Tom Keane

The Tubman Twenties

So, just as cash is becoming obsolete, we’re now going to put a woman on the $20 bill. Hey, I guess it’s better than putting her on a pedestal.

This has been something of a saga. The U.S. Treasury Department was originally planning to off Alexander Hamilton from the $10 bill. But thanks to the insanely popular eponymous musical that apparently has more fans than folks who have actually seen it, Hamilton held in there. Instead, Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and union spy, will grace the $20 bill. Andrew Jackson — the man responsible for the ignoble Trail of Tears and a slaveholder to boot — will in turn get bumped to the back of the bill, making him and Tubman uncomfortable roomies, to say the least.

And Hamilton too will be getting new roommates. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew also says the back of the tenner will host a variety of women, including Lucretia Mott, Alice Paul and Sojourner Truth. All of this reminds me, oddly, of the statues along Back Bay’s Commonwealth Mall. You may remember: Struck by the fact that public artworks on the Mall, the Public Garden and the Common all feature men, a group began pushing for a woman’s statue. Unable to decide on one woman, we ended up in 2003 with three women of history — Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone and Phillis Wheatley. They’re portrayed lounging around in a circle, looking for all the world like they’re gossiping about the indiscretions of the neighbors next door. Mind you, any one of these women — and many others too — would have deserved her own statue. But instead we put them all in one spot, called it the Boston Women’s Memorial, and just like that, our consciences were salved. The rest of the city, I guess, remains the Boston Men’s Memorial.

It felt back then like women were being appeased. Today’s changes to our currency have the same placating feel as well. By 2020 — the year the new bills should come out — it’s a safe bet that smartphones and debit cards will have largely replaced cash. The Tubman Twenties will probably get as much use as the old Susan B. Anthony dollar coins. The victory will be Pyrrhic.

Currency travails notwithstanding, there’s no question that women have made much progress since the 1920 Amendment that granted them suffrage. Back then, women rarely got any sort of higher education. Today, more women than men are college grads (indeed, the crisis on that front is now what happens to the men left behind). It once was the case as well that employment ads were neatly divided into “Jobs for Men” and “Jobs for Women.” Those distinctions are long gone. “A woman’s place is in the House,” runs the bumper sticker, “…and the Senate.” Add to that soon the White House, as the Democratic party stands poised to nominate a woman for president, a signal and long overdue moment.

Yet that campaign itself has exposed the deep sexism that far too often runs through our veins. When Bernie Sanders shouts, he’s persuasive; when Clinton does, she’s shrill. A Sanders surrogate at a rally recently saw fit to call Clinton a “whore.” And the exit polls from this week’s New York primary showed some odd results too. Hillary won among single women, married women and married men. The one group she lost to? Single men — the “Bernie Bros.”

The rhetoric of that campaign has grown coarse of late, but when issues are discussed, one that Clinton focuses on is the disparity between compensation paid to men and to women. It’s illegal, of course — President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963 — but it persists nevertheless. And it’s a reflection of the way women still have a tough time breaking through any number of ceilings, be they membership on corporate boards, partnerships in venture capital firms or senior management of big law firms.

And even in our personal lives things are still askew. It was once a near-tenet of the women’s movement that straight women should stop adopting their husband’s last name. Yet over the last 30 years, the numbers haven’t changed much: in more than four out of five marriages, the Misses become Mesdames. And the children that result from those happy unions? Almost all of them bear their father’s last name as well.

Well, at least those kids in four years will get to see a woman grace the front of the $20 bill — if such a bill can be found. At the same time and much more meaningfully, they may also get to see another woman running for her second term.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on April 21, 2016.

Pragmatic Hypocrisy

Baker and bathroom laws are popping up across the United States. The former seek to allow businesses to refuse to serve those who are LGBT, the typical example being the anti-gay baker who doesn’t want to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. The latter pretends there is no such thing as being transgender. Both laws are thinly disguised measures to discriminate and harass.

And they are prompting a thunderous backlash. One wonders, however, whether that backlash is more an effort to garner good PR than it is genuine, deep-seated offense at egregious public policy.

How else to explain Canadian rock star Bryan Adams announcement that he was so upset by Mississippi’s new “religious tolerance” law he was cancelling an April 14 concert in Biloxi? Bully for him, you might think: He’s putting into action his ethical beliefs. Perhaps. Yet within the last four weeks, Adams had no problem performing in both Russia and Egypt — each deeply and notoriously anti-gay.

Hypocrisy? You bet. And Bryan Adams isn’t alone.

Bruce Springsteen also canceled a planned concert because of a newly adopted baker and bathroom law in North Carolina. But Springsteen apparently has no problem performing in far less gay-friendly places such as Italy, Poland and Japan — he’s held concerts in all many times over the last number of years.

Nor is the hypocrisy confined to musicians.

PayPal, for instance, was apparently so concerned by the North Carolina law that it said it would cancel plans to build a new operations center in Charlotte, a loss of $3.6 million and 400 jobs. Apple, Bank of America and more than 100 other companies signed onto a letter opposing the new law. Many cities, including Boston, have banned city-funded travel to North Carolina.

