eventually, Wesley Brown and Jean divorced; Wesley married Crystal Malone in 1963. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander before retiring in 1969 to pursue other interests.
As my story tells, it was racism in the Navy that made it possible for me to know the Browns. Midshipman Wesley Brown changed America for the better. He suffered to accomplish it, but he kept his pain to himself and his closest friends.
I am proud to say that once, I knew Wesley Brown and he knew me.
People hate me. People have hated on me my whole life, but never more than now, it seems, in my old age, when I need their love so bad. If they only knew how their hatred weakens me and any hope I have for happiness. Maybe they’d relent and welcome me into their friendly world.
But I don’t think so. If they knew how much I hurt, they’d hate me more, shun and isolate me even further, just to watch me suffer.
Rod Smart was the leading rusher for the Las Vegas Outlaws of the short-lived XFL. His career took him to both the CFL and NFL, where he played in Super Bowl 38 for the Carolina Panthers. On the last play of the game, with the Panthers trailing 32-29 and only 4 seconds left on the clock, Rod Smart received the New England Patriots kick-off. He was unable to score the game-winning touch-down.
As Torrold DeShaun “Rod” Smart, the would-be NFL star, once said: I feel as if everyone hates me, from my mom to my dad and even my brothers and sisters; everyone ”Hates Me.”
All hope abandon, ye who enter here…
The first time I learned people hate me was at the Army boot-camp for officer-candidates at Fort Benning, Georgia during the summer of 1968. I went there to train after becoming an officer candidate to avoid the military draft during the Vietnam War.
It was a period in our history when the government conscripted hundreds of thousands of young men to fight in Vietnam. Exemptions from the draft (called deferments) had been given to college students for years, but no longer.
Students across the country began competing to get into Army ROTC training programs, because they were the only sure way to stay in school and avoid military service, at least temporarily. At my school, I was one of only eighteen students (out of a pool of several thousand applicants) who qualified for officer training.
I felt lucky, because now I could finish my education. Maybe, by the time of my graduation, the war would be over.
Cadets who enjoyed push-ups (and were good at them) thrived in officer training camp.
At officer boot-camp that summer, in the humid choking heat of Georgia, the training began. The recruits were, like me, the cream of the crop, the best of the best, from some of the finest colleges and universities in the USA and around the world. I’ve not been with smarter, worthier people than those who shared my summer of ’68 at Fort Benning.
We found ourselves trapped in the grasp of some of the most ignorant, mean-spirited drill sergeants I’ve ever encountered. Their mission was to squeeze each recruit through a juice-grinder to see what we were made of and to prove to the military how strong (or how weak) were our minds and bodies.
They cursed us, abused us, deprived us of sleep and dignity, and told us we were over-privileged swamp scum, not worthy of the army. They convinced me they meant every word.
Drill-sergeants ask a young recruit whether he prefers caramel or strawberry syrup on his French soufflé.
In chow-lines, gnarly swamp-people with missing teeth menaced and taunted us by swearing, shoving and pointing fingers. One officer forced recruits to eat their own cigarettes.
During a month-and-a-half of hell, I watched people go beserk on the firing range, collapse with seizures due to excessive heat and lack of water, quit the program, and go mad.
All I thought about during those forty-two days in Hell was this: it can’t last forever. I can survive, I can hold on, I can sleep again with my sweet girl-friend, Mary-Ann, who loves me. All this pain, this agony, will fade to an unpleasant memory, nothing more, in good time.
Studies conducted on young men adept at crawling through mud beneath barbed-wire show that they enjoy the taste of dirt more than cadets who lack this skill.
But, of course, I was naïve. Every dinner has its dessert, its crème-de-la-crème, its grand-finale, its coup-de-grace. Boot-camp was no different.
Two days before the end of training, the Army announced that each cadet in every forty-three-man platoon would participate in mandatory peer-reviews of their fellows. Drill Instructors — armed with notepads and pencils — ordered every officer-candidate to rank every other officer-candidate, from top to bottom.
Worst of all, the DIs forced each cadet to write an explanatory paragraph about each soldier they placed in the bottom-five. I think I remember trying to say something nice about each one of the five I chose.
