Searching for Narnia

Clive Staples Lewis, known popularly as C. S. Lewis or Jack as he preferred friends to call him, was easily among the intellectual giants of the last century. His oeuvre spanned dozens of books ranging across medieval literary criticism, fictional fantasy, and children’s literature. In an era when it was decidedly not cool to be a Christian writer and popular apologist, he was its most influential. While his spiritual journey is less known, it produced Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Weight of Glory, The Problem of Pain, The Great Divorce, A Grief Observed, and many more as he navigated it.

Lewis was born to book-loving Irish parents in Belfast as the 19th century wound down. Their reading interests were diverse and their literary appetite was unlimited so the house became one sprawling library. Lewis’ autobiography recalls that ...

There were books in the study, books in the dining room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most empathically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves.

I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.

Lost in these books, Lewis became friends with Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He read Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, The Odyssey, mythology, and Norse legends. The works of Voltaire, Milton, and Spenser became old friends, and his private tutor taught him to read Greek so he could read original texts for pleasure.

When he was seven years old, Jack’s brother, Warren who was three years older, was shipped off to an English boarding school, costing him his closest companion. Jack thus became even more reclusive and bookish – living in a world of words inhabited by armored knights and anthropomorphic animals who inspired him to write and illustrate his own books.

Jack’s mother died of cancer just three months short of his tenth birthday. The family’s Protestant faith was only nominally religious, not that a 10-year would have the faith to weather the loss of an adored parent. When his prayers for his mother’s recovery were not answered, Jack began to disbelieve the God of the Bible his mother had given him because the God of his experience was cruel, perhaps a fantasy. Jack’s slow drift toward atheism became complete within a year or so, and his spiritual emptiness was compounded by his father’s grief which left both boys estranged from their only living parent. Jack was packed off to a boarding school – rarely a good experience in early 20th century England. His once warm and satisfying home life was never to be again.

By his own admission, C. S. Lewis entered early adulthood searching. That search brought him under the influence of the writings of George MacDonald, a 19th century Scot Presbyterian minister and novelist, whose works in his own time were more popular than those of Charles Dickens. MacDonald’s fantasy entitled Phantastes forcefully challenged Jack’s atheism. After reading other MacDonald works, he confessed that they had "baptized" his imagination, preparing him for a world beyond the material one he had grown so tired of.

The influence of George MacDonald helped turn Jack away from his atheism, and in his book, The Great Divorce, the narrator, who is the embodiment of Jack, meets MacDonald in Heaven. The narrator speaks:

... I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I had first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the new life. I started to confess how long that Life had delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly and reluctantly I had come to admit that his Christendom had more than an accidental connection with it, how hard I had tried not to see the true name of the quality which first met me in his books is Holiness.

Another writer who influenced the direction of Jack’s life was the English novelist, journalist, and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton. His book, The Everlasting Man, published in 1925, claimed at its outset “when we do make [the] imaginative effort to see the whole thing [Christianity] from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside.” Lewis would later admit:

In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. . . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

Even as MacDonald and Chesterton were stirring Lewis's thoughts, respected friends and fellow students were challenging his atheism. Then shortly after joining the faculty at Magdalen College of Oxford, he became close friends with men whose logic he admired – only to find them seriously thoughtful Christians. Among them was J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, and later the creator of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Tolkien above others was the friend who most influenced Jack’s ultimate repudiation of atheism.

Slowly Jack began to regain belief in the teachings of Christianity. And yet he described how he fought against Christianity’s appealing logic up to the moment he fully embraced it. He was brought into Christianity, he said, like a prodigal, "kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape."

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Jack described this struggle:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

During the last decade of a life he had lived as a bachelor, Jack met Joy Gresham who was then separated from her alcoholic and abusive husband. She was an American writer, Jewish (at a time when anti-Semitism was openly practiced), a former Communist, and a convert from atheism to Christianity as a consequence of reading The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters, two of Lewis’ books. She had come to England with her two sons to visit her spiritual mentor. While there, her husband abandoned her for another woman. She divorced him and remained in England.

Lewis found Gresham an agreeable intellectual companion and in time they became personal friends. Warren, Jack’s brother, wrote of their relationship:

For Jack the attraction was at first undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met... who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humor and a sense of fun.

Gresham gradually fell into financial troubles and Jack underwrote the education of her two sons at a boarding school. Their common interests in the boys’ education, literature and life eventually led to love and they were married in 1956. Jack was 59 years old and his new wife was 16 years his junior. But that did not prevent a happy marriage and they had four bliss-filled years until she complained one day of a painful hip that was later diagnosed as a deadly form of bone cancer.

Her death, like the death of his mother, dealt Lewis another crisis of faith. He expressed it in his book, A Grief Observed, as he poured out grief, anger, and doubts that would persist for several years. His lament was so personal and raw that A Grief Observed was originally released under a pseudonym to prevent readers from knowing he was its author. Only after his own death was his authorship made public.

Jack penned these words as her epithet near where her ashes were scattered:

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

Between 1947 and 1954, Lewis wrote a series of seven fantasy novels, The Chronicles of Narnia, which would become his best known work. Over 100 million copies in 47 languages have been sold.

While these seven novels seem to have been written for children, they also appeal to adults. Lewis Carroll, the nom de plume for Charles Dodgson, was a logician. So his tale of Alice in Wonderland is a play on logic, which appeals to adults, just as its content appeals to children. Likewise adults see sacrifice and redemption in the characters of Narnia even as children see only their mythic qualities.

