Freedom From and Freedom For

The NY Times Opinionator blog carries thoughts by philosophers. Here's a snippet from a posting in honour of July 4th and directed to the issue of America's Independence Day:

Song of Freedom

By J.M. Bernstein

When Janis Joplin achingly sang that “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” she (or the song’s composer, Kris Kristofferson) was critiquing a widely held ideal of independence: namely, the aspiration toward maximum liberty from all binding attachments and obligations. Isn’t it obvious, the argument goes, that each promise, and each unbreakable emotional bond, entails a loss of true freedom, an abrogation of true independence? Joplin’s refutation is simple and elegant: in actuality, absolute freedom is a picture of perfect emptiness, since if you have nothing left to lose, you have nothing.

However much the ideal of unencumbered freedom has become associated with the Declaration of Independence, freedom from binding attachments is no part of its philosophical underpinnings. In protesting against British tyranny, the American colonists were not proclaiming an ideal of individual freedom from government. On the contrary, they were pleading the cause for a vital conception of political community.

The above is more charitable to the ideals of American society than I would be. I find that the emphasis on "freedom" is overdone in the US. It is a pursuit of "freedom from" at the expense of self fulfillment within the context of social obligations.

I also believe, as Mark K. Smith points out in an article on Erich Fromm, the emphasis on "freedom from" can lead to a craving for authoritarianism. I find this to be especially true of the right wing politics in the US:

In 1941, the first of Erich Fromm’s deeply influential books appeared: Escape From Freedom. It argued that ‘freedom from the traditional bonds of medieval society, though giving the individual a new feeling of independence, at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity’. This alienation from place and community, and the insecurities and fears entailed, helps to explain how people seek the security and rewards of authoritarian social orders such as fascism.

We learn from our mistakes and Fromm was writing in the context of the mid-20th century disaster of fascism and war. The rise of authoritarianism was a dire problem. Fromm was pointing that the ideal of "liberty" in the Declaration of Independence was not a simple "good". It could be abused and could lead to the mass of people embracing fascism.

Bernstein is right to condemn the emphasis on "freedom from" as a blind alley that leads to "nothing left to lose". Certainly people need individual liberties to allow them to develop their individual talents. But this is not despite the larger society. A free society imposes obligations. At the very least, one must reciprocate and enlarge the freedoms of others to pursue self-development, but not at the expense of the larger society to have their fair share of security and happiness. Bernstein notes that the "freedom" people really need is the freedom for self realization in a social context of mutual obligations and a society that emphasizes realizing your individual potential in a socially responsible way.

The last 30 years has seen an era of egomania in the US that has allowed the top 0.1% of the population to become maddenlying wealthy at the expense of the larger society. This was the "freedom from" any social obligations and the wild frenzy to seize economic wealth at the expense of the broader society. The economic condition of the bottom 80% of the population has stagnated while the elite has grown rich beyond their wildest imagination.

The elite in the US must use the opportunity of the Great Recession to turn back toward social obligation and focus on "freedom for" the great mass of the population to realize their dreams. We've had 30 years of "freedom from" social obligations by the elite and it has led to tragedy. That now needs to be balanced by greater emphasis on social connectedness and the obligations toward a civil society.

Exploring the Oddities of Sexual Preference

Here's a self-test from an article in New Scientist that explores the strange world of sexual selection:

Which face is more attractive? If you chose the face on the left, you share the tastes of most heterosexual men. It is a composite face, or "morph", made from the faces of eight women with unusually small feet. The face on the right is a morph of eight women with unusually large feet.

It's quite a difference, isn't it? Women with smaller feet have prettier faces, at least according to the men who took part in this study. So do women with longer thigh bones and narrower hips, as well as women who are taller overall. And the contest isn't even a close one. "These are the most strikingly different morphs I've ever seen," says Jeremy Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University at Albany, New York.

Go read the article to learn more strange preferences by men and women. Funny, I wouldn't have considered this, but with a bit of science you can uncover these strange sexual selection pressures in the mating game.

Errol Morris on Anosognosia

Here are some bits from a 5-part series that Errol Morris has written on anosognosia:

Part 1:

An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.” They literally aren’t alerted to their own paralysis. There is some monitoring system on the right side of the brain that has been damaged, as well as the damage that’s related to the paralysis on the left side. There is also something similar called “hemispatial neglect.” It has to do with a kind of brain damage where people literally cannot see or they can’t pay attention to one side of their environment. If they’re men, they literally only shave one half of their face. And they’re not aware about the other half. If you put food in front of them, they’ll eat half of what’s on the plate and then complain that there’s too little food. You could think of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as a psychological version of this physiological problem. If you have, for lack of a better term, damage to your expertise or imperfection in your knowledge or skill, you’re left literally not knowing that you have that damage. It was an analogy for us.

