Despite the political space between us, I am a great admirer of Yaacov Lozowick. I link to him with praise and pleasure, and I offered a particular shout out here. He has written kindly of me. But yesterday he erred. He repeated the conservative mini-meme, in a post titled Novice or Underqualified, that President Obama is “in over his head.” There are those on the right who question whether Obama is really all that intelligent.
You could laugh if it didn’t make you want to blow up the box. This is the kind of absurdity, the kind of failure to think outside the narrow bounds of one’s own predisposition, that makes productive political debate so hard and rare. Can one support Obama while acknowledging he can, himself, err? The question and answer really shouldn’t be necessary. Can one perceive him in potential error and not believe him a fool? You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?
Yaacov is Israeli, and like many – apparently most – Israelis, and other supporters of Israel, including me, he thought from the start that Obama made a significant mistake in the way he framed his original position on a settlement freeze. He didn’t acknowledge well-known verbal agreements between the Bush administration and Israel, and he demanded more, as a starting point, than the Palestinians had themselves been asking. Hope of progress stalled at the start. Combine that with otherwise verbal efforts to project a more balanced, mediating image to the Palestinians, and Israelis, thinking through the prism of their own interests, form a quick, I believe rash, judgment.
About other aspects of Obama’s foreign policy, I wrote a little yesterday, and I will write more next week.
However, to note that among those who wonder about Obama’s experience are those who praised, supported, or even tolerated Sarah Palin as a Vice Presidential nominee is to return one to the acid trips of yore. Despite his brief gubernatorial years, George W. Bush was himself a complete novice on the world stage. Let us not forget the names he neither knew nor could pronounce, or that he advocated in debate with Al Gore a less arrogant foreign policy. It is only to describe the facts of known contradiction to say that George W. Bush, prior to taking office, had no coherently developed set of foreign policy convictions – did not know what he believed.
Obama has no greater, no less experience than Bush had. Originally, I reluctantly supported Hilary Clinton for just that reason. But a Clinton will always disappoint (see reluctantly). For me it was the moment when Steve Croft asked Clinton if she knew that Obama isn’t a Muslim and she said, no, he isn’t – and then, her lying eyes shifting in their sockets, added, “Not as far as I know.”
And experience is no guarantee, we should know. The dangers Obama faces are enormous, so it is possible, though not likely that any error he makes will be fraught with the danger of the only important decision the very experienced John McCain made.
Regarding intelligence, one might wish to rest one’s case with two obvious words: Palin and Bush. But that would be facile. (It is fun sometimes.) One can acknowledge the possibility of a person’s being right – making some good policy decisions – and his still not being, intellectually, you know, all that impressive. We know the right believes Bush pursued some good policies. We know that’s the position. Okay. But do we have to pretend he was, like, really, really smart? And Palin, we know she’s sorta the thrilling anti-intellectual-elite anti-matter, but, there, you see, really by definition….
In Obama’s case, well, you know – in contrast to Palin or Bush – normally a person who graduates magna cum laude from Harvard, serves as president of the Harvard Law Review, and teaches law at the University of Chicago Law School gets – normally a person with those creds get his automatic props, you know what I mean? Credit is given for significant credentialed achievement. That’s why we have CVs. I’ll let those who dismiss the CV this time around account for it themselves. But, hey, let’s not be superficial here. We’ve all met boobs with badges. So where the intellectual rubber meets its recognition road is in the encounter – with the mind itself. Smart people recognize other smart people, even people not as smart often recognize a superior mind.
Where I’m standing, I’m lookin’ at pretty smart. If you don’t see it, I …really…don’t … know… what… to …say.
And that’s how the conversation ends. You got different ideas, let’s debate. Let’s argue – in the real sense – and argue and argue and argue. You start talkin’ shit, and then people talk shit back, and then we’re all in a world of shit.
Shit.
AJA
This entry was posted on
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at
7:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under The Political Animal.
To a very large number of college students, the word “opinion” refers to an expression of approval or disapproval. It is the “yea”-“boo” theory of thinking and argument. Like. Dislike. Approve. Disapprove. Disapprove strongly – “O no you dit-ten!”
This dangerous misapprehension is oddly counterbalanced by the equally deleterious belief that the modifier “just” is somehow, by prime syntactical directive, automatically prefixed to the word opinion, with the variable intervention of “my” or “your” or “her” and the like. This is not a congenital disorder. It is in the culture. It earns, in fact, a lot of money: the inability to distinguish a “just” form of opinion from a well-reasoned opinion or an opinion well-supported by evidence. Or even, for that matter, a fact. I read a lot of disagreements with what the student did not understand to begin, even with what the author did not actually believe. Consequently, I spend a great deal of effort attempting to clarify that in contrast to opining, understanding is thinking too, and that to state what something means, in the absence of praise or condemnation, is also an opinion.
As dear departed Professor Hutcheon – blustery, pipe-reeking, jaw-jutting Willard Hutcheon – once bellowed at the young philosopher naïf that was I, when I made reference, hypothetically, to accepting an element of George Berkeley’s argument regarding immaterialism: “Understand! Not accept. The head is not a soup pot.”
