Long Pauses

Category: Politics

  • Altruism?

    The Times has two articles this morning about the growing numbers of uninsured in America and the effect those numbers are having on the political landscape. After describing the combined impact of rising healthcare costs and unemployment, Robin Toner writes:

    In such times, the plight of the uninsured becomes more of a middle-class issue, more of a symbol of real close-to-home insecurity and thus more politically potent, advocates and experts say. Until now, “it’s mainly been an issue of altruism for a discrete and disadvantaged population,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal consumer group. “Now that the losses in health coverage are impacting more middle-class and working families,” Mr. Pollack said, “this issue becomes one of self-interest for a very substantial part of the population.”

    I read pieces like this with only a novice’s understanding of the problem. The “business” of health care is beyond me. Which is why I don’t typically write about our need for something like socialized medicine. But that quote has stuck with me. In our money-saturated political discourse, caring about the health of our least advantaged citizens has become a question of “altruism.” As if it were a purely moral issue, divorced from politics!

    It’s amazing what kind of noise is made when middle-class sensibilities and suburban comfort are threatened. (Any parallels here with the American Church are purely intentional.)

  • Trying to Understand It All

    There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
    — Harry Truman

    I’ve become interested in Iran lately. For personal reasons. I have a new student in my ESL class who arrived recently in America by way of Switzerland and Tehran. He’s a religious and political refugee with nothing but contempt for the Islamic fundamentalists who dominate his country. Each time I’ve chatted with him, he has spoken nostalgically of the days under the Shah. I shake my head knowingly and listen with rapt attention, but my fuzzy understanding of his country’s history is formed mostly by childhood memories of the hostage crisis and by the snippets of wisdom I glean from Kiarostami, Panahi, Makhmalbaf, and those other brilliant Iranian filmmakers.

    It’s a start, though. When he mentioned that his last job there had been building an apartment complex on the outskirts of the city, I said that Kiarostami’s films make those mountains look like the most beautiful place on earth. His eyes lit up, then he told me about the hours and hours he had spent hiking and rock climbing there.

    With my new friend in mind, I read with great interest H.D.S. Greenway’s review of All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. In “The Iran Conspiracy,” Greenway offers a usable introduction to the political and economic rationale for the CIA’s involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government. The parallels with the current situation are impossible to ignore.

    In the current age of American unilateralism and preemptive military interventions, it is hard to remember that just after World War II America still stood for something quite different in the Middle East. Although the US emerged from the war as “the leader of the free world,” the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese still ruled over vast empires. To many colonized people the United States was identified with Wilsonian idealism and anticolonialism. . . .

    In the early 1950s Stephen Penrose, a president of American University of Beirut, wrote: “Until recently American enterprise in the Middle East has been almost entirely non-governmental, an important difference from most other national patterns. Americans have never been seen as colonizers or subjugators and it is hard even now for most Arabs to conceive of them as such.”

    When President Bush first mentioned the “Axis of Evil,” I nearly choked, knowing that, in doing so, he was drawing a line in the sand — a line that would re-establish a Cold War-like polarity and dominate foreign policy and political discourse (and eliminate nuance in the process). I’m only now beginning to understand, however, just how intimately the Cold War and Middle East have been bound.

    The war in Korea changed America’s outlook and policies as surely as did the attack on September 11 in the current administration. The invasion from the north came in June of 1950, and convinced the United States that the Western nightmare of expanding, militant communism was coming true. The Korean War coincided with the growing crisis over Iran’s nationalization of its oil industry, and had the effect of narrowing Washington’s differences with the British at Iran’s expense. Korea played into the American decision to reverse its early opposition to an anti-Mossadegh coup. Coincidentally, the Korean War ended in July 1953, while [Kermit] Roosevelt was plotting his coup. . . .

    In many ways America’s obsession with terrorism since September 11 is an echo of its obsession with communism fifty years ago. Today the United States and Britain claim they must occupy Iraq because of the threat of terrorism. Officially, both say they want to get out as soon as possible; but ideologues in the Pentagon dream of Iraq advancing America’s interests, and Israel’s too, in the Persian Gulf as the Shah once did. Talk of a new American imperialism is becoming fashionable among conservative academics, some of them in power. They forget the lesson of British experience, which is that when a people will no longer accept it, foreign domination is almost impossible to maintain. Kinzer begins his book with an apt quote from President Truman: “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”

  • Incompatible with Morality?

    A few weeks ago, on our return trip from Florida, I tuned the radio to a local talk radio station. We were driving through Birmingham at the time, so the debates of the moment centered on two topics: Judge Moore’s fight to save the Ten Commandments and Governor Bob Riley’s proposal to radically transform the state’s tax structure. In the days since, both issues have been put to bed. Moore’s monument was whisked away in a matter of minutes while his supporters were having a prayer meeting; Riley’s proposal was soundly defeated in a state-wide referendum. Prominent portions of the evangelical church are decrying the former and cheering the latter.

    Which brings me back to that talk radio show. Though not explicitly Christian (from what I could tell, at least), the show did feature a pastor as one of its two hosts, and it clearly attracted listeners and callers of a fairly conservative bent. No problems there. Or surprises, really. I was disappointed, though, to hear caller after caller after caller fawn over Judge Moore and his call to “keep God in America,” while simultaneously denouncing Riley’s progressive tax plan, particularly because Riley seemed to be acting for all the right reasons. A friend put it something like this: “The Church is getting mobilized behind a symbol, but, once again, we’ve failed to act on an opportunity for real social justice.” And the people of Alabama are already suffering for it.

    As far as religion-bashing, pro-war, ex-liberal pundits go, Christopher Hitchens is probably my favorite — a guy whose stubborn reason pisses me off as often as it forces me to stop and re-consider my opinions (which is quite often, actually). Here’s Hitchens on the Ten Commandments flap. (It will help the reading if you picture him standing awkwardly at a podium, slightly drunk and very bitter.)

    It’s obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.

    That last sentence is one of those that I’m talking about — absolutely maddening, but impossible to ignore. Hitchens, a man obviously capable of higher-order thinking, looks at the Church and denounces it as incompatible with morality. I disagree completely, of course, but, watching events as they unfolded in Alabama, I can’t say that I blame him.

  • I Just Don’t Know

    I’ve been meaning to mention this one for a few days now. Last Friday, Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in the Times, “Freedom’s in 2nd Place?” raised some questions that need to be raised right about now, especially given the growing disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kristof and his wife, both from immigrant families, recently visited their ancestral homes, the former in Ukraine, the latter in China. For Kristof, the juxtaposition was remarkable.

    Since 1989, when the Soviet Union opened fire on Communism and China opened fire on its citizens, China’s economy has tripled in size — and Ukraine’s has shrunk by half. Even in Russia, according to Izvestia, 40 percent of the people can’t afford toothpaste; in Karapchiv, many can’t afford toilet paper and make do with newspapers (which to me seems sacrilegious). Meanwhile, prospering China has become a global center for cosmetic surgery.

    I was as outraged as anyone that Chinese troops massacred hundreds of protesters to destroy the Tiananmen democracy movement. But China’s long economic boom has cut child mortality rates so much since 1990 that an additional 195,000 children under the age of 5 survive each year. Does this mean that the Chinese are better off for having had their students shot? No, of course not. But it does mean that authoritarian orderliness is sometimes more conducive to economic growth than democratic chaos.

    With another bombing today in Iraq, and with growing numbers of American casualties, those occasional soundbites from Iraqi civilians who claim that life was actually better under Saddam — that they at least had clean water and electricity under his dictatorship — are becoming louder and more difficult to ignore. Can Kristof’s conclusion about “authoritarian orderliness” and “democratic chaos” be applied to Iraq, despite the drastically different social, political, historical, religious, and economic conditions in Ukraine/China and the Middle East? I’m beginning to think, with great regret, that it can.

    None of this should come as a big surprise, of course. Many of us who protested the war did so not because we are anti-American (insert witty Toby Keith quip here), but because we are students of history, because we are willing to learn from the British Empire’s and Soviet Union’s mistakes. The $64,000 question is: Given current conditions, what the hell do we do about it? Some are already arguing that we should admit defeat and cut our losses. I’m not so sure.

    A dear friend of mine is now in parts unknown, doing the type of work that must be done if this war ever really will lead to greater peace and safety in the world. This is the last note I received from him:

    I consider it a privilege to be able to serve the people of Iraq. Please pray that they will find true shalom in the coming months and years.

    Quite an antidote to the cynicism, eh? Here’s what I want to see. I want President Bush to stand before a nationally televised audience, and I want him to commit a trillion (with a T) dollars to Iraq’s economic recovery. Oh yeah, and he should tell those military families who stood united behind him in February and March that their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers will be serving mandatory one-year deployments, because that is what it will take to do the right thing here. Then, I want him to humbly seek the guidance of the United Nations, and I want him to hand over administrative authority to a multilateral coalition. And then I want Bush and Congress to pay for the whole damn thing with a radically progressive tax restructuring. Because, you know what? War is costly, peace will cost a helluva lot more, and America is the only country capable of footing the bill.

    Will it happen? Nope. None of it. But it’s the only thing resembling a solution that I can come up with.

  • F— Off, Old Europe

    The arrogance of this bunch is just staggering. Tell me — is there any legitimate justification for our continued snubbing of the U.N.? I mean, other than a general, “nobody’s gonna tell me what to do” stupidity?

    “The administration is not willing to confront going to the Security Council and saying, ‘We really need to make Iraq an international operation,’ ” said an administration official. “You can make a case that it would be better to do that, but right now the situation in Iraq is not that dire.”

    I really wish Bush would just come out and tell the truth: “Of course we knew there weren’t any WMD. Of course we knew that democracy in Iraq was a pipedream. Don’t you get it yet? We want 100,000+ heavily-armed American troops stationed smack dab in the center of the Middle East. And for as long as (is politically) possible. It’s the only way we can show ’em who’s boss.”

    Another Really Short Take. After more than a year of waiting, I was finally able to see Sokurov’s Russian Ark today. What a beautiful, beautiful film. I knew that I would be impressed by the craft of it all, but I hadn’t expected to be greeted by such a compelling narrative. The last twenty minutes are the best cinema I’ve seen all year. So much history and tragedy and nostalgia and sorrow — and all from a ballroom dance sequence, a steadicam shot through a sea of self-conscious extras, and Sergei Dreiden’s remarkable face. I doubt I’ll see a better film in 2003.

  • Theology of Empire

    This weekend I received the latest issue of Sojourners, in which editor-in-chief Jim Wallis discusses the neocon move toward empire and the bad theology that Bush uses to promote it. The article isn’t available online yet — all the more reason to subscribe — so here’s a quick preview:

    The much-touted Religious Right is now a declining political factor in American life. The New York Times’ Bill Keller recently observed, “Bombastic evangelical power brokers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have aged into irrelevance, and now exist mainly as ludicrous foils.” The real theological problem in America today is no longer the Religious Right but the nationalistic religion of the Bush administration — one that confuses the identity of the nation with the church, and God’s purposes with the mission of American empire.

    America’s foreign policy is more than pre-emptive, it is theologically presumptuous: not only unilateral, but dangerously messianic; not just arrogant, but bordering on the idolatrous and blasphemous. George Bush’s personal faith has prompted a profound self-confidence in his “mission” to fight the “axis of evil,” his “call” to be commander-in-chief in the war against terrorism, and his definition of America’s “responsibility” to “defend the . . . hopes of all mankind.” This is a dangerous mix of bad foreign policy and bad theology.

    But the answer to bad theology is not secularism; it is, rather, good theology. It is not always wrong to invoke the name of God and the claims of religion in the public life of a nation, as some secularists say. Where would we be without the prophetic moral leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu, and Oscar Romero?