Although Lewis originally conceived what would become The Chronicles of Narnia in 1939, he did not finish writing the first book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, until 1949. He described its origin in an essay:

…all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about 16. Then one day, when I was about 40, I said to myself: “Let's try to make a story about it.”

Narnia is a parallel world, a kind of medieval vision of Paradise, whose portal is a wardrobe. Through it four sibling children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy enter Narnia where they meet various characters in the Chronicles. Only Aslan the Lion is carried through every sequel of the Chronicles and it becomes clear that he is a prototype of Christ.

Lewis continues:

At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there, he pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.

I haven’t the space to recap each of the Chronicles. You should read them. But absent some knowledge of Lewis’ spiritual quest, something would be lost to an adult reader. Lewis intended that the Chronicles tell a good story, and they certainly succeed in doing that. But he also intended to use Narnia as a canvas to demonstrate moral truths about the conflict of good and evil. To that end, each of the Chronicles employs a motif which Tolkien called a eucatastrophe – a good catastrophe – in which each sequel ends happily. Good conquers evil. And each sequel ends with the children being sent back to the “real world” – until the last one.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, therefore, ends with Aslan defeating the wicked White Witch. In a world gone wrong, Aslan thaws winter and returns Christmas and spring to Narnia. The children return home tumbling out of the wardrobe.

Prince Caspian ends with the restoration of the rightful King Caspian to the throne and the expulsion and death of the usurper Miraz. All seven of the noble lords are accounted for as The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ends and the ship’s crew reaches the far end of the eastern sea – the limit of Aslan’s realm.

The Silver Chair concludes with King Caspian returning to his youthful self through death and resurrection, Prince Rilian is released from his enchantment, and the enchantress is destroyed. As The Horse and His Boy concludes, Shasta and Aravis live as Crown Prince and Princess of Archenland, Narnia is freed, and the Calormenes are defeated. The Magician's Nephew ends with the healing of Digory's dying mother, and in a striking similarity to the Genesis story, Narnia is created and the evil Jadis is expelled.

The Last Battle employs the eucatastrophe motif but also this sequel is the final happy ending for all the Chronicles of Narnia. Once again the world has gone wrong and Narnia itself is destroyed. But all that is good – man and beast – is transported to Aslan’s land, a Narnia-like place yet better in every respect and clearly a symbol of Heaven.

The story and the series end with Aslan speaking to the children explaining how they got into Narnia this last time:

“You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be,' said Aslan.

Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.”

“No fear of that,” said Aslan. “Have you not guessed?”

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.

“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

C. S. Lewis died of renal failure on November 22, 1963 – almost a half century ago this past Tuesday. Despite his fame, his passing received little note in the national press, which was occupied with another event that occurred on the same day in Dallas, Texas – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Is Cain Ready for Prime Time?

If ever there was a candidate for the Horatio Alger award, it would be Herman Cain (and in fact he won it in 1996.)

Cain was born to poor parents – a mother who was a cleaning woman and a father who was a barber and chauffeur. Yet Cain graduated from Morehouse with a degree in mathematics and went on to receive a Masters degree in Computer Science. He rose through the management ranks at Burger King, a subsidiary of Pillsbury whose CEO recognized Cain’s talent and made him CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, another Pillsbury subsidiary.

He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, a member of various public company Boards, the CEO of the National Restaurant Association, a talk show host, syndicated columnist, author of five books, and an unsuccessful candidate for the 2000 Republican Presidential nomination and 2004 US Senate seat from Georgia.

Disclosures filed for the Republican Presidential nomination show his net worth to be between $3 million and $6.5 million and his income for the combined years of 2010 and 2011 is between $1 million and $2 million – an imperfect though frequently-used measure of professional success.

Yet despite his arguments that his real-world business experience would make him a better President than a career politician, his recent campaigning shows otherwise.

Americans elected a person in 2008 who arguably had the thinnest resume of any President in the history of the Republic. His hope and change rhetoric proved to be ephemeral barnyard refuse as he has brought the country less hope and inflicted change that 74% of the people think is going in the wrong direction.

Cain doesn’t have a thin political resume; he has no political resume. While his business experience would give him a different view of the world than a hack who had spent his (or her) entire career in politics, the top office in the land is not the place to get on-the-job political training. Business and politics operate with different ground rules and one doesn’t carry over well to the other. Harry Truman believed that when he assessed General Eisenhower’s suitability for the Oval Office. Truman said, “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike – it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.” Eisenhower, however, had been the Supreme Commander of the largest Allied Army in the world which was fraught with big egos and politics.

The reason that a state governorship is better training for the presidency than a House or Senate seat or a business career is that it gives experience on a smaller and less threatening scale in dealing with a legislature, state budgets, and the federal government bureaucracies. Even with gubernatorial experience Al Gore made Texas Governor George W. Bush look a bit foolish for not knowing the names of heads of state he would likely have to deal with if elected President. If Cain were to get the nomination, Obama would exploit what Cain doesn’t know about the federal government, how agencies work, procedures, and the office of the presidency.