Understanding, determining meaning requires reading the evidence. We all have predispositions in our reading. Some predispositions are more pronounced than others. So regarding Afghanistan – a very difficult problem in a world of difficult problems – we have many opinions. Often these opinions are not way stations along the ruminative journey: they are the destination, the conclusion of the argument. And all the evidence still to be encountered or considered is read with that destination in mind. The opiner is going where he is going; the only question is how this new information will help him get there.
Regarding Afghanistan, there are well-established destinations. For instance, one kind of traveler will note that it has thwarted Alexander the Great and Brezhnev the Small, the government is corrupt, there is no there there, the Taliban are local extremists, and Al-Qaeda can always move to Somalia, let’s say. Shall we try again to build that nation? In the alternate Afghanistan, it is the central front in the war against Al-Qaeda, Pakistan is a related, not separate danger, if we leave, Al-Qaeda will wage war from it again, and we must not lack the resolve to fight a long – even very long – war against a patient, mortal enemy.
All of these points are well made. I accept the force of all of them. And that gets us exactly nowhere so far. It is worth noting, though, that many of those already ticketed to the first Afghanistan give no real credit to the character of the other. Many of those traveling from the other end of the station are similarly disdainful. And then there are those – our Vice President, we hear, is one of them – who propose a more nimble, distant, less troop heavy, and technological war on Al-Qaeda (ignoring the Taliban as never having been the real enemy). We know that such an approach during the Clinton years was a pronounced failure, helping lead to 9/11, but it is also true that we have traveled continents from that state of technological warfare. The new and current commander of the American force in Afghanistan, General McChrystal, is famous for his high tech drone devastation of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. But such success, we know, was in the context of a heavy troop presence in that country.
People with opinions about a very difficult problem like Afghanistan, particularly those whose opinion has already taken them where they are determined to go, do not always have commensurate knowledge of the situation. Oh, they know plenty. They are well-versed in international affairs, and catch up quickly on hot spots new to them. But, really, if that were enough, why bother with a national security staff, the state and defense departments, the CIA, the NSA – the whole universe of spook and satellite. Let’s designate Pundit One President for the month. He well knows what to do without the benefit of.
We’re all – those of us who involve ourselves – going to need to, certainly try to, make a determination for ourselves. One hopes there will be a lot of listening and reading going on – a lot of reading of the evidence. And part of the evidence is who is already there, wherever there is, and how they are reading the evidence themselves to suit themselves. On the left, there are those who reflexively oppose any use of American military force, can never seem morally to justify it (even after 9/11 – see my swipe at the emblematic Susan Sarandon here) and who always, just by the way, also manage to judge every such prospect as doomed to failure, thereby framing their argument in practical terms and avoiding any acknowledgment that that train, for them, left before you even got there.
Counterparts on the right travel according to a more, not really muscular, but testicular itinerary. To see the prospect of conflict, even to be already engaged in one, and not be devoted to victory by blowin’ up that muthafucka’s ass with a mortar is to emasculate oneself politically and morally. Hell, even Sarah Palin has the balls to not-blink them to death. Liberal pussies.
It is inarguable that since Vietnam whole swaths of the left have been unable to countenance aggressive U.S. protection of its interests in the world – by which I mean the use of force. It has, for them, been a shameful fact even that the U.S. has self-interests in the world. This led to a perception of the Democratic Party that lost it the faith of the American people to protect them.
It is also true that many on the right reason about U.S. interests in the world like a cross between the arrogant imperialist and your neighborhood macho asshole. And whatever grudging credit the right was given by some on the left in matters of self-defense was lost in Iraq. That is the price, indeed, of getting it wrong, and of deception.
When it is clear what train those people are on, all of them. I let the doors close. I have a destination, too. The United States needs to be unswervingly committed to defeating Al-Qaeda, in all the ways it may need to be done, including militarily – and I mean aggressively so – but in other ways as well. If it can be done by increasing the military force there – and that could be done so much more easily if the NATO nations stopped living in a twenty-first century version of the 1930s – then I will support that direction. I have until now, but the recent Afghan elections have made me pause. It is not wrong to pause. It is not wrong to consider and reconsider. President Obama does that. It is something I like about him. If I can be persuaded that a more remote war against Al-Qaeda can succeed, I will support that option. I don’t believe we should nation-build in Afghanistan. There is a long list of nations we could try to build. That is not why we went there. It is not why we should stay. If building Afghanistan is possible, and it is necessary to defeat Al-Qaeda, then I am for it. That is very self-interested. Every morning I wake up, and the first thing I want, whether I think it or not, is to live. That is self-interested too. I’m okay with that. Whatever good I can do follows from it.
So I’m going to be reading the evidence. I’m going to be reading and I’m going to be listening. I’m going to be trying to understand the current situation and its prospects as well as I can before I make a decision – before I say yea or boo. I made a decision once before. After eight years, I’m reassessing. I don’t trust people who won’t reassess their thinking. I may have missed a couple of trains, trains that left a long time ago, but that’s all right. I’ll catch another.
AJA
This entry was posted on
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at
12:45 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under The Political Animal.
