Eduardo Saverin is a co-founder of Facebook who renounced his U.S. citizenship in advance of that company’s initial public offering on the stock exchange; in doing so he has perhaps saved himself tens of millions of dollars in U.S. tax liability on the billions he will earn. Despicable, huh? He has profited beyond most people’s dreams, thanks in substantial part to the freedom to innovate and do business that living in the the United States of America has provided him, and now, just before the big pay-off, he thinks he can just file a form, escape to Singapore, and get away without paying Uncle Sam a cent.

The political response to this has come today from Senator Charles “Chuck” Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), in the form of their proposed Ex-PATRIOT Act (Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy), which would seek to tax those such as Eduardo Saverin even after they’ve left the U.S. and their citizenship behind, and would also impose a mandatory 30 percent tax on the capital gains of anybody who renounces their U.S. citizenship. That must be pretty pleasing to those outraged at Eduardo Saverin’s rude and ungrateful behavior. That’s understandable.

And I hold Mr. Saverin in no particular esteem. I don’t even have a Facebook account (can’t afford one). I probably would not like him very much, especially if his recent actions reflect some contempt he has for the good ol’ U.S.A. However, I feel sure I cannot be the only one with serious misgivings about the implications of this “Ex-Patriot Act” for what it means to be an American these days. [Read more →]

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From section: Commentary, News by Sean Curnyn

It seems that I’ve traversed a line of some sort, and passed a milestone detectable only by elite marketing professionals. Age-wise, I am somewhere in my forties (I make a conscious effort not to keep precise records anymore), and I was as of this afternoon feeling reasonable healthy. I returned from a quick run around in the park with my dog, and opened the mailbox to find a single item addressed personally to me. [Read more →]

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From section: Commentary, Health and Living by Sean Curnyn

Dick Morris looks at the polling fundamentals today and concludes:

If the election were held today, Obama would lose by at least 10 points and would carry only about a dozen states with fewer than 150 electoral votes.

I think there’s little in his analysis to be debated by honest folk. It’s been said in this space for a long, long time that Barack Obama is the weakest incumbent president in living memory, based on fundamentals that go far beyond those in today’s polls. (And the polls will move around a lot between now and election day.) But there’s no question that things look especially bad for President Obama’s reelection campaign today.

Morris puts his finger on the frightening political trap in which Obama finds himself with this sentence:

Obama cannot summon the commitment he got in 2008 by negatives or partisanship. It was precisely to change the “toxic” atmosphere in Washington that he was elected. To fan it now is not the way to regain the affection of those who have turned on him.

That’s true. The angles that Obama is pursuing right now are ones that are designed to stir up his base, and in some respects he’s having success in that area. However, he can’t win with only his base, and the more he stirs it up with partisanship and class warfare, the more he will repel the “middle” voters that he also needs to win. Two general observations about those independent voters can be made: (1) They vote their pocketbooks (which means their perception of whether the country is on the right track, economically) and (2) they are turned off by obvious partisanship and ideologically-based agendas. Since on (1), the economy is rotten and is widely perceived as only getting worse and on (2) Obama has only become more and more conspicuously partisan and ideological as time has gone on (with even Peggy Noonan and David Brooks beginning to notice!) then Obama would seem to be utterly sunk. [Read more →]

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From section: 2012 CAMPAIGN, Commentary, Politics by Sean Curnyn

Making the comparison between the following two recent stories might be a very obvious thing to do, but sometimes the obvious just cries out to be highlighted anyway.

The first story is so horrible that it is extremely difficult even to contemplate. It’s the kind of story that makes you shake your head and then, understandably, want to just turn it away. A court in Oklahoma will nevertheless have to focus on all of the details at some point. On March 13th last, a perpetrator invaded the Tulsa home of 90-year-old Bob Strait and his 85-year-old wife Nancy. Nancy was beaten and sexually assaulted. She died two days later. Bob, a veteran of World War II who fought on D-Day and earned a Bronze Star, was also injured in the attack and he passed away just about one week ago. The house was robbed and the next day a 20-year-old man was picked up by police driving around in Bob Strait’s car. He is currently being held on charges of first degree murder, first degree burglary, armed robbery and assault with a dangerous weapon. Bob and Nancy Strait had been married for 65 years. [Read more →]

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From section: Commentary, News by Sean Curnyn

Back in October, yours truly visited the Financial District in Manhattan and took some pictures of the rising structure which is now officially known as “1 World Trade Center” and reflected then on whether the originally-conceived name for the building, i.e. the Freedom Tower, might stick in general usage, despite the apparent effort to put that moniker in the past. I think there’s good evidence today that it is sticking. Take just the headline in the New York Post as a barometer: WTC’s Freedom Tower to rise higher than Empire State building today.