Part 2:

June 11, 1914. In a brief communication presented to the Neurological Society of Paris, Joseph Babinski (1857-1932), a prominent French-Polish neurologist, former student of Charcot and contemporary of Freud, described two patients with “left severe hemiplegia” – a complete paralysis of the left side of the body – left side of the face, left side of the trunk, left leg, left foot. Plus, an extraordinary detail. These patients didn’t know they were paralyzed. To describe their condition, Babinski coined the term anosognosia – taken from the Greek agnosia, lack of knowledge, and nosos, disease.

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There were many unanswered questions in Babinski’s original paper. Did the anosognosic patient have absolutely no knowledge or some limited knowledge of her left-side paralysis? Was there a blocked pathway in the brain? Was the anosognosia an organic (or somatic) disease? Or a derangement of thought? Was she in some sort of trance? Babinski also noted that many of his anosognosic patients developed odd rationalizations. When he asked them to move their left (paralyzed) arms, they would decline to do so, offering a myriad of implausible excuses. (Furthermore, not all of his patients with left-side paralysis were clueless about their condition. Some patients had knowledge of their paralysis but were oddly indifferent to it. For these patients, Babinski coined the term anosodiaphoria, or indifference to paralysis.

Part 3:

Discusses the stroke of President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and whether he had anosognosia and whether this illness caused the US to not ratify the treaty for the League of Nations.

Part 4:

V.S. Ramachandran has written about anosognosia in a number of journal articles and in his extraordinary book with Sandra Blakeslee, “Phantoms in the Brain.” Ramachandran rarely settles for the status quo. If there is something unexplained, he pursues it, trying to provide an answer, if not the answer. He has made a number of spectacular discoveries, most famous among them his innovative use of mirror-boxes to treat phantom limb syndrome. Rather than devise complex experiments, he prefers simple intuitive questions and answers. His work on anosognosia is a perfect example.

Ramachandran was taken in by a question that haunts Babinski’s original work on anosognosia — the question of whether the anosognosic knows (on some level) about the paralysis. What is going on in an anosognosic brain? (Babinski’s original question: Is it real?) Almost any deficit can be explained as volitional. How do you know that an anosognosic patient is really in denial, or oblivious, or indifferent to his/her paralysis? How do you know that the patient is not feigning illness? This was a critical question during World War I, when neurologists had to deal with a flood of injured soldiers and had to discriminate between the truly damaged and those just malingering.

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V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Well, you can have anosognosia for Wernicke’s aphasia [a neurological disorder that prevents comprehension or production of speech] or you can have it for amnesia. Patients that are amnesic don’t know they are amnesic. So, it has a much wider, broader usage. Although it was originally discovered in the context of hemiplegia by Babinski and is most frequently used in that context, the word has a broader meaning. Wernicke’s aphasiacs are completely lacking in language comprehension and seem oblivious to it because [although] they smile, or they nod to whatever you say, they don’t understand a word of what you’re saying. They have anosognosia for their lack of comprehension of language. It’s really spooky to see them. Here’s somebody producing gibberish, and they don’t know they’re producing gibberish.

Part 5:

DAVID DUNNING: Here’s a thought. The road to self-insight really runs through other people. So it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting. Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded? If you watch other people, you often find there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things. I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on. Now, the sad part about that is — there’s been a replication of this with medical students — people at the bottom, if you show them what other people do, they don’t get it. They don’t realize that what those other people are doing is superior to what they’re doing. And that’s the troubling thing. So for people at the bottom, that social comparison information is a wonderful piece of information, but they may not be in a position to take advantage of it like other people.

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For years, I have had my own version of the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In my version, God appears before Adam and Eve, and tells them that they have disobeyed Him. He admonishes them, and they will have to leave immediately. Everything will be completely grotesque, grim, ghastly and gruesome outside of Eden. God spares them no detail. Adam and Eve, both crestfallen and fearful, prepare to leave, but God, feeling perhaps a little guilty for the severity of his decision, looks at them and says, “Yes, things will be bad out there, but I’m giving you self-deception so you’ll never notice.”

The above series of articles provokes a lot of questions and thoughts. I got me thinking about my mother...