There, I said it. Conservatives have sometimes been annoyed by my use of that term – dominating mentality of conquest. It is not the kind of language I like to use. It bespeaks a manner of, in this case postcolonial, academic jargon I disdain. Heidegger said that “Language is the house of being.” Jargon closes a door. Heidegger, like Hegel before him, and Wittgenstein in his aphorisms understood the revelatory nature, instead, of poetry: “The purest essence [of language] unfolds itself in poetry,” he said. “Poetry is the original language of a people.”
Still, some aspects of reality are ugly. Ugly reality, ugly words, unless one wants to make an aesthetic object of the ugly, like fetishizing power, in domination. Politically, let’s not.
The other day I wrote again about the suit to compel the Washington Redskins football team to change its name. A point I’ve made in the past on this subject is that the general American culture cannot honor Native America in mascotry. The defeated do not make mascots of their conquerors. The making of the mascot by the conqueror, even in expressed, so-called honor, is by its very nature, an act of dominance. So, too, is the appropriation of another’s cultural heritage. The inability to recognize this is a manifestation of the dominating mentality of conquest.
The other day Indian Country Today reported that “[t]he Onondaga Nation buried the remains of 180 ancestors and more than 1,000 funerary objects in a private ceremony in early September after repatriation by the New York State Museum.” The repatriation had been ordered by a 5-1 vote of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Review Committee. That NAGPRA was passed by the Congress in 1990 is a virtue not to be ignored, though there are, of course, those who dismiss the significance of centuries old bones just as others do the symbolism of smiling Chief faces at Progressive Field in Cleveland.
The review committee had been required to review and vote on the matter because the New York State Museum had resisted turning over the remains. Museums frequently do this. In this case the New York Sate Museum claimed that the remains predated the development of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, of which the Onondaga were the central component, and thus were culturally unaffiliated with the Onondaga.
The claim by museums and other institutions that the ancestors’ remains and other sacred objects are “unaffiliated” is almost universal, despite the fact that the remains are found in territories where known indigenous peoples have lived for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
“There seems to be an acceptable norm from a lot of major museums, including the New York State Museum, by stating that they have theories that say, for instance, the Onondaga Nation didn’t exist until contact. I guess when the Europeans named the Onondaga Nation ‘the Onondaga Nation,’ is when they became the Onondaga Nation,” O’Loughlin [Shannon Keller O’Loughlin, an attorney for the Onondagas] said.
Specifically, the museum claimed that
the Haudenosaunee Confederacy came into existence sometime between 1450 and 1500 even though the nations themselves have evidence that it was formed between 1,000 and 1,100 years ago.
The NAGPRA review committee did not credit this argument, but let’s, for the sake of argument, credit it now, as a meaningful distinction, legally and morally. And let’s turn for a moment to one of the more well-known and longer standing of such disputes – that between the government of Peru and Yale University over the artifacts and treasures excavated by Hiram Bingham from Machu Picchu in 1912 and 1914-15, under the aegis of Yale and the National Geographic Society, and with the agreement of the Peruvian government.
A signed agreement between then Peruvian President Augusto Leguía and the expedition reserved to the Peruvian Government “the right to exact from Yale University and the National Geographic Society of the United States of America the return of the unique specimens and duplicates.” Over the years, Yale has made small shows of honoring this agreement, but has mostly made varied arguments concerning its superior capacity to curate this world treasure. It was only in recent years, however – when former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, Peru’s first president of indigenous descent, made the dispute an issue of particular personal interest – that Yale revealed what it considers its legal trump card.
Much of the disputed collection of artifacts is from the 1912 expedition. After that expedition, the Peruvian legislature changed the existing applicable laws. But it seems that applicable in 1912 was the 1852 Civil Code that permitted those who excavated such artifacts to keep them. In making this argument, Yale seems not to feel compelled to honor what others (among them the National Geographic Society) believe should be the superseding Presidential agreement.
Hiram Bingham
Now the Machu Picchu dispute has two levels of cultural appropriation to it. One exists within the context of the North-South politics of the Western Hemisphere. The other is at the level of the relationship between the dominant European-descended culture of Peru and its indigenous peoples, in the case of Machu Picchu, the Quechua (Inca) people. I am not aware (which does not mean it is not so) of any current disputation between the Peruvian government and the Quechua regarding Machu Picchu. Our own guide when we visited was a half-blooded, fully-identified Quechua man who was quite proud of the current representation of Machu Picchu to the world.
The active, public dispute, then, is between one of the most famous universities in the world, in the most powerful nation in the world, and the intellectual culture they both represent, and a nation that in comparison long suffered in its economic and political development. Nonetheless, acknowledged by both sides, even in the disputed issue of applicable law, is the principle of the Peruvian people’s sovereign claim to the cultural and artifactual heritage of their land – even though the existing predominant ethnic group and culture of Peru is not that of the people who built Machu Picchu.
On the one hand, that circumstance duplicates in form the relationship in which the Onondaga (and other North American Tribes) stand in relationship to the United States (and Canada). On the other hand, it also clarifies that on an international level, as a matter of sovereign control and authority – and in contrast to the position so often taken toward Native Americans in the U.S. – clear, direct cultural/ethnic “affiliation” between artifacts and remains and the people claiming ownership is not a determining factor.
