the sad red earth

When ShrinkWrapped and I announced the inception of “The Open Mind,” we each cited as a motivation behind it the interest, in his words to me, of exploring “how two reasonably bright, reasonably decent people can disagree so significantly in their perception of reality.” One commenter, on one of our posts, suggested that we avoid more general philosophical arguments and address ourselves to specific issues that so often divide left from right, in the hope of attempting some common ground. This was a most reasonable suggestion, and even though, inevitably, it is those issues with which most of our exchanges are bound to concern themselves, it did seem to overlook a compelling truth: except in instances of the most truly open minds – a genuinely common intellectual exploration of ideas, rather than the rigidly maintained battle lines of contest in debate – a forum such as this is not where people tend to find common ground. For nothing is at stake.

As much as we all, left and right alike (ah, here’s common ground) tend to deride the practice of our legislators, when they haggle – excuse me, I mean debate – there are actual gains and losses to be exchanged in the chambers, as in the making of peace between enemies. Real stakes motivate people toward real compromise in real policy action. Under the conditions here, there is no such motivation, and without a spirit of real intellectual generosity and openness, there is no coming together. Perhaps we will encounter that openness at times. In any event there are benefits in clarifying and (I offer this word with very tender care) respecting differences.

Another commenter offered a contrary opinion:

Without delving into the details of either your or his posts, or either ripostes, I feel I must address what I see as the bigger issue: You have not resolved the underlying, fundamental differences between the two of you….

My larger point is that the two of you have differences of belief far more fundamental than what is being discussed here. Until and unless you not only identify, but resolve these differences, you will make no progress in discussing these more specific topics. All you are doing is putting ice packs on a feverish forehead, without attacking the infection.

I agree. Or at least it’s worth a go. So, with plenty of future opportunity for debate on cap and trade (please let’s not), I offer a first attempt at laying a foundation for identifying fundamental beliefs and differences. Accept it not, I beg, as comprehensive. The ending number and idea are determined as much by late night fatigue and the press of deadline as by the cozy comfort of systematic completeness. There may yet be a First Blood Part II. I offer one closing, guiding principle for reception of this effort: note its subtitled denotation of “a” liberal. Your humble and fallible servant is neither the face nor the voice of “liberalism.” (“I am not a number,” our beloved, original The Prisoner cried, “I am a free man!”) There are others willing to play that role; I think and speak for myself. You want to argue with “liberals,” knock yourself out. I’ll be elsewhere, but it’s a free cyberspace.

As of this writing.