Cain’s knowledge deficit disorder in foreign affairs is especially stunning. In one of the debates he said the US must prevent China from getting nuclear weapons – which they’ve had for decades. When interviewed by Chris Wallace who asked him to state his position on the Palestinian "right of return" issue, Cain was obviously confused. "The right of return? [pause] The right of return?" asked Cain. Wallace helped him connect the dots and Cain’s answer was positively awful, clearly ignorant that to allow the Palestinians to reoccupy Israel would end Israeli statehood. The President, not the Congress, takes the lead in foreign policy, and Obama’s disastrous ignorance of it has shown what can happen to a political parvenu. Today, despite Obama’s bowing and apologies, the Middle East is a more dangerous anti-American region than it has ever been in the modern era, and the prospect of another world war centered there is likely in the next decade.

Cain found his inner Rick Perry this week when he gave an interview to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Monday. It was palpably painful to watch. Asked if he agreed with Obama’s Libyan actions and policy, Cain looked like a kid stumped in an oral exam. "OK, Libya…" Cain replied followed by ten seconds of silence. The presidential wannabe looked as if he were waiting for a clue in the parlor game of Charade. "President Obama supported the uprising, correct?" Then a few seconds later he took a stab at an answer: "I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reasons…nope, that's a different one…I've got all this stuff twirling around in my head. Specifically, what are you asking me that I agree or not disagree (sic) with Obama?" Ugh! Cain ought to take something for that “twirly” stuff.

His response concerning his non-position on Iran wasn’t much better. He started out saying that the mountainous terrain of Iran made a military strike "not a practical, top-tier alternative." Huh? I believe planes can fly higher than mountains. I can’t imagine the Israelis letting Iran go nuclear saying, “We can’t go in there; the place has mountains.” Minutes later he flipped and said, "… stopping Iran may be nearly impossible without direct military intervention..." Cain’s frequent reference to getting input from advisors when cornered as he was in this interview was not comforting. What if his advisors are idiots – like the ones advising the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Mitt Romney has been the object of scorn for his storied flip-flops, but Cain is little better. Early in his campaign he said abortion was a woman’s choice. The pro-life constituency so necessary to win the Republican nomination howled. Cain did a 180 and stumped for days that he had been misunderstood. Even when he was given softball questions during the “Center Seat” segment of Bret Baier’s Special Report his responses to A.B. Stoddard’s attempt to reconcile his “before and after” statements on abortion still sounded like he’d changed positions from pro-choice to pro-life.

Asked what his solution would be to people coming into the US illegally from Mexico, Cain said as President he would build an electric fence that had the potential to kill those climbing it. As criticism mounted he said he had been joking. But then later he told Arizona reporters that he wasn’t “walking away from that idea.” His inconsistency leaves voters ignorant of his position on the fence and the prevention of illegal crossings.

On October 31, the left-leaning online e-zine, Politico, reported two anonymous women had filed sexual harassment complaints against Cain years ago when he was the CEO of the National Restaurant Association. They were resolved by NRA payments for sizable settlements to each woman. Sexual harassment has become a growth industry because plaintiff attorneys have learned how easy it is to “greenmail” an employer that doesn’t want the expense or publicity of defending itself in a trial. Cain was rising in the polls at the time, so that fact combined with the political tilt of Politico and the anonymity of the plaintiffs had the smell of a “gotcha” all over it. (The same thing is happening to Newt now that he’s rising in the polls – to wit: the amount and purpose of money paid to him by Freddie Mac.) Campaign contributions began pouring into the Cain coffers from sympathetic supporters who believed Cain was the victim of a smear.

Two things are worth noting, however. One is that Politico asked Cain to comment on the story ten days before it was released. He refused, and his campaign staff did nothing to prepare for the coming media frenzy even with ten days’ notice. Additionally, a third and fourth woman have come forward also alleging untoward advances from Cain, the latter lawyered up with controversial uber attorney, Gloria Allred. Now a fifth woman has gone public with a story that would have seemed innocent were it not for the allegations of the other four.

What is important here is not whether Cain is guilty of these assertions. His innocence can be plausibly explained, and fair-minded people ought to assume innocence until it can be proven otherwise. What is important is how Cain handled it. First he denied the Politico story, then he couldn’t recall it, then he recalled bits and pieces of it but excused his spotty recollection because it “happened over 20 years ago.” (Newt is making the same mistake.)

Now, I can buy not being able to recall something that happened 20 years ago. Sometimes I have problems recalling details from a year ago. For the record, the first incident happened, allegedly, in 1998 – 13 years ago, not 20. What’s remarkable is that Cain had ten days to get ready and didn’t. He should have called the NRA and asked for a briefing so that he would be prepared with a focused response – not one that flopped around like a newly caught fish in the bottom of a boat.

A charge of sexual harassment from two different women a year apart which resulted in money settlements is not a trivial business issue that an accused CEO could or should be ignorant of. And both accusations occurred as Cain expressed interest in running for national office – knowing every skeleton in his closet would be scrutinized if he came close to winning the nomination. If he truly knew nothing of the settlement, what does that say about him as a candidate for the highest office in the land? And if he did know the details and still gave the gaffe-riddled explanations that I’ve heard, what does that say about his seat-of-the-pants approach to solving problems and making decisions?

When he appeared on the “Center Seat” segment of Fox News, Charles Krauthammer asked Cain to explain his curious parsing of the difference between the words “agreement” and “settlement” which was then part of his defense perimeter against the allegations of the first two women. His response was jaw-dropping. Krauthammer, somehow managing to restrain himself from busting out laughing, said, “it sounds like you are explaining, ‘Well, it depends on what the word ‘is’ is.’ So, how does Herman Cain end up parsing the words in a Clintonian legalistic way?”