Sovereignty is.
Why does the Onondaga Nation not now have sovereignty over the land on which the remains were discovered, and thus, when the remains were discovered, did the Onondaga not have control of them?
Because the Onondaga, as were all Native Americans, were overwhelmed and conquered by foreign peoples.
Why does the brute force of conquest continue to prevail in matters of sovereignty, physical control, and determinations of ethnic-cultural affiliation?
In Peru – I do not know – it may simply be brute fact.
In the United States, it is the 1823 Supreme Court decision Johnson v. M’Intosh, which justified continued European-American sovereignty over the land through right of “discovery,” and in so doing declared Native peoples to be
an inferior race of people, without the privileges of citizens, and under the perpetual protection and pupilage of the government.
And the people of the United States, including its archaeologists and museum curators and athletic team owners, do not know this, or care if they do, and live as if they have an inherent, rather than a circumstantial, right to be here, without any consideration to the exceptional and invisible nature of Native American life.
That is the dominating mentality of conquest.
AJA
This entry was posted on
Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at
11:55 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under Indian Country.
Indian Country Todayreports that the litigants in the suit to force The Washington Redskins football team to change its name have decided to take the case to the United States Supreme Court. They filed a writ of certiorari petition with the court on Sept. 14.
Readers of this blog will recall that I first wrote about the case, and the general issue of Indian-named teams and mascots in The Honor of the Mascot back in June. A somewhat different version appeared as a guest post at The League of Ordinary Gentleman.
The contention of the plaintiff’s – clear, I think, to all but those resistant to recognizing a harsh truth about American history – is that the Redskins name is racist, which trademark law prohibits. Plaintiffs’ loss at the appellate level was based on statute of limitations grounds for filing the suit. I responded briefly to those grounds in the comments to the League version of the post, a response that was not legal in nature, but instead historical and moral. Of course, with the entire legal basis for dealing with Native Americans originating in the Supreme Court’s explicitly racist 1823 Johnson v. M’Intosh decision (an effective historical equivalent for Native Americans to the Dred Scott decision for African-Americans) – still unrevised by the Court and informally, supportively cited in conversation by Justice Antonin Scalia as recently as this past April (see the League post) – fundamental arguments against U.S. policy vis-à-vis Native Americans should not be legal, but historical and moral.
Suzan Shown Harjo
Most well known among the plaintiffs is Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee Indian who heads Washington D.C.’s Morning Star Institute, an organization dedicated to “Native People’s traditional and cultural advocacy, arts promotion and research.” Included among these areas of the institute’s focus is protecting, preserving and restoring Native sacred grounds and spaces.
In that June post, I referenced an ESPN online editorial reflecting a typical lack of sympathy among many sports fans for the plaintiffs’ position and on the entire issue of team names and mascots. Interestingly, on another occasion, a supportive ESPN hosted Harjo in an online chat session about the subject with fans. The fan comments, as they can be, were revelatory if not necessarily instructive, and Harjo acquitted herself with remarkable grace and aplomb. Among the encouragingly supportive comments and the rankly boobish, there were some highlights. A couple of chatters offered this common response:
Harry: Don’t you think that this is a pretty petty thing to be nagging about? Aren’t there bigger issues out there in the world today than name-calling?
Suzan Shown Harjo: Most of the people who ask that question don’t do anything about our big issues. The Native American parties to our lawsuit are the ones who are doing something about the big issues, and this is one of them, because it is contextual, atmospheric — it affects federal Indian law because, for one thing, policymakers don’t make good policy for cartoons or for people who are used for others’ sport.
The questioner here is employing the either/or fallacy, the mistake in reasoning that suggests only one of two options is available – exclusive of each and any other – when there are, in fact, multiple, possibly non-exclusive options. Pursuing improvements in Native health and education, for instance, in no way precludes, also, attempts to eliminate government-supported racist iconography. Pursing the latter does not preclude the former. We can do more than one thing at a time. And, as Harjo astutely points out, there is a profound “contextual, atmospheric” element – the one that leads most Americans to be generally culturally, historically and morally unconscious in the matter of the country’s history with, and relation to, Native Americans. In this next question and answer, Harjo follows up on that point perfectly.
Noah Hurwitz: I’m alarmed at the number of offensive remarks that people have made during this chat. Why is it that there is so little respect given to Native Americans?
Suzan Shown Harjo: That’s one of the problems with dehumanizing, objectifying images, names, behaviors — promotion of disrespect.
There is this argument, often offered in relation to African-Americans, too, and about which I will soon post – the “get over it” argument.
Harry: I am first to agree that what has happened to the Indians by the Americans was a horrible thing, and it shouldn’t be looked over. However, how long are you going to play that trump card? Eventually, you need to move on as a group and realize that things are never going to revert back to the olden days. Eventually you are going to have to take responsibility for yourself and stop pulling out that same card.
Suzan Shown Harjo: We aren’t trying to go back to a bygone era. We seek justice in our own time and in comparison to all the other human beings of our time.
Finally, for my purposes, Harjo’s got herself a sense of humor.