Principia Liberalis*

a liberal’s manifesto, conservatively conceived

1. Our time is spent: Pushing a rock up a hill. Contemplating the rock. Playing on and around the rock. Sitting beside the rock. All are important, none more so than another, each sometimes more pressing than the others.
2. Human beings aspire to the good and are drawn to the bad. They are both. There is no evidence to conclude which will ultimately rule in them.
3. Human history is both sublime and horrific.
4. We should be guided in our aspirations by what is best in us while always protecting against what is worst in us.
5. There is such a thing as evil. It often conceives of itself as a good.
6. While civilizations and nations are aimed at the future, they are driven by the past.
7. Nations, like people, are responsible for their actions. They act as historically and legally conceived and constituted entities, and they are responsible as historical and legal entities.
8. The animating determinant of historic national responsibility is in the living consequences of past acts: no continuing consequences, no conceivable responsibility.
9. The past cannot be undone, but the future can be different; this is accomplished through understanding and acknowledgement of the past and accountability for it.
10. Accountability for the past is policy for the future.
11. The colonial epoch is ended. Its consequences are not.
12. Victors record history. This does not make the history false. Neither does it make it true.
13. Conquerors leave the past behind more easily than the conquered. This is because the conqueror owns the future.
14. To have been conquered or oppressed, to be weak, does not ennoble a people before or after the fact; the acts of a conquered, oppressed, or weak people are not legitimized by those conditions. Neither is the injustice of their conquest, oppression, or weakness abused, or the justness of redress, negated by their imperfection.
15. We are a common human race and should approach the future in that belief; however, human affections are stronger the more closely experienced, more abstract the farther afield.
16. Cosmopolitanism is good, affording wide-ranging experience of human culture and a deeper knowledge of humanity; in its absence people are prone to parochialism, ignorant fears, and prejudice.
17. Close fields of association and concern are natural. Without them human sympathies are intellectual creations and not affective connections. One must love one’s neighbor before one can love the world. One should love the world. (But is free not to.)
18. The greater the justice, the greater the harmony. All oppositions are not enemies; the reconciliation of many oppositions leads to greater harmony and greater justice.  This does not mean that all claims are valid, all positions legitimate, or that all demands should be met: many claims, positions, and demands are themselves unjust and destructive of harmony.
19. Extremism in the defense of liberty or any other idea leads to terror and tyranny. Liberty is best ensured through moderation, including the distance between the people and the ensuring authority of the people: too close and a narrowness of interest and intolerance will prevail; too far and the oppressive abstraction of bureaucracy will rule.
20. The human species is a technological species. Technology creates meaning in life. However, the consequences of this essential nature are not an unqualified good. The greatest human happiness is not the product of the greatest prevalence of technology. There is no evidence of human capacity to judiciously guide its technological nature.
21. Technology increases affective connections, which are loosened by the distance that technology narrows. The greater the affective connection, the greater the sense of mutual moral responsibility. Notions of discrete and separable, autonomous individuality, neither responsible to nor the responsibility of others, are irreversibly challenged by population density and technology, and the increased effect of human actions on other humans. It is necessary to define what core autonomy need be protected, as an essential human good, but earlier stages of political relation, of individuals to each other, and of individuals to the commonweal, will not be recovered.
22. Government is neither good nor bad. It is necessary. Neither is its size good or bad. It should be the size necessary to fulfill the responsibilities judged to be appropriate to it. Government is best assigned those responsibilities that are necessary to the commonweal above what is necessarily optimally efficient, though it need not be an enemy of efficiency. Sources of optimal efficiency cannot concern themselves with the common good whilst remaining optimally efficient; they must be managed when applied to the common good so that a balance is achieved between efficiency and the breadth of the benefit they deliver.
23. A breadth of interests entails a breadth of power to protect them. A breadth of power generates its own interests. Even a benign power will be caught in this cycle of mutual reinforcement. Imperial behavior, conceived only as protection of interests, can expand innocently and then be justified, in the maintenance of an imperial nature, as a necessary protection of interests.
24. Terror and tyranny must be opposed, freedom and democracy defended, in more than mere word, not only by might. All efforts to confuse these ideas must be combated.
25. Yankees rule. (The baseball team.)

*Anything worth saying is worth puffing up in Latin.

AJA

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 7:52 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

As the title suggests, I wasn’t surfing. Obviously, that’s surface and quick: a cool glide. I do that, but mostly I poke around. It’s somewhat haphazard, but it isn’t a ride. I stop constantly and I probe. Curiosity is one of the life forces: the simple impulse, desire, need to know. Were the earth and its environs at some stage of being sucked into a black hole (any astrophysicists out there who can speculate on the likelihood – not to put too fine a point on it – in my lifetime?) there would, to the very last possible moment, be scientists maintaining a grip while observing and measuring the phenomenon. I would be Richard Dreyfuss gazing up, eyes like white diamonds, at approaching oblivion. Even though everything learned would be lost in the instant.

Curiosity. It fills the time.

So I was poking around some Latin American blogs I’d been meaning to check out – I read some already, and these had been referrals – when I stopped in at Along the Malecón. It has lots of photos, and I’ve been to Cuba. I wrote a poem from my experience. The Malecón of the blog title is the Havana sea wall that lines the Caribbean, overlooked by the crumbling facades of Neo-Classical and Moorish buildings. A stroll along el Malecón, where old Chevys pass and a breaking wave may crash hugely over the wall and soak you, can evoke all of the complex history, music, and romance of the city.

The post I focused on was about a staged street contretemps involving Cuban journalist Reinaldo Escobar and a mob of Castro supporters who swarmed and jostled him. Escobar is the wife of blogger Yoani Sánchez, of the blog Generation Y, and who sometimes appears on HuffPo. Sanchez is a preeminent Cuban dissident who has been cited for distinction and won several awards, including, most recently, the Columbia University School of Journalism’s “Marie Moors Cabot Prize,” for which the Cuban government refused Sanchez a travel visa to New York to accept the award. Recently, Sanchez posed on her blog a series of questions to both Raul Castro and President Obama. Obama has answered them.