As it happened, the evening after the peer-review, one of the cadets broke into the administration building and stole the reviews. Word got around, and soon a few dozen cadets, including me, gathered outside the barracks to rummage through them, their summaries and explanatory comments.
I discovered that my fellow cadets ranked me third from the bottom. I couldn’t grasp it, it seemed so unreal, so I read the comments. Apparently, I lost equipment, stole things, went AWOL, and was generally unprepared and unkempt.
I lacked the intelligence required to lead, lacked problem solving skills, etc. etc., on and on. I kept checking the name to see if it was mine. Nothing written about me was true.
This photo, retrieved from the Army Archive, shows Billy Lee on his last day of boot camp. He is the cadet lying on the stretcher, apparently too drunk to walk the quarter-mile to a waiting bus.
It occurred to me that all of it — all the negativity and cruelty; every last hateful condemning word — was going to be part of my permanent record, my profile, which would follow me forever in the army and beyond.
Why, I asked myself over and over, would people who I thought were my friends write nasty, untrue, career-ending things about me? I couldn’t work out the answer.
Officer training camp broke me. I spent the next two days drunk, sobbing silently inside myself. On the last day, while the other cadets scurried to leave, I writhed on the floor by my bunk, unable to pack my things or police my area. Psychological trauma and grief immobilized me. The pain of being hated ruined me. I never recovered.
Billy Lee
Editor’s note:This article has been a fictionalized compilation of actual events, which occurred during two training camps — the first at Fort Benning, Georgia; the second at Fort Riley, Kansas the following summer. The stolen peer-reviews incident occurred at Fort Riley during the summer of 1969.
Incidents in the two camps have been conflated by Billy Lee to make a more comprehensible read. The incidents are true. The order is true. But events happened over consecutive camps — basic training and advanced infantry training the following summer.
P.S. Since writing this article, some people have asked me if, over the years, I might not have garnered some insight into why my ROTC compatriots at Fort Riley rejected me. (At Fort Benning, peer reviews weren’t conducted.)
The answer is yes, but these insights weren’t included in the article, so that readers (who might not know me well) could experience the wonder I felt. In truth, (allow me first to lie; the truth is too painful) I was well-connected and proud. People hate arrogance, and that is what I was. I received special treatment from higher-ups. That, and my attitude, didn’t go over well. (Will you permit me to do some preliminary blame-shifting?)
General Boatwright was two months older than my dad. Like my dad, he was a Warrior who dedicated his life to the defense of the United States of America.
General Boatwright, the base commander at Fort Riley — who knew my dad — gave me an escort on his private plane to camp. I boasted about it. Later, he flew to our bivouac-site with a half dozen helicopters and called me out of formation (as I remember it, with a bull-horn) to interview me in front of everyone about camp conditions. I remember he asked about the food and how we were treated. I told him everything was great.
The General invited me to what I think I remember was his daughter’s birthday celebration, which meant I had to abandon my buddies to harsh camp conditions, while I partied.
Later, I wrote a thank-you letter to the General, which a drill instructor somehow managed to intercept. He read it aloud at morning reveille to my gathered platoon. In front of everyone, the outraged DI tore up my letter, while he explained so that even a child could understand: cadets don’t write letters to Generals.
None of these incidents helped me get a good peer review. (Listen to me shuck and jive over these irrelevant incidents. Patience, please. I’m working my way to truth, but it’s hard)
The most damaging things that happened were self-inflicted. I remember bragging about myself to others. (Here comes partial self-serving approximations of truth.) I told wildly exaggerated stories to hide the truth about myself from others. The truth was, I hated the choices I made. I bragged about myself, but I bragged about things no one should be proud of — like the details of my sex-life.
I self-destructed. Yes, I hated the Army. Yes, I hated war. Yes, I trapped myself in a place I didn’t want to be. I made it embarrassingly obvious to everyone. I hated myself.
Yes, I hated the Army. Yes, I hated war.
I couldn’t believe the terrible decisions I’d made. I couldn’t believe what a coward I was; how I caved to the powerful idiots who took us into the genocidal killing-field that was Vietnam for no other purpose than to test our newest equipment and evaluate our effectiveness to wage war. (More tangential bullshit is on its way.)