My mother died of a brain tumour. The effect of the tumour was poor balance and problems with manipulating things with her left hand. After the surgery to remove the tumour, she was left with "left neglect", the anosognosia described in the above articles. I was horrified that the surgeon whose "treatment" worsened the condition and led to her death within 3 weeks never too any responsibility for his clumsy surgery. I was further horrified by the poor treatment my mother got in hospital. My family is only 2 generations removed from farming where you cared for the sick and dying at home. My mother would have gotten superior help in his last three weeks by being at home. But he was a "medical" system that condemns people to die in the brutal environment of a hospital where paid workers show minimal regard for their charges. For my mother this evidenced itself in the following ways:

• They persisted in putting the service call button on her left side, but with left neglect she was completely unaware of its presence, so she was effectively abandoned until family noticed the mistake and put it on the right or until a staff change and remaking of the bed moved it to the right side. The worst incident resulting from this "oversight" by the nursing staff was when she was left on a hard metal bedpan for 4 hours because she couldn't find the service bell and her voice was too weak to get the attention of staff.


• The orderlies were extremely clumsy moving her to/from the bed. She was limited in how she could help them because of her left paralysis. They invariably stepped on her bare feet with their shoes hurting her and risking broken bones. She was fragile and at their mercy and pointing this out to staff did nothing to prevent its recurring.


• Food was placed in front of her and none of the staff showed any awareness that her left neglect meant she would not attend to any food on the left. So they left her to pick at the food on the right. Worse, they gave her utensils wrapped in plastic that are hard enough to get at whith two hands. In short, her meals were frustrating. She was already well underweight. She died withing three weeks in large part because of malnourishment. When I pointed out the problems with food to the hospital they pretended to show concern, but they didn't ask any questions or follow up in any way that would indicate that they truly wanted to learn from mistakes. One incident sticks in my mind: she was rushed from a "rehabilitation" hospital to emergency suffering from a severe infection. When we arrived, waited for emergency care to be complete, and accompanied her to her hospital room, I requested food for her. The hospital said they couldn't provide anything because the cafeteria was closed and the dietician was not available. I kept insisting and they finally brought her a "snack". She was a severely underweight woman and was hungry and only got this "food" under protest from the hospital despite the fact that she had missed her supper because of the emergency room care.


• I noticed that the hospital did have signs put on rooms & beds where patients had a risk of falling. This was to call the attention of the nursing staff to this condition and the need for extra care. My request for a similar sign to call attention to "left neglect" was ignored by the hospital. Consequently the level of care was haphazard at best. Only those staff who took the time to understand my mother's condition even had a possibility of taking appropriate care. This kind of neglect was endemic to the hospital situation. I spent months assuring the hospital that I was not interested in suing over my mother's death. I just wanted to make them aware of her problems and their inadequacies in caring for her. They showed no more than "superficial" concern, i.e. they acknowledged my letters and "assured" me that their procedures ensured that patients got the best possible care. They weren't interested in hearing about any failings on their part. They weren't interested in improving their practices.

One Man Crusade

Paul Krugman has a lonely calling. He is the voice of reason in a sea of irrationality. Here are some bits from his latest NY Times op-ed in which he argues -- yet again -- that austerity and budget cutting are not the way out of the current Great Recession:

When I was young and naïve, I believed that important people took positions based on careful consideration of the options. Now I know better. Much of what Serious People believe rests on prejudices, not analysis. And these prejudices are subject to fads and fashions.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s column. For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity. That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed.

This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination — specifically, on belief in what I’ve come to think of as the invisible bond vigilante and the confidence fairy.

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What’s the evidence for the belief that fiscal contraction is actually expansionary, because it improves confidence? (By the way, this is precisely the doctrine expounded by Herbert Hoover in 1932.) Well, there have been historical cases of spending cuts and tax increases followed by economic growth. But as far as I can tell, every one of those examples proves, on closer examination, to be a case in which the negative effects of austerity were offset by other factors, factors not likely to be relevant today. For example, Ireland’s era of austerity-with-growth in the 1980s depended on a drastic move from trade deficit to trade surplus, which isn’t a strategy everyone can pursue at the same time.

And current examples of austerity are anything but encouraging. Ireland has been a good soldier in this crisis, grimly implementing savage spending cuts. Its reward has been a Depression-level slump — and financial markets continue to treat it as a serious default risk. Other good soldiers, like Latvia and Estonia, have done even worse — and all three nations have, believe it or not, had worse slumps in output and employment than Iceland, which was forced by the sheer scale of its financial crisis to adopt less orthodox policies.

So the next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good. And real-world policy — policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families — is being built on that foundation.