    Wallis’s piece doesn’t offer any particularly revelatory insights into Bush’s agenda, but it’s a great read because it synthesizes so much material and reexamines it through his (Wallis’s) humble perspective. And on a day that I discovered this, it seemed that a little humility was in order.

    A couple of fun factoids from the same issue:

    • CEO pay at the 37 largest defense contractors increased 79 percent from 2001 to 2002. The average defense industry CEO in 2002 made $11.3 million — 577 times as much as the average U.S. army private on the ground in Iraq.
    • In 1999 the average wait for public housing in Miami was 9 months; in 2002 it is 84 months.

  • Vigorous Democracy

    I don’t know whether suddenly I’m hearing more talk about democracy because I’m listening better, or prompting it. But if the clearest essential for a vigorous democracy is a citizenry that cares, I’d rather think that my conversations are signs of a nation rousing itself in defense of democratic traditions and institutions.
    — Margaret Krome

    I’ve been thinking the same thing lately, though that might be more a reflection of the company I keep than anything like a national trend. During Clinton’s first campaign, I was a typical 20 year old undergrad — a kid who considered himself a “registered apathetic.” (I used those exact words to describe my political leanings then.) Over the next decade I became increasingly aware politically, and increasingly interested. And then came Bush/Gore . . .

    George W. Bush has turned me into a political animal, and I’m not the only one. Everywhere I go now, I find myself stepping into political discussions. Wars, dead soldiers, and budget deficits will do that to a country, I guess. Hopefully, history is a good indicator here. Johnson’s an interesting example. So’s Bush 41. And instead of announcing the golden age of neo-conservative hegemony that many had predicted, Newt’s Contract with America in ’94 helped to set the stage for Clinton’s landslide re-election. I’m beginning to think that Dubya’s club-’em-and-smirk-while-you-do-it agenda might just be inspiring the same kind of counter-movement across the left-of-center. Hell, if he keeps it up, Bush might just lose the center, too. Surely Margaret Krome and I aren’t the only people who are noticing this.

  • The Precision of Words

    Anyone who caught the Blair/Bush press conference a few days ago might sympathize with Philip Roth. Those two leaders, now joined at the hip politically, make for such an interesting juxtaposition — one a well-read academic and well-spoken debater; the other a shoot-from the hip, “just like one of us,” rambling wreck. After watching his companion casually slip the word “compunction” into an off-the-cuff remark, Bush got that wild-eyed look again and began spewing stuff like:

    As I understand, there’s been a lot of speculation over in Great Britain, we got a little bit of it here, about whether or not the — whether or not the actions were based upon valid information.

    We can debate that all day long until the truth shows up. And that’s what’s going to happen. And we based our decisions on good, sound intelligence, and the — our people are going to find out the truth. And the truth will say that this intelligence was good intelligence; there’s no doubt in my mind.

    I mention Roth because in his recent fiction he seems to have become preoccupied by the degradation, sensationalizing, and politicization of language. In The Human Stain, for instance, (soon to find larger public acclaim, by the way, when the film adaptation starring Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins is released in the fall), the main character is undone by a single word, spoken innocently but exploded by an agenda. At one point, he returns to Athena college, the site of his tragedy, and overhears a conversation between two young professors, who are debating the Clinton/Lewinski scandal. Using the young intern as a personification of her generation’s intellectual vacancy, one says to the other:

    Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure. There’s one. My students cannot stay in that place where thinking must occur. Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end—every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious , must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliché. Any kid who says “closure” I flunk. They want closure, there’s their closure.

    This passage caught my attention this morning as I was typing up notes because of three words: ambiguous, knotty, and mysterious. I worry when politicians denounce ambiguity, when they normalize and conventionalize concepts as mysterious as democracy and history. People die unnecessarily as a result. Families are destroyed and resources are wasted. Someone should flunk ’em.

  • Looking Back

    The latest polls are in, and Mr. Bush can’t be pleased. A quick run-down:

    • Bush’s overall approval rating has dropped to 59%, well below Bush 41’s numbers at this point twelve years ago.
    • 52% of those polled believe there has been an “unacceptable” level of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
    • 57% still consider the war with Iraq to have been worth the sacrifice, down from 70% ten weeks ago.
    • 50% said Bush intentionally exaggerated evidence suggesting Iraq had WMD.
    • 80% fear the United States will become bogged down in a long and costly peacekeeping mission in Iraq, up eight points in less than three weeks.

    The good news, as far as I’m concerned, is that, with the American population growing increasingly concerned over our military occupation, Bush will be less likely to instigate that conflict with Iran or Syria that I have been predicting would come some time in the weeks leading up to primary season. Also, with Dean’s campaign in much better shape than was Clinton’s in ’91, and with Congressional Democrats finally finding some backbone, things are looking better for 2004.

    What I find more interesting, though, are the comments from the “man on the street” that always accompany the findings of polls like this. In the linked article, Betty Stillwell, 71, says, “We were supposed to be in there and out. By now I thought they would have set up a government, and they haven’t done that yet. . . . I think the whole thing was poorly planned, no thought to the aftermath.” Similar sentiments were expressed by interviewees on the Friday edition of ABC Nightly News. One woman, the mother of a 20-year-old serviceman, said that she had stood confidently behind President Bush in February and March (as was her patriotic duty), but that she was surprised and saddened to discover, four months later, that her son was still in the desert, still at risk.

    Huh?

    I totally sympathize with this woman’s frustration (believe me), but to act as though the “untidiness” of post-war Iraq is a big surprise only proves your ignorance. Today I discovered one of the perks of writing a blog. Blogging acts as a record of sorts — a map of texts and happenings through which I can now plot the course of my changing passions and opinions. Or, in other, more self-congratulatory words, it’s like a big We Told You So. (I never said I wouldn’t be petty if it served my needs.) So for those two well-intentioned women (and others like them) who are surprised by how messy things have become, here’s a quick look back through Long Pauses:

    On a Saturday morning in February, millions of people stood up against this war. And just a few days earlier, I warned about what would happen if we made foreign policy decisions based on irrational fear rather than on historical analysis. That post echoes the comments I made on January 30 when, in response to the now much-discussed State of the Union, I wrote: “The histories of nations that have exercised imperial force under the guise of Providence should be telling to all but the most blindly ill-informed and arrogant.”

    On January 2nd there was Robert Scheer in The Nation, writing:

    we are mobilizing our massive forces against a weakened secular dictator 6,000 miles away who doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with a series of devastating terrorist attacks. What is happening here? Certainly not the construction of a coherent foreign policy aimed at increasing the security of the United States or our allies. This is an Administration that in two years has so mucked up our approach to the world that merely applying the demands of logic is made to appear unpatriotic.

    And speaking of those links between Iraq and Al-Quaeda. . . . I was writing about Bush’s rhetorical strategies nine months ago, two weeks into the life of this blog. Responding to his September 12 speech, I wrote:

    After being pressed for several weeks to provide evidence that links Iraq to Al-Quaeda, and after failing repeatedly to do so, the President has instead linked them rhetorically, which, to be honest, is all that he really needs to do in order to sway public opinion back to his favor. Suddenly Hussein has been transformed into a new Osama, a figurehead and weapons broker.

    And it was in the same speech that President Bush first began promising a future in which the people of Iraq would “join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world.” My response:

    Man, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? Again, I applaud his spoken motivations, but I just don’t see this administration or the American voters being willing to put forth the long term efforts necessary for such a radical change. Let me be clear here: I have complete faith in the abilities of our armed services, and I have no doubt that we could quickly destabilize Iraq and oust its leadership (though doing so will come at the cost of thousands of lives, some ours, most theirs). But what happens next? That’s the answer that I most wanted to hear yesterday and the one that I knew he would carefully sidestep.

    Downright prescient, eh?

    Now, finally, a majority of Americans are beginning to ask the questions that so many of us wanted answered nearly a year ago. These in my very first blog entry, for instance. Norman Mailer and George Kennan warned us. Reverend Fritz Rich warned us. Democratic Senator Robert Byrd and Republican Representative John Duncan warned us. Countless church leaders warned us. Chris Hedges warned us. And Shane Claiborne certainly warned us.

    In October Pete Stark stood on the floor of the House and asked a question that his less courageous peers only now have the balls to ask:

    What is most unconscionable is that there is not a shred of evidence to justify the certain loss of life. Do the generalized threats and half-truths of this administration give any one of us in Congress the confidence to tell a mother or father or family that the loss of their child or loved one was in the name of a just cause?

    I wonder how that mother interviewed by ABC last night would respond?

  • It Smells Like . . . Victory

    One of the most iconic and ironic lines in all of American film. Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Kilgore — a name straight out of Dickens — is framed in one of those low-angle, “Hollywood Hero” shots. Mortars explode around him, but he moves confidently, oblivious to or unshaken by (I’m not sure which) the danger and destruction that threatens to end him. Kilgore is an anachronism — an archetypal war hero stripped from a WWII service film and dropped into chaos. His attempts to impose discipline and order on the situation are both absurd and strangely fascinating. Ask anyone what they remember about Apocalypse Now and most will mention Kilgore. Most will even remember his most famous line.

    I was reminded of that scene today when I read The Progressive‘s recent interview with Martin Sheen, in which he discusses the potential of civil disobedience, the pitfalls of being an outspoken liberal, and the wellspring of his resilient faith. I was aware of Sheen’s activism, of course — it’s near impossible not to be when he is so often demonized by the conservative media — but I’d never heard him explain so rationally and passionately his motivations. Who knew that he would come off sounding like a modern Dorothy Day? Sheen’s answer to the final question is damn near inspiring:

    Q: Do you despair, or do you have hope?

    Sheen: No, no, I never despair, because George Bush is not running the universe. He may be running the United States, he may be running the military, he may be running even the world, but he is not running the universe, he is not running the human heart. A higher power is yet to be heard in this regard, and I’m not so sure that we haven’t already heard, we just haven’t been listening. I still believe in the nonviolent Jesus and the basic human goodness present in all of us.

    If all of the issues that I have worked on were depending on some measure of success, it would be a total failure. I don’t anticipate success. We’re not asked to be successful, we are only asked to be faithful. I couldn’t even tell you what success is.

  • Take Me With You, Alec

    I’m not even sure how to wrap my ahead around stuff like this. According to a recent poll, a third of the American public believes that we have already discovered WMD in Iraq. And nearly a fourth believes that Iraq actually used chemical and biological weapons during the war. As the article mentions, this is the same American public who believed — or, at least half of them believed, and half is way too many — that Iraqis were flying the planes on 9/11. Read this next line in that David Letterman dumb guy voice, the one he makes while curling up his top lip: “Saudi Arabia, huh? Never heard of it.”

    Several analysts said they were troubled by the lack of knowledge about the Sept. 11 hijackers, shown in the January survey conducted for Knight Ridder newspapers. Only 17 percent correctly said that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.

    “That really bothers me, because it shows a lack of understanding about other countries – that maybe many Americans don’t know one Arab from another,” said Sam Popkin, a polling expert at the University of California-San Diego who has advised Democratic candidates. “Maybe because Saudis are seen as rich and friendly, people have a hard time dealing with them as hijackers.”

    No wonder Toby Keith and that “Have You Forgotten” guy are still leading us all to war. If I lived in terrified ignorance, I’d probably want to drop some bombs, too. (By the way, the AP has now officially put the estimated civilian death toll in Iraq at over 3,240, which means, of course, that our Christian democracy is now responsible for nearly 500 more civilian deaths than the 9/11 hijackers.)