I found myself in a space I didn’t want to be, doing things I didn’t believe, for reasons that made no sense. I was scared to pay the price that came with resisting the evil I saw so clearly once I immersed myself in it. I had abandoned my point of view, my sense of what was right and wrong; my identity; my sense of self; my integrity. (If only any of this were true!)
Why, under the stress of basic training, did I turn on myself? Why did I manipulate others to turn on me? Why did I work so hard to bring the Universe of judgment and condemnation down on my pathetic-loathing-self? I would have to wait until many years later in therapy to learn the answers. (And I can never share them. Why don’t you understand? It’s killing me. I’m so afraid.)
I became obnoxious and inauthentic. It must have been obvious to everyone but me. It’s a wonder one of the cadets didn’t shoot me. They turned on me, because to them I was a sick puppy and a phony to boot. I wouldn’t own up. I was a coward. I refused to embrace the truth about myself.
Today, it’s clear to me that way back then in the fevered heat of officer training camp my peers would have ranked me at the very bottom of the pile had it not been for a couple of loving, perceptive souls who shared my pain and placed me, mercifully, carefully, near the very top.
Their act of kindness meant that when the scores were averaged, two other cadets would suffer the excruciating shame of being hated even more than me. Imagine. Hated more than me! HaHa! HaHaHa! Burp.
If might makes right, America is the most righteous nation to ever exist.
Most Americans — if asked before 911 — would say that nothing is wrong with America. America is where everyone wants to be. People risk everything to come here. End of story. And by the way, if you don’t like it, leave.
The attitude of most Americans before September 11, 2001 was to willfully and blissfully ignore the many blunders for which the United States is renowned in the rest of the watching world.
These screw-ups include but are not limited to:
Codifying slavery in our Constitution (Article IV, Sec. 2)Southern States fighting the Civil War to preserve slavery.Conducting genocidal wars against native Americans.Depriving Negroes of their freedom after fighting a bloody civil war to give them their freedom.Permitting our country to slide into a Great Depression while doing almost nothing to fix it. (Free coffee and donuts?)Dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities.Killing 20% of the population during a senseless war in Korea.Allowing gangsters to run our cities.Unleashing a bloodbath of assassinations against politicians and entertainers in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.Executing foreign leaders (among them, Che Guevara, pictured above) while launching Bay-of-Pigs style military operations against small countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Chile.Conducting a genocidal war in Vietnam — simply to test a new generation of weapons. Jane Fonda, pictured above, was among the first who said it wasn’t right.Exploiting migrant agricultural workers.Overturning sixty years of tax law in the 1980s to allow undemocratic concentrations of wealth.
In 2001 Americans believed these idiocies lay in our past; our distant past. They were symptomatic of nothing; not worth noticing, analyzing or fixing. They had nothing to do with now. Nothing was going on now that we needed to fret about or repair. Like Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine, Americans could say, What, me worry?
World Trade Center Twin Towers.
In 2001 the Twin Towers came down. Buried in the rubble lay two-hundred billion dollars of 99.997% pure gold ingot (allegedly recovered).
The oil-rich Bush family‘s first reaction was to take the world to war. The ramp-up was egged on by profiteers, as war always is. And Wall Street insiders, under the cover of the War on Terror, began to deploy contrived financial instruments like bundled sub-primemortgage derivatives (which obfuscated risk) to better suck dry the deep pools of the world’s wealth unaware.
Blunders came fast and furious. By 2008 the leaders of the United States had made so many mistakes they created a financial meltdown. Millions of people lost their homes and jobs. The middle class lost fifty-five percent of its accumulated wealth — much of it in retirement accounts. The situation became dire, causing some people to believe God was punishing the USA for its sins.
Before he made his Nobel Prize winning run for the presidency, Barack Obama’s pastor was Jeremiah Wright. During the early years of Obama’s term, hundreds of retired Chicago police officers set up a perimeter defense around Jeremiah’s church each week to protect congregants from death threats. Obama eventually resigned his membership to protect from harm his friends-in-Christ. It worked. Over the years the threats decreased; the church survived.
People decided to turn around and do the unthinkable: elect the nation’s first black president. His pastor, Jeremiah Wright, screamed, the chickens have come home to roost, on all the news shows. Some people thought, maybe Barack Obama can calm down our angry God.