JJ: Ever think that instead of promoting equality, this fight of yours will sour people about Indians. People may think that Indians are kind of stupid for trying to change a mascot’s name.
Suzan Shown Harjo: The thoughts of those who could be soured over a bid for justice are of little interest to me — what are they going to do? Get mad and take away the western hemisphere?
AJA
This entry was posted on
Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at
9:27 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under Indian Country.
When I review with students the fundamentals of academic and intellectual honesty, I take it beyond the obvious perils of plagiarism. I explore with them the massive managerial task of sifting, sorting, and employing the evidence and arguments they have gathered through research, my principal focus in this context the evidence and arguments that do not support their own argument.
For the sake of entertainment – it is a performance – I recount the tale of an undergrad paper I wrote in a class on Hegel and Heidegger. My mission: to tease out all of the implications of a self-actualizing World-Spirit available to elucidation in twenty pages. I worked on the paper for weeks, straining in those last days to grasp from the mental air Hegel’s conception in all of its magnitude. Sitting at the parson’s desk in my small Manhattan studio, writing by hand, I would contort physically, seek to conduct the ideas that were slow to enter, even as now, still – hands reaching to follow my abstracted gaze – I will waive the baton at the vocabulary of my imagination. On the final day – it was always the final day, the last moment, with my papers: damned words – on the final day, there came a moment.
I was stunned.
Outside, that week, Manhattan, as always, had buzzed. Brilliant sunshine had graced the island – while I labored from my fourth floor tomb in the recesses of nineteenth century idealism. I glanced out the window at my sun-dappled Upper Westside airshaft. Oh my God, I thought.
I’m wrong.
Well, you see where I’m going. How, over the next minutes of frantic philosophical review, I came to determine with climactic relief that No, I am not wrong, I cannot now relate in detail. It is all so very dreadfully lost to history. Did I resolve the cognitive dissonance with a little turn of “love the one your with”? Had I, in fact, been wrong to think myself wrong and right when I rediscovered myself right? Who knows? But there is the dilemma.
Though it shouldn’t be a dilemma. Intellectual honesty does not permit withholding and ignoring evidence and reasoning that argue against your hypothesis or claim. This is not the academic standard. And if the students do not know it already, and if they learn it (I do what I can), they also very quickly learn that the public life of the world is in no way conducted by such a standard. Of course, confirmation bias – the mental tendency to process and prioritize information so as to confirm existing beliefs and produce conclusions to which we are predisposed – exists in the academic world too. It exists in egregious self-awareness, but the more prevalent and more dangerous form is the unconscious bias.
The political world, however, is so much the egregiously self-aware, fraudulent show. We know this. You know this. The mainstream media know it, even as they give stage, set, and microphone to the performers. From not answering the questions asked, to pretending to seek compromise, to seeking in every “exchange of ideas” to gain tactical advantage in the long war between right and left, nearly all have their established ideological bias, and few are open to a true examination of ideas. Concessions are bartered, when the legislative system seems to work a little – as it does not now, so far, on healthcare reform – but these compromises are like an exchange of prisoners in war, all the practical politics of giving in order to get, but not a foot of common ground excluded from the battleground.
In a 2007 interview with beliefnet.com, John McCain stated that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.”
At the extremes, this means that even the settled ideals and principles of the nation’s founding, over two hundred years ago, are still not truly settled, as Christianists will assert, against all the evidence of the founding documents, and the intellectual and spiritual lives of the founders, that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. The right still argues against the achievements of FDR.
The extreme left is no different. American Soviet sympathizers of the thirties and forties went to their graves never fully acknowledging the Stalinist abomination they supported, or that they erred. Their remainder and their heirs still champion the Rosenbergs with folk song commemorations. They repeated their error with Mao, with – despite the misguided war – the Vietnamese communists, and they champion, still, Fidel Castro’s Cuba. They now praise Hugo Chavez. They never met a demagogue or tyrant in whose thrall they would not blindly be, so long as he sings the praise of the salt of the earth and rails against capitalist elites. They will learn nothing.
Just recently, seven days after the eighth anniversary of 9/11, Susan Sarandon commemorates the occasion by praising at the Huffington Post the “courage” of Representative Barbara Lee in casting the lone congressional vote against military action in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and eliminate the Al Qaeda training camps to which the Taliban gave haven. A lone voice such as this is either, indeed, the epitome of courage or the essence of misguided, and the ringer of the celebratory bell of praise has a fifty percent chance of being right. Note, however, how Sarandon makes no distinction between the purpose of military action then – what Lee condemned – and what American action in Afghanistan has ineffectually drifted into over the years since. Note, too, how Sarandon’s standard catchphrase summation of Afghanistan as a “quagmire” is offered, in fact, as restatement of this warning from Lee: “Let us not become the evil that we deplore.” Lee was warning of no quagmire. She was claiming that action to oppose the forces behind 9/11 and those who supported them would make the U.S. evil, and on the order of its attackers. And Sarandon is so tunneled in her vision that she cannot see this, or, if she can, recognize the true nature of it in contrast to what she claims of it.