  • Give ‘Em Hell, Bill

    A few days ago I read John Nichols’s report from the Take Back America conference, where Bill Moyers delivered a rousing speech “that legal scholar Jamie Raskin described as one of the most ‘amazing and spellbinding’ addresses he had ever heard.” Naturally I was anxious to read it for myself, and now a full transcript is finally available online. In just under 6,000 words, Moyers outlines the history of America’s Populist and Progressive movements, unearths the historical precedents for the Grover Norquist / Karl Rove School of Realpolitik, and issues a challenge to left-leaning politicians and voters alike: “This is your story – the progressive story of America,” he concludes. “Pass it on.”

    It really is a fantastic speech — much too long for me to adequately comment on it here. I do want to snip this one paragraph, though, which reminded me of something I had written just a few days ago.

    In “Sin and Society,” written in 1907, [Edward A. Ross] told readers that the sins “blackening the face of our time” were of a new variety, and not yet recognized as such. “The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate, murders with an adulterant instead of a bludgeon, burglarizes with a ‘rake-off’ instead of a jimmy, cheats with a company instead of a deck of cards, or scuttles his town instead of his ship, does not feel on his brow the brand of a malefactor.” In other words upstanding individuals could plot corporate crimes and sleep the sleep of the just without the sting of social stigma or the pangs of conscience. Like Kenneth Lay, they could even be invited into the White House to write their own regulations.

    And a not-so-random snippet from “The Trouble with ‘Being Left in This Country’: Tony Kushner’s Progressive Theology” (a work in progress, all rights reserved):

    In A Bright Room Called Day, Kushner’s first major play, he dissects one of those “moments,” revisiting the final days of the Weimar Republic, when, with its competing factions divided by petty politics and by interference from the Cominterm in Moscow, the German Left stood idly by as the National Socialist Workers’ Party swept to power. In case the parallels between Weimar Berlin and Reagan-era Washington, D.C. were too obscure for that first audience who saw Bright Room in 1985 — or for any audience since, for that matter — Kushner also places on stage with his German characters a contemporary American Jewish woman. Zillah Katz — “BoHo/East Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies” — is like a living embodiment of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. A polemicist and provocateur, she repeatedly interrupts the relatively naturalistic drama in order to comment on the action, and she does so in an explicitly didactic fashion. At her most outrageous, Zillah screams at the audience: “REAGAN EQUALS HITLER! RESIST! DON’T FORGET, WEIMAR HAD A CONSTITUTION TOO!” And in an image that could serve as an epigraph for Kushner’s next play, Angels in America, she adds: “Don’t put too much stock in a good night’s sleep. During times of reactionary backlash, the only people sleeping soundly are the guys who’re giving the rest of us bad dreams.”

    “Sleep the sleep of the just” is my favorite line from Moyers’s speech. That strange metaphor — the idea that sleeping soundly somehow demonstrates moral rightness — has shown up in a few odd places lately, most notably in the frequent reports that President Bush is sleeping well despite (or, perhaps, because of) the war. Well thank God for small blessings, eh?

  • A Dangerous Admission

    “You are a living mockery of your own ideals: either that, or your ideals are too low.”
    — Charles Ludlam, The Theater of the Ridiculous

    I’m slowly waking to the realization that I’m a socialist. Talk about a word that carries some impressive baggage. Tony Kushner has said in a number of interviews that he has found the label “gay playwright” to be less confrontational for most Americans than “socialist playwright.” In America today, alternative sexualities are less transgressive, less unthinkable than alternative economics. How odd.

    I say I’m a “socialist” fully aware of the problems, both practical and theoretical, inherent in the term. Not to mention the problems of the term itself: In our murky, ideologically informed, sound-bite political discourse, socialism is Communism is Stalinism is (someone explain this last one to me) liberalism. So, with apologies to any political scientists who might be reading (doubtful), here is what I mean when I say that I’m a socialist (in 90 words or less):

    • Although many of his specific predictions have yet to materialize (and likely won’t), Marx was absolutely correct when he demanded that our current situation always be understood in hard historical and economic terms.
    • Capitalism is, by necessity and by design, exploitive. (I say that with the realization that market competition has resulted in obvious and radical societal benefits as well.)
    • The championing of individualism over collective action and social justice is (in a word that I use with some trepidation) anti-Christian.

    An example. Today Nike announced that the shoemaker will be paying LeBron James — the teen phenom who has yet to play a single basketball game in either college or the NBA — $90 million over the next seven years. We’ve become deadened to figures like this, learning to expect that top athletes are entitled to top salaries. It’s capitalism at its finest. James is, after all, only exploiting an existing, highly competitive market. That he is able to do so is, in a very real and very sad sense, the American Dream. But read coverage of the story and you’ll stumble upon passages like this:

    The “marquee” basketball category — hoops shoes that sell for more than $100 at retail — is home to perhaps the sexiest battle in all of footwear. It brings massive margins, approaching 50 percent, as these cheaply made shoes fetch prices up to $140. (Nike tried to get $200 for a recent Air Jordan model, but kids balked at forking out that much.) Nike has traditionally owned this category, due in large part to the phenomenal sales of Air Jordans, but with MJ retiring this year there seems to be a chink in the armor.

    So competitors have lined up young guns. Reebok has Allen Iverson; Adidas has Tracy McGrady (and, until last year, Kobe). And Nike has tried to turn Toronto Raptors guard Vince Carter into its new Michael Jordan. Carter at first seemed the real deal, but he’s lost luster over the years as he has been felled by numerous injuries, and it doesn’t help that he plays up in Canada. Right now, Iverson, McGrady, and Jordan are the only guys who really move product, and Jordan’s on the way out. In short, Nike’s desperately searching for a new Michael.

    Is LeBron James the one? That’s up to the market, but Nike clearly thinks that LeBron is its cup of tea. Marquee shoes are aimed at black, inner-city kids who are willing to spend huge amounts of money every time the new, hot shoe hits shelves. An Adidas exec once told me that “the day after payday” is the biggest sales day in this category (the way he said it, you could tell that exploitation was not really an issue for him). To ring these kids’ consumer bells, endorsers need to be just a little bit flashy and a little bit dangerous. Iverson fits the bill, with his tats and his slightly sketchy past; Kobe does not, with his squeaky clean demeanor (he speaks fluent Italian, for goodness’ sake). McGrady’s athletic, street-ball moves on the court do the trick; Shaq’s oafish approach to the game, though perhaps the most dominant in the NBA, doesn’t sell shoes. What about LeBron? Already put under investigation for receiving “throwback jerseys” (stylish, vintage team wear) and a Hummer SUV while still an amateur, he has the controversy angle sewn up, and anyone who’s seen him dunk knows he’s got all the moves.

    There’s so much to marvel at here — that a single product will routinely return a 50% margin (at whose expense and to whose benefit?); that having a “slightly sketchy past” is now an asset to a company spokesperson (what cultural and economic forces are responsible for this change?); that executives deliberately target already impoverished “demographics” (how are profit motives complicit in the maintenance of that poverty?); and, most damning of all, that we’ve come to accept this as not only the “best we can do” but as the only system imaginable (even waging wars so that we might impose the “freedoms” of capitalism on other cultures).

    The deep, deep cynicism that marks my generation is, I think, the inevitable by-product of this distorted value system. Here’s a haunting snippet from an interview with Susan Sontag. Leading into this paragraph, she had been talking about the value of art, whose job, she feels, is “keeping alive people’s capacity for feeling, feeling in a responsible rather than a facile way.” Sound familiar? It reminds me of a certain poem: “The poets must give us / imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar / imagination of disaster.” Anyway, here’s the snippet:

    After all, if advertising works, and it does, then so does art, and in the same way. These images and stories influence us; they create legitimacy and credibility. They make things which used to be central marginal, difficult to defend. I’d go back to an earlier point I was making: That though many people I know actually are capable of acting on principle, most of them could not defend what they’re doing as acting on principle. They no longer have a language of ethical action. It’s collapsed, it’s dropped away. Whereas new forms of cynicism and cruelty, of indifference to violence, have become central in the culture. And that’s a change. I think that’s a big change.

    “They no longer have a language of ethical action.” That line has lingered with me for more than a month now. I think of it whenever I hear good people (good Christians, in particular) talking about money or taxes or politics, in general. And good Christians talk about these things a lot, often in Wall Street’s terms. Is it any wonder that a growing number of us are feeling increasingly alienated from a church that is, by most measures, indistinguishable from the culture in which it exists and from which it adopts so many of its values? As I told my parents last week, the question that plagues me is: How much of my worldview is shaped by Christ’s radical theology, and how much of it is simply a reflection and reinforcement of middle class America’s chief values — the worship of comfort, conspicuous consumption, and prosperity? Imagine for a moment what it might look like if America and its churches “stood united” behind something that matters instead of something like this.

    Along those lines, I’ve recently begun studying the Rule of the Order of Saint Benedict — this rich, 1,500 year old tradition that is so remarkably and beautifully counter to our culture. Elevating selfless community over individualism, sacrifice over comfort, contemplation over distraction, the Rule captures something of the grace of the Sermon on the Mount, reminding us that a “language of ethical action” certainly exists and must be reclaimed. My friend Karen describes it like this:

    I know what your saying about the Benedictines. My first book was The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris, which was like a breath of fresh air after the hype of evangelicalism. For once, my attraction to learning about them didn’t seem to be a reactionary swing…you know, I was charismatic and I hated it so now I’m Anglican, or vice-versa. And it wasn’t nostalgic because one recognizes the very human side in the rule – the warnings against authoritarianism and laziness and such. Of course, it is also inspired by Scripture so it was another way of breaking crusts off of verses I had been overexposed to. It was just something that seemed to land home for me and still does.

    I’m working my way through Joan Chittister’s The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages and can’t recommend it highly enough.

  • Christian Nation

    “A man cannot be a perfect Christian . . . unless he is also a communist.”
    — Thomas Merton

    “God helps those who help themselves.” When you teach freshman composition at a southern public university, you get used to hearing that expression. It’s usually prefaced with, “Like the Bible says . . .” I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, mostly because I’ve also been thinking about the words “Christian nation” and how I have no idea what they mean.

    My students’ favorite proverb, of course, isn’t in the Bible. (You won’t find it there because it’s a base degradation of Christ’s teachings and sacrifice.) The exact source of the phrase is a bit murky, but variants appear in the literatures of many cultures, including Aesop’s fables, a play by Aeschylus, and — most significantly for us Americans — a 1736 edition of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Which is just perfect.

    I’m no Colonial-era scholar, but I’ve read most of the significant founding documents — enough of them, at least, to know that, contrary to much of public opinion, America has never been a “Christian nation,” or, not the one reimagined by contemporary American evangelicals. (Googling “Christian Nation” and America turns up no shortage of opinions on this question and from a variety of, um, interesting perspectives that span the political and theological spectra.) Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Paine, like so many of their compatriots, were typical Enlightenment intellectuals. Which means that they were Deists whose faith was reserved largely for Reason rather than God. It also explains why they so deliberately eschewed dogma in their noble pursuit of democracy.

    I say all of that to say this: there’s something in this expression — “God helps those who help themselves” — that offers us, I think, a usable model for understanding the Right and the evangelical church’s devotion to it. It’s Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, and vaguely-Biblical-sounding rhetoric all rolled into one. It’s pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps jingoism stripped of all historical, political, and economic context. It’s nostalgic and proud and intellectually lazy. It is decidedly not, in any shape or form, Christian.

    Jordon Cooper recently posted a blog along somewhat similar lines. He’s done us all a favor by transcribing a passage from a book by Tony Campolo (which I’m totally stealing, by the way, so go visit Jordon’s site):

    While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I became good friends with a young Jewish student who eventually made a commitment to Christ. As I tried to mentor him and give him a direction as to how to live the Christian life, I advised him to go to a particular church that was well known for its biblically based preaching, to help him get a better handle on what the Bible is all about.