But as of 2014 — six years after the near-fatal financial meltdown — the USA continues to hover on the precipice of a Soviet Union style collapse.
It’s time to ask the question: Is something wrong with America? And maybe one more: Is somethingwrong with Americans?
Before we ask or answer questions like these, perhaps we should ask an even larger question. Is America a place where people have any chance at all to do well over time?
It might be that geography and geology on this side of the globe are not suitable for civilization or sustained human activity. Whoever lives on this side — whatever their values or culture — may, in the long run, not matter.
Historically, large populations of humans have been unable to establish themselves for long periods on our hemisphere.Hurricane Irene, 1999
The Americas have been inhospitable to humankind. Looking back over the eons, a case can be made — due to earthquakes, volcanoes, meteor hits, frequent ice ages, predatory animals, mosquito and insect bred diseases, droughts, floods, wild fires and hurricanes — that large populations of humans have simply not been able to establish themselves on our hemisphere for long periods; nor will they, ever.
This disturbing graphic is one artist’s depiction of volcanic eruptions 100 miles southeast of Yosemite National Park — now a hundred years overdue.
The United States endures, on average, a thousand tornadoes each year. This number is greater than all the tornadoes that occur in the rest of the world added together.
It wasn’t until 1920 that the population in North America reached a hundred million people. It is conceivable — under reasonably imagined scenarios — that the population of North America will soon collapse.
Some geologists believe the mammoth super volcano buried beneath Yellowstone National Park will erupt someday — perhaps soon. If they are right, surviving humans will have to start over.
Coastal shelf off Los Angeles, California
Other geologists believe seismic activity in the west may one day cause the loss of sizable portions of our continental shelf, perhaps precipitating a cataclysmic flood. Earthquakes in the Cascadia subduction zone have wiped-out huge swaths of our Pacific Northwest forty-one times during the past ten-thousand years. The next earthquake/tsunami is a hundred-and seven years overdue.
It is often said California is the eighth largest economy in the world. Should California or the Pacific Northwest slide into the Pacific Ocean, it would be hard for the rest of North America to keep going.
In addition to the deaths of forty million people, intensive seismic activity and floods could destroy California’s four civilian nuclear reactors (one active, but all storing dangerous quantities of radioactive waste) and the military’s nuclear sites, nuclear powered ships, and submarines. High-level radioactive waste would then pollute the Pacific Ocean and our coastal areas for many thousands of years (much like the disaster now unfolding in Fukushima, Japan).
The question of whether our continent is suitable to support an advanced civilization for more than a few hundred years remains to be answered. It’s not clear to me that it can.
But let’s return to the original question: Is something wrong with America?
Why does a country with our values do bad things? Why so much inequality, crime and perversion? Why so much addiction, pervasive drug use, bullying, child abuse, domestic violence and murder?
Why generational wars, gated communities, blighted inner cities, militias, and political extremism? Why concentration of wealth for the few and debt and despair for the many? Why the increase in home schools and private academies in a nation whose founding virtue was public education for every citizen?
Why so much hatred directed against a people whose only crime was hating slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the current hardships of discrimination in hiring, housing, health care, and policing?
Why can’t black people, for example, catch a break after everything they’ve put up with, from lynchings to (for one black man, at least) being ridiculed on national television for mispronouncing correct answers on Jeopardy?
When we ask questions like these, it seems clear (to me at least) that something sinister is wrecking havoc on our dreams and aspirations. Something fundamental about the way we think and problem-solve is not serving us well.
Europeans like to point out that Americans solve problems by selecting and working through all the wrong solutions first. It’s what makes us so sure we’re right, when we finally stumble on the correct solution.
But how about another view? We live in a country where powerful people once owned slaves. Industrial tycoons operated private militias to control restless employees.
We live in a country where an entitled, strong-willed aristocracy has ruled for centuries a population who believes itself to be free; a democracy.
Old habits of thought and action have been handed down from each generation to the next on both sides.
The powerful and wealthy have learned they can hire spokesmen (like Rush Limbaugh and Tom Brokaw, for example) to play on the fears, aspirations, and assumptions of common people to better confuse and seduce them into serving their interests. This manipulation of one class of people by another has led to a schizophrenic dynamic, which is one of the reasons people in other countries and cultures think Americans are crazy.
