No, the blogger debates are not dead. In fact, we just got a new comment (the 45^th!) on the abortion debate today. And the thread following HP’s argument against gay marriage has been slow, but steady. I’ve been meaning to jump into the fray myself, but I think I’m still suffering from turkey-induced political apathy. And information overload. I’ve been impulsively scribbling down notes in my little moleskin pocketbook that I keep in my back pocket, but not really letting any of those notes play out.

So that’s what I’m going to try to do right now - digest some of those thoughts and ideas that have been playing around in my head. Because nothing is worse than brain constipation.

First though, about the blogger debates - one of us will soon write a post arguing for extending the benefits of marriage or civil unions to all citizens without discrimination and then I think we’ll take a holiday break and ask HP to come back when he returns from Mexico to finally debate the conservative versus liberal sides of economics.

An Investment Perspective of Man’s Value Versus Woman’s Value

I was having beers with a couple friends and they were explaining to me that early marriage is always a bad investment for a man because a man’s worth increases as he gets older, wealthier, and more successful while a woman’s worth decreases as she becomes older, less fertile, and less attractive. I paid no attention and passed it off as macho chauvinism, but the concept made a lot more sense when recent Nobel Prize winner said it in an interview with New York Times Magazine:

I describe the relationship between man and woman as a Hegelian relationship between master and slave. As long as men are able to increase their sexual value through work, fame or wealth, while women are only powerful through their body, beauty and youth, nothing will change.

I had never before realized the truth in this. I’ve always been attracted to older, intelligent, and confident women. But socially speaking, men certainly do have the advantage over woman when it comes to aging. I wonder if the inverse is true: if young women have an advantage over young men?

So Here’s This Idea For a Reality TV Show

Last night, my mind numb from programming all day, I laid down on my bed and turned on CSPAN. Brian Lamb’s incredible and incredibly unbiased network played an hour of the Canadian Broadcasting Channel’s coverage of President Bush’s visit to Canada. It was the first time I had ever watched CBC and I was blown away by the quality of their reporting. The entire hour focused on the Bush’s visit, the US, Canadian-US relations, differences in values, and US foreign policy. They even compared the US media coverage of Bush’s visit to Canadian media coverage.

Just try and imagine us doing the same thing here. Imagine the president of Belarus visiting the US and PBS does an hour long special comparing US versus Belarussian media coverage and analyzing Belarus’ values and foreign policy. It would never happen.

And I was reminded of just how much other countries define themselves in comparison to the United States. I was also reminded how much the public image of the United States has been tarnished since I first started traveling abroad in 1999.

There is a new reality show that has just started in Israel. The idea is to get a group of young, attractive, articulate Israelis to compete amongst each other as to who is the best spokesperson or “ambassador” to improve Israel’s image abroad and explain Israel’s side of the conflict with Palestine.

One of the opening shows (you can hear an excerpt from The World) is held at Cambridge University in England and splits the male and female contestants into two groups each responsible for coming up with an appealing argument to Cambridge students. According to Washington Post, neither group was very convincing.

The idea is ingenious though - to show not only how young Israelis explain themselves to others, but also how they interact with each other to come up with those explanations. The only down side to the show is that it is only broadcast in Hebrew, but already there is talk of translating it into English and broadcasting it here - as they should.

Obviously, what I’m proposing is that we need the same reality show here in the United States. Something more focused than The Real World: Paris. I mean a group of about 10 young Americans from all over the country each with their own idea of what America means to them and then they get shipped off abroad with cameras in tow to explain their vision both as individuals and collectively.

The show would be a smash hit not only in the US, but also especially around the world which is so desperately trying to figure out how the American psyche works.

The most amazing conversations I’ve ever had have all been in dingy, smoke filled bars around the world either drunk or stoned or both and talking politics with the locals. In the end, I found that I am just as critical of anti-americanism as I am of American policy. If those conversations, sans the weed, were to make it onto primetime with pretty faces making them, I can guarantee you you’d want to tune it.

Federalism

Federalism has been getting a lot of attention in the media lately. And rightly so. Federalism refers to states’ rights or state sovereignty; the power relegated to state governements instead of the federeal governement. And for the entire 20^th century, it has always been a Republican value.

In fact, I remember asking my high school history teacher what the difference between a Republican and a Democrat was and he told me Republicans want local power and Democrats want federal power. And so I went home that night and proudly declared myself a Republican to my parents.

The Democrats have favored the federal government because, in general (and specifically concerning civil and abortion rights), the federal government was more progressive than the majority of the states.

Now, however, that the conservatives have the Senate, House, White House, and soon the Supreme Court, several writers have made a very good case for progressives to embrace federalism.

In fact, we already have. Wheter it be gay marriage in Massachuesettes, medicinal marijuna in 11 states, or stem cell research in California, progressives have learned that local government makes local change. If the red states want to keep voting themselves into bankruptcy and bigotry, why not let them?