    When I met my friend several weeks later, he said to me, “You know, if you put together a committee and asked them to take the Beatitudes and create a religion that contradicted every one of them, you could come pretty close to what I’m hearing down there at that church.

    “Whereas Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the poor,’ down there they make it clear it is the rich who are blessed. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ but the people at that church have a religion that promises happiness with no crucifixions. Whereas Jesus talked about the meek being blessed, they talk as if they took assertiveness-training courses. Jesus may have talked about the merciful and peacemakers, but those people are the most enthusiastic supporters of American militarism and capital punishment I have ever met. Jesus may have lifted up those who endured persecution because they dared to embrace a radical gospel, but that church declares a gospel that espouses middle-class success and affirms a lifestyle marked by social prestige.”

    As I listened to my friend’s accusing words about the church, I realized it could just as well be aimed at me. Since that conversation, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on whether or not my lifestyle is really Christian. Soren Kierkegaard once said, “If you mean by Christian what the Sermon on the Mount says about being a Christian, then in any given time in history, there might be four or five such persons who would have the right to call themselves Christians.”

    And I say all of that to say this: Kierkegaard was right. “Christian” — if you mean by Christian what the Sermon on the Mount says — is a weighty word, and it’s serious, and, most remarkable of all, it’s full of grace. Please don’t affix that word to this country, which, for some reason, has been blessed with the delicate gift of democracy but will never deserve it. That, also, is grace.

  • Red Five Standing By

    I subscribe to the Pop Culture Association & American Culture Association listserv, which typically fills my in-box only with announcements of calls for papers and research queries. But occasionally someone’s dander will rise and an interesting discussion will follow. This week, several participants have been debating the merits of the various Cultural Studies textbooks, and from that debate has blossomed a chat about the practical impact of myth and heroes on American politics. I was only skimming the messages until I discovered this note, written by John Shelton Lawrence, co-author of The Myth of the American Superhero (2002):

    I would challenge people to think about President Bush’s donning of the flight suit today, engaging in flight, appearing with his flight helmet on deck of the Abraham Lincoln and place it in the context of the film Independence Day. Is the president being scripted to match the plot of a superheroic action president in the film? The question seems worth exploring.

    If you’re at all intrigued by this question, Dr. Lawrence has posted an interesting article on his Web server. “Post 9/11: Who Can Save the Day?” is an anecdotal but historically sensitive discussion of the “relationships between U.S. foreign policy makers and some important popular artifacts.” He takes on, in short order: Teddy Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, FDR and William Randolph Hearst, Clinton’s and Dole’s celebration of Independence Day, and Dubya’s affinity for Rambo. The last section, as you might have guessed, is the most relevant today. After describing the administration’s push for the American Services Members Protection Act, Lawrence concludes with this fun little anecdote (and by “fun” I mean horrifying):

    In February 2002 the president’s pleasure in superheroic fantasy and his eagerness to use it in conveying his own political values was revealed in an incident with Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel. To accompany a “Masters of the Universe” article on the Bush administration’s crusade against evil, Spiegel created a satirical cover depicting each national security player in the role of a zealous destroyer from American popular culture. George W. Bush, surrounded by his advisers, received a muscular Rambo body holding an automatic weapon and ammunition belts.

    Daniel Coats, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, visited Der Spiegel‘s editorial offices — not to protest the caricature or the article’s viewpoint about reckless unilateralism — but to report that “the President was flattered,” whereupon he ordered thirty-three poster-size renditions of the cover for the White House. Each policy maker on the cover reportedly wanted a copy.

    [insert loud guffaw, deep sigh, profane tirade, or sarcastic insult — whichever best suits you.]

  • The Agenda

    At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me begin by saying that, within the strange confines of my personal experience, many of the “Regular Joes” who support President Bush and his agenda seem to do so because he is pro-life and because he evidences publicly the recognizable signs of a “committed walk with God.” Within this community — this large, evangelical sub-culture — voting Republican is a “moral” act, a single gesture by which evangelicals hope to restore America to its Christian foundations (whatever that means — and, of course, it doesn’t mean anything, which is the beauty of empty, historically-blind rhetoric, but that’s another rant entirely).

    So with that out of the way — along with the obligatory acknowledgement that there are, of course, notable exceptions to my rule — I want to dig into William Grieder’s recent piece for The Nation, “Rolling Back the 20th Century,” which does a nice job, I think, of summarizing the Neoconservative agenda. The thesis of his argument, as implied by the title of the article, is that, since Reagan’s election in 1980, the Right has moved slowly but steadily toward a dismantling of New Deal America with the ultimate goal of returning us to the “lost Eden” of the McKinley Era. This is the line that really grabbed by attention:

    Many opponents and critics (myself included) have found the right’s historic vision so improbable that we tend to guffaw and misjudge the political potency of what it has put together. We might ask ourselves: If these ideas are so self-evidently cockeyed and reactionary, why do they keep advancing?

    If you’re a regular reader of Long Pauses, then you know that I’m plagued by the word “praxis” — the symbiotic relationship of theory and action. I was reminded of it again last night as I finished reading Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe’s 1970 account of a fund-raising party held at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein in honor of the Black Panthers. At one point, the trio of Bernstein, Otto Preminger, and Barbara Walters (!) assail Don Cox with pointed questions concerning the risks of violent revolution, and the leather-clad, afro-ed Panther is able only to regurgitate the Maoist jargon of “petty bourgeois oppression” and “individual freedoms.” He isn’t very convincing.

    But the Neocons are. I keep thinking of a line from Angels in America, when Joe, the mostly-closeted Mormon, Republican lawyer, asks Louis, his Jewish, progressive lover: “Do you want to be pure or do you want to be effective?” The Neocons seem to have discovered praxis in spades, though it’s praxis built upon grossly immoral theories of capital. Grieder summarizes the main points of that agenda, each of which is explained in much greater detail in the article:

    • Eliminate federal taxation of private capital, as the essential predicate for dismantling the progressive income tax.
    • Gradually phase out the pension-fund retirement system as we know it, starting with Social Security privatization but moving eventually to breaking up the other large pools of retirement savings, even huge public-employee funds, and converting them into individualized accounts.
    • Withdraw the federal government from a direct role in housing, healthcare, assistance to the poor and many other long-established social priorities, first by dispersing program management to local and state governments or private operators, then by steadily paring down the federal government’s financial commitment.
    • Restore churches, families and private education to a more influential role in the nation’s cultural life by giving them a significant new base of income — public money.
    • Strengthen the hand of business enterprise against burdensome regulatory obligations, especially environmental protection, by introducing voluntary goals and “market-driven” solutions.
    • Smash organized labor.

    Later in the piece, Grieder boils it down even further: “Dismantle the common assets of society, give people back their tax money and let everyone fend for himself.” It’s an oversimplification, obviously, but it’s also a frighteningly accurate summary of Bush’s domestic policy. I guess the question that plagues me is: How did this agenda become the guiding light for America’s evangelicals? How did a Church founded on Christ’s ministry become united behind a political ideology that elevates market forces over justice and mercy? Do we so completely lack imagination and understanding of history that we’ve concluded that this is the best we can do?

    Grieder concludes:

    I do not believe that most Americans want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country. This is a failure of left-liberal politics. Constructing an effective response requires a politics that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush’s governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more positive, inclusive, forward-looking vision.

    Perhaps it could be modified slightly and still retain some of its weight:

    I do not believe that most Christians want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country. This is a failure of the evangelical church. Constructing an effective response requires a theology that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush’s governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more graceful, just, and merciful vision.

    Just doing my part for the cause.

  • News from the Front

    Tonight, I listened to Shane Claiborne tell stories about Baghdad. He’s taller than I expected (6′ 3″, maybe) and skinnier and younger. I mean, I knew he was young, but after reading his diaries for the last few weeks I somehow expected him to carry the weight of his experience in his skin. He’s just a kid, though — a couple years younger than I am, in fact. Looks like that skater kid who annoys you at the mall. The one with the flared pants and chunky glasses who you avoid making eye contact with. Shane had the pants and the glasses, along with a light brace around his chest that restrained his left shoulder. The one he dislocated while riding at high speed through a militarized zone on the road from Baghdad to Amman. The one he dislocated while bombs fell in every direction. The one he dislocated while his friends’ skulls cracked open beside him.

    Shane is a local boy — a graduate of Maryville High School who went off to college in Philadelphia a few years ago and decided to stay. He and several friends committed to spending five years together in community, living Christ’s example in an inner-city neighborhood. After his talk tonight I told him that I was glad he was home safe, that I had prayed for him. Then I thanked him for being one of those voices that has brought me comfort in recent months, when I have felt so alienated from so much of American religion. With typical grace, he smiled and said, “That’s the struggle, isn’t it? At some point you have to stop complaining about the Church and start being the Church.” The Simple Way, they call it.

    Shane left for Baghdad a few weeks ago as part of a Christian Peacemaker Team, in cooperation with Voices in the Wilderness. He went, he told us, with two goals in mind: first, to comfort the people of Iraq, showing them the other face of America, and second, to document that experience so that it could be shared with everyone willing to listen. I was deeply discouraged to hear him confirm my worst suspicions. Whenever they fought to bring specific humanitarian crises to the attention of reporters, the international media would soon be on the scene, asking questions, conducting interviews. Shane’s one experience with the American media — a live interview on one of the morning news programs — was cut off soon after he began answering the first question: “How does it feel to be considered a traitor in your own country?” A quick sidenote: one of the crises that they experienced was the bombing of the Baghdad market. Shane visited the scene the next day, and tonight I held a small part of a civilian vehicle that was incinerated in the attack, immediately killing all of its passengers.

    He had plenty of stories to share, many of which are posted in his diaries. There’s the one about the thirteen year old girl whose birthday party he attended. She wished for “Peace” as bombs blasted the horizon, an image that I would dismiss as cheap sentimentality in a film, but not in life. There’s the one about the bombs that explode before impact, spraying uniformly sized cubes of shrapnel into homes and families — the cluster bombs that we promised we wouldn’t use this time. (Shane has photos of those cubes, scraped from the bloodied walls of apartments near his camp.) There’s the one about the well-spoken (in English, that is) Iraqi doctor who stitched Shane and his friends back together after their accident, refusing payment. He asked only that they tell the world that the Americans had bombed their smalltown hospital three days earlier.

    My favorite story was of an Iraqi Christian who Shane met during a worship service. I didn’t realize that there were so many Christians in Iraq — upwards of one million, he told us. After a service, this man and Shane were discussing the war, and the man asked, “Do Americans support this war?” “Some do, but there is growing opposition.” “And the church?” Shane said that his heart sunk when he heard that second question. “Well, most do not, but some parts of the Church do support the war.” “Not Christians,” the man said, startled. “Yes, Christians.”

    “But, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’”

    What I love about this story and about this man is that his mind could not reconcile such a gross contradiction. It was impossible for him to imagine a Christian Church that imagines disaster and that accepts Bush’s heresy of redemptive violence as so many segments of ours have. He is such a wonderful reminder of the catholicity of Christ’s church and of how powerful it is despite our best efforts to castrate it.

  • Kushner on Bush

    Tony Kushner on President Bush and military intervention in Iraq:

    It’s very hard for me to ever say that I think unilateral military action on the part of United States can be a great thing at this point. The idea of the United States armed forces going in and suppressing and controlling a population of any sort is so fraught with history. . . . The minute we start dropping bombs on anybody, everybody feels very good for five minutes. And there is a fantasy sense that we’re still the number one country on earth because we can go in there and kick this person, and we forget we’re talking about this completely decimated country that was annihilated [a few] years ago and has never rebuilt.
    — from an interview with Craig Lucas on January 20, 1993.