As if his first explanation wasn’t horrid enough, Cain repeated it!

“It wasn’t intended to be Clintonian,” Cain said. “It was simply using the word ‘agreement,’ which in business organization (sic) I have run, when there has been an employee leaving, whether voluntarily or involuntarily we generally call it an ‘agreement.’ So that was the perspective from which I got around to that.” Oh puh-lease, no more already!

Yet when Sharon Bialek, the fourth accuser, met the press with Gloria Allred, the Cain campaign’s response was right out of the Clinton play book – destroy the character of the accuser. He launched a slash and burn attack on Bialek, itemizing personal bankruptcies, custody battles, and sundry financial problems. It didn’t come up to the standards of James Carville’s “drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park” attack on Paula Jones but it wasn’t pretty. Predictably, Cain’s support among women dropped.

Among the many things that the Cain campaign is revealing about its leader, the sexual harassment attack has shown that Cain doesn’t do crisis management well. But if there’s anything a US President ought to do well it’s manage a crisis.

Threatened that the sexual harassment allegations would overtake his campaign, Cain opined initially that their disclosure was motivated by racism, then he accused the Perry campaign of leaking the stories because a staffer had left Cain and defected to Perry. Neither of those explanations developed legs so his campaign manager, Mark Block, told Sean Hannity that Karen Kraushaar, 55, the second woman to leave the NRA with a settlement, was the mother of Josh Kraushaar, an employee of Politico. “So we’ve come to find out that her son works at Politico,” Block assured Hannity. Asked if he’d confirmed that as fact, Block responded, “We’ve confirmed that he does indeed work at Politico and that’s his mother, yes.” Well at least Block got half of it half-right; Josh Kraushaar did work at Politico but he left in 2010. And same surname; not related. Block should have been fired but he’s still laboring on in the Cain campaign, racking up another question mark about Cain’s judgment in keeping him.

I sometimes wonder if Romney the Robot can fog a mirror. He is the Second Coming of Bob Dole. But smiling like a Cheshire Cat, he is also unflappable when criticized and so far he hasn’t lost his cool on the campaign trail. In contrast, the sexual harassment affair has revealed a dark side to Herman Cain’s temperament. Personal attacks cause him to become irritable and surprises flummox him.

When asked about possible campaign violations committed by Mark Block, Cain got testy and told the reporter to change topics. It was a legitimate question. Non-profits can’t contribute to political campaigns. In this case the Federal Election Commission was asked to look into money that came from a non-profit founded by Block which was not reported as a loan on the books of the Cain campaign. Block has a record for these shenanigans. He was charged with campaign law violations in 2001. It was settled when he agreed to pay a $15,000 fine and stay out of Wisconsin politics for three years. His legal battles left him broke and stocking shelves at Target. Hiring him to run the campaign is another example that calls Cain’s judgment into question.

All things considered, Herman Cain is a likable guy. At a young age he achieved success as a key executive in a major corporation. The fact that he is successful and a black man makes him an important role model – desperately needed in the black community, which lacks few outside of sports and entertainment. Now 65 and well off financially, he is still in the harness when others are beginning to slow down. But his campaigning has shown how unprepared he is for prime time.

Sorry, Mr. Cain, we already have an on-the-job trainee as President. We don’t need another.

Cain’s 9-9-9? Nein!

When the 1913 income tax became law in the US, the entire tax code was explained in 400 pages. The taxpayer’s return consisted of a simple four page form, one page of which was the instructions.

World War II came and tax code complexity exploded. Special provisions (aka loopholes) exponentiated. The code, which had occupied just 504 pages in 1939, had mutated to 8,200 pages by war’s end in 1945.

To prove that the complexity of the tax code can be quantified by the number of pages it takes to explain this monstrosity, recent researchers used regression analysis showing that since 1945 the number of code pages have grown 3.3% per year exponentially (that is, increasing at an increasing rate rather than a constant rate). The current tax code – are you ready for this? – requires 71,684 pages and 10 million words for the geniuses we’ve elected to explain how to comply with their insatiable demand for cash.

God explained the entire plan of salvation in less than 800,000 words! Tolstoy’s War and Peace – one of the longest novels in print – described Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 560,000 words, and Ayn Rand’s longest novel – Atlas Shrugged – explained the clash of government socialism and a creative society in 645,000 words.

The tax code has been modified and expanded 14,000 times since 1986 – the year of Reagan’s Tax “Reform” Act. Over 500 changes were made just last year. Predictably this has created an industry of compliance and avoidance experts, which the IRS estimates consumes six billion hours annually to complete tax forms – the equivalent of three million jobs that do nothing else. It’s also estimated that compliance costs will soon reach a half trillion dollars annually – money undisputedly better spent creating something of economic value.

It may shock you to learn that there was a time during the Second Age of Middle-earth when the sole purpose of a tax code was to raise the money to run a country’s government. But today's governmental elites have pooh-poohed such a pedestrian purpose and expanded it to redistribute income, discriminate in favor of chosen industries (aka political contributors), and discriminate against certain behaviors and activities – like not driving a fuel-efficient car or installing solar panels on your roof, which our beneficent government otherwise rewards with tax credits for compliance.

