Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Antisocial Networking - 4.10.09

Michigan Radio's Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been spending time on Facebook and he's not so sure about how social social-networking is.

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I have a theory about all these social networking sites. They are the real al-Qaeda plot to destroy western civilization, a brilliant one. No more inefficient blowing up of single buildings.

They have found a way, through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn and god knows whatever else there is, to paralyze virtually everyone under the age of thirty. Within a few years, they'll just be able to waltz in and finish us off.

Even if they are not a plot, I suspect these things are going to do us in anyway. Without any doubt they are the biggest time-wasters in history. If you aren't of the Facebook generation, fear not.

Don't worry if you don't understand this stuff. I am not of that generation either, but have fearlessly taken a Facebook safari to explain it to you. Actually, I got into Facebook only because I wanted to read something, and the only way to do that was to sign up.

I put down my name and date of birth because I thought I had to. Within no time, I was deluged by notices that people wanted to be my Facebook friend. I ignored these, until someone's feelings were hurt. Okay. I pressed the button. I had my first Facebook friend. Then I got another. And another. I wrote a column about how silly this was, and got more. Finally I decided, okay. Since this doesn't mean anything to me, anybody who wants to can be my "friend."

So once a week, I would add on all these people. I did hear from two old enough to know better whom I had lost touch with and was happy to hear from. "Send me a e-mail," I told them. I don't want to "write on your wall." I did write on a wall once, telling a fellow middle-aged person that a close mutual friend was ill.

She thanked me, and told me, "Do you know everyone in the world can see what you write on someone's wall?" That was that.

Next, kids started complaining I didn't have any pictures of myself on Facebook. Darn right. I already knew that my best friend's daughter, who is unable to find the time to get it together for nursing school, had pasted 82 pictures of herself on Facebook.

I don't know how to put a picture of myself on Facebook and refuse to learn. So I called someone who did.

Thanks to her, the official World War II portrait of Joseph Stalin is on my Facebook page. A Presbyterian minister in California said that he liked the mustache, but thought I had gained weight.

However, all this went too far when boatloads of strangers wished me Happy Birthday. Big Brother Facebook had reminded them to do that. So I fixed my profile to conform more closely with Uncle Joe's. My birthday is now Dec. 21, 1879, thank you very much.

And to all my 428 Facebook friends who made this column possible, I'd just like to say this: Don't ever ask me to twitter. In my world, middle-aged men don't "tweet."

And that isn't about to change.

Essay: Freedom - 1/29/09

When you stop and think about it, we have some pretty strange political alignments in this country these days. Those who are most in favor of so-called “free-market economics,” aka the Republican Party, also tend to be against letting people freely make decisions about their own reproductive systems, or what they inhale.

Those who are pro-choice, or in favor of allowing same-sex marriage, aka Democrats, also tend to be more willing to regulate business, and enforce anti-trust regulations designed to see that nobody got to be too big. They also are far more inclined to require private enterprise to do things that protect the environment.

Unbridled free-market economics were largely out of favor between the time the New Deal started and Ronald Reagan became President in 1981. Since then, however, we’ve celebrated the market. Our leaders have generally held the view that government regulation was bad, and that we’ve had way too much of it.

That was certainly the prevailing philosophy over the last eight years, but in the end, things didn’t turn out so well.

The stock market crashed last fall, the federal budget deficit is higher than imagination, and John Maynard Keynes seems to have been resurrected from the dead.

The federal government has poured hundreds of billions into the market to try and stimulate it back to life, and is gearing up to pour in nearly a trillion more. Yet so far the patient still isn’t breathing very well, and the doctors are getting more worried.

Those dwindling few who still hold to the old-time free market religion think the sure cure for everything is tax cuts. In my view, they are obviously people with limited knowledge of the potholes on I-94.

But while it is easy and popular these days to expose the silliest of the Bush administration’s economic banalities, Dr. Peter Ubel has tried to something deeper and more controversial in his half-sobering, half-entertaining book, Free Market Madness. The good doctor is not just challenging the right of the Enrons of this earth to steal our pension funds. He’s questioning to what extent we ought to be trusted with free choice at all.

As a physician, he constantly sees patients who don’t exercise when they should and don’t eat healthy food even though they know how important that is to their welfare. For a moment, I thought I was talking to my doctor. Libertarians might say that an individual has a perfect right to do with their own body what they want to. Trouble is, we don’t live in a vacuum.