Possible future if we don’t secure our democracy.
The lunacy will not end anytime soon. It seems our country is determined to follow its aristocracy wherever it leads. History is full of examples of elites who — deluded, depraved, and out of touch — led their civilizations into the abyss. It’s why our ancestors invented democracy — so cliques of wealthy, well-connected power-trippers couldn’t harm us.
Alas, democracy is not a form of government the elites of the world favor. And we may have lost our democracy a long time ago. Perhaps we never had one. We simply imagined we did, because our rulers told us so.
Billy Lee
Post Script — 19 October 2017 — from the EDITORS:Nineteen months after the publication of this essay, Americans elected a self-proclaimed billionaire and entertainer who was unvetted as to his physical and mental health; unvetted as to his financial status; unvetted in his foreign entanglements; and who lacked any experience whatever in the art of politics.
He lost the popular election by eleven million votes to Hillary Clinton (3M votes) and third-party candidates (8M votes).
Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and Evan McMullen garnered the lion’s share of third-party voting.
The new president blamed his 11 million vote deficit on illegal voting by immigrants. He is now being investigated by the Justice Department and committees in both the Senate and the House of Representatives for conspiring with foreign powers to rig the outcome.
He didn’t serve in the military, yet threatens to take America to war against Korea and Iran. Something is wrong with this picture. He is dismantling health-care and unleashing immigration pit-bulls like ICE on a population of young people who have no memory of having ever lived outside the United States.
It seems like an angry, racist pit-bull is loose in the china-shop. Maybe Billy Lee is right. If so, the United States is screwed. It really is. When this nightmare is over, a lot of broken glass is going to be lying around that everyone will somehow have to clean-up.
The good news? America has a way of surviving catastrophes of its own making. We’re good at managing unnatural disasters that we inflict on ourselves. Maybe to some the chances seem this time to be as low as one in a million.
Jim Carey said in the movie Dumb and Dumber, one in a million means we still have a chance. We might survive the mess of a failed presidency. It’s possible. Who knows? Many are ready to sit on the sidelines to “wait and see” what happens.
During WWII, millions boarded trains in Europe to travel to God knows where. What’s the worst that can happen? many thought to themselves as they watched German soldiers with dogs push families into rail cars.
Maybe waiting to see what happens is not the best strategy for survival..
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Note: On Tuesday September 24 2019 the House of Representatives opened an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.
Pele’ with Bobby Kennedy in Rio, 1965. Pele’ died 29 Dec 2022 of complications from colon cancer. He was 82.
Our gross national product…counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear away…carnage. It counts…locks…and jails…. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets….
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials…. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
Bobby Kennedy 1968
Capitalism is a system of wealth creation characterized by private ownership of the means of production (land, buildings, factories, labor, patents, intellectual property, etc.), where products are made and sold in unregulated markets to generate the revenues that sustain production and provide profits for the owners to use as they see fit.
Capitalism works best in a stable legal environment, where laws protect owners sufficiently that their ability to produce products is unimpeded.
Under this definition, Capitalism differs little from Slavery until the legal environment secures certain rights to labor.
In the USA, the legal environment takes the form of a constitutional republic undergirded by a bill of rights. The bill-of-rights secures certain safeguards to labor in the arenas of religion, speech, arms, assembly, petitions and so on. The constitutional republic secures representative government, which enables labor to choose its political leaders.
The owners of businesses make up a small percentage of the population and would be insignificant players in the parts of the legal environment where voting majorities determine the operation of government if they were not protected by privileges which, as a practical matter, are not enjoyed by labor.
In the United States the powers of government are divided into the three branches to provide checks on usurpation of powers. Further checks on government power are provided by business owners—specifically those individuals who own media and entertainment; individuals who direct cartels in certain industries like defense, medicine, agriculture, transportation, information technology, and pharmaceuticals; and those individuals who own and operate private militias.
It is understood and admitted by independent economists and historians (those who don’t work for the cartels) that without intervention by government, Capitalism tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of business owners—even in those rare circumstances when owners show little interest in manipulating the system to maximize their advantages.