    Yep. 1993. He was talking about that President Bush. I’ve just begun working through Tony Kushner in Conversation, edited by Robert Vorlicky. Here’s another interesting tidbit. Turns out that the Reagan administration wasn’t all bad. Kushner describing a federal grant that helped to fund the writing of Angels in America:

    The application for it was very honest. I said I was going to write a play about gay men and Mormons and Roy Cohn, sent it in to the federal government under Reagan, and thought, this will come back immediately with no money attached. Then they gave us this huge check. . . . It was Washington money with an eagle stamped on the check. So I felt, when I was writing it, that it was taxpayers’ money, and I do think that had some impact on the play’s scope.

    I wonder if Jesse Helms — the homophobic, anti-NEA Helms of old; not the kinder, gentler, post-Bono, pro-AIDS relief Helms — ever found out.

  • Frontline

    I watched the address last night and got exactly what I expected. As an aside, I don’t understand why the President’s staff informs the media of what he will be saying hours before he says it. I guess it is just more time for the administration to disseminate its message.

    I watched a fantastic installment of Frontline last night called, The Long Road to War. The first half hour was devoted to a political biography of Saddam, the second segment dealt mostly with the ’91 Gulf War, and the final bit addressed the Clinton and Dubya years. I’m so glad I caught it because it helped fill in a lot of holes for me. It was also nice to get the story from a relatively objective source, which was then supplemented with original interviews with prominent Iraqi officials and neo-cons like William Kristol and Richard Perle, who offered a fascinating peek inside the Hawk mentality. Here’s a helpful chronology from Frontline’s Website.

    Some interesting facts (that were news to me):

    Saddam’s relationship with the CIA goes back to the early-60s, when he was an up and coming enforcer (torturer/killer) for the Bath Party. The CIA helped them overthrow the existing government, which was pro-Soviet, and Saddam slowly rose through the ranks until he deposed his mentor in 1979. To inaugurate his regime, Saddam, at a formal dinner, had several of his best friends removed from the room and executed. Video footage of the dinner (which was shown on Frontline) was also broadcast throughout Iraq to let the people know what kind of a leader they now had. An odd moment: you can see Saddam crying after he gives the orders. Even in the 1960s, by the way, Saddam had a separate library devoted to Stalin. Nice.

    One interesting segment dealt with the feud between Saddam and Bush 41. All commentators, American and Iraqi alike, agreed that each man had disastrously misjudged the other. Bush made the regrettable mistake of making it personal — calling out Saddam by name — and in the process he did nothing but elevate Saddam’s status in the Middle East. Not only was Saddam taking on the United States, but he was now actually taking on the President himself. What a hero. Saddam, for his part, assumed that Bush would never actually attack him. After being supported by America throughout the 80s during his war with Iran and in his suppression of the Kurds, Saddam guessed that Bush would never risk American lives in the Iraqi desert.

    The big revelation for me was learning about the massive mistakes that we made at the end of the Gulf War (and that were strangely well-intentioned). After beating down the Iraqi army and destroying most of Saddam’s Republican Guard, our forces planned to eliminate what remained of enemy opposition. Powell, who was on the scene and who was disturbed by what he was seeing (on Frontline they showed footage of American helicopters gunning down retreating soldiers), Powell called Schwarzkopf and suggested that they call it off. Schwarzkopf passed the recommendation onto the White House, who went along with Powell. Rather than risk more American lives and needlessly kill more Iraqis, a truce was declared and Schwarzkopf was sent alone to sign off on Iraq’s terms of surrender. Here’s where it gets interesting.

    The Iraqis asked for permission to fly their helicopters. Knowing that we had destroyed most of their roads and bridges, Schwarzkopf agreed. Then, the Iraqis asked for permission to fly their armored helicopters. Again, Schwarzkopf agreed. Why did the Iraqis need those helicopters? Both in the North (the Kurds) and in Baghdad itself (Shia Muslims), opposition forces were rising up to depose Saddam — just as Bush had hoped! What did we do about it? Well, after allowing Saddam’s troops to use their armored helicopters, we just threw up our hands and said, “We did our job. Now it’s up the Iraqi people to deal with Saddam.” Tens of thousands of resistance forces were wiped out while our military looked on from a safe distance, forbidden to intervene.

    I’m really frustrated by the frequent comparisons of Saddam to Hitler — Saddam is contained, after all — but the footage of the crushed uprising was eerily similar to what I saw in The Pianist this weekend. Young men were dragged on the ground and shot point blank in the back of the head. Women and children had no choice but to put their belongings on their back and step in line. Everyone fought for bread and water. Bush didn’t act until several weeks later, when Saddam turned his attention to the Kurds. We set up and protected relief camps that were filled with Kurdish refugees, but by then the resistance had been quashed and Saddam was firmly in power again. Several interviewees said that, had America intervened, even for only a few days, Saddam would have been ousted by his own people.

    I also enjoyed the program because it dealt explicitly with the divide in the Republican party between what they called the Neo-Reaganites and the Practicalists. The divide has created an interesting tension in Dubya’s administration. On one side are folks like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who have been pushing Bush toward war with Iraq since well before 9/11; on the other are Bush 41 and Powell, who warned the President months ago that he would never get support for war from the U.N. The Hawks versus the Diplomats. I was well aware of this divide, of course, but the show cast it in a new light. I have more sympathy for the Practical thinkers, especially for Powell, who has been dutifully fighting an honorable diplomatic battle that he has always known would never amount to more than ceremonial political maneuvering. But I have to admire (in a sick, sick way) the Machiavellian efficiency of the neo-cons, who exercise such remarkable control over affairs. That they’ve managed to do it under the flag of “Christian Providence” is just forehead-slapping.

    I have to admit that some of the administration’s attitudes toward Saddam make more sense to me now. I am so ready to see his reign brought to an end, and to think that that will happen without actual military force is, at best, idealistic, at worst, hopelessly naive. But I’m still horrified by the prospect of our looming war because I genuinely believe — and the Frontline special only reinforced this belief — that our administration honestly thinks that it will be stage one (or maybe stage two, after Afghanistan) in a military-supported, imperial quest to democratize the world. Talk about naive.

  • A Bush Win?

    Mark Levine, an assistant professor in the History Department at UC – Irvine, has written a piece for Alternet that asks a simple but important question: How will the Left respond to a “Bush Wins” scenario? In other words, what will happen to the energies and coalitions formed around the anti-war movement this year when American forces depose Hussein quickly and with relatively few casualties — few enough, at least, to avoid swaying public opinion back home? What will happen when Bush successfully establishes something resembling (superficially, at least) a democratic-like regime in post-war Iraq? Remember that the general opinion of the American populace is that we have already achieved an overwhelming victory in Afghanistan — a victory against terrorism, a victory for democracy. Problem solved. Time to move on.

    The political Left, having established its most public position in decades, could be heading toward another in a series of significant embarrassments. With war now only days away (I assume), parts of the anti-war movement seem to be — and I say this with some hesitation — relishing the prospect of disaster. Today, Antiwar.com posted a link to this article, which promises “thousands of U.S. fatalities.” Surely the Left — which, you must admit, expresses its concerns in moral terms as often as the President does — can stake out its position on stronger grounds than, “Well, when thousands of Americans die, then, then the whole world will finally see how misguided Bush really is.” Surely the Left can hope for better than a bloody “I told you so.”

    Levine writes:

    the reality is that if the war is quick and a U.S.-occupation established effectively, progressive forces need to accept the removal of Hussein as a great opportunity to build democracy and justice in Iraq, whatever the actual motives of the Bush Administration. The social and political forces unleashed by the end of decades of Hussein’s murderous rule will not easily be penned in by a US-sponsored show-democracy; but whether these forces use a reopened public sphere or turn to violence to respond to the likely betrayal depends in good measure on how adroitly the world progressive community can lay fast but deep roots in Iraq.

    Levine argues that the Left should be working overtime now “to inoculate the American people against what the Carnegie Endowment for Peace has already labeled the ‘mirage’ of democracy that will likely be planted in Iraq after a short war.” Doing so is a tricky game, though, especially when American attention spans are busily occupied by American Idol and Anna Nicole. Harkening back to the finest hours of the New Left, Levine suggests that our greatest potential might lie in student movements. But he warns that the Left’s credibility also rests on its ability to refocus “on the larger world systems which have produced toxic conflicts such as Iraq, Sudan, Colombia and the Congo. In other words, taking steps toward a more holistic approach to peace and justice.” I hope I get to see it happen.

    But, of course, the Left continues to hold out hope for peaceful resolution, and the White House waffling of the last few days has offered occasional glimpses of promise. The best initiative for peace that I’ve found was offered this week by Sojourners – Christians for Justice and Peace. After meeting with Tony Blair and Clare Short, an ecumenical delegation of church leaders worked with Sojourners to draft a 6-point “Alternative to War for Defeating Saddam Hussein.” It seems remarkably pragmatic and just to me — a welcomed relief after months of naive anti-war sloganeering. Instead of annotating the proposal, I would encourage you to read it for yourself and pass it along.

  • God Bless Norman Mailer

    My wife is convinced that I’m the only person in America who is grateful that C-Span 2: Book TV comes standard with basic cable service. (If the shoe fits . . .) On Saturday night, I flipped it on and was pleased to find Norman Mailer answering questions from a large audience, doing so with his typical blend of blustery arrogance and spot-on insight. He was there to discuss The Spooky Art, his latest collection of essays, but I tuned in too late and only caught the last few questions. Two of them caught my attention.

    First, a man near the back of the room stood up and told Mailer that he felt “cheated.” His comment was something along the lines of, “While I’ve enjoyed your latest turn toward novels, I hate that I’ll never get to read Mailer on Clinton or Mailer on Bush, because I really cherish Mailer on Kennedy and Mailer on Nixon.” The second question-asker was more to the point: “Mr. Mailer, what is your opinion of American fascism?” I was pleasantly surprised by Mailer’s response. After first pointing out that he had, in fact, written about Clinton — and after taking several well-deserved jabs at the former President for the despicable connections between his policy in Kosovo and a certain Oval Office blowjob — Mailer suggested that, instead of addressing the issue with less care and time than it obviously deserved, he would defer to a speech he had recently delivered, which would soon be published in The New York Review of Books. From the shift of tone in his voice, it was obvious that Mailer was genuinely troubled by recent events, that he had paid them considerable attention, and that he was generally satisfied with the resulting speech.

    Only in America is now available online, and it is the best piece on Bush, Iraq, religion, and America’s political troubles that I’ve read. As I’ve mentioned around here often, I’ve been a champion of Mailer’s political commentary since first reading Armies of the Night and gasping at his prescient analysis of the Cold War. Sure, he can be as subtle as a sledgehammer, but the combined weight of his experience, intelligence, and confidence strike me with a welcomed force. (As an Onion headline put it this week, “Fox News Reporter Asks The Questions Others Are Too Smart To Ask.”) Man, I’d love to see an 80-year-old Mailer hand Bill O’Reilly his ass.

    One of that remarkable generation of Jewish-American authors (along with Miller, Malamud, Salinger, Bellow, and Roth, among others), and as its most explicitly political member, Mailer is, of course, intimately familiar with the long-standing and oft-troubling relationship between America’s faiths in God and country. Bush’s triumphalism has not gone unnoticed. For Mailer, Bush’s brand of “Flag Conservatism” is a natural and deeply disturbing by-product of America’s schizophrenia.

