Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

The odd couple


How uncomfortable do these two look? I’m uncomfortable and I wasn’t even there.

After a bitter campaign that sometimes got personal between the president and the woman to be House speaker, the two had a makeup luncheon at the White House. Appearing publicly in the Oval Office after an hour of private discussions, the pair emphasized finding common ground and ignoring talk of bedeviling specifics, such as their division over the Iraq war. They took no questions.

And really, do you blame them? That only would have forced them to hang out together a little longer. Best to get it over with and get on to more enjoyable matters, like washing the dishes or cleaning the shed.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Defenders of the dark ages

The so-called defenders of marriage and family seem intent on returning us to the middle ages. Not only are they pushing further same-sex marriage bans (seven more states passed bans on Tuesday, bringing the total to 27, and Massachusetts is considering one), they also want to make it more difficult for couples to get divorced.

What strikes me about all this is just how inhumane it is, crafting laws to regulate love relationships, requiring failed marriages to continue unless there is a specific “misconduct” and only allowing divorce after a proscribed waiting period.

Having witnessed too many married couples soldier on in bad marriages and watching what that does to the kids involved and what it does to the couple, how sour it turns them, how bitter, one has to wonder exactly what winning this fight will mean. What benefit does legislation like this have for married couples or society? None that I can see.

It’s the same question that should be asked everyday about same-sex marriage — what impact will allowing same-sex couples to marry have on the rest of us? The answer, again, is none.

What, then, is gained for society by continuing to regulate love relationships in this way? Again, nothing — unless you want to drive the entire culture back to the dark ages, which seems to be the goal.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Fixing government

As The New York Times points out, the new Democratic majority has a chance to fix the ethical potholes that currently exist in Congress so that officeholders can avoid falling into them. And the Democrats should make it their first priroity.

Many of the Republicans who took control in 1994 saw themselves as reformers from the heartland. But their leaders soon convinced themselves that the Democrats were a force so evil that any effort was justified in keeping them at bay. To do that, they made lobbyists a regular part of the government as they traded perpetual access for campaign re-election money. They created an extraordinarily efficient system for running the House, in which even moderate Republicans were iced out of the decision-making process. Enamored with their own sense of virtue, they shut down the ethics process.

The Democrats, as the editorial points out, already want to ban gifts from lobbyists and “publicly disclosing the secret ‘earmarks’ that get inserted into legislation on behalf of special interests before they’re passed into law.” They should be put in place the minute the new Congress is sworn in “while the Democrats are filled with fervor and not totally focused on what they’re giving up,” the Times writes.

The key, when all is said and done, is to change the culture of the institution — one that is insular and partisan and results in legislation that has nothing to do with the lives most of us live everyday.

Members of Congress tend to live in a bubble that reinforces the feeling that they are special and immune to normal rules. Being forced to fly coach, to pay one’s own tab at the golf course and resort, are useful reminders of their mortality. But the most destructive bubble of all is the one that shields elected officials from opinions other than their own. To really change the House culture, Ms. Pelosi will need to overcome the toxic take-no-prisoners political climate in which any concession to the other side is seen as a sign of weakness.

It is this bubble that got the Democrats in trouble in the first place (does anyone remember the check scandal) and that made the last 12 years of Republican rule so painful for the country.

Step 1 in making change has occurred. We’ve tossed out the troglodytes — or many of them. Now it is up to the Democrats to begin Step 2.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.