However, what bedevils the United States just now are not the extremes of the left, but those of the right. And it is worth emphasizing again – it is always necessary to emphasize – that none of the extremism I just pointed out on the left is mainstream Democratic Party belief and policy (Barbara Lee stood alone) and that all of the extremism on the right is now the extremism of the Republican party: voiced, affirmed, or tolerated by its leaders, promoted by its media arms and voices, and encouraged among its followers. It is insufficient to contemporary conservative fanaticism to view divergent political policies between the parties within the range of traditional differences, among them the extent of government’s role in a range of areas. The right attempts to justify its extremism by projecting it onto the Obama Administration: socialist, fascist, Nazi, Hitler, Muslim, African, Manchurian and grimly reaperish in its conspiratorial designs on its own citizens – a fulsome stew of otherness and fear.
The nativism that plays so large a role in the passions of stoked up protesters isn’t unique to the U.S., but the U.S. has its particular brand. The two oceans that so long provided both defensive and cultural barrier between the United States and foreign elements produced a kind of cultural speciation event, for good and ill. The ill is that the more culturally parochial elements in American society view other cultures as not simply different and strange, but as nearly barbaric –even when, contradictorily, a kind of modern, cosmopolitan sophistication is perceived. Nativists and the politically unsophisticated are encouraged by well educated conservative hierarchies to disdain well educated hierarchies – modern, cosmopolitan, sophisticated elites, who are then identified with liberalism, or worse. This ever changing modern life – ever evolving away from comforting verities – is considered, despite it veneer of sophistication, to be decadence, a degeneration from the once-delivered world.
The word “barbarian” is derived from the ancient Greek bárbaros. Ironically, at the emerging height of Athenian civilization in the fifth century B.C.E., with its increased commerce and interaction with other civilizations, Greeks found themselves ever more in contact with foreign peoples and manners. The word Bárbaros was an onomatopoeic representation of the brutal, incomprehensible sounds – barbar – made by these new, unfavored elements, which included, ironically, advanced peoples such the Egyptians, Persians, and Phoenicians. In a similar manner, advanced European cultures are barbarized, in the comparison of proposed U.S. health care changes to European systems, through terrifying tales of what Americans would face were Europeans (and the more familially denigrated Canadians) in any way emulated. One would think, to hear the stories and fears, that all these nations were undergoing a humanitarian tragedy of untold extent – a degenerate Black Death of un-capitally motivated health care we only are brought to recognize whenever it is suggested the U.S. try something in any way similar.
It is certainly fine for Americans to prefer their own culture and ways, to think themselves exceptional. The French do as well, the British. It is part of the integral nature of a culture to prefer itself over others. I just got a cab ride yesterday – back from the hospital to have my bike-bonked noggin CT scanned – from a Ghanaian, native of a nation lacking many of our advantages, who says he has been here “too long” and cannot wait to be home again. It is not fine – it is the promotion of ignorance – to continually believe that only American manners are superior, while all around us are slowly descending into darkness.
In France, since 1905 – ah, this should upset both left and right – and inspired by the French Revolution, there has existed in law the same separation between church and state as exists in the United States. The French, however, because of their own historical particularities, can be more aggressively secular than Americans. In 2004 – prompted by current circumstances that are not germane to my point – France adopted what is sometimes called its secularity law, prohibiting all ostentatious display of religious symbolism, including garb, in schools. All religious observance is accommodated in France. Dress and practice are free in non-institutional and religious settings. Only the institutional public sphere is maintained in secular separation. Obviously, this is contrary to American practice, where we tolerate and accommodate personal religious presentation in the public sphere, favoring none. As uncommon as is the French approach among Western democracies, however (though I like it), it is a coherent view of how to maintain the balance between secular principle and religious freedom.
We need to be able to examine issues from different perspectives, consider their worth, and grant (not all of them) their value, even if we decline them, without finding the demon in the different. That sounds so elementary doesn’t it? We would teach that to children. We tell children, too, that it doesn’t matter if others have done something wrong; it is still wrong for them to behave the same way. “He did it too” is a child’s cry. Yet that is what many on the left have cried before, of the right, and what the right cries now whenever people of supposed seriousness and responsibility are asked to denounce the demagogues and the hateful, racist ideas and voices currently soiling the national scene.
Barack Obama was elected to lead the nation. That many people voted for a black man to be President. It is an enormous historical achievement we should not quickly forget. But ugly elements are still out there – you’ll encounter them when you hardly expect it. Some are quite prominent. Some speak for the Republican Party. Some are in the Republican Party. Some lead the Republican Party. Even today, there are the unrepentant who defend Joe McCarthy, and though he may have stumbled, by an accident of character, on an appropriate idea – to oppose communist and Soviet influence in the U.S. – history has judged him for the disgraceful blight he was on the nation. It will do that, too, of those on the right who continue to enable, and do not attempt to change, the current fearful political climate. It will condemn them, and, if what they do does not lead to worse, it will forget them. History has a way of doing that to the hacks of the political process.
As Xenophanes, that notable, unbarbaric Greek said, “The gods did not reveal from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, men find that which is the better….”
AJA
This entry was posted on
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at
12:48 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under The Political Animal.