    And, of course, we were not in shape to feel free of guilt about September 11. The manic money-grab excitement of the Nineties had never been altogether free of our pervasive American guilt. We were happy to be prosperous but we still felt guilty. We are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is a grace note. We are a Christian nation. The supposition of a great many good Christians in America is that you were not meant to be all that rich. God didn’t necessarily want it. For certain, Jesus did not. You weren’t supposed to pile up a mountain of moolah. You were obligated to spend your life in altruistic acts. That was still one half of the good Christian psyche. The other half, pure American, was, as always: beat everybody. One can offer a cruel, but conceivably accurate, remark: To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but you strain to remain dynamically competitive. Of course, Jesus and Evel Knievel don’t consort too well in one psyche. Human rage and guilt do take on their uniquely American forms.

    I love Mailer because of moments like this — blunt-force observations with remarkable consequences. Here’s another, where he takes a cliched symbol — in this case, plastic, which has been neutered of its metaphoric value at least since The Graduate — and wrestles from it more significance and poetic delight than I imagined possible:

    Marketing was a beast and a force that succeeded in taking America away from most of us. It succeeded in making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. One has only to cite fifty-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box with balconies, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways with their vistas into the void; and, beneath it all, the pall of plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant’s tactile senses, plastic, front-runner in the competition to see which new substance could make the world more disagreeable. To the degree that we have distributed this crud all over the globe, we were already wielding a species of world hegemony. We were exporting the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful American corporations. There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor— only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.

    The current tenor in D.C. seems to reflect a more general suspicion of intellectualism that is seeping across the country (much to the delight of cable news architects). Well, I’m going to say something that will sound terribly elitist to many: phrases like “that sat on the soul like jail” matter — and not just because of their content. Mailer knows precisely what effect that 64-word sentence — the one that begins “One has only to cite” — will have on his readers, just as he knows precisely how much dramatic weight will be carried by each of those seven monosyllabic words that end the paragraph. As do all good readers and writers. Despite the claims to the contrary made by Bush’s defenders, a love of and attention to words cannot be so easily divorced from a love of and attention to ideas, which is why I choke on my fist every time I hear America’s most public evangelical reduce the complex machinations of foreign policy, morality, and theology (most of all) down to good and evil. Is his world really so simple? Is his mind?

    Mailer continues (and in a manner that makes me think he’d enjoy Long Pauses):

    “Flag conservatives” like Bush paid lip service to some conservative values, but at bottom they didn’t give a damn. If they still used some of the terms, it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They loved words like “evil.” One of Bush’s worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could push to increase his power. When people have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed. Of course, as he sees it, he is doing it because he believes America is good. He certainly does, he believes this country is the only hope of the world. He also fears that the country is rapidly growing more dissolute, and the only solution may be—fell, mighty, and near-holy words—the only solution may be to strive for World Empire. . . .

    From a militant Christian point of view, America is close to rotten. The entertainment media are loose. Bare belly-buttons pop onto every TV screen, as open in their statement as wild animals’ eyes. The kids are getting to the point where they can’t read, but they sure can screw. So one perk for the White House, should America become an international military machine huge enough to conquer all adversaries, is that American sexual freedom, all that gay, feminist, lesbian, transvestite hullabaloo, will be seen as too much of a luxury and will be put back into the closet again. Commitment, patriotism, and dedication will become all-pervasive national values once more (with all the hypocrisy attendant). Once we become a twenty-first-century embodiment of the old Roman Empire, moral reform can stride right back into the picture. . . .

    More directly (even if it is not at all direct) a war with Iraq will gratify our need to avenge September 11. It does not matter that Iraq is not the culprit. Bush needs only to ignore the evidence. Which he does with all the power of a man who has never been embarrassed by himself. Saddam, for all his crimes, did not have a hand in September 11, but President Bush is a philosopher. September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.

    I feel obliged to comment on those snippets, but mostly I just want them to be read. Mailer slips so easily into flag conservative “logic” here — coloring it all with much needed irony — which makes his moments of genuine outrage all the more powerful. Mailer on post-war Iraq (as an aside, it’s good to see that he still holds impotent liberalism in such high contempt):

    Real democracy comes out of many subtle individual human battles that are fought over decades and finally over centuries, battles that succeed in building traditions. The only defenses of democracy, finally, are the traditions of democracy. When you start ignoring those values, you are playing with a noble and delicate structure. There’s nothing more beautiful than democracy. But you can’t play with it. You can’t assume we’re going to go over to show them what a great system we have. This is monstrous arrogance.

    “This is monstrous arrogance.” Consonance. I love it. I wonder if we’ll ever again have a president who values the life of the mind, one who can recognize or even define consonance. Take it home, Norman:

    The need for powerful theory can fall into many an abyss of error. I could, for example, be entirely wrong about the deeper motives of the administration. Perhaps they are not interested in Empire so much as in trying in true good faith to save the world. We can be certain Bush and his Bushites believe this. By the time they are in church each Sunday, they believe it so powerfully that tears come to their eyes. Of course, it is the actions of men and not their sentiments that make history. Our sentiments can be loaded with love within, but our actions can turn into the opposite. Perversity is always ready to consort with human nature.

  • American Triumphalism

    First, read Ashes to Alvin by Ann Lamott, whose name has come up so often in my life recently that I feel downright compelled to go get some of her books.

    Hats off to Rev. Fritz Ritsch, pastor of Bethesda Presbyterian Church, for his wonderful op-ed piece in Sunday’s Washington Post. Taking to task both President Bush — who has consistently and brazenly appropriated bad theology in an effort to forward his agenda — and those portions of the American church that have graciously accepted that agenda without criticism, Ritsch likens Bush’s self-image to that longed-for “Davidic ruler — a political leader like the Bible’s David, who will unite [the American church’s] secular vision of the nation with their spiritual aspirations. All indications are that they believe they have found their David in Bush — and that the president believes it, too.” Ritsch distinguishes between this attitude of “American triumphalism” and the alternative message that should be emanating from our churches: “grace, hope and redemption — the truth of Biblical faith.”

    For months now, as I’ve grown increasingly concerned by the administration’s evocations of Providence as a justification for war, I have often accused Bush of a type of Fundamentalism that is difficult for me to distinguish from the “Evil” that he is so determined to eradicate. Ritsch echoes these concerns, but does so more eloquently than I’ve been able to manage:

    In the aftermath of 9/11, people came to church in droves, looking for larger meaning, and then they left again, frustrated. That’s a problem churches need to address, not least because our failure to give them what they were looking for may have lent potency to presidential theology. When people were searching for meaning, the president was able to frame that meaning. In a nation of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In a secular society, a president who can confidently quote scripture is that man.

    The president confidently (dare I say “religiously”?) asserts a worldview that most Christian denominations reject outright as heresy: the myth of redemptive violence, which posits a war between good and evil, with God on the side of good and Satan on the side of evil and the battle lines pretty clearly drawn.

    War is essential in this line of thinking. For God to win, evil needs to be defined and destroyed by God’s faithful followers, thus proving their faithfulness. Christians have held this view to be heretical since at least the third century. It is the bread-and-butter theology of fundamentalists, whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian.

    In contrast, the Judeo-Christian worldview is that of redemption. Redemption starts from the assumption that all of humanity is flawed and must approach God with humility. No good person is totally good, and no evil person is irredeemable. God’s purpose is to redeem all people. Good and evil, while critical, become secondary to redemption.

    I can’t seem to get that “one-eyed man is king” line out of my head. It occurred to me again and again as I read the cover story in this week’s Newsweek, “Bush and God.” Everything about that article rings so true to me — its portrait of evangelical training (weekly Bible studies, “quiet times”) and “personal relationships” with God. There’s the sense that fluency in the lingo — “laying-on of hands,” being “called” to service, having a “walk” — is no longer an inevitable by-product of the contemplative life, but an end in and of itself. Somewhere along the line, American Christian “culture” seems to have superseded Christianity, diluting its call for humility and forgiveness and replacing them with strict codes of acceptable behavior (which, it seems to me, are decidedly white, suburban, middle class, and Protestant). It’s all so terribly frustrating and confusing.

    I so want Bush to be the Christian President that many of my friends claim him to be, but then I read articles like this, in which he makes such ridiculous comments. Asked about the 30 million marchers who protested against his policies a few weeks ago, he responded:

    “Of course, I care what they believe. And I’ve listened carefully. I’ve thought long and hard about what needs to be done,” he said. “And obviously some people in Northern California do not see there’s a true risk to the United States posed by Saddam Hussein. And we just have a difference of opinion.”

    As if “California liberals” were the only Americans upset right now. It’s difficult for me to believe that he has “listened carefully” when he has refused to even meet with leaders of his own church, who were counted among the protesters.

  • Strange Bedfellows

    After twenty-three straight days of precipitation, the sun is finally shining again on East Tennessee. It’s the type of day that demands grilled something-or-other for dinner. And beer. Not a lot of beer, mind you, but definitely some beer. Cold beer.

    Mmmmmmmm . . . cold beer . . .

    In Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer calls himself a member of the “Conservative Left,” which makes more and more sense to me as I spend more and more time arguing with friends about this unnecessary, but apparently inevitable, war. The cable news networks would like for us to believe that America’s political dialogue can be reduce to a simple dichotomy: conservative versus liberal. That sure would make things easier, wouldn’t it? Right/wrong. Black/white. Good/evil. Problems solved.

    In fact, we’re being led by a cabal of neo-conservatives in the White House (who trade in a strange language that melds religious fundamentalism with liberal interventionism), aided by a sad lot of liberal moderates in Congress (both Republicans and Democrats alike), who cower under the political pressures applied so efficiently by the administration. As a result, the only American politicians who are making any sense right now are those at the extreme ends of the spectrum, those who actuallystand for something. I can’t decide which side is making the stronger anti-war argument at the moment, but I applaud them both. John Duncan, my traditionally conservative Representative to the House, gave a great speech earlier this week that had him quoting Robert Byrd of all people.

    It is a traditional conservative position to be in favor of a strong national defense, not one that turns our soldiers into international social workers, and to believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy, rather than in globalism or internationalism. We should be friends with all nations, but we will weaken our own Nation, maybe irreversibly, unless we follow the more humble foreign policy the President advocated in his campaign.

    Finally, Mr. Speaker, it is very much against every conservative tradition to support preemptive war. Another member of the other body, the Senator from West Virginia, not a conservative but certainly one with great knowledge of and respect for history and tradition, said recently, “This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This upcoming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world.”

    If only the anti-war movement could manage to unite those two poles. That would be a fun march.

  • Beautiful

    I had planned to post a rambling personal narrative today, describing in minute detail my particular experiences in Saturday’s anti-war demonstrations. But when I sat down to it, the idea seemed a bit too self-indulgent, even by blog standards. Here’s the long and short of it: On a rain-drenched day that never climbed out of the mid-40s, an estimated 500-650 Knoxvillians lined the city’s busiest street, stretching in a line of protest across the front face of its largest shopping center. There was a handful of long-hairs and radical-looking college kids in attendance, but most — maybe as much as 95% of the crowd — looked as though they had carpooled to the event in minivans. Hardly a ragtag cabal of jobless anti-Americans, as some would characterize the peace movement. It was pretty beautiful.

    One anecdote: During the two-hour protest, only four or five passersby felt compelled to hurl profanity at us, with maybe three times that many making their voice be heard by way of creative hand gestures. At one point, though, a nicely dressed man in a luxury car came to a complete stop, rolled down his windows, pointed to the group of Muslim women standing beside me, and yelled for them to “just go home.” I was stunned and began muttering under my breath, “I can’t believe that happened. I can’t believe that just happened.” Apparently I was saying it pretty loudly, because the woman beside me — a beautiful older woman wearing a head scarf and a “Human Shield” sign — grabbed my elbow, looked up at me, and said, “It’s okay. This is our country, too.” I can’t get her face out of my head — so kind and welcoming, well-worn and somewhat resigned. That’s the memory that will stick.

