Regardless of What They Say About It, We're Gonna Keep It

The Snopeses have never, as far as I can tell, seen a living President whose side they wouldn't take.  It's rather touching.  Today they took on a recurrent slur on President Obama: that the family dog Bo had been flown in his own personal jet to meet the Obamas when they arrived in Massachusetts for their vacation.  I think it's a safe bet that this rumor was fostered by Republicans, because in one version quoted by Snopes, the writer asks rhetorically "I wonder if that sets well with all the unemployed, hurting, U S citizens who can't afford food, but we can pay for this."  Republicans only care about the unemployed, hurting U S citizens when a Democrat is President, or when some other partisan advantage can be gained by pretending to care.  Democrats play the same game in reverse.

So, according to Snopes, Bo is sometimes shipped out on a separate plane, but they quote a newspaper report that he doesn't have the plane to himself, or even to himself and just one handler: "there were other occupants on the plane, including several other staffers.  The presidential party took two small jets to the Hancock County-Bar Harbor Airport in Trenton because the airport was too small to accommodate the President's usual jet."

Fair enough, I guess.  This tale reminded me of a review the late John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of A Time for Truth (McGraw-Hill 1978), by former energy "czar" and Secretary of the Treasury William Simon.  (The review was collected in Annals of an Abiding Liberal, published in 1979 by Houghton Mifflin.)  As if unwilling to let the book stand on its own two feet, so to speak, Simon got introductory essays written by two ultraconservative economists, Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek.   Galbraith reported that Simon wrote

of going to Moscow in April 1975 [that is, during the Republican Gerald Ford administration] for a worthy but modest public relations exercise on behalf of Soviet-American trade.  What he calls "a staff group from the departments of State and Commerce and others" were along.  It was a relief, he says, to be on the way home, and as they soared out of the Soviet capital on Air Force Two, "seventy-eight dignified representatives of the United States of America shouted and applauded like youngsters in sheer relief ..."  A more candid man would condemn taking seventy-eight people all that distance for such a job.  That, in all truth, Mr. Simon, was bureaucracy run wild [Annals of an Abiding Liberal, 104-5].

The President is a different case than a "public relations exercise," of course.  He can't really travel without support staff.  I suppose the amount of tax money that goes to pay for those two small jets is infinitesimal compared to the full Federal Budget.  And Air Force One also goes with the job.  I doubt that Republicans really want to impose the same austerity measures on Republican Presidents that they'd happily impose on Democrats.  Or vice versa.  It's funny, really.

Individualists of the World, Unite!

Now that the Heterosexual Oscars are over, many Colts fans are in deep mourning. Such is life -- you can't have a winner without a loser, or many losers. At alicublog Roy Edroso reports on rightbloggers' reactions to the big game, and quotes one Troy Nelson:

What happened to the days of pulling for organizations, teams, and players whom [sic!] best demonstrate the virtues of team work and heart and will power? Who overcome the challenges of a determined opponent on the level playing field of competition? Of blood, sweat, and tears? I guess in our coddled, emasculated, socialist society any overt demonstration or celebration of these qualities is offensive, too Darwinian, too Randian, too capitalistic.

Ah yes, professional sports are certainly capitalistic, with the heroic players working for the Ellsworth Tooheys of America. But "Darwinian"? I thought good conservatives repudiated Darwin. What the Creationist/Intelligent Design take on team sports would be I don't know. "Randian"? Ayneleh was apparently ambivalent at best about Darwin. I'm not sure what she would have thought of the Superbowl -- surely it would have been too corporate for her, though she never let herself be hobbled by consistency -- but one of her disciples assures the faithful that "no guilt is called for, because watching sports satisfies a vital human need." And this acolyte somehow manages to turn subordination and sacrifice in the service of the group into selfishness and self-glorification; that's fundamentalism for you, which manages to interpret a text until it means its opposite. (Not all Objectivists agree, however.)

That is why the economist John Kenneth Galbraith took on the subject years ago:

I once wrote a piece of which I was at the time very proud (I maybe shouldn't go back and read it again), arguing somewhat ironically that socialism in the United States was the result of organized sports. It takes people at a vulnerable age and makes teamwork, more than individual work, the thing. It subjects people to the authority of the team captain or the coach, and as I say, this is at an age where people are vulnerable. And therefore, team sports are the breeding grounds for socialism and must be watched very carefully. And I had an organization in the piece -- this ran in Harper's -- called "the CIA": the Congress for Individualist Athletics. It was written under a pseudonym because I was then an ambassador, I couldn't write under my own name. One day the postman struggled into my room at Harvard with a pile of letters this thick that had been sent on from Harper's from people who, well, they fell into three classes:

• people who wanted to know whether it was real or not;
• people who wanted to join; and
• people who demanded that I exclude baseball from the list because baseball is not, as they said, a "socialist" sport: when you're up at bat, you're on your own.

Well, it's an example of the dangers of using irony. Under the best of circumstances, many people are going to take it seriously.