If I lose my health insurance, get diabetes from eating poorly, and have to be taken to an emergency room, I may well cost society many thousands of dollars. Smokers have cost the government billions. The question is, what do we do about it? The good doctor is too smart to suggest any simple solutions. Instead, he is in favor of what he calls “carefully calibrated restrictions on our freedoms.” Sounds good in principle.

That is, as long as I get to do the calibrating.

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Interview: Peter Ubel - 1/29/09

Man is an essentially rational being, who can be depended on to act in his own enlightened self-interest, if free to do so. So, why are there so many overweight, unhappy people in the U-S? Peter Ubel has been wondering about these things. He is a physician and behavioral scientist at the U of M, and the author of the new book, “Free Market Madness.” Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Stem Cell Research Part 1 - 10/20/2008

The great journalist Edward R. Murrow once said “I cannot accept that on every story there are always two equal sides to every question.” That was when he was trying to expose the way in which the demagogue Joe McCarthy was terrorizing the nation and threatening our freedoms – all in the name of preserving freedom.

Murrow wasn’t arguing against fairness. He was merely arguing that good journalism is more than stenography. For example, if a woman says that two plus two is four, and a man says that no, two plus two is 78, we may have an obligation to report what they say.

But we also have an equally strong obligation to try to get at and report the truth. Murrow managed to do that brilliantly with McCarthy, by letting him hang himself with his own words.

And I think there is a strong need for journalists to try to perform some similar function on the stem cell issue. Most of the anti-stem-cell advertising I have seen, whether online or on TV, consists of blatant lies. Spokesman for those opposed to stem cell research say it would cost the taxpayers a lot of money, which isn’t true.

They say that it would open the door to human cloning, which also isn’t true. They also argue that there is no value whatsoever in using embryonic stem cells, which is also untrue.

Never mind that some of these lies contradict each other; I guess they feel if they throw enough mud, some of it is bound to stick.

What this is really about, of course, is religion, and the main opposition – probably the only opposition – comes from people, primarily Roman Catholics, who believe it is a sin to use embryos for even life-saving research.

The odd thing about this is that the embryos that the anti-stem cell crowd professes to be so interested in saving are destined to be poured down the drain if not used to help mankind. That’s because they are all excess or defective products of fertility clinics.

I suspect the opponents would really like to outlaw the clinics, but know they couldn’t get anywhere with that. Here is the bottom line: The scientists who do understand embryonic stem cell research, like Sean Morrison, believe that it offers the best kind of hope for treating a large variety of diseases, injuries and disorders.

What’s more, if cures are found, they might – might – hold enormous future economic potential for the state of Michigan.

Nobody can promise that. What we do know is that if we don’t lift the ban and permit this research, Michigan will be doomed to the status of a scientific and intellectual backwater.

This country was founded on the principle of freedom of religion – and freedom from being oppressed by other people’s religion.

Voting for embryonic stem cell research is a real no-brainer. Nobody is going to require anyone to donate any embryos.

But if anyone still longs for a society where religion is allowed to block scientific and economic progress … there is always the Taliban.

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Essay: Primary Reform - 8/21/2008

Debbie Dingell is right about quite a few things when it comes to the primary selection process. It does badly need reforming and the outcome in Michigan was a complete mess.

We have disagreed in the past over who was responsible for that mess and how it was handled, but she’s right about something else:

That’s no longer important. The trick is to try and fix it for next time. The problem is that it is like every other close call.

You have a little episode, you go to the doctor, and she tells you to stop eating red meat. You happily agree, and your resolution lasts about two days. And so it goes, till you have the big one.

Or you are scared straight. The ironic thing is that this year, for the first time since the 1960s, every last Democratic primary and caucus was important. Michigan would have mattered whenever it held its vote.

But that hasn’t usually been the case. All too often, the race has largely been over before Michiganders had their say. Now, it is good that Howard Dean and Barack Obama want a reform commission.

This is exactly the time to do that. Here’s what I worry about, however: if Obama wins the election, the pressure to do something will likely disappear for eight years.

Incumbent Presidents usually don’t face challenges from within their party. Neither Presidents Bush or Clinton did, for example. So if a President Obama is essentially unopposed for renomination, nobody will care if Michigan votes first or last.