The author of the blog is reporter and teacher Tracey Eaton, who spent five years in Cuba as Havana Bureau Chief for the Dallas Morning News, and he reported on the Escobar incident professionally and objectively. I found the first, at that point only, comment to the post curious. It seemed to suggest, in a slippery, backdoor way that Cubans actually have greater redress for their grievances than do the people of any other nation. (My goodness! What have the last fifty years been about? ¡Un qué error!) Then the anonymous commenter stated that Sanchez and other “dissidents” (the commenter’s quotation marks) were not what they appeared to be. Why not and what they were the identityless commenter did not say. You can read my comment in response, calling the earlier commenter out.

Sometime later in the day, Eaton himself commented, blandly thanking the first commenter and writing, “It is true that we hold Cuba up to impossible standards sometimes. We put Cuba under a microscope and somehow expect it to shine all of the time.”

Second stage curiosity now kicked in. “Impossible standards”? Like freedom and democracy? I didn’t know those were impossible standards. Again, what conflicts could have been avoided.

I returned to my work, while soothing the sting of this pointed disregard of my own comment (I am very sensitive) with curious rumination. Then two more comments came in, form a third commenter, the essence of which is captured herein:

Yoani and Escobar…are creations of the American (anti-Cuba) capitalist news media and receive support and encouragement from the gusanos in Miami and from the Yankee imperialist government, as Obama has demostrated with his stupid “answer” to questions submitted by this sensation and publicity seeking bloguera.

This was followed by another “thanks for the comments” from Eaton.

What was I, chopped liver? No polite little thank you for my brave contribution?

Now, I’m really curious. I do some more of that poking about, regarding Eaton, and can find nothing but his very professional reporting on Cuba. I even come across a final, personal piece he wrote near the end of his Dallas Morning News tenure, looking back on his experiences in Cuba. The piece reflects, again, a kind of bland unwillingness to reach conclusions about experience that I sometimes find in reporters who have so trained themselves not to form opinions. Other than that, I can find nothing to account for the imbalance in thank yous, or the thank yous at all. Was it me? Should I have railed against gusanos and imperialists and publicity seeking blogueras?

And then another comment arrived in my mailbox, from Leftside (okay, now we’re at least clear), who thinks Sanchez a foreign agent (a subject to which I’ll return at another time), and who writes of Sanchez’s own detention by police, “We can argue whether any injuries were the result of Yoani’s own resistance to the detention, or the aggressive action of taking a piece of paper from the security officials and putting it in her mouth.”

That’s some “aggressive action.” I’da beat the living daylights out of her with a hose, and no doubt the dead in Iran shot themselves, through the aggressive action of resisting the theft of their electoral process.

Anyway, can you see it coming?

“Leftside, Thanks for your comments….:

Well, now I’m so curious, I can’t stop scratching myself. I have written Eaton and asked him if he would like to respond. I’ll let you know.

Update

Tracey Eaton, after my contacting him to offer an opportunity to respond, has left a comment – thanking me for the comment on his blog. Hmn.

Back after the Thanksgiving weekend with The Open Mind III: Judgment Day.

AJA

Photography by Julia Dean

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 2:42 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

Just when I’m out gettin’ a tooth drilled, Shrinkwrapped goes and adds (I guess it kinda makes sense) an addendum to his post trying to pin anti-Semitism, historically, on the left, stating “For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism.” He even trots out a quote from the Karl-man. He does it all “For those who have difficulty understanding the provenance of modern anti-Semitism and its intimate relationship with the Left.”

Since only one other presumed liberal commented on his original post, I’m gonna presume this was more or less directed at me. (It is all about me, isn’t it? Doc?)

Keep in mind, I had already acknowledged the current, growing scourge of left anti-Semitism, but I like to revise history only in the direction of the truth, not in conformance with

I'll buy that!

absolutist ideological demonization of political adversaries.

The entire history of active American anti-Semitism, which we all know – but you can’t count on any agreed truths anymore – has been slight in comparison to the histories of the European, Arab, and Muslim cultures, is on the right, from the KKK and the John Birch Society, to the American Nazi party and skinheads, to the country-club, institutional, and residential anti-Semitism of mid-century Republican WASP power centers. In Europe, over several centuries, the entire establishment of the Pale of Settlement, the ghettos, the Tsarist May laws, were the creation of illiberal, anti-democratic aristocracies, supported by the pogroms and daily, petty anti-Semitism of culturally conservative, parochial and chauvinistic elements in a myriad of national settings. Even amid the growth of left-oriented anti-Semitism, a recently as 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the firmly established anti-Semitic, right wing extremist in France gained nearly 18% of the vote in the runoff Presidential election.