People prefer to use a name for something in the skyline rather than an address, and the people of New York will call it what they choose to call it. It’s not entirely clear to me why the owners (being the Port Authority of NY and NJ) chose to ditch the name “Freedom Tower,” but that’s what they did back in 2009. They did suggest that it was easier to get tenants by calling it “1 World Trade Center.” Did “Freedom Tower” seem too “in-your-face,” too defiant? Yet, “1 World Trade Center” was the name/address of one of the buildings that was destroyed on September 11th, 2001—the other one being “2 World Trade Center.” (In common usage, mind you, they were the Twin Towers.) Would you prefer to rent space or go to work in a building bearing the name of one recently destroyed by terrorists or in one bearing a new name? Go figure. [Read more →]

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From section: Commentary, New York interest, News by Sean Curnyn

I’ve opined in this space on this subject before, but today can’t help myself from doing so once again, in response to yet another highpoint in the swirling mass-hysteria that has seemingly engulfed so many over the concept of bullying.

An Iowa newspaper—The Sioux City Journal—generated a great deal of attention a few days ago when they devoted their front page to an editorial decrying bullying. It was prompted by the death of a 14 year-old Iowan boy. He had committed suicide, reportedly in the wake of being harassed and bullied because he had “come out” to friends as being gay. The editorial, like so many other columns and public declarations on the topic, extends great sympathy and pity to the suicide victim, while making no bones about blaming those who bullied him for his death, and blaming society-at-large for failing to spot what was happening and failing to halt the bullying.

Bullying is bad. It’s wrong to be mean to people. “Love your neighbor as yourself;” following that rule rules out bullying, and that rule should be followed. Kids who bully other kids should be called to account for it. But human nature—and especially juvenile human nature—being what it is, there will always be bullies, as there always have been. When someone kills him or herself, however, the bigger problem is surely the response to the bullying. We call someone who kills him or herself a “suicide victim,” for a reason. That person has taken his or her own life; he or she is a victim of his or her own act of suicide. It is the wrong response to any kind of bullying or indeed to any challenge that life throws in a young person’s path. It eliminates any chance of a positive change in circumstance. It wastes an entire human life. And it wounds those who knew and loved the suicide victim in ways that will never heal. It is, simply, a crime, and an awful one. This is why when someone threatens suicide that person can be involuntarily committed to a mental institution on that basis alone. Force is employed if necessary to prevent the crime from being committed.

Indeed, if you publicly threaten suicide, you will not be held up as a figure deserving of tearful tributes and poignantly-composed editorials. Why, then, when someone succeeds in doing it, should that person—now a corpse and so unable to hear any of the sympathetic words—be fawned over in this way? And more importantly, what is the message being sent to other kids who find themselves victimized by cruel peers? They are being told that if they do the same deed there will be front page stories, TV news features and memorial services in tribute to them, with everyone crying in pity for their terrible hardship and castigating the idiots who tortured them. I humbly suggest that this is not the way to reduce teen suicides. It is instead feeding the swamp of the potentially-lethal self-pity in which bullying-victims may be tempted to wallow.

Kids should by all means be taught—and I think by parents in preference to school officials—that there are ways of dealing with bullying. But they must also be taught that the biggest mistake is to make a bully or bullies the center of one’s existence—to give them that kind of power. Even in the age of internet postings and text messages, the old adage holds true, like so many old adages: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me. Time passes; even high school has an end. Above all else, kids must be taught never to even consider taking their own lives. It is not laudable. It is not a solution. It does not make you a hero. It is a crime, and one far worse than any juvenile insult.

It may in fact be the one truly unforgivable crime, at least in this sense: When you’re dead, it’s too late to say you’re sorry.

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From section: Commentary, News by Sean Curnyn

Late last year, author Ron Rosenbum gave a lecture at Stanford University titled “Bob Dylan’s God Problem—and Ours.”

More recently, he wrote an article in The Chronicle Review titled “The Naked Truth,” reexamining what he said during that lecture. It had to do with the problem of how we can believe in an all-powerful God who is totally good when there is so much evil in the world. (In philosophical circles the consideration of this problem is known as “theodicy.”) Rosenbaum was in particular looking at how the problem seemed to be considered by Dylan in his work, and the lynchpin of this lecture was apparently a few lines that he had recently found in Bob Dylan’s 1960′s book of poetry and stream-of-consciousness writing called “Tarantula.” Specifically:

“hitler did not change
history. hitler WAS history”
(Found at the bottom of page 23 of my own paperback edition from St. Martin’s Griffin.) (UPDATE: See all twenty lines of the poem at this link.)