It’s pretty easy to multiply your taxable income by a percentage to determine the government’s take. The challenge is determining the amount of your total income that qualifies as “taxable” income. Because of the arcane provisions of the tax code, people are motivated to find ways to minimize their taxable income. Instead of replacing the code and reducing rates, which is the problem, every revision Congress makes to the code adds to what is already there. So in time we have the current crazy quilt of patches with tax rates that most payers think are excessive. Taxpayers simply find new ways to minimize their tax bill – which they should; avoidance is not evasion – and the fox and hound silliness continues while thousands of new pages are added to the tax books.

Arguments have been put forward for a flat tax, a fair tax, and other ideas that would scrap and replace the current code and it multitudinous exemptions, preferences, and special case provisions. I haven’t the space to critique every proposal to replace our Frankensteinian system, but I will comment on one that seems to have caught the public imagination – Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, which has elevated him in the polls.

Cain introduced 9-9-9 with the confidence that, “If 10% is good enough for God, then 9% should be just fine for the Federal Government.” Hard to argue with that. But the devil is in the details. His 9-9-9 plan would drop the current 35% corporate tax rate to 9%, eliminate the six-bracket personal income tax system and replace it with a 9% flat tax, and add a consumption tax in the form of a 9% national sales tax on retail transactions. There would be no personal deductions except charitable contributions.

When it was rolled out, critics howled that the poor would be taxed under 9-9-9, so Cain modified his plan to exempt them from taxes. I happen to believe that everyone should pay taxes – even the poor, albeit at low rates – because when you’ve got skin in the game, you watch the game. With almost half of US households paying no federal tax, too many citizens have no vested interest in a government that costs them nothing. That’s not the way democracy works.

The four questions that a tax plan advocate must answer is: (i) is it simple – easily understood, (ii) is it fair – unfortunately a subjective criterion, (iii) does it raise enough revenue to operate the government, and (iv) can politicians manipulate it?

So, let’s look at Cain’s plan through this screen.

Is it simple?

A simple tax code should not require business and personal taxpayers to spend the time and resources currently required in keeping tax records, filing returns, and hiring experts to navigate the labyrinthine arcana of the current tax code. Arthur Laffer recently editorialized that for every dollar of business and personal income taxes paid, about 30 cents is paid to comply with the tax code. Cain asserts that 9-9-9 will abolish the 30-cent compliance cost without reducing the government’s take.

Is 9-9-9 simpler than the current code? Well, sorta’. Cain’s plan is more complex than 9-9-9 sounds if you read the explanation of it on his web page. The plan, of which 9-9-9 is a part, consists of three stages.

Stage One requires Congress to reduce the top tax rate for individuals and corporations to 25% and eliminate the capital gains tax. Cain believes this will encourage individuals and businesses to repatriate overseas profits and investments and put the money to work on American soil. I say fat chance that a President Cain could make that happen, but hey: let’s keep an open mind.

Stage Two kicks in 9-9-9, abolishing the payroll tax and replacing it with three taxes. Then Stage Three is implemented which would slowly replaces 9-9-9 toward a Fair Tax – essentially a flat tax.

Cain would “simplify” the tax code by eliminating personal deductions, exemptions, and credits except charitable deductions. Businesses would not be able to deduct wages and many expenses that are deductible today, but they would be able to deduct capital purchases rather than depreciate them over years, and they could exempt capital income.

Therefore, Cain’s taxes – on wage income, again at the cash register as a sales tax, and yet again by businesses on their sales less the cost of goods and services – are essentially consumption taxes. Note that wages are essentially taxed three times – first with the 9% flat tax, then again as business profits (since wages aren’t a deduction), then again in the retail sales tax.

I agree with Cain that we should tax consumption – i.e. when people spend money, not when they save money. But a simpler plan than Cain’s would be to tax income and exempt returns on savings, like interest, capital gains, and estates.

Is it fair?

First, we must agree on a definition of fair. Obama thinks it’s unfair that 48% of households pay no federal income taxes and that he can’t get current taxpayers – especially the richest ones – to pay more so he can eliminate even more households from paying taxes.

That less and less should pay more and more stokes the most controversial attribute of the Cain plan. It raises taxes on the middle class and the lower class. The upper class gets a large tax reduction in 9-9-9 and people who pay no taxes or little taxes now will see their share increase to offset those reductions.

For this reason, Cain’s 9-9-9 is too regressive, critics say. And I say the current system is too progressive. A highly progressive tax code essentially caps by government edict what people are allowed to earn. Conceivably the marginal tax rate in the highest bracket could be 100%, meaning the government takes all income (caps it) that falls in that bracket.

Democracies don’t work that way. The government has no business managing the fates of winners and losers. As long as gains aren’t ill-gotten, people shouldn’t be penalized because they are successful. And, I might add, the spending and investing habits of the rich create many jobs that would disappear if there were no rich people.

In my judgment, Cain’s 9-9-9 or any other plan that makes the tax system less progressive regrettably has little chance of becoming law because its argument isn’t economic. It’s ideological.

Does it raise enough revenue to operate the government?

In recent years, the gross domestic product (GDP) has averaged about $14.5 trillion and federal tax revenues have averaged about $2.3 trillion or about 16% of GDP.

Cain’s 9-9-9 would tax personal income, which is about $7.7 trillion, at 9% and raise $693 billion. Business income of $9.5 trillion, taxed at 9%, would raise $855 billion. And finally, retail sales, which have recently averaged $8.3 trillion, would raise $747 billion if taxed at 9%. These three tax revenue streams total to $2.3 trillion, which is the current total of tax receipts in recent years from income, business profits, payroll taxes, capital gains, and estate taxes. The calculations eliminate families living below the poverty line.