This need to demonize the other side by distorting history – why, it’s downright Soviet in nature. Their commies, these conservatives.

Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, of North Carolina, claims, “We were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the 60s.”

Could you die? Could you just die?

Republican revisionism on civil rights is not a new campaign. Foxx’s insult to the American electorate’s intelligence grows out of the Republican argument that a greater percentage of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act than did Democrats. Never mind that many of the Dems who voted against it were Southern conservatives (not liberals) who were soon enough Republicans, and that many of the Republicans who voted for it couldn’t today go unpilloried by the Palinized ‘publicans. Never mind the full history of civil rights and Republican distortion: click that link above.

Next thing you know they’ll be claiming it was a Republican who freed the slaves…

I love it when they embrace Lincoln. Like he might ever be a Republican today.

You ever hear that old Cold War joke about an auto race just between a U.S. built car and a Soviet model? The Kremlin press release reported that the Soviets came in second and the U.S. next to last?

So now the Heady one claims, “For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler).” That’s my emphasis added. And that’s right – the socialist Hitler. Well, it was, right, the National Socialist Party?

Just like, in the North, it’s the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Can’t argue with the label. They wouldn’t kid us, would they?

Never mind (there’s a lot of “never-minding” having to go on) that Hitler was firmly anticommunist and pro private property, and that the mix of his ever changing economic policies is probably overall best described in the end as state capitalism. And otherwise, clearly, an all round liberal fellow.

I wouldn’t have to add that last if it weren’t for the fact that there seems this tendency on SW’s part to run liberal and left and Marxist all together. Or that he and his crew of cheery conservative commenters, when they’re supposedly arguing with me, choose to argue against “liberals.”

I’m not liberals. I’m a liberal. I speak for myself only. I’ll presume SW does the same. So you won’t find me linking, for support, as SW did, to the liberal likes of John Ray, who makes this his blog header:

It’s the shared hatred of the rest of us that unites Islamists and the Left. American liberals don’t love America. They despise it. All they love is their own fantasy of what America could become. They are false patriots. The Democratic Party: Con-men elected by the ignorant and the arrogant

And having to explain if that’s what I think. By their blog referrals shall ye know them.

Okay. That should have gotten some juices flowing for the resumption of main ring action after the holiday. Unless Shrink decides to throw a pulka at me tomorrow. If he does, I’m sure it will be very tasty. He’s actually, in private, a very cool guy.

I mean, he used to drive a Karmann Ghia. How cool is that?

AJA

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 5:46 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

It has been only the convergence of many demands – including the work of return home to Los Angeles – that has so long delayed the the next installment of “The Open Mind” debates, what The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have called – well, they haven’t actually called them anything yet. But just you wait.

The next real entry in the series appears next Monday, as a digestif for your Thanksgiving overload. As a cocktail, here is today’s post from Shrinkwrapped, with my deft and definitive rejoinder in his comments section available beneath it.

Comments

Judge Crater said…

“Anti-Semitism and Leftism are inextricably linked.”

That statement is taking me farther through the looking glass than I want to go. I guess if you go far enough down the rabbit hole names like Marx, Engels, Trotsky, David Ben-Gurion, Saul Alinsky, and dozens more have disappeared along with the Smoking Caterpillar.

Israel, the Jewish homeland, was conceived, created, and supported by Jewish leftists. It’s still a socialist state by any modern measure – certainly as socialist as France.

If history means anything, and maybe in right-wing wonderland is doesn’t, Jews, to their enduring credit, have been at the forefront of “leftist” philosophy and action. The fact that three-quarters of American Jews vote Democratic, and that there are ten Jewish Democratic members of the Senate and 25 in the House, is a bitter pill for Dr. Shrinkwrapped to swallow is regrettable.

But, believing fifty impossible things before breakfast, isn’t going to change it.

Reply November 23, 2009 at 02:48 PM

I’m sorry to dash (not I’m not) my “blog friend and rival’s” fantasy of my nascent recognition of bias against Israel and my slow walk across the Bridge of Spies, but my position on this subject (and the greater one of undemocratic forces in the world in general) is very longstanding and in no way (weep not, my friend) inimical to the essence of liberalism. I won’t reply at too great length because then we might as well share “open minds” on the subject (and perhaps we shall) – and Judge Crater has already recoiled with appropriate disbelief and fact-based summation at the fantasticality of “Anti-Semitism and Leftism are inextricably linked.”