Sorry to have been so mostly silent the past week or so, but I’ve been traveling more than usual and then had a little off-road biking accident that rattled my head a bit. The doctors say I’m fine, and bound to be no more bothersome than usual, but I will now offer the suddenly especially meaningful reminder to you all to WEAR A HELMET on any two-wheeled vehicle. I would not be writing to you now had I not worn mine. Soon to be posted: part 2 of “Looking at How We Look at Things” (somewhat cockeyed at the moment).
This entry was posted on
Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at
2:47 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under Uncategorized.
Julia and I were riding up in the big cab of the motorhome. I was driving, she was taking notes, and we were both looking out through the panoramic window on America that has always been the continually renewable charge – along with that of just packing up our home and taking it, the entire home, somewhere new every few days or weeks – of our year-long journey together. We were trying to recall our “best”s and “most”s. Robert Redford and Bradford Dillman played a game like this in The Way We Were, the college boys reclining on the easy deck of someone’s full-sailed boat, already worldly enough to answer “Best ice cream sundae” and similar questions with the names of exotic locales that, at their age, along with the game itself so young, bespoke their casual privilege. How to characterize what Julia and I were doing, well, who am I to say?
Suddenly, Julia, knowing the answer, proposed with a laugh that I immediately returned: “Most surprising thing anyone has said to us.” I had heard it just the day before, at a Yamaha dealership in Charleston.
All during our trip strangers have been gratifyingly friendly and warm, delighted to hear of our travels, often intrigued by the motorhome, or the scooters we ride, or the hydraulic lift on the back of the motorhome that carries them. They wish us well. And so too this worker at the dealership who approached to converse while I tied down the rear wheel of one of the scooters. We talked about Charleston, about how beautiful it is and how these days so few of the people who live in and around it are actually from there, and we talked about other places he had lived, including San Diego. I said it was a nice city, a bit of bland politesse that hid my actual dislike. Given that I am a native New Yorker through whose veins the Hudson River flows, and that in that light one must recognize San Diego – speaking as a kind of urban particle physicist here – as pretty much the anti-New York, my feelings should not be notable. But people, as I say, have been lovely to us, why should I critique where they come from, and agreeable pleasantries always speed the way.
It was the smiling, unexceptionably offered reply, then, that made the moment memorable.
“Yeah, except for the niggers and spics,” he said.
There has actually been almost none of this along the way, except, maybe, less directly, the carny in Talihina, Oklahoma who had run away from home at seventeen and been living the life ever since, who seemed about to have something to say about the Jews he’d encountered in New York, until I mentioned softly that I’m from New York, and he appeared to wonder quickly what else he didn’t know about me, and his memoirs took a slightly different direction.
On the other hand, it has been striking how frequent it is that people, during brief, chance encounters with a stranger, are willing to share some vaguely cultural or political feeling they can in no way be assured the visitor shares. This isn’t my own nature. Despite this blog, and my delight in good, vigorous debate of all kinds, it is not my wish to make political views the affective handshake of human encounters. When Aristotle wrote that “man is by nature a political animal,” he meant a social animal tending toward organized and civil relationships – civilization. He didn’t mean a voting precinct manipulator or a demographic strategist with eyes on the next election. Besides, I learn more by listening.
Something I’ve heard a bit is something that shouldn’t be surprising: politicians and government leaders meeting in the distant halls of power with financiers, bankers, and corporate leaders and engaging in all sort of abstruse discussion and negotiations about the money they all in one way or another control, and that “ordinary” people do not – well, that has a certain air about it and it isn’t sinus clearing ocean air. In the behemoth modern nation-state, government – no matter how representative in process, and regardless of who has read Max Weber or not – is always easily going to appear an unresponsive and controlling abstraction, a dominating other and a cabal of shadowy and self-interested lever-pullers working in opposition to the simple integrity of single human lives.
As far back as both Socrates and Gautama Buddha, however – in remarkably different ways and at remarkably close points in time – education has aimed at enabling the enlightened mind, a mind brought to see the light, as the shackled viewer of shadows escaped from Plato’s allegorical cave comes into an initially blinding light, a mind able to distinguish appearance from reality. Can governments be these shadowy cabals? Oh, we know they can, often, from long experience. Have they always been, must they always be? And now there are so many screens on which to project the shadows of illusion and half-truth. How is one to tell?
Thomas Frank, in What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, famously analyzed how it has come to pass over recent decades that many rural, working class, and middle-income people found their identification with conservatives and the Republican Party, when their economic and social interests were best represented by the Democrats. Social conservatives, argued Frank, had their cultural interests played with, though never fulfilled, while economic conservatives pursued the policies that benefited the socially conservative not a whit either.
In the matter of all those negotiations with bankers and CEOs, necessarily inherited by President Obama from Bush, appearances are indeed unattractive. And many a Republican was true to ideological belief in insisting that banks and brokerages be allowed to fail and “taxpayer money” not be used to bail out large corporations that had simply failed in the market place. What a confusingly progressive seemingly anti-corporate stance. And then there are the Democrats, following on Bush, hand in hand with the financial elites. Whoa, Nelly. What’s goin’ on here? Well, of course, fascists create corporate-states and their opposites, socialists, take over the means of production, like auto companies – and now you have a full-fledged shadow-play theater production generated by implodingly contradictory motivations almost no one can track. Hard, then, to persuade many – already having their strings pulled – that in this instance the corporate failures would be so great as to produce cataclysmic consequences for “ordinary folk” well beyond the satisfying spectacle of broker billions down the porcelain chute.