In my mind, no one has written more eloquently about this than New York Times Magazine’s Jim Holt and I’ll leave you with his article:

A States’ Rights Left?
By JIM HOLT

Published: November 21, 2004

When George W. Bush was re-elected, people in some of the bluer states were so angry and sad that they talked of moving to Canada or seceding from the Union. How else, they felt, could they escape the intensifying red-state control of Washington? But there is a less drastic survival strategy available to liberals in the coastal and Great Lakes states, one that involves neither emigration nor civil war. It is based on the venerable doctrine of states’ rights. And the oddity is that President Bush himself is determined to give the blue states a rather generous gift to help it succeed.

The phrase ‘’states’ rights” has a nasty ring to it for liberals, given its historical associations. During the civil rights era, it was the proud slogan of Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond and George C. Wallace, who fought tooth and nail against desegregation. A century earlier, it was invoked by the slave states of the Confederacy to justify their secession from the Union.

But states’ rights has not always been the intellectual property of reactionaries. During the War of 1812, it was a rallying cry for antiwar forces. In the winter of 1814 and 1815, representatives from New England states came together at the Hartford Convention to express their hostility to the federal government and ”Mr. Madison’s War.”

So the doctrine of states’ rights has had a varied career. But why resurrect it today? The reason is simple. There are big differences among the states, as the last election showed — differences in their understanding of tolerance, in their attitude toward the role of religion in public life, in the value they place on education, conservation and scientific research. The more sovereignty each state has, the better it can pursue policies that are appropriate to the needs and preferences of its people.

Marriage affords a vivid example. In some states it is evidently more imperiled than in others. The Bible Belt states, in particular, have a shockingly high divorce rate, around 50 percent above the national average. Given such marital instability, these states are anxious to defend the institution of heterosexual matrimony, which may explain their hostility to gay marriage. The state of Massachusetts, by contrast, has the lowest divorce rate in the nation. So its people — or at least its liberal judges — perhaps feel more comfortable allowing some progressive experimentation. It will be interesting to see how this experiment plays out, assuming the Bush administration does not succeed in choking off the right of a state to recognize same-sex marriages by getting the Federal Marriage Amendment enacted.

Another matter on which states differ is crime and punishment. Here, too, they have considerable autonomy. Since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the death penalty was constitutionally permissible, most states have chosen to reinstate it. As a group, however, the 12 states that reject capital punishment have a murder rate that is decidedly lower than those that embrace it.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But there are symbolic advantages to living in a state without the death penalty. A few years ago, when I happened to be a resident of Maine, I traveled to Paris. There, in the course of conversations with Parisians, I was reminded that capital punishment, which the French abolished in 1981, was now a distinctively American form of barbarity. ”I’m from Maine,” I would always reply, beaming a bit. ”We outlawed the death penalty in 1887!” (I did not mention that Maine had also outlawed drinking a few decades earlier.)

One of the most striking differences among states is in their levels of wealth. Liberals tend to live in more economically productive states than conservatives. The top five states in per capita personal income (Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland and New York) all went to Kerry; the bottom five (Utah, New Mexico, West Virginia, Arkansas and Mississippi) all went to Bush. Since the blue states are generally richer than the red states, they must bear a greater portion of the federal tax burden. Most of them pay more to Washington than they receive, whereas most of the red states receive more than they pay. Some liberals in blue states must wonder exactly what they get in return for subsidizing the heartlanders, who are said to resent them.

Here is where President Bush is their friend. According to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, as much as two-thirds of the benefits from the income tax cuts he pushed through in his first term go to taxpayers making more than $100,000 a year. These well-off Americans tend to be concentrated around New York City, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and other liberal enclaves. By contrast, relatively few of the benefits from the Bush tax cuts go to the Southern and Prairie states, where low-income working families with children are more the norm. At present, the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire by 2010. If the president succeeds in making them permanent, as he has vowed to do, it will mean lasting relief for the blue states. The money they had been sending to the red states could then be spent locally, according to their own liberal values — say, on public schools (where they already spend more per pupil than the red states) or stem-cell research.

The more conservatives succeed in reducing the size and scope of the federal government, the more fiscal freedom the blue states will have to pursue their own idea of a just society. There are already signs that this is happening. Senators like Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Charles E. Schumer of New York are rumored to be contemplating gubernatorial runs in their respective states, convinced that there is now more to do in the governor’s mansion than on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, blue-state liberals should stop despairing and start thinking locally. Instead of saying, ”The United States is. . . . ” try saying, ”The United States are. . . . ” See? You feel better already.

Jim Holt is a frequent contributor to the magazine.

Correction: Nov. 21, 2004, Sunday

An essay on Page 27 of The Times Magazine today about states’ rights as a potential issue for the Democrats includes an outdated reference to the possibility that Senator Charles E. Schumer would run for the governorship of New York. On Monday, after the magazine had gone to press, Senator Schumer announced that he had no plans to run.