Of course, there is a significant and growing problem with Antisemitism on the left, and its origins are not as simple as that basement lab conservative bromide. Over the twentieth century and beyond, depending upon the locale, it has partaken of various measures of Marxist transnationalism, postcolonial ideology, and deeply embedded cultural histories of Antisemitism. Over much longer history, however, Antisemitism everywhere has demonstrably been the sentiment and activity of nationalistic, conservative and reactionary forces in a society. That doesn’t alter the reality of the new threat, though.

I must add that I think Shrink is too quick to label reflexive and historically uninformed anti-Israeli political sentiments as Antisemitism. I do not hesitate drop a brickload on anti-Semites, but I do not think too readily conjoining the two is beneficial.

Finally, it’s curious how we are prone to filter reality through our predispositions. (Doesn’t SW sorta specialize in that phenomenon?) In any other consideration, an 80%-20% imbalance in a vote, on an issue, would be considered quite overwhelming. If you got that kind of vote for President you could be king, but by this calculus it’s a grip on “the core of the Democratic Party.” Now let me see, what percentage of Republican legislators were willing to state when asked that they rejected birtherism…?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 1:56 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

Poem: “Forgetfulness,” read by its author, poet Billy Collins

Animation by Julian Grey of Headgear

Produced by JWTNY

*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 Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 9:23 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under A Blue Guitar.

Nothing has bedeviled the human race more than the nature of evil. Organized religion has, mostly, made a cartoon of it, and quite unsuccessfully and destructively warred with nature over it. Secularists have too often dismissed the reality of it, rationalized or pathologized it, pissed on it with irony. Many on the left mocked George W. Bush’s very mockable locutions – “evildoers” – and through that mockery implied that evil is only that cartoon concept and not real. Then some of them called Bush evil. The fearfully and frightfully ignorant and malicious on the right today who caricature Barack Obama with every mask of evil that occurs, including prayers that wish him harm, have no sense at all of where they themselves stand in relation to that awful force, but that is part of seductive, self-concealing nature of evil: those who are often think themselves righteous.

For several decades now, the secular particularly were content to consign the problem of evil to Hannah Arendt’s somewhat comforting formulation of its banality. Recently Ron Rosenbaum – reflecting on unhappy revelations about Arendt (oh, how often must it be?) – angrily rejected the long hold on our uncritical imaginations of a notion he finds too neat and demonstrably untrue. I mostly agree with him, though I think too complete a rejection is also too neat. Demonstrably, too, some manifestations of evil are banal.

We have a notion of evil because from very early days human beings have suffered the cruelty of their fellows to which they chose to assign that name. All the rest has been an attempt to comprehend.

In this chilling account from Tunku Varadarajan – writing about tonight’s HBO documentary on last year’s terrorist attack in Mumbai that killed 170 people – we see two of the faces of evil:

This is not a documentary for the young to watch, or even for those adults who crumble easily. How to process the telephone conversation between Wasi and the gunman holed up in Mumbai’s Chabad House, where a few American Jews are held hostage? Wasi says: “As I told you, every person you kill where you are”—referring to the Jewish building—“is worth 50 of the ones killed elsewhere.” Later, as Indian army commandos close in on the building, Wasi, watching the scene on TV in Pakistan, fears that the last surviving gunman there will be taken alive. So he orders him to shoot the last two Jewish hostages forthwith: “Yes, sit them up and shoot them in the back of the head.” The gunman, now weak with hunger and thirst, obliges. We hear a shot. Wasi does, too—he is on the line. What about the second shot, he asks. “I got them both,” he is told, by the gunman.

The terrorists killed 170 people; nine of the 10 terrorists were killed, and one—Ajmal Amir Kasab—was captured alive. Imagine the consternation when he turned out to be a brainwashed tool, a Pakistani peasant with no clear thoughts of his own, a man who was taught that, on being martyred, his body would emanate a sweet scent and his face would begin to glow. After Kasab’s colleagues were killed, the Mumbai police took him to the morgue to see their bodies. “We broke him psychologically,” a senior policeman says. In the morgue, Kasab saw no glowing faces, and detected no sweet scent; all he saw were the mangled, hideous, unheavenly corpses of his fellow terrorists. He knew, then, that “he had been taken for a ride.” In such primitive belief rests the fate of the innocent.

