Rhinocrisy

Military cemetaries make me tear up. Their silence^* always feels appropriately embarrassed. What can you say to a kid you send to die, emotionally if not physically? Here, have a free tombstone?

So Memorial Day, when I biked to Presidio National Cemetary, I expected to find myself sad as usual at the grassy hillside of rank and file. Instead, I found myself irritated. Not just my usual Memorial Day irritation at the most violent, aggressive nation on earth taking a day to play victim while ignoring those it has killed. I’m used to that feeling. This was a new, improved irritation.

Each grave was decorated with its own American flag. Ten thousand or more fluttered like pinwheels in spring sunshine, looking as cheery and disposable as a raver picnic. Salt in the wound.

There’s no greater betrayal of democracy than offensive war. Nobody signs up and enthusiastically donates her or his life for Empire and Conquest. While I’m sure some died happy to know that they helped defend the country against Mexican depredation, Spanish — um, sinking of the Alamo, Japanese invasion (which even happened!), Communist dominos, or more 9/11s, we’re not citizens when we’re dead. We’re dirt, just like the rabbit I saw on a trail earlier, its entrails being devoured by flies and ants just hours after being crushed by a mountain bike. We’re the same dirt no matter what country we called home.

For a country to try to reclaim these corpses, after betraying them by drafting or duping them to die in wars that were, beneath the public rhetoric, almost all aggressive, is like a murderer showing up to a funeral. For the reclamation to be so cheery and parti-colored is like the murderer offering everyone ham canapes.

Of course it’s not just the military that screws the pooch on Memorial Day. I also saw mourners visiting graves in fancy Lexi and Mercedeses (”Thanks for dying so I can drive a fancy car!”) and I saw a man on a beach with a big flag and a boombox playing bombastic John Philip Souza marches, all brass and snares and the joy of the military machine. I’ll take less of that and more Taps, please.

Forget official Memorial Day. Remember the dead of all sides, every day.

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^* Golden Gate National Cemetary excepted. It’s in the flight path of an airport and next to a freeway. Some cemetaries are beyond embarrassment.

I think it’s obvious that Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is an absurd temperature gauge of our economy. But for more than a decade, I haven’t been able to put my finger on what it is that’s missing. Here’s a brainstorm that you smarter people can kick around.

I think the problem is that GDP shows only what is in the money economy. If something isn’t monetized, like fresh air or sunlight or a lover’s kiss, it has no value in the GDP. Conversely, an oxygen tank, lightbulb or prostitute’s blow-job is part of the GDP. So we need a measure that accounts for the full range of wealth and income, not just the part that happens to go through a cash register.

I think we should come up with balance sheets for our geographic areas that resemble those for business, in which businesses need to account for inventory and physical plant. In business, such a balance sheet accompanies the income statement — the equivalent of the GDPs and net savings rates that geographic areas frequently calculate.

A geographic area’s balance sheet should include its resource base, including water, fuel, educated citizenry, public health, and so on.

Each year, along with reporting the increase or decrease in monetary wealth for the place, government should also report on changes in resource wealth, including both cultural and natural resources. And unlike most U.S. accounting, it should mark those resources to market. That is accounting jargon for this: The inventory should calculate how much the country’s fresh water, educated citizens, topsoil, and so on are worth TODAY, not how much they were worth when they were purchased or conquered. (For various reasons, most companies need to be conservative in their estimates of wealth, so they say a good is worth what they paid for it. That’s goofy when it comes to geographic administrative areas.)

Under such a system, scarcity (e.g., drought) would increase the present value of a resource (e.g., water). That way in a drought, a place will have to be more careful in spending its water, as reducing its supply in an aquifer will do more to reduce the place’s reported net assets in a drought than in a flush period.

Increases in national/city/planetary wealth could be credited to the GDP. So services provided “free” by nature, families, and public services would get credit for increasing people’s income as they really experience it. A politician or central banker could get credit for increasing cash income or for increasing the plenitude of resources, especially scarce ones.

If anything, free services have a higher felt value than those that cost money, due in part to the cheapening, desensitizing effect that money has on all relations. It would be good to credit our free services in our accounting of wealth and income.