However, that’s exactly the time to make sweeping changes. I can tell you that one thing probably is not going to change – the custom whereby Iowa holds the first-in-the-nation caucus, and New Hampshire the first primary a few days later. Those events are too much a part of our political tradition.

Frankly, I like that tradition, because those are two small states where candidates without much money and a compelling message can be seen and heard. And there are plenty of cases where candidates have charged out of Iowa and New Hampshire with victories under their belts, but fell far short of the nomination.

Remember Pat Buchanan? Paul Tsongas? Ed Muskie? They were all New Hampshire winners, and then vanished beneath the waves of political oblivion.

What some people would like to see established is a series of rotating group primaries, maybe four, to be held on the first Tuesdays of February, March, April and May. Both parties could set these up so that if Michigan were to vote as part of a February cluster in 2012, it would then vote in May in 2016, then April in 2020, et cetera.

They could make these regional groupings or weighted clusters of large and small states – whatever. Long as they do something.

This year we got a wakeup call, as Michigan Democrats managed – by way of a protest – to make our state largely irrelevant in the most exciting nomination contest in history.

Now they need to make sure that never happens again.

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Interview: Rebekah Warren - 6/19/2008

There is widespread agreement that Michigan should join a historic international compact protecting Great Lakes water. Both houses of the legislature have passed legislation to join the compact. But, the versions are different. Rebekah Warren, a Democrat from Ann Arbor, is the main sponsor of the house bill. She is trying to smooth out the differences with Republican Patty Birkholz, who is the main sponsor of the Senate version of the bill. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Representative Warren.

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Essay: Balancing Act - 4/15/2008

Governor Jennifer Granholm made a tactical mistake in her state of the state address last January, a mistake similar to the one that cost the first George Bush his presidency.

She appeared to promise to avoid raising taxes or fees of any kind this year. Now, it is absolutely true that the present shell-shocked legislature would be unwilling to raise taxes even if doing so could cure cancer and make the Detroit Lions a winning team.

Yet you never want to limit your options, or paint yourself into a corner. That is what George H.W. Bush did when he told the Republican National Convention twenty years ago, “Read My Lips.

“No New Taxes!” Two years later, he found it impossible to avoid raising taxes. Conservatives felt betrayed, and Democrats, who had been in favor of raising taxes, used the moment and the sound bite to gleefully portray Bush as a typical hypocritical politician.

Bush had some excuse for tying himself into knots over taxes. At the time, he was running for president and trailing Michael Dukakis in the polls. Dukakis later self-destructed magnificently, but when Bush promised no new taxes, he couldn’t have foreseen that.

Granholm had far less excuse and as a matter of fact, doesn’t really seem to have completely closed the door. What she said on January 29 was this: “The budget I’ll present to the Legislature next month will contain no new fees or taxes.”

As I read it, that says nothing about not raising taxes if a sudden crisis comes and the roof falls in or the Canadians cross the border and seize Port Huron. Yet her remarks were immediately seized on as a pledge never to raise taxes, and judging by everything she has said since, the governor seems to regard it that way.

She did that, I think, to try to make nice with the legislative Republicans, who still control the state senate.

But I am a bit surprised she gave away a bargaining chip in advance.

True, nobody is going to go for another general tax increase. But you can make a good case for raising hunting and fishing licenses, for example; ours are cheaper than many other states.

There are probably other fees that it would make sense to raise and which would cause a minimum amount of pain. After all, nobody makes you go hunt deer or bear, for example.

That’s not an argument in favor of more taxes. But the nation in now commonly acknowledged to be moving into a recession. That means, almost certainly, that state revenue will fall short.

Which will mean last-minute budget cuts. Now, I just renewed my driver’s license for four years. That cost me eighteen dollars.

If they kicked that up to twenty-five bucks, almost none of us would really notice the difference, and it would mean about ten million new dollars a year for the state. If that helps Lansing from further slashing aid to education, I’d be there in a heartbeat.

And bet you would be too.

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Essay: Charging the Mayor - 3/24/08

Let’s tell the truth about what’s going on in Detroit today. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy would say that her decisions as to who to prosecute and what charges to bring are simply about the law, the evidence, and justice.

My suspicion is that she would deny that any of this is about race. On one level, she is certainly right. There is no reason to impugn her integrity or the integrity of the prosecutor’s office.