The inability of Capitalism to generate a vigorous and sustainable middle class creates problems of poverty and is one reason why economists tend to advocate for government programs to redistribute wealth to the lower-earning labor sector.
An important historical example followed the aftermath of World War Two. Millions of GIs returned home to the United States after defeating Germany and Japan. Business owners tied to the war profited well and wanted to give something extra to the families of soldiers who fought to protect them.
Because the tax code at that time limited how much revenue owners could keep, they looked for ways to dump windfalls into worthy causes. They worked with government to fashion programs for low-cost education, home loans, and other perks for returning GIs. Windfalls permitted the USA to build highway systems and inexpensive cars for ordinary people to enjoy. Within a few years of the start of these initiatives America built a middle class.
So, what eventually happened?
In the years after 1980 a new generation of business-owners took power and convinced Congress and the president that taxes on large incomes should be reduced from 92% to 28%. These capitalists were sons and grandsons, for the most part, of the same men who helped build the middle class in the first place.
What is the effect of these tax rate changes? What do tax changes mean for society and labor, where most Americans live?
And let’s be clear. The 92% tax rate on earnings above $250,000 during the Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-Nixon-Carter years was a de-facto cap on high-incomes. Workarounds did exist for those lucky few who had access to stockbrokers — men mostly who opened doors to low tax rates for privileged elites — but all non-stock market income was capped.
One good example is the medical profession. After 1980 the dramatic reduction of top tax-rates eliminated what had been a practical limit on incomes. Doctors — many operated as business owners — learned that income limits were gone; minus a small tax fee, they could keep as much money as they could collect.
What happened?
Doctors increased fees at a frenetic pace.
Medical care costs became prohibitive for the majority of workers. As a result, some migrated into programs like Medicaid and Medicare. Others found themselves locked into jobs they disliked because quitting meant losing insurance. Today medical care is so expensive that Congress felt compelled to pass the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to avert systemic collapse of public access to healthcare.
With limits on incomes now gone, doctors, some of them, seem to be overcharging government healthcare programs for services; a few have been arrested for committing crimes to maximize their incomes. The temptations of unlimited Benjamins have ignited a frenzy for dollars that shows no signs of abating.
In the USA, chasing after unlimited wealth seems to have overtaken every profession and institution. Businesses and public institutions are being looted by the professionals who run them.
Owners drive down wages because they can keep the difference for themselves. Operators drive businesses nearly into bankruptcy to skim as much money as they can in as short a time as possible—so they can retire to a private island, perhaps. Who knows?
Concentration of wealth can be a bad thing because it influences what society produces to the disadvantage of labor and the poor. Expensive luxury items (like $500M homes) are built to satisfy the appetites of the wealthy while products and services like schools, clean water, and nutritious food needed by labor are neglected.
These trends (and anyone could list dozens more) are not new. Every civilization that has allowed unreasonable concentrations of wealth has come to a bad end. Ordinary citizens are demoralized, excesses are committed, cynicism and cruelty increase.
An example is gated neighborhoods. It is humiliating to be ostracized by the privileged. Humiliation of citizens without redress breeds despair, which leads to pathologies destructive to society.
Segregation is an impulse strongly felt by a slave state with a long history of income inequality. It behooves those of us who live in the USA—a country with the reputation for promoting the cruelest form of slavery—to guard against trends (like gated-living) that reek of segregation and slavery.
Another problem with unlimited wealth is that it tempts those who have it to buy hi-tech weapons. Many wealthy individuals have created militias to enhance their power.
Everyone knows about the Mafia but respected individuals with good public relations have established private militias as well. A family in Michigan owns an air force and drones plus soldiers who work under contract with the US military to fill in gaps overseas.
A concentration of wealth combined with military power in the hands of an entitled few can become a clear and present danger to the liberty and way of life of ordinary citizens.
Now… a few sentences about Ayn Rand who, more than any other public figure I know, provided the moral justification for the rapid sequestration of wealth by our elites.
I met this squat, chain-smoking, thick-accented Russian woman 50 years ago after having read every book and newsletter she had published at the time. She wrote with seductive logic that appealed to me and I suppose other average people and probably a lot of billionaires as well. The utopian vision described in her book The Virtue of Selfishness undergirds extremist groups like the Tea Party and their spin-offs.