What amazes me is the disconnect between "the haves" and the "have nots". There is simply no regard for the suffering being endured by tens of millions because of the greed and mistakes of some very rich people. Meanwhile, "the haves" show no awareness of or sympathy for that suffering. That is simply cruel. The story of a dog being beaten gets more attention than the plight of millions of Americans being cut off from unemployment benefits. It really disturbs me that the media amplify the posturing of well bed, brain dead people while the needs of millions are ignored.

Beyond the simple inhumanity of the economic system, there is the stupidity of foregoing the productivity possible if you put people to work. Getting infrastructure done now is cheap. When the politicians get around to it in 5 or 10 years, when conditions will be incomparably more dire than they are now, that spending will indeed "crowd out" other spending and lead to inflation. But nobody sees the sense of spending now when capacity is underutilized and there is a "army of unemployed" more than willing and able to work. Tragic.

Interesting Perspective on Poverty

I find this proposal to be very interesting. That it comes from a philosopher makes it even more interesting to me.

Here is a bit from an article in the Boston Globe newspaper. It is over two years old, but this is the first time I've encountered it and it makes sense to me. Most real insights are this kind of "lateral" move where you change the paradigm (think of the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn):

Imagine getting a bee sting; then imagine getting six more. You are now in a position to think about what it means to be poor, according to Charles Karelis, a philosopher and former president of Colgate University.

In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.

To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale. Social conservatives have tended to argue that poor people lack the smarts or willpower to make the right choices. Social liberals have countered by blaming racial prejudice and the crippling conditions of the ghetto for denying the poor any choice in their fate. Neoconservatives have argued that antipoverty programs themselves are to blame for essentially bribing people to stay poor.

Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn't apply to the poor. When we're poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

Poverty and wealth, by this logic, don't just fall along a continuum the way hot and cold or short and tall do. They are instead fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way. At some point between the two, people stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences. Perhaps because economists, by and large, are well-off, he suggests, they've failed to see the shift at all.

Go read the whole article.

This comment is consistent with the fact that Karelis has reformulated the problem and is working from a new paradigm:

Few economists are familiar with Karelis's work, and when it's presented to them, they tend to be skeptical of its explanatory power.

The article does cite one economist that finds it interesting:

"There's not much evidence in the book, and there are a lot of bold claims, but it's great that he's making them," says Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University. It "was a really great book, and it was totally neglected."

I find Tyler Cowen to be an interesting economist because he is more open to new ideas than mainstream economists. Time will tell if Karelis's work is a breaktrhough or a false lead. I, for on, think it is a breakthrough.

Bad News in Afghanistan

The major media gives a hint that there is bad news in Afghanistan. They talk about rising levels of injury and death. But the core story remains the ever-optimistic "winning the battle slowly" just like in Vietnam, the generals kept being optimistic about the "body count" as they slowly lost the war.

Here's an article by Ann Jones in TomDispatch.com that lays out the pessimistic -- and more realistic -- view of how things are going in Afghanistan:

It’s only in the last year or two that the Marines and the Army started pulling a few American women off their full-time non-combat jobs and sending them out as Female Engagement Teams (FETs) to meet and greet village women. As with so many innovative new plans in our counterinsurgency war, this one was cobbled together in a thoughtless way that risked lives and almost guaranteed failure.

Commanders have casually sent noncombatant American women soldiers -- supply clerks and radio operators -- outside the wire, usually with little training, no clear mission, and no follow up. Predictably, like their male counterparts, they have left a trail of good intentions and broken promises behind. So when I went out to meet village women near the Pakistan border last week with a brand-new Army FET-in-training, we faced the fury of Pashto women still waiting for a promised delivery of vegetable seeds.

Imagine. This is hardly a big item like the “government in a box” that General McChrystal promised and failed to deliver in Marja. It’s just seeds. How hard could that be?

...

Moreover, it’s not working for a significant subgroup of Americans in Afghanistan either: combat soldiers. I’ve heard infantrymen place the blame for a buddy’s combat injury or death on the strict rules of engagement (“courageous restraint,” as it’s called) imposed by General McChrystal’s version of COIN strategy. Taking a page from Vietnam, they claim their hands are tied, while the enemy plays by its own rules. Rightly or wrongly, this opinion is spreading fast among grieving soldiers as casualties mount.

It’s also clear that even the lethal part of counterinsurgency isn’t working. Consider all those civilian deaths and injuries, so often the result of false information fed to Americans to entice them to settle local scores. To give just one example: American troops recently pitched hand grenades into a house in Logar Province which they’d been told was used by terrorists. Another case of false information. It held a young Afghan, a relative of an Afghan agricultural expert who happens to be an acquaintance of mine. The young man had just completed his religious education and returned to the village to become its sole maulawi, or religious teacher. The villagers, very upset, turned out to vouch for him, and the Army hospitalized him with profuse apologies. Luckily, he survived, but such routine mistakes regularly leave dead or wounded civilians and a thickening residue of rage behind.