I don’t want to linger too long on the Bob Dylan element, because there are (believe it or not) questions that seem more important to me here, but I have a few thoughts. Ron Rosenbaum sums up his reaction to encountering the lines this way:

Whoa. Those eight words: “… hitler did not change history. hitler WAS history”! Where did that come from? In the 10 years I spent writing a 500-page book called Explaining Hitler (Random House, 1998), not one of the historians, philosophers, artists, or other sages I spoke to or read ever made as white-hot an indictment of humanity as that. An indictment, implicitly, of God as well.

Well, I think Rosenbaum had an experience that maybe all Dylan fans have, usually when listening to his music, when we hear something that pierces right into an area of great relevance to us. It seems uncanny that he’s thinking just like us. (And it is uncanny, don’t get me wrong.) As someone who spent ten years writing a 500 page book on Hitler, and is currently writing a book on Bob Dylan, Rosenbaum was struck as if by a lightning bolt by the confluence of these two great subjects. Here was Dylan making a piercing observation about Hitler, albeit only eight words in a jumbled collection of sometimes incomprehensible “poetry” (which for the record and arguably to my shame I’ve read more than once in my life and re-consulted on numerous occasions). But Rosenbaum’s take on it as “an indictment of humanity” and “implicitly, of God as well” is his own. I take it as a simple statement of fact rather than an indictment, and one that in theory could be made by an atheist as easily as by a devout believer in God, albeit with different import. Obviously, given that it’s just eight words, and given the context in this book “Tarantula,” one’s first instinct is to avoid attaching too much weight to it at all, but at a minimum it surely is a comment on human nature, and one that is not inconsistent with the view of human nature that permeates Dylan’s body of work: People are capable of anything. Corruption is a constant. Hitler, in that sense, was only an especially gigantic personification of the presence of evil in history and the capacity for evil in human nature. [Read more →]

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From section: Commentary, Dylanosophy, Faith by Sean Curnyn

Warmest wishes to those observing Passover and to those—like yours truly—observing Holy Week and Easter.

Both celebrations could be said to be about God’s desire to set His people free. Here’s to that, now and forever.

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From section: Commentary, Faith by Sean Curnyn

At the Palm Sunday service this morning in the church we attend, we sang a hymn called “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” and I was reminded of something I’d first noticed only a few years ago (because I am not someone who grew up singing these tremendous old Protestant hymns): the melody of this song was appropriated note for note by Paul Simon for his song “American Tune,” from his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.

Researching it a little more, one finds that this melody is attributed originally to one Hans Leo Hassler, who somewhere circa 1600 composed it for a love song called “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret.” The Lutheran Book of Worship titles the melody as “Herzlich Tut Mich Verlangen.” Later J.S. Bach used both the melody and the religious poem that had by then been married with it in his St. Matthew’s Passion.

I don’t know, honestly, where Paul Simon heard it, and I don’t know if he’s ever discussed this in an interview. Perhaps if he heard the hymn, sung in English and out of any context with Bach, he may have thought it to be an American Protestant hymn.

Or maybe he was quite comfortable with the irony of using a German melody for a song titled “American Tune.” Paul Simon’s song—thanks not least to this melody—is a lovely and poignant one. In his head as he wrote it may have been political issues of the time that were causing him angst, but the finished song has neither political nor topical references, and this is why it’s as good a song today as it was then. It sounds like a strange and sad elegy for an America that has all but collapsed beneath tragic and hard times. [Read more →]

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From section: Commentary, Music by Sean Curnyn

A report from—of all sources—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is throwing cold water on the idea that climate change, whether man-made or natural, is responsible for any net increase in damaging global extreme weather events. From this report by Andrew Orlowski (and the full IPCC report is at this link):

“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change,” writes the IPCC in its new Special Report on Extremes (SREX) published today.

“The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados,” the authors conclude, adding for good measure that “absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”.

Is that perfectly clear? Well, if you read those lines three or four times I think you’ll perceive that what it is saying is that there’s nothing to say regarding any increase in damage from extreme weather due to “climate change.”

So what about all the weird weather everywhere, and all the weather-related disasters of the past decade or so? [Read more →]

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From section: Commentary, News by Sean Curnyn