Tilting at windmills.

AuthorCooper, Matthew
PositionSupermarkets, Spiro Agnew and vice presidential candidates - Bill and Hillary Clinton, Spiro Agnew, trends among liberals

Lost in the supermarket

If you're anything like me, you're a basket case when it comes to filling your grocery basket. It's not just the mind-bending options available (37 different varieties of Doritos); it's also the vexing political and moral calculations. I've never gone in for those socially conscious mutual funds; I don't really see the moral pitfalls of owning defense stocks. But when it comes to food, my brain becomes a mini debating society. Fresh blueberries? They look great, and I want them out of season, but the fuel spent to bring them here from Chile seems wrong. My parents boycotted grapes in the 1970s out of solidarity with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers--but hey, that was one product. Today, we're so imbued with the idea of making ethical choices that our heads are buzzing, at least until we say "F--k it," pull into BP, buy some smokes, and hop back in our Suburban.

Whole Foods versus Safeway has always been a particular dilemma for me. Each is close to my home in Washington. Each has its merits. Whole Foods' meats, seafood, and produce are definitely better, but when I shop at Safeway I can both eat and pay rent. "Whole Paycheck" jokes aside, Whole Foods is a bundle of contradictions. It still has the hippie, organic DNA of its Austin founding, but the company's CEO, John Mackey, is libertarian and a leading opponent of Obamacare. Safeway has plenty of union workers. Whole Foods doesn't, and Mackey has likened unions to herpes ("unpleasant and inconvenient," he calls them). At the Whole Foods near me, the crew is heavily immigrant, which is great, but the turnover is fairly brisk, which I'm not sure how to read. Is the place a great first rung? Or a terrible place to work? At the nearby Safeway, it's mostly native-born African Americans who wear United Food and Commercial Workers buttons, are proud of higher-paying employment, and stay at their jobs for years. One cashier I spoke with at Safeway recently described how she was putting her three kids through college. At the nearby Whole Foods the other night, close to the ten p.m. closing time, I said to my cashier, "You sure must be glad to be going home." She replied, "No, I have two other jobs."

We could use an elephant in the room

What if the majority of elected Republicans believed (or were free to say without being primaried) that man-made activity causes climate change? Sure, environmental legislation might actually be able to move forward. But there'd be an equally important consequence of global warming entering the realm of normal politics. We'd have an actual contest of ideas. Instead of arguing first principles we'd begin asking, on a bipartisan basis, what to do about the problem. Spend more on solar, or carbon capture, or what? I suspect that Republican market-oriented thinking would help. Republicans came up with widely praised ideas like the individual mandate in health care, although they later chucked it the way a robber might toss a gun in the river. Cap and trade emerged as a reasonable way of controlling acid rain in the 1990s under President George H. W. Bush. It's not that there wasn't lobbying and dealing and ill will. But at least there was the kind of agreement about the basic facts that allowed politics to work.

At a time when so much of the GOP is treating global warming as a theory (hey, so is gravity), it's intriguing that the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation gave its Profile in Courage Award to Representative Bob Inglis, a former Republican House member, who is working on climate change issues after once being indifferent.

Spiro Agnew: Not completely evil

The Baltimore riots this spring reminded a lot of people of Spiro Agnew, who was the governor of Maryland when the city erupted in 1968. Agnews law-and-order crackdown caught the eye of Richard Nixon and infuriated the state's black leaders. But Agnew wasn't always seen as hostile to racial struggle. As Baltimore County executive, Agnew won the governorship in 1966 against Democrat George Mahoney, a segregationist. By contrast, Agnew denounced bigotry, backed an anti-discriminatory open housing law, and even as a Republican garnered 70 percent of the black vote. (If it's hard to think of Maryland, now almost 30 percent African American, as a font of segregation, remember that it was more southern and white back then. It's telling that George Wallace was shot in Laurel, Maryland, during his 1972 presidential campaign.) Agnew had been governor the same short amount of...

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