    It was such a treat to go home that afternoon and end temporarily my cable news boycott. On every channel I saw footage of global dissent. As many as 30 million people gathered throughout the world’s cities, small and large, from Alaska to Antarctica to India and all points in between. Pretty cool.

    Some notes from around the globe:

    “What astonished everyone who marched on Saturday – let’s settle on a million, shall we? – was the apparently limitless variety of those with whom they shared the roads of central London. Not just a diversity of banner-bearing interest groups but of individuality, brought into focus by the single underlying feeling that gave this day its resonance.”
    — Richard Williams

    “On streets of beauty, the warm people inched along or stood and chanted and laughed against a war and for peace and their warmth made the winter temperature irrelevant.”
    — Jimmy Breslin

    “This is not an America we recognize. When we recited the pledge of allegiance in our long-ago scout meetings, it was to a different America, one with different principles. It was an America that lived by the rule of law. An America that was a land of compassion and brotherly love. An America that took seriously a promise to be a good neighbor, both across the street and around the globe. Sure, some of it was myth but we believed in the heart of the story. Others envied our good fortune to be born in America, and we nodded with recognition of that truth.”
    — Nancy Capaccio

    “The whole world is against this war. Only one person wants it,” declared South African teenager Bilqees Gamieldien as she joined a Cape Town antiwar demonstration on a weekend when it did indeed seem that the whole world was dissenting from George W. Bush’s push for war with Iraq.
    — John Nichols

    “But on Saturday, Feb. 15, I emerged from the largest demonstration I’ve ever attended in Dallas with more hope than ever before that our situation will improve. It wasn’t just that 5,000 or so people from one of the most right-wing regions of the world, the former home of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the fictional J.R. Ewing and many others who represent cold-hearted, selfish economic and political policies, had braved the wind and cold and threats and everything else to make a statement to Bush Inc. that a ‘blood for oil personal revenge world domination military boost’ war against economic sanctions – wracked Iraq was unacceptable.”
    — Jackson Thoreau

  • Duck and Cover

    I’ve heard the soundbite hundreds of times over the years, memorizing subconsciously its particular pauses and inflections. Not until the weeks following September 11, though, did FDR’s most memorable message resonate in any meaningful ways for me. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He was speaking, of course, within the context of our Great Depression, but that notion — that America must choose to never surrender its defining characteristics to irrational fear — has since been rightly applied to a host of economic, social, and political concerns.

    The peculiar dangers of “fear” — its threat to democracy, humanism, rationality, diplomacy, spirituality — have been on dramatic display in recent days. I’ve instituted a boycott of all 24-hour news channels in my home, but last night, as I burned off my frustrations at the local Y, I was deeply disheartened by what I saw on the TVs that surrounded me. Connie Chung’s silent lips mouthing the latest terror alerts. “Survival experts” providing how-tos on terrorism preparedness. Home Depot employees reporting raids on their duct tape and plastic sheeting inventories.

    I’m trying so hard to avoid surrendering to cynicism, to have sympathies for those who are genuinely afraid right now, to understand why Our Christian President (TM) has felt it necessary to whip us into such a frenzy of excitement and paranoia. As I’m prone to do, my thoughts have lately been drifting toward the 1950s and its obsessive/compulsive fixation on communism. I can practically hear Senator L. B. Johnson, his Texas drawl demanding that we respond to Sputnik before the Russkies take control of the atmosphere and unleash catastrophic weather on us (which he really did). I can hardly flip on the news without hearing Bert the Turtle reminding me to “duck and cover” at the first sight of a nuclear flash.

    The lines between fact and parody are blurring in frightening ways. Look at this bit from The Onion:

    Saddam Enrages Bush With Full Compliance
    WASHINGTON, DC—President Bush expressed frustration and anger Monday over a U.N. report stating that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is now fully complying with weapons inspections. “Enough is enough,” a determined Bush told reporters. “We are not fooled by Saddam’s devious attempts to sway world opinion by doing everything the U.N. asked him to do. We will not be intimidated into backing down and, if we have any say in the matter, neither will Saddam.” Bush added that any further Iraqi attempt to meet the demands of the U.N. or U.S. will be regarded as “an act of war.”

    And now this from yesterday’s White House press briefing with Ari Fleischer:

    And I have a document — I’ll be happy to release this to you — about the fact that Iraq has not complied, they cover up their compliance in seeming efforts to comply, such as their statements about unconditional U-2 flights, which we now know from the letter that was sent by the Iraqis, so-called conditional became — so-called unconditional became conditional as soon as the ink was dry on their letter. It was never unconditional to begin with; it always had conditions attached.

    It’s all just too much at times, which, I guess, is precisely their point. Lull us into exhausted submission. I heard a report on NPR a couple weeks ago about the effect of impending war on our economy. The general consensus among those interviewed was, “Well, if we’re going to blow up Baghdad, I wish we’d go ahead and get it over with. I’ve got stuff to buy and episodes of American Idol to watch.” I don’t use this term lightly — and I’ll probably retract this in a day or two — but it all stinks of fascism to me.

    On Saturday, I’ll be standing at the corner of Morrell Road and Kingston Pike, smack dab in front of Knoxville’s largest shopping center and busiest intersection, participating in a peace vigil. I’m of two minds about it. I’m not so naive as to think that my presence will change the minds of those drivers zooming by, conducting their Saturday morning errands. But I’m excited by the idea of taking part in a global protest, and I also like the idea of being a living representative of that significant section of Christian America that feels increasingly alienated by an administration that so frequently claims our interests.

  • Let America Be America Again

    A friend just passed along this link, which made me laugh. Turns out that Laura Bush just cancelled a planned poetry celebration after learning that one of the invited speakers had encouraged his colleagues to use the event as an opportunity to publicly denounce war on Iraq.

    “It came to the attention of the First Lady’s Office that some invited guests want to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum,” a White House statement said. “While Mrs. Bush understands the right of all Americans to express their political views, this event was designed to celebrate poetry.”

    Why do I find this amusing? Because the event was intended to celebrate the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, and Langston Hughes — a homosexual, an atheist intellectual, and a radical Old Left Communist (grossly reductionist caricatures, but you get the point). Apparently Mrs. Bush thinks that readings of Whitman, Dickenson, and Hughes at the White House should be devoid of political content.

    Hopefully they’ll work out their differences real soon, though. I’d love to hear President Bush reading Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again.” I mean, can you think of a more patriotic title for a poem?

  • The State of the Union

    Thoughts on the State of the Union.

    To lift the standards of our public schools, we achieved historic education reform — which must now be carried out in every school and in every classroom, so that every child in America can read and learn and succeed in life. To protect our country, we reorganized our government and created the Department of Homeland Security, which is mobilizing against the threats of a new era. To bring our economy out of recession, we delivered the largest tax relief in a generation. To insist on integrity in American business we passed tough reforms, and we are holding corporate criminals to account.

    I realize that Bush is fiercely pro-life and that he has an inspirational Christian testimony, so I understand why he has garnered blind support from certain portions of the Right. What I don’t get is his claims of conservatism. When I think conservative, I think fiscal responsibility, small government, states’ rights, and isolationism. The Bush administration is none of the above. After deriding Gore as a “nation-builder” during the 2000 debates and promising to never use our military for such purposes, Bush has ushered in a new age of American imperialism, even winning from Congress the right to launch unilateral pre-emptive strikes on sovereign nations.

    Bush’s “education reforms” have likewise helped to grow the Federal government to its largest size ever and have mandated unprecedented Federal control over local school systems. His Department of Homeland Security now exercises the authority to monitor our private lives with near complete abandon. And his mismanagement of the economy has cost us billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. (Before you claim that he inherited a bloated economy from Clinton, which is partly true, explain to me why Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and most of Bush’s other chief economic advisors were ushered out in the closing weeks of 2002.) If we can’t count on a Republican President for fiscal conservatism, what’s the point?

    A friend and I were discussing all of this last night, trying, as objectively as possible, to understand what is so conservative about Bush’s brand of “compassionate conservatism.” (Don’t get me started on the “compassionate” part.) This morning he sent me this link, writing, “Someone’s reading your mind.”

    To boost investor confidence, and to help the nearly 10 million senior who receive dividend income, I ask you to end the unfair double taxation of dividends.

    New rule: No one is allowed to play the “senior” card unless they’re discussing, well, seniors. To spin the dividend cut as a compassionate move in the interest of seniors is just dishonest. I can only imagine what kind of lightbulbs went off when someone coined the phrase “double taxation.” Mark my words, we’ll be hearing a lot more of that one in the coming weeks.

    Join me in this important innovation to make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of energy.

    Environment-friendly Bush? I wonder if you can buy that in a two-pack with the “Pro-Affirmative-Action Lott” doll?

    I urge you to pass both my faith-based initiative and the Citizen Service Act, to encourage acts of compassion that can transform America, one heart and one soul at a time.

    See, now I actually like this idea in theory, but there is no way it will have legs if it ever squeaks through Congress. The other day, I flipped on an episode of “Random People Arguing” on CNNMSNBCFOX and caught a remarkable exchange between Jerry Falwell and Strawman Liberal Methodist Minister. SLMM did his very best to pin Falwell down with the following question: “Do you support the government’s use of your tax money for the funding of Muslim charities?” Falwell absolutely refused to answer the question, doing his best to maintain that tattooed grin. But SLMM continued to press until the two men regressed to adolescence right before my eyes. Honestly, Falwell threatened him. It was surreal. Dada, even.

    And that’s exactly what we’re going to get in Congress when politicians begin trying to divvy up Federal monies for distribution to “faith-based” initiatives. Again, I can’t imagine why any conservative would support this.

    Too many Americans in search of [drug] treatment cannot get it. So tonight I propose a new $600-million program to help an additional 300,000 Americans receive treatment over the next three years.

    Can you imagine if Clinton had tried this? Lott, Robertson, and Buchanan would have called him a Socialist.

    I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.

    Well I’ll be damned. You know who’s responsible for this, don’t you? Bono, and God bless him for it. If Bush gets half of that amount out of Congress, I’ll be the first person to thank him. I can only imagine what kinds of “reproduction-related” measures will be attached to this one.

    Whatever the duration of this struggle, and whatever the difficulties, we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men — free people will set the course of history.

    This one is probably too obvious to even be worth mentioning, but with “we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men,” Bush has secured his place in the Meaningless Double-Speak Hall of Fame.

    In each case, the ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism, and communism were defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength of great alliances, and by the might of the United States of America.

    Note to self: use this line in the conclusion of your dissertation. I couldn’t possibly imagine what “militarism” means in this context, but if this isn’t proof that the Cold War is alive and well, nothing is. How much do you want to bet that an earlier draft of this speech used “fascism” instead of “Hitlerism”? I guarantee it. Probably something like this:

    Bush: “What’s fascism again?”
    Rove: “Yeah, good point. Let’s change that to, uh, How ’bout Hitlerism?”
    Speechwriter: “Hmmm, I don’t think that’s a word.”
    silent stares from Bush and Rove
    Speechwriter: “Hitlerism works for me.”

    Tonight I have a message for the men and women who will keep the peace, members of the American Armed Forces. . . .

    If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means — sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military — and we will prevail.