Of course a number of critics have come forward with their analyses to show why the Cain plan is not revenue-neutral. However, all analyses regarding revenue-neutrality, including the one I’ve presented, really beg the question. It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Neither Cain’s 9-9-9 nor the current tax system raises enough money to operate the government, which is spending at a rate of $3.6 trillion per years. Historically, government spending has been 20% of the GDP. So when government spends about 25% of the GDP and pays for it with taxes representing 16% to 18% of the GDP, even a politician ought to understand you can’t keep that up. And indeed the historic deficits have piled up into a national debt exceeding $14 trillion – an all time high. Yet, trying to support an extraordinary level of spending by jiggering the tax code to raise more money will make us less and less able to raise enough money to operate the government. It already has. Obama wants to increase tax receipts, which will make the US even less viable economically than it is now. Money is only economically productive when it’s in the hands of the private sector – not the hands of the government.

But even that is not always true. There is over $1.5 trillion in private capital sitting on the sideline instead of engaged in productive pursuits because of the economic uncertainties caused by our current level of spending. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan doesn’t address that issue. And until it does, disputes over whether his plan is revenue-neutral with the current tax code are irrelevant. It’s the wrong problem.

Can politicians manipulate it?

The “9” that will find the least support even among conservative supporters of Cain is the one devoted to the sales tax. No one will ever go wrong by mistrusting a politician – even kith and kin. Some are corrupted, but all are corruptible.

If we have a healthy distrust of politicians, then putting a national sales tax in their hands is like putting a loaded gun in a child’s hands. It’s hard to imagine that 9-9-9 could remain fixed until the Lord returns. More probably, 9-9-9 would become 10-10-10 and before long, 15-15-15 or more.

Cain has tried to prevent this by suggesting the repeal of the 16th Amendment – something that would take longer than a two-term president’s tenure – to eliminate the legality of the income tax. He has also proposed that as President, he would get Congress to freeze 9-9-9 and require a two-thirds vote to increase rates in the future. Lots of luck. Congresses have been increasing rates since the Revolution, and it’s probably unconstitutional for a Congress to bind a future Congress.

One of the worst negatives of Cain’s national sales tax is that it opens the door to a Value-added Tax. Pelosi suggested a VAT to pay for ObamaCare but knew she had no chance of passing it into law. Especially popular in Europe, every country which conned its citizens to support a VAT as a way to bring down national debt learned the hard way that quickly becomes a new tax blooming atop the old tax structure with the original VAT rate increased.

Americans should remember all of the surprises that were hidden by the writers of the ObamaCare law. Hardly a week passes without a new hidden provision coming to the surface. Therefore, try to say with a straight face: “It is unlikely that a politician would slip in verbiage in a future bill adding a wholesale tax to the retail tax – thus converting Cain’s sales tax to a VAT.”

Politicians say they want a tax system that is fair and simple. But fairness and simplicity are mutually exclusive most of the time. Fairness requires a tax code with Solomonic exceptions and special provisions. Government wants to incent home ownership so it makes mortgage interest deductible, but it excludes mortgage interest that provides too much of a deduction – jumbo mortgages. Government wants to incent charitable giving so it makes it deductible, but if you give goods or services instead of cash all sorts of qualifiers have to be written into the regulations. With each of these “fairness” provisions, the code becomes more complex. Strike them in the interest of simplicity and the code becomes less fair.

Three weeks ago, on October 22, the 25th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act passed without fanfare. How well I remember the Gipper hitting the airwaves to argue that if we taxpayers would give up our tax shelters and loopholes (which were little more than legislated work-arounds to offset onerous tax rates), he would lower taxes and rates would remain unchanged in the future. That was Reagan’s quid pro quo.

The highest tax bracket was lowered from 50% to 28%. The lowest bracket was increased from 11% to 15%. Capital gains were thereafter taxed at the same rate as ordinary income. The number of tax brackets was consolidated to make them simpler. Since Lincoln’s Civil War Revenue Act of 1862, this was the only time that the top rates were lowered and the bottom rates were increased, thus broadening the tax base, which I thought was fair. With skin in the game you watch the game.

The next day, the Wall Street Journal published this commentary:

Yesterday, shortly after 11 a.m., Ronald Reagan signed HR 3838, the landmark tax-reform bill of 1986. The battle to get tax reform is over; the battle to keep it is just beginning.

Mr. Reagan recognized this in his statement at the signing ceremony, pledging to stop rate increases, and laying out a remarkably thoughtful explanation of the principles behind the movement to cut tax rates. Enjoy it while you can. Congress will be back on Jan. 6 and the movement to take away tax reform will start.

And start it did. Since 1986 Congress, which would not again raise taxes if only we taxpayers would give up some of our deductions, has raised taxes. George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s successor, failed to win reelection because he broke his “No new taxes” pledge to the American people. Good riddance. Many of the “loopholes” abolished 25 years ago are back.

Until American voters pay attention to what goes on in Congress and punish those who spend and tax too much, we will be stuck with a system that no one comprehends and whose primary beneficiaries are the clients of Gucci-shod K Street lobbyists.

Cain is right that we need to fundamentally change our tax system. But will 9-9-9 accomplish it? Nein!