(H/T Jeffrey Goldberg)

AJA

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 11:39 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

Since I posted my first installment of Who Will Watch the Watchers, Richard Landes over at The Augean Stables has very ably pursued the same focus on Human Rights Watch, and more deeply too, emphasizing two issues: the resistance to criticism and the increasing role of postcolonial ideology in driving the agenda, not just of HRW, but of other human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International.

I focused myself, earlier, on the resistance to criticism, and on the remarkable fact of it. HRW is an organization conceived as a professional watchdog group – its mission to investigate, evaluate, and publish reports that pass judgment on the human rights records of other entities. Yet when HRW is itself criticized, it responds with the same kind of dismissive, even hostile and accusatory language directed at its critics as might any authoritarian state – its Director Ken Roth, for instance, charging supporters of Israel of attacking HRW with “lies and deception.” HRW does not even substantively rebut charges against it: it simply rejects them, even when coming from its founder. As Landes points out, one would imagine that an organization with the professional mission of HRW would be institutionally constituted to accept and review criticism – even to engage in systematic self-review. Not HRW.

Pause for a moment: every significant figure in HRW’s Middle East and North Africa division has a history of sympathy for the Palestinian position, even a record of political advocacy for that position, or has, in one instance, a collector’s passion for Nazi military regalia – yet HRW is completely unable to comprehend why it has lost the trust of Israel or its supporters, unable to consider that it has gone astray in the application of its mission to Israel. It is simply astonishing.

The causes are several and related. At their root, is the influence of postcolonial ideology.

I want to be clear here. The postcolonial critique of the Western world is genuine, substantive, valuable, and necessary. However, like any other even good idea, it can be distorted and abused, applied both uncritically and excessively. A perfect, lunatic example is the characterization of the return to their homeland, after nearly two thousand years, of the most historically and intensively oppressed people in recorded history as a “neo” colonial project in the manner of the half-millennial enterprise of one of the very civilizations that played so long a role in oppressing them. The mind boggles.

But the nature of human rights organizations has changed. From what Ben Cohen at Z-Word Blog termed, in correspondence with me, as the” liberal internationalist principles of their founders” human rights NGOs have become turned in their perspective by anti-imperialism. And in many respects, they do not recognize this turn, and when they do, their sense of righteousness is sufficient that they do not acknowledge that anti-imperialism is, indeed, a perspective and not a vision of the full truth of political praxis. It is worthwhile to examine an example of how this actually happened.

I suggested last time that Amnesty International, too, has changed – actually, even more radically and visibly than has HRW. AI’s mission has long been based on the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but with a much narrower, self-determined “mandate,” the greatest focus of which, since its founding, has been work on behalf of the individual “prisoner of conscience.” Unlike Human Rights Watch, which is staff run, and which focuses on data gathering and reporting on human rights conditions all over the world, AI has been a “grassroots,” volunteer-guided organization. Primary among its activities, it’s thousands of local groups and student groups around the world have “adopted” prisoners of conscience (POCs), or other “action files” regarding individuals somewhere being detained in violation of accepted principles of human rights. These groups regularly write letters to appropriate government officials urging humane, legal treatment of the prisoner or advocating the prisoner’s release. This activity was the originating work of AI. In contrast, the paid staff of AI, using area specialists, performs investigations and issues reports, in the manner of HRW.

Beginning in earnest in the late 90s, a drive began within AI – within its membership, among its staff, and on its Board – to broaden the AI mandate. Given the organization’s broad and complex structure of volunteer government, the process of change was long, and involved lengthy debate. It was, in many respects, a model of the kind of non-hierarchical consensus building – person centered and self-actualizing empowerment, rather than power wielding – that such a grassroots organization should exhibit. A major argument by proponents of the expanded mandate was that under the historic mandate, AI was too limited in nature. It was voiceless and inactive in relation to significant contemporary human rights issues (social, economic, and cultural rights, for instance, in contrast to the traditionally considered civil and political rights) while other NGO’s were free to play a role.

AI suffered, as well, under a variety of self-imposed restrictions, against advocacy of economic boycotts, for instance, or against national sections of the organization, e.g. AIUSA, working on issues in their own country.