At the same time, though, PayPal is making great efforts to expand throughout the Middle East, where intolerance for LGBT rights is intense. Apple, of course, manufactures many of its products in the People’s Republic of China, also a country unfriendly to all human rights — including LGBT. Nor does Bank of America hesitate to set up shop in the more repressive areas of the world. Homosexuality is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, but if you need to bank in that country, BofA — conveniently located on the 20th floor of Kingdom Tower in Riyadh — is happy to help. And Boston counts Ghana’s Sekondi-Takoradi as one of its sister cities; Ghana also has a well-deserved anti-gay reputation.

So what’s going on? Getting indignant over human rights helps burnish corporate and political patinas. They make for good press, too. (In Adams’s case, one suspects his hostility to Mississippi’s law was also a good career move; he’s received more media attention of late than he has for a long time.) But indignation had its limits. It’s easy for PayPal to write off North Carolina; it can just build in another state. But avoiding entire countries can be economically costly. If, say, Apple abandoned cheap Chinese manufacturing, profits would likely plummet.

It’s questionable in any event whether boycotts or economic sanctions really are the best ways to change behavior. In many cases, close economic and cultural engagement with nations hostile to human rights are more effective. That, after all, is the essence of the argument for normalizing relations with many backward regimes — most recently, Cuba.

Still, the hypocrisy argument — clean hands for one should mean clean hands for all — can go too far, becoming, really, just an excuse for inaction. Yes, there are double standards. But on occasion it can make sense to treat those in your backyard differently from those an ocean away.

Moreover, sometimes a well-timed boycott or economic sanction can have an impact — not necessarily for their monetary cost, but because they raise an issue’s profile. The backlash against North Carolina and Mississippi is a case in point: It actually seems to be having an effect. The governor of North Carolina just weakened one offensive portion of the state’s controversial law. Meanwhile, other states seem to be treading more carefully as they consider passing their own versions of baker and bathroom bills. None of this would be happening without the outcry from Adams, Springsteen and numerous corporations. It may be hypocrisy, but its pragmatic hypocrisy: The kind that works.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on April 15, 2016.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Baseball is the comfort food of the sporting world, the old slippers you put on at the end of the day. After a long winter break, the 2016 season begins this Sunday. The Red Sox play their first the next day and open at home a week later. With 162 games scheduled between opening day and October 2, we will soon fall into the almost-daily routine of listening to the familiar (and some not so familiar) voices calling balls and strikes as the crowd murmurs away in the background.

It is a sport many think out of step to our age. We are an ever-more frenetic and driven culture, seeking instant gratification and minute-by-minute thrills. Most popular sports follow suit: they are fast-paced and exciting, rapid high-energy, high-adrenaline contests that drive their participants near the point of exhaustion. Bodies slam again the boards in hockey, sweat slicks basketball courts and football players pull each other to the ground.

Baseball is their antithesis. The pace is slow, measured and unhurried. If there is sweat on the brow, it’s from the sun or nervous anticipation. No clock drives the action forward. Most of the game consists of players standing at the plate, taking a few swings and then sitting down. Action on the field is sporadic; indeed, the best-fought of games — the no hitters — are admired precisely for the fact that almost nothing happened at all. A friend to these shores, brought up on soccer and rugby, allows that baseball is “absorbing.” It’s meant as praise but it is faint praise indeed. Sports, one thinks, should offer more than the contemplative pleasure of a good book.

It is still called “America’s pastime,” but the numbers lend credence to those who think baseball really may just be past time. Professional football is now in ascendance, generating annual revenues of $13 billion. Baseball is a quarter less at $9.5 billion. Those figures are particularly striking because baseball’s season is 10 times as long as the NFL’s, meaning that, measured on a per-game basis, baseball does even more poorly. One wonders whether baseball’s survival to date has merely been because other major sports have traditionally given the summer a wide berth. As soccer increasingly comes into its own in America, that deference may be coming to an end.

But perhaps it is baseball’s iconoclasm that saves it. It is (except for cricket, I suppose) a game like no other. As a software designer might claim of his product, the bugs are actually features. The very routine of baseball, its lack of excitement, its meditative, chess-like nature, its refusal to tie itself to a clock, its long and enduring history — all of these become its virtues. Baseball soothes and comforts while football, basketball, hockey and the rest inflame. Here in Boston we saw that most remarkably in 2013, when the Red Sox helped a city recover from the carnage of Marathon Day. Baseball doesn’t make everything all right, of course, but it does seem to offer the hope that, perhaps, everything could be alright. As James Earl Jones said in “Field of Dreams,” it’s the “one constant through all the years.” In a time of Trump and terror and Bernie and Benghazi, when it feels sometimes as if the great American experiment is coming off at the wheels, when we desperately need respite from all the craziness around us, the 2016 season comes not a moment too soon.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on April 1, 2016.