    Note: I’m praying that we will somehow avoid this war because I don’t feel it is theologically just (despite Bush’s deliberate efforts to work that word into his rhetoric). Because I don’t think this war is justified, I feel that any casualties, any casualties, would be tragic and senseless wastes of lives that were created by God for more meaningful purposes. So please don’t take this as knee-jerk anti-Americanism, a phrase that, in recent weeks, has been thrown around much too casually and ignorantly by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk:

    This and this is how our forces will “keep the peace.”

    Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity. We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know — we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history. May He guide us now. And may God continue to bless the United States of America.

    This will be my most carefully measured comment. The histories of nations that have exercised imperial force under the guise of Providence should be telling to all but the most blindly ill-informed and arrogant.

  • Nixon on Art

    It’s not every day that I link to the Weekly Standard, but this is just too surreal to pass up. In “Still the One,” Andrew Ferguson goes digging through the Nixon tapes and finds gold. Old Dick will always be a wonderful mystery to me. (That last sentence might get me some Google traffic.) I can’t imagine that I could possibly offer comments that would do this stuff justice. Kind of speaks for itself, eh?

    The next meeting that morning concerned the arts.

    Nixon’s presidency was the most generous ever enjoyed by the arts establishment in the United States. Representing that establishment in the administration were Nixon’s old law partner Leonard Garment and, preeminently, Nancy Hanks, a former director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and thus, ex officio, a life member of the Eastern Establishment.

    On the tape, Nixon says he wants to talk about the film industry.

    “Now, Nancy, it turns out, 52 percent of the movies we see here in the United States were made abroad. What I want to do is find a way to keep these damn foreign movies out. Oh, I know they’re supposed to be so damn great and so forth. To tell you the truth, I don’t see many movies. Saw ‘Love Story.’ ‘Patton.’ But my point is, I will not have America slip to number two in the world when it comes to movies.”

    Mrs. Hanks protests that the popularity of foreign movies is owing to their superior quality.

    “Well, then, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to take it to the movie industry. You tell ’em, You’ve got to start producing good movies. Say: No more of this weird stuff! Shape up!

    “The family movie is coming back, you know. People don’t like arty. They don’t like offbeat.

    “But the film industry, they’re trying to reflect the intelligentsia”–the word drips with venom–“and that is their big mistake. Following the intelligentsia is where they always go wrong. Look at these film schools today. All they do is the weird stuff. They produce weird movies. They produce weird people.”

    But Hanks and Garment have come to talk not about the movies but about the government’s grandest current project for the arts, the construction of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Museum on the National Mall.

    “Is this going to be some of that–that modern art?” Nixon asks suspiciously.

    “It is, Mr. President,” Mrs. Hanks replies, in her Rockefeller voice. “It’s one of the finest collections of modern sculpture in the world.” In the wuld.

    quot;Oh yeah?” Silence. Then: “Don’t let it be one of those horrible modern buildings, all right? ‘Cause if it is, we’re not going to do it.”

    Garment and Hanks try to explain that the plans have already been approved.

    Nixon’s voice deepens. “I will not have the Mall desecrated with one of those horrible goddamn modern atrocities like they have in New York with that, what is it, that Whitney thing. Jesus H. Christ. If it looks like that, it–will–not–happen.”

    Silence.

    “And I don’t want ‘controversial,’ either. All right? Now this list for the board or whatever. Am I stuck with these names?”

    Garment assures him the list for the museum’s board of directors can still be changed.

    “Good. I’m taking all the Easterners off of here. Got that? Every single one. And this name–what’s–some Harvard name. Know him. Part of the Eastern Establishment. Rich guy, but he’ll never lift a finger to help us. Well, the hell with him. Am I right?”

    Nixon mentions names of California donors he would like placed on the Hirshhorn board.

    “Just put ’em on the list,” he says. “I mean, why not? Think they’ll make the thing a disaster? They can’t make it a disaster because it’s a disaster already!”

    “No, no, Mr. President,” Mrs. Hanks scolds. “It will not be a disaster!”

    “Oh, come on, Nancy,” Nixon says quietly. “I’ve seen the plans.”

    Another silence.

    “Well,” he says at last, “I wash my hands of the damn thing. Just make sure I don’t have to see it when I look out this window.”

    And there it is: an entire administration in miniature, the capitulation of the tough-talking Republican. The damn building got built, of course, and the Hirshhorn is indeed an atrocity, as Nixon knew it would be, rising up on the Mall without windows or warmth, poured from dun-colored concrete in the shape of a giant automotive air filter.

    Why did they hate him so? “They” did get their building, after all, and so much else from him, too. A few hours in the tape room at Archives II, though, makes the answer plain: They hated him because he hated them. Deep as it was, the hatred wasn’t about politics. It cut much closer to the vitals–into culture, disposition, class, I’m not sure what to call it. One of Nixon’s legacies indeed is to demonstrate the puniness of politics, its relative insignificance in the larger scheme of what moves men to do what they do. His enemies knew he wasn’t one of them, and though he may have tried to buy their trust with every kind of political concession, Nixon knew it too. He hated them for it and vice versa. And the hatred, both his and theirs, is what did him in at the end, as he also knew.

    Sorry that was so long, but I want to capture it all in case the Standard pulls it down.

  • High-Stakes Testing

    Eight years ago next week I began my student teaching internship at Niceville High School in Niceville, Florida. Niceville won a Blue Ribbon award that year, designating it one of the state’s finest. (I’m not making that up.) Midway through the semester, I was surprised when I learned that my lesson plans would have to be discarded for the next few weeks because it was time to begin preparing the 9th graders for their next round of standardized exams. And by “preparing,” of course, I mean giving practice tests and working systematically (and in mind-numbing detail) through past reading samples — or, in a nutshell, equipping my students not with knowledge or repeatable skills but with the tricks of test-taking. That experience is one of the main reasons my career as a secondary school teacher ended before it began.

    It’s also one of the main reasons  I was bothered by Bush’s education platform in the 2000 campaign. After accusing Gore of instigating an “education recession” and of using “fuzzy math,” Bush proceeded to construct America’s educational system in grossly capitalist rhetoric. “All I’m saying,” he grunted in the first debate, “is, if you spend money, show us results, and test every year.” Bush then turned to his “Texas miracle” as evidence of his rightitudedness, “proving” that more standardized testing would narrow the growing gaps in white/minority results. The “Miracle” had its doubters even then, but a new study, recently released by researchers at Arizona State University, seems to have proven what every good classroom teacher has been preaching for years:

    “Teachers are focusing so intently on the high-stakes tests that they are neglecting other things that are ultimately more important,” said Audrey Amrein, the study’s lead author, who says she supported high-stakes tests before conducting her research.

    “In theory, high-stakes tests should work, because they advance the notions of high standards and accountability,” Amrein said. “But students are being trained so narrowly because of it, they are having a hard time branching out and understanding general problem solving.”

    Perhaps most controversial, the study found that once states tie standardized tests to graduation, fewer students tend to get diplomas. After adopting such exams as a requirement for graduation, twice as many states did worse than the national graduation rate as did better. Not surprisingly, then, dropout rates worsened in 62 percent of the states, relative to the national average, while enrollment of young people in programs offering high school equivalency diplomas climbed.

    The reason for this is not solely that struggling students grow frustrated and ultimately quit, the study concluded. In an echo of the findings of other researchers, the authors asserted that administrators, held responsible for raising test scores at a school or in an entire district, occasionally pressure failing students to drop out.

    Here is the full report, and here is Arizona State’s press release.

  • Hauerwas, Bush, and Alexander

    After listening to me ramble incessantly, a professor recently pointed me toward Stanley Hauerwas. I now see why. Hauerwas is a professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, where he has earned a reputation as an outspoken critic of the complacency that has come to characterize much of the American Christian church. I’m on my way to the library to grab a book or two, and at the top of my list is A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity, which sounds like it may have been written explicitly for me. Should be interesting.

    Hauerwas is a ridiculously prolific writer, but here’s an interesting and timely introduction. When asked what advice he would give to President Bush, he responds:

    It’s a tricky question because, if he had asked me, he wouldn’t have been President! (Laugh) So, I’d say, “You need to tell the American people the truth.” This is still about oil. We intervened in Kuwait to protect Saudi oil. You can say, “Well, gee, don’t you think you ought to oppose a tyrant?” Look, the United States is very selective about which tyrant it’s going to pursue. When Indonesia invaded East Timor twenty-five years ago, we didn’t do anything. Why? East Timor didn’t have any strategic interest to us. Bin Laden is clearly motivated by the fact that the United States is in Saudi Arabia. We’re in Saudi Arabia to protect the oil. We need to say that the reason America has such a problem is because we’re such a rich country, and we depend on the resources of the rest of the world. Therefore, maybe the best thing we could do… I mean, rather than saying, “Well, what can you do to support a reaction against bin Laden” — rather than saying “Go out and shop” — maybe he should have said we should put a three dollar tax on gas. (Laugh) That way we won’t use so much of it. That would have been a sacrifice. Yeah, I’d say, “Tell the American people the truth about these matters.” I’m not sure that people around the Bush Administration even know the truth because they need to tell themselves lies about what they’re doing — and they believe the lies — in order to carry forward.

    And later:

    I distrust words that try to explain. I think that we’re desperate to find some explanation when there just isn’t an explanation. I mean, George Bush saying, “Why did they do this? Because they hate us because we are free.” That’s not what they’re saying. They say that they’re enacting jihad against the infidel who they think are deeply corrupt. I think even to accept that — I mean, it doesn’t explain what was there. Of course it’s helpful to get certain kinds of background to put it into perspective, but the idea that somehow or other we’re going to understand this is a little bit like people wanting to have a conspiracy theory around Kennedy’s assassination. We so hunger for some reason that this might embody and make it intelligible to us. But genuine evil is not intelligible. Bin Laden understands some of this. He wants the action to be senseless. And it is senseless because he wants it to call into question America’s sense of non-vulnerability. And he certainly did.

    And along those same lines . . . In January, Laura Bush stood with Hamid Karzai and said:

    We will not forget that 70 percent of Afghans are malnourished.

    We will not forget that one of every four children dies by the age of five because of lack of health care.

    We will not forget that women were denied access to medical care — denied the right to work, and denied the right to leave their homes alone.

    Her speech echoed the sentiments voiced by her husband repeatedly since the days immediately following the start of the U.S. bombing campaign:

    In our anger, we must never forget that we are a compassionate people. While we firmly and strongly oppose the Taleban regime, we are friends with the Afghan people.

    But, of course, the rhetoric of compassion is quite different from the practical problems of “nation building.” Like many opposed to war in Iraq, one of my main concerns has always been “the day after.” What do we do after we have destabilized a dictatorship? What do we do after, in Hauerwas’s words, “we bomb a Stone Age country back into the Stone Age”? If Afghanistan is any indication, then not much:

    “Rather than getting out there in a leadership role and saying, ‘We need a Marshall Plan,’ and fighting for it, they’ve taken a minimalist approach,” complained Joel Charny, a vice president of Refugees International.

    He’s right. The reconstruction funds the Bush White House requested for Afghanistan have been flowing slowly to the country. Moreover, several months ago the White House opposed an effort in Congress to add $200 million to the total. And the total number of US troops committed to rebuilding — after the doubling — will be 340. That’s not a lot.

    Word of the day: nomothetic adj.

    • Of or relating to lawmaking; legislative.
    • Based on a system of law.
    • Of or relating to the philosophy of law.
    • Of or relating to the study or discovery of general scientific laws.

    Maybe some context would help. From Jeffrey Alexander’s Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason:

    In the postwar period, general sociological theory has been associated with the search for nomothetic knowledge. It has been viewed, by its proponents and critics alike, as the crowning glory of the positive science of society. (90)