Like most utopian thinkers, her logic was flawless yet led to ridiculous conclusions false on their face. As fantasy her fiction has a certain appeal but to advocate for turning a country over to its richest citizens to do as they please is folly and counter to every form of democracy and free society.
Consider these questions. Who spies more—government or the companies we work for? Who looks at social media sites, credit ratings, where we live, or what our hobbies are—government or the companies we work for?
Who discourages us from speaking our minds? Who stops ordinary people from discussing religion and politics? Who intimidates folks from protesting social injustice? Who blacklists professionals when they “go-rogue” ? Who controls how much money anyone makes?
Clearly, private companies exercise these powers.
What about government?
It collects taxes and arrests bad people who commit crimes.
Companies? They control our lives.
Think about it.
What are we? Slaves?
The answer is, yes, kind-a.
Under Capitalism business owners are an existential threat to people’s freedom. But we have a representative government, don’t we?
In theory at least, folks can use the government to their advantage—not only to limit the powers of business owners over their personal lives but to limit the incomes and estate sizes of private individuals through appropriate tax policies.
And they can forbid the acquisition of military-style powers by civilian elites. It’s important. Read the Second Amendment to convince yourself that it’s true. Outside of the limits of a well-regulated militia, gun-runners are anathema to freedom. Limiting military powers to well regulated militias is the reasonable prerogative of free people in democratic republics like the United States.
How do we preserve the best elements of Capitalism—a proven wealth generator—while eliminating threats it can impose on our liberties and, for most people, their standard of living?
My proposal is this: pass a maximum-income law. This law would set the maximum income from all sources as a multiple of the minimum wage.
Let’s say the multiple is set to 1,000. When the minimum wage is set to $20,000 per year, the maximum income from all sources would be pegged at 1,000 times that—$20 million.
In the same way, the maximum size of estates could be set at some multiple of the maximum income. The multiple might be set by Congress at 20, for example. Then the maximum size of an estate would be 20 times $20M—a $400M maximum.
Now these multiples are simply one example. It might be that folks decide a multiple of 1,000 is too high or too low; they might decide to set the multiple at something lower—say 100 or 50—like it was during the 1950s and 60s. Then again, folks might agree that a figure of $400M isn’t enough for high achievers in the modern age and set maximums higher.
What’s important is to set maximum incomes high enough to preserve incentives to create wealth while at the same time reducing the incentive to loot that unlimited incomes encourage. Unreasonable profits which might end up in owners’ pockets would then more likely be distributed inside companies to workers or to the existential needs of the companies themselves.
Wealth not distributed inside companies could be given to charity or society (e.g. through the mechanism of taxes) to be spent on programs beneficial to labor.
Of course, concentrations of wealth are necessary for economic development. This need for capital is where well-regulated public corporations and public banks come into play.
I hope to write an essay about the role of corporations in society sometime in the future. Hopefully, someone else will write the essay before I get around to it. For now let me suggest that the United States might be better off if corporations and financial institutions were made truly public and regulated like public utilities.
A challenge presented by this proposal is to apply these income and estate-size limits internationally to prevent individuals and cartels overseas from gaining advantages that would threaten our country and its citizens.
Another challenge worth mentioning is that although this proposal puts limits on only a few thousand, or perhaps a few tens-of-thousands of individuals and their families, these are the folks who actually control governments by the power of their concentrations of wealth. It might be problematic, at least at first, to convince the truly wealthy to go along.
But we should try. They are tens-of-thousands. We are billions. Think about it. The grandfathers of the current generation of the wealthy shared their wealth to benefit ordinary people. I don’t believe that any billionaire thinks that their sharing after World War II hurt any of them in any way that counts for anything.
Billy Lee
Click Watch on YouTube link below to view Michael Moore’s award winning movie,Capitalism: A Love Story.
Postscript added 3 December 2022: During the past two years of pandemic, oligarchs increased their wealth by five trillion dollars. The gap between wealthy and poor, in both resources and power, increased dramatically worldwide. The predicament of ordinary people changed. To help readers understand, the Editors agreed to include the following video, which we hope everyone will watch and absorb.