Kristallnacht: Beginning the Holocaust

At 0945 on Monday morning November 7, 1938 a 17-year old German Jew of Polish descent, Herschel Grynszpan, appeared at the reception desk of the German Embassy at 78 Rue de Lille in Paris. He asked to see an Embassy official in order that he might hand-deliver an important document. Grynszpan was directed to the office of the most junior embassy official on duty that morning, Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Entering vom Rath’s office, the diplomat rose and asked for the document. Grynszpan allegedly cried out, "You're a filthy boche and in the name of the 12,000 persecuted Jews, here is the document!" as he pulled a pistol and fired five shots at vom Rath.

One shot entered vom Rath’s shoulder and did little damage. But another struck him in the left side causing severe internal damage to his spleen, stomach, and pancreas. The German diplomat punched Grynszpan and staggered out of his office where he collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital but despite all of the efforts of French and German surgeons, the damage exceeded their skills. Ernst vom Rath died on Wednesday November 9.

That night and into the early hours of the next morning the sounds of breaking glass were heard throughout Germany and its territories as the storefronts of Jewish businesses were smashed. Fires consumed synagogues and Jewish institutions as gangs of Nazi storm troopers destroyed 7,000 Jewish businesses and torched more than 900 synagogues. Over 90 Jews were killed, and 30,000 able-bodied Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, over 1,000 of whom would die from disease or beatings before their release.

History would remember this night as Kristallnacht – Crystal Night or the Night of the Broken Glass. Seventy-two years ago this week, Kristallnacht marked the beginning of the Holocaust.

The national vandalism against Jewish businesses was not provoked by the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, but his death provided the Nazi government with the excuse needed to implement a policy that had been in the works since Hitler took power in 1933 – i.e. to expunge Jews from all public German life. Hitler ruled that the stores damaged on Kristallnacht could not reopen except under the management of non-Jews. Jews could not sell goods or services anywhere or manage a business or pursue any economic activity in Germany or its territories. Jewish children could not attend school.

The insurance proceeds from the damage of Kristallnacht – about 6 million marks or $30 million today – had to be turned over to the German state where it fueled German rearmament. For the death of vom Rath a 1 billion mark fine was imposed on the Jewish community, the equivalent of $5.5 billion today.

Grynszpan’s execution of vom Rath horrified the Jewish community, but they also condemned Kristallnacht and the expropriation of Jewish property. German Jews and the World Jewish Congress decried the denial of statehood because of the act of one apparently deranged teenager. News of Kristallnacht spread to the global community, which was nominally sympathetic to the plight of the German Jews but weren’t moved to action. The world still hoped that Hitler could be appeased, and so it was anxious not to provoke the Reich to move closer to the horrors of another world war.

In America President Roosevelt exclaimed, "The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States... I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization." Yet he was disinclined to accept any more European Jewish refugees. The 15,000 or so already in the US on temporary visas were granted permanent asylum but no more.

Anti-Semitism was rampant in that era and Roosevelt’s mother was an outspoken anti-Semite. But it is unlikely that he was. He had appointed a number of Jews to high public positions in his cabinet and one – Felix Frankfurter – to the Supreme Court. Yet when prominent Jews and liberals pressured Roosevelt to be more accommodating, he suggested resettling Jews in Africa or South America rather than the US because he feared it would stir up his political enemies like Charles Lindbergh, a white supremacist, anti-Semite, and Nazi sympathizer.

As Jews fled Germany ahead of the impending Holocaust, several boatloads of mostly Jews were denied disembarkation in ports around the world. The plight of the St. Louis off the coast of Florida in June 1939 was one such incident that remains a controversy in the Roosevelt administration to this day. Carrying a thousand Jews fleeing the Nazis, the St. Louis’ captain, a sympathetic German, had first attempted port in Cuba and was refused. Sailing toward the US, the State Department refused landing rights and Roosevelt refused to respond to telegrams from passengers aboard who asked for asylum. Canada also refused to let the St. Louis dock and it returned to Europe where its German captain was determined to beach the ship off England to force it to accept the passengers. A compromise was reached which distributed the Jews to England and Free Europe, but when Hitler overran the Continent, half of the Jews who returned there died in concentration camps. The odyssey of the St. Louis became the basis for the historical novel The Voyage of the Damned.

Varian Fry, a 32-year old Harvard-educated classicist with no training in undercover work, was untroubled by his country’s diplomatic sensibilities. Working under the nose of the Nazis as a representative of a private American relief organization, Fry went to France to rescue Jewish intellectuals who had been ordered to surrender themselves to the Nazis after France fell to Germany. Using illegal means and a black market network, he managed to smuggle about 4,000 Jews out of Vichy France before the Vichy government threw him out of the country. Those rescued from the Holocaust represented the best and brightest minds in philosophy, music, art, literature, and the sciences. They included pianist Wanda Landowska, painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, writer Hannah Arendt, and sculptor Jacques Lipchiptz. Writer Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler also escaped the Gestapo with Fry’s help. She brought with her the original scores composed by her first husband, Gustav Mahler, and manuscript symphonies by Georg Bruckner.

Varian Fry – essentially an American Schindler – was reprimanded by the US government for his actions and died in obscurity. But in 1995 he became the first American to be given Israel’s honorific, “Righteous among the Nations,” at Israel's national Holocaust Memorial. It was the same honorific bestowed on Oskar Schindler.

The motives of Herschel Grynszpan have never been revealed but they were probably driven by despair. Grynszpan was in France illegally living with an aunt and uncle. Because of his status, Grynszpan could not work and had no money. After two years in country he could speak little French. Because he had entered France illegally, he had no way to return to Germany legally or to legally enter Belgium or Poland. In short, he was trapped.