All of these conditions, proponents of change argued, endangered the size of the role AI would be able to take in the future of human rights advocacy; they limited AI’s role as a player. Given the broad interests of human rights supporters, AI’s limited mandate could diminish significantly its future fundraising prospects. In other words, to reduce the issues to their essential term without reducing their meaning, advocates of change within AI were concerned with the organization’s ability to exercise power (“influence” is a kinder, gentler term, but spades and roses and all that), not only in the world, but within – in relation to – the human rights NGO community, as well. It is known (pdf), too, that AI and other NGOs are influenced in their areas of focus and reporting by publicity considerations – not for themselves as such, but for their mission: what will draw public attention to the very issue of human rights and produce more wide-ranging effects. What this may mean for the subjects of imbalanced attention, with respect to developing political energies and forces, is undoubtedly too complex a calculus, so apparently it is not made. Below are tables from the link above. (Click on the image once, even twice, to zoom.) Note the disparities, as to the subject nations, between “violations of personal integrity rights” as well as “deadliest armed conflicts” and nations subject to press releases and reports. There is cause to posit even greater imbalances in more recent years.

What the campaign to broaden Amnesty’s mandate fatefully disregarded was what had previously long been respected – the possibility of disagreeing about what exactly constitutes the full range of human rights. (This in contrast, say, to ideals, or what I choose to neologize as an “enlightenment,” as an alternative notion to that of an “entitlement.” One, even a nation, might be dull and unenlightened, but, presumably, this would be one’s right to remain – subjecting one to community censure, perhaps – and not an institutionalized and punishable crime.) Notions of civil and political rights are the product of centuries of evolving human debate and contestation. While some may be asserted as “self-evident,” our ability to promote them – even prosecute their absence – is likewise the product of an increasingly contracted, widely, socially agreed upon conception of human integrity. Whatever absolute truths there may be, our ability successfully, peacefully to incorporate them into social and political structures is dependent upon those truths being social constructs as well. Large numbers of well-meaning populations need to accept them as true. This is so of most civil and political rights; it is not so of many social, economic, and cultural rights. One might agree that all people should be free of hunger, or even have the civil right to obtain an abortion. It is another matter to agree on the economic system or policy that might free people from hunger and to claim that there have been human rights violations if a nation still has not ended hunger or conceives the moral issues of abortion differently. The campaign to expand AI’s mandate rejected the fundamental possibility of disagreeing over how to support those rights.

Along with having expanded the mandate, AI has ended the “work on own country” (WOOC) prohibition, as well. The idea behind the WOOC prohibition was recognition, in AI’s early and subsequent years, that AI members and supporters in closed and relatively unfree societies faced dire risks for their advocacy. Limiting AI national sections to working on the rights conditions in other nations reduced these risks. But there was a consequent and highly beneficial effect of the WOOC prohibition, particularly for open societies: it removed national members from engagement in the political, ideological disputes of their own nations, and thus advanced and reinforced the disinterested nature and objective practice of AI’s work. Now AIUSA regularly, prominently injects itself into matters of U.S. national policy. With the prohibition removed, just as AI, far beyond serving as a human rights watchdog, actually partners with governments in developing policy, AIUSA interjects itself, for instance, in United States-Mexican relations and offers policy recommendations for joint U.S.-Mexican initiatives in addressing human rights violations in Mexico. Completely gone is the once sage recognition that advocating specific policies along with the parties one critiques drops one into the same muck and mud, where policy often has uncontrollable consequences (like economic boycotts against Israel).

The unfortunate truth is that over time increasingly large numbers of AI members ceased to recognize any potential space between their ideological commitments and conceptions of human rights, sacrificing the organization’s long-sought and hard-earned  reputation as an objective advocate. It is not, anymore, only authoritarian despots who conceive of AI as a leftist organization, but large numbers of people simply to the right of it and the ideology that now clearly directs it. When AI calls the U.S. prison facility at Guantanamo, for all its flaws and failures, as it did in its 2005 annual report, “the gulag of our times,” when it promotes lectures by Noam Chomsky (infamous for his denials of the Cambodian killing fields and the Serbian concentration camps during the Bosnian war, and who claimed, shortly after the U.S. invasion to topple the Taliban, that the U.S. was perpetrating a “silent genocide”) when it participates, in whatever manner, in the degenerate enterprise of the Durban United Nations World Conference Against Racism, it loses the moral authority it earned over decades.

Human rights organizations are the intellectual and moral creations of the political left. That is not an accusation. It should be a point of pride for the left. But the hubris of some elements of the left is in the failure to situate themselves within a discourse and