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Factor in accounts of what General McChrystal did best: taking out bad guys. Reportedly, he was vigorously directing Special Forces’ assassinations of high and mid-level Taliban leaders in preparation for “peeling off” the “good” Taliban -- that is, those impoverished fighters only in it for the money. According to his thinking, they would later be won over to the government through internationally subsidized jobs. But assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers -- or those we call the bad Taliban -- actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns more interested in living off the population we’re supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty. From the point of view of ordinary Afghans in the countryside, our “good Taliban” are the worst of all.

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American development was supposed to have made it all so much better. But tales abound of small, successful projects in education or health care, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and then dropped without a single visit from USAID monitors afraid to leave their Embassy fortress in Kabul. Regularly, USAID now hands over huge hunks of “aid” money to big, impossibly ambitious, quick-fix projects run by the usual no-bid Beltway Bandit contractors whose incompetence, wastefulness, unconscionable profits, and outright fraud should be a national scandal.

This, too, is a process everyone knows but can’t speak about because it’s not part of the official script in which the U.S. must be seen as developing backward Afghanistan, instead of sending it reeling into the darkest of ages. Despairing humanitarians recall that Hillary Clinton promised as secretary of state to clean house at USAID, which, she said, had become nothing but “a contracting shop.” Well, here’s a flash from Afghanistan: it’s still a contracting shop, and the contracts are going to the same set of contractors who have been exposed again and again as venal, fraudulent, and criminal.

Just as Obama sends more troops and a new commander to fight a fraudulent war for a purpose that makes no sense to anyone -- except perhaps the so-called defense intellectuals who live in an alternative Washington-based Afghanaland of their own creation -- Clinton presides over a fraudulent aid program that functions chiefly to transfer American tax dollars from the national treasury to the pockets of already rich contractors and their congressional cronies. If you still believe, as I would like to, that Obama and Clinton actually meant to make change, then you have to ask: How does this state of affairs continue, and why do the members of the international community -- the U.N., all those international NGOs, and our fast-fading coalition allies -- sign off on it?

Both Afghanistan and Iraq remind me of Vietnam. The official view pushed by the government and the media they feed is that "things are going well, more slowly than expected, but we are making progress". But the reality is that it is a meat grinder, the end is not in sight, and it will be abandoned because it is just too hard. So all that blood and treasure will be lost. It will be lost of a lie.

I accept that the US had to go into Afghanistan and "kick butt" but it did that in the first 3 months and should have withdrawn after the Northern Alliance had seized Kabul. It should never have gone into Iraq. Everything else has been a waste of blood and treasure.

Obama & Lincoln

I was thinking this morning about how Obama claimed to be such a devoted follower of Lincoln. And I was thinking of how for 18 months Obama has fumbled around in the presidency saying good things -- he was elected to bring "change" -- but delivering very little. He reminds me of Lincoln's generals. They talked a good fight, but they failed to take the army into the South and deal a deadly blow the to the rebellion. Obama has been unwilling to take on big interests, the lobbyists, big corporations, Wall Street, etc. He has advisors who know who crappy the economy is. He has fiddled while Rome burns. Just like McClellan in the Civil War, Obama has marched his proudly outfitted troops up and down but failed to engage the enemy. Obama preens as a leader who understands the electorate and what is needed. But he is timid like McClellan. He is unwilling to take his troops to war.

It is time for Obama to find his inner U. S. Grant and take on the ills that are strangling the US. The American people have suffered from a decade of no real wage increases. The rich got richer under Reagan-Bush-Clinton and they got phenomenally richer under Bush II. Meanwhile the economy sickened and it is now dying under the hand of the Great Recession. Obama has to find the heart of Grant and slug it out with the enemies that are strangling the US: the Republicans, big corporate interests, the war lobby, etc. Obama needs to turn the US toward a new direction that will see rewards flow down to the people who actually do the work in society. Obama needs to set up a safety net to protect the most vulnerable of the population during this terrible economic crisis.

Big changes are needed. Not the baby steps Obama has taken up to now. He needs to be like Grant and send the troops in and harden himself to the slaughter that war truly is. War is a meatgrinder that feeds off the flesh of the innocent. Only by great effort will the Reagan legacy be slayed like the dragon that Reagan's legacy truly is. Only when the sword of a fired-up politics has been shoved through the heart of Republican intransigence will there be any hope of a new dawn. I'm waiting for Obama to find his inner U. S. Grant.