Yet on another level everything in Detroit is about race. Essentially, our legacy of racial injustices of the past and the reality of modern-day misunderstandings, pervade nearly everything in American life. The legacy of slavery and segregation influenced the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial.

Racial stereotypes and anger and resentment are why ninety-five percent of the 1950s white population of Detroit has left the city.

The legacy of racism, and the continued difficult relationship between two peoples, one formerly slaveholders and the other formerly slaves, has defined this nation from our beginnings.

It’s what Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal correctly called “the American Dilemma.” And it cuts both ways.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was never charged with any crime, but resigned two days after his involvement with a prostitute became public knowledge. The scope of abuses of power in Detroit clearly go far beyond mere sexual failings, based on the 14,000 text messages between the mayor and his chief of staff.

My suspicion is that if a scandal of this kind were to involve the mayor of Grand Rapids or the governor, they would have resigned long before this. Yet the mayor of Detroit has openly tried to make this about race, though all the parties involved are black.

Because of race, there are those in his city who will defend him no matter what the evidence or the verdict.

Because of race, there are those who would attack him or any black politician no matter what the evidence.

If you doubt this, glance at the website Detroit is Crap.com,

I don’t know how all this will play out. I do know, however, that a politician did say something insightful last week. He said that while black anger is based on a authentic legacy of humiliation and doubt and fear, “at times that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.”

And, “in fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community,” also justified. He said, “This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.”

But this politician said he is convinced that by working together “we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds.”

And in fact, we have no choice but to try. The man who said those words is both black and white. He is also leading the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Michigan might do well to keep his words in mind as Detroit moves through the weeks and months ahead.

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Interview: Michael Rubyan - 3/12/08

It’s not unusual for talented student filmmakers to make their own documentary films these days. But not many get people like Mike Wallace, Janet Reno and the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee to star in them. Michael Rubyan is a student at the University of Michigan. He produced, “Life is For the Living,” a documentary about stem cell research. It premieres tonight at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Rubyan about the film.

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Essay: Giving Thanks - 11/21/07

Several years ago, a big red steer escaped somehow from a slaughterhouse and went running down Jefferson Avenue in Detroit. He led police on a chase O.J. Simpson could only envy.

In the end, they knocked him out with a tranquilizer dart. I remembered vaguely that there had been protests from people who thought he deserved to live. One day I asked my friend Jennifer Sullivan, an animal rights person, if she knew whatever happened to him.

“Yes. We took him out to Sasha Farm.” That was the first I ever heard of the place. It was, she told me, the Midwest’s largest farm sanctuary, in the country near Manchester, west of Ann Arbor.

The next weekend we went out there. It looked like a well-managed Garden of Eden. Jefferson, well, what else were they going to name him was there, supremely uninterested in the media. There were other cattle, and hogs and chickens and a whole host of dogs that had been saved from Hurricane Katrina. There was Boris, a wild boar who had been found newborn by a hunter, as well as a legion of potbellied pigs bought as cute “fad” pets and later discarded. There was a magnificent racehorse who barely escaped becoming dog food. And then there were a few animals who still showed signs of a life of torture. Chickens without beaks, for example. They cut them off in factory farms so they won’t peck each other. They do it without anesthesia.

And then there was Samson, a magnificent red chow.

Officially Dorothy Davies and her husband, Monte Jackson, run Sasha Farm, but it was clear that Samson really watched over the whole place. That’s when they told me that he had been rescued from what they called a vivisection lab.

Dorothy and Monte are vegans now. Not everyone who supports Sasha is a vegan or even a vegetarian. But spending time there gives you a different perspective. Whatever else you say about primitive man, they had to meet the meat they ate.

We mostly never do. You may still want to eat turkey, but after you meet the birds at Sasha Farm, you are unlikely to think of them in quite the same way. The turkeys looked happy when I went back to see them this fall. Happy, healthy, and well-adjusted.

Dorothy and Monte have been saving animals since soon after they moved here in 1981. Monte was terribly injured in a trucking accident last year, but he’s recovering gradually.

Samson was still hanging on when I was there in September, but a few days later, he started showing signs of nerve damage.

He died in his sleep, and they buried him on a hillside the day before Halloween. Sasha Farm hasn’t elected a new straw boss yet, but my money is on a very stubborn baby pygmy goat named Stephen Colbert. He intends to have a nice thanksgiving tomorrow.

Regardless of what’s on your plate, here’s hoping you do too.

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