Or there is the other monster shadow of our truly worth-worrying-about national debt, but as I noted in “The Conservative Hole”
…every Democratic President since the FDR/Truman term has decreased the national debt as a percentage of GDP – yes, even Carter. Every Republican has increased it. Without exception. Reagan tripled the debt. By the end of Bush Sr.’s single term, in twelve years, the Republicans had more than quadrupled it. Bush Jr. added billions more. Now, in less than two months under Obama, Republicans and [Andrew] Sullivan are stuffing their hands in their pockets and getting, at last, hysterical over an increase in the national debt – not to expand military spending, not to enrich the rich, but to try to restore the economy and help those in the middle and at the bottom.
No, the topic and the worry are not new, but the hysteria of the tea-partiers, the 9/12ers – from whence does it now come, by whom led?
From and by Rush Limbaugh, living in his big fat mansion smoking his big fat cigars with his big fat mouth? What has he ever done for ordinary people but make himself in all ways fat on their fear and resentment?
Joe Wilson, former member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, defender of flying the Confederate flag over the South Carolina capitol? It’s just a symbol of state’s rights, the way the swastika is only a symbol of German nationalism.
Mark Williams? Asked by Anderson Cooper if he really thinks Barak Obama is a Nazi, Williams say he never called Obama that. Cooper then points out that on Williams’ website, Obama, satirized as “Mubarak” Hussein Obama is indeed called a Nazi. Williams flashes, then, the unctuous grin of the shameless shiteater, as he does when defending the characterization of Obama as an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief.” Racist in chief, he is asked with disbelief. Until he represents all of the people, says Williams, what else can Williams conclude?
Is it worth noting that many Americans did not feel well represented by George W. Bush? Would Williams, then, claim that Bush was once “Racist in chief”?
I try to teach logic to students. I try to teach argument. They wonder how truth is attained when there are so many conflicting claims proffered with so much passion, sometimes with apparent evidence. It is a hard, messy business I tell them, especially when there are always those who will continue to claim and yell otherwise even when evidence is conclusive, even when fact is established. The purpose of argument said one student is to win. Yes, I say, as far back as the Sophists whom Socrates set out to expose, there have been many who devote themselves only to that: they live in the shadows, they don their sunglasses, and they invite you to join them.
But there are guidelines, I tell them. You can learn them. You can follow them.
One of them is very simple and very informal: when the cat, smiling, says it never even saw the mouse, and you see a tale hanging from the side of its mouth, there is a credibility problem.
Even if you like the cat.
Tomorrow part 2, “Confirmation Bias: Even If You Like the Cat”
AJA
This entry was posted on
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at
9:18 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under The Political Animal.
My poem would eat nothing.
I tried giving it water
but it said no,
worrying me.
Day after day,
I held it up to the llight,
turning it over,
but it only pressed its lips
more tightly together.
It grew sullen, like a toad
through with being teased.
I offered it money,
my clothes, my car with a full tank.
But the poem stared at the floor.
Finally I cupped it in
my hands, and carried it gently
out into the soft air, into the
evening traffic, wondering how
to end things between us.
For now it had begun breathing,
putting on more and
more hard rings of flesh.
And the poem demanded the food,
it drank up all the water,
beat me and took my money,
tore the faded clothes
off my back,
said Shit,
and walked slowly away,
slicking its hair down.
Said it was going
over to your place.
Larry Levis, 1972
*Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry,” Reasons for Moving, 1968
This entry was posted on
Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at
4:41 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under Culture Clash.
makes productive political debate so hard and rare. Can one support Obama while acknowledging he can, himself, err? The question and answer really shouldn’t be necessary. Can one perceive him in potential error and not believe him a fool? You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?
implications of a self-actualizing World-Spirit available to elucidation in twenty pages. I worked on the paper for weeks, straining in those last days to grasp from the mental air Hegel’s conception in all of its magnitude. Sitting at the parson’s desk in my small Manhattan studio, writing by hand, I would contort physically, seek to conduct the ideas that were slow to enter, even as now, still – hands reaching to follow my abstracted gaze – I will waive the baton at the vocabulary of my imagination. On the final day – it was always the final day, the last moment, with my papers: damned words – on the final day, there came a moment.
, famously analyzed how it has come to pass over recent decades that many rural, working class, and middle-income people found their identification with conservatives and the Republican Party, when their economic and social interests were best represented by the Democrats. Social conservatives, argued Frank, had their cultural interests played with, though never fulfilled, while economic conservatives pursued the policies that benefited the socially conservative not a whit either.
apparent evidence. It is a hard, messy business I tell them, especially when there are always those who will continue to claim and yell otherwise even when evidence is conclusive, even when fact is established. The purpose of argument said one student is to win. Yes, I say, as far back as the Sophists whom Socrates set out to expose, there have been many who devote themselves only to that: they live in the shadows, they don their sunglasses, and they invite you to join them.