In March 1938, Poland passed a law to become effective October 31 which revoked the citizenship of Poles who had been living abroad for more than five years. The purpose of this edict was to prevent the 70,000 Poles who had been living in Austria and Germany from returning to Poland. Although Grynszpan was born in Germany and was thus a German citizen, he was also a Polish citizen – until the edict which made him stateless.

In August 1938 the German government canceled all residence permits for foreigners living in Germany and told them to leave. This was specifically directed at the Jews. In an attempt to beat the Polish edict which would become law on October 31, the Gestapo arrested 12,000 Polish Jews, packed them on trains, and started them toward the Polish border. Among them were the Herschel Grynszpan’s parents and sister. The Jews were permitted only one suitcase and all other property and possessions were to be left behind to become property of the state.

As the train approached the Polish border, for some unknown reason it stopped two kilometers short, forcing the 12,000 deportees to walk the rest of the way to the border town of Zbaszyn. They were refused entry into the country and the Polish Red Cross and Jewish welfare organizations were ill-equipped to feed and nurture so many people in so small a town. From Zbaszyn, Herschel’s sister wrote a post card to him reporting what had happened and asking for money – which he didn’t have.

Ernst vom Rast was obviously selected randomly to be the victim of Herschel Grynszpan’s despair. Ironically, the young German diplomat was known to have expressed anti-Nazi sympathies because he opposed the persecution of the Jews. That had put him under Gestapo scrutiny for his views.

After the shooting, Grynszpan remained in his victim’s office awaiting the arrival of the French police. He cooperated with them freely and gave his correct name. Confessing his act he said: “Being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have a right to exist on this earth. Wherever I have been, I have been chased like an animal.”

In his pocket was a photograph of him, taken by a street photographer as was common in that day. On the back, addressed to his parents in care of his uncle, he had written a final note dated November 7, 1938:

"With God's help.[in Hebrew]My dear parents, I could not do otherwise, may God forgive me, the heart bleeds when I hear of your tragedy and that of the 12,000 Jews. I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest, and that I will do. Forgive me. – Hermann [his German name]

From November 1938 to June 1940 Grynszpan was imprisoned in the juvenile section of the Fresnes Prison in Paris from the date of his arrest to June 1940 while his French lawyer and the prosecutor (who consulted with a German lawyer to placate Hitler) argued about trial procedures for 18 months. But Germany invaded France in May 1940. As they approached the outskirts of Paris in June, prison inmates including Grynszpan were sent south away from the advancing army.

En route south, the prison bus was strafed by a German plane, killing several prisoners and allowing others to escape in the confusion. Grynszpan was one of them. But instead of making good his escape, he continued to walk south to the original destination – to the prison at Bourges – where he dutifully turned himself in to the French police. They sent him on foot and without guard to the prison at Toulouse thinking he would attempt to escape the Nazis. But with no money, no knowledge of the country, and poor French speaking skills, this naïve, if not immature, boy turned himself over to the officials in Toulouse.

Since arriving in Paris, the Nazis had been on Grynszpan’s trail, and with the fall of France, they caught up with him in Toulouse where he was taken into German custody and flown to Berlin. Shuttled between concentration camps, Grynszpan was treated relatively well because Goebbels intended to make him the object of a show trial in which it would be alleged that vom Rath’s death was the result of a conspiracy of international Jewry, not the random act of a distraught young man.

But Goebbels found that it was no easier to proceed with a trial in Germany than it had been in France. He got caught in a bureaucratic crossfire between the German Justice Ministry, which asserted its independence from the Nazi political apparatus, insisting that Grynszpan was not now a German citizen and therefore could not be tried in a German court for a crime committed outside of Germany. It was textbook German bureaucratic paralysis, and the pulling and tugging continued into 1941.

Goebbels’ solution was to charge Grynszpan with high treason for which he could be tried regardless of citizenship – at least so he thought. But the internecine legal wrangling continued until October 1941 when an indictment was finally handed down. However, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December brought the US into the war with a formal declaration against Germany and the Axis on December 11, and the Grynszpan trial never took place.

What happened to Grynszpan after that is not fully known. Many Nazi documents remain unread. But there remained hope among German authorities that they could charge international Jewry with causing World War II. Thus it is likely that Grynszpan continued to be treated well during the war in order to make him the key actor in a trial. He was still alive in late 1943 or early 1944 because Adolf Eichmann testified in his own trial in Israel that he remembers interrogating Grynszpan in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin around that period.

After the war – which all of Herschel’s family survived – there were rumors that he was living under an assumed name in Paris. One rumor wag said he was married and had two children. This is unlikely. His parents and siblings moved to Israel and made it known through Jewish networks that they were alive and were looking for him. While it is possible that his German captors killed him, it is more likely that he died of disease, since his value as a trial witness and Hitler’s interest in him would have provided an extraordinary degree of political protection.

On June 1, 1960, the Amtsgericht (Lower Court) of Hanover declared Herschel Grynszpan deceased. The date of death was fixed as May 8, 1945. The decree became official on July 24, 1960.

Zendel Grynszpan, Herschel's father, was present at the Israeli premiere in 1952 of Sir Michael Tippett's oratorio, A Child of Our Time, based on Herschel Grynszpan.

Of the eleven million pre-war European Jews, six million were consumed in the Holocaust. The Nazi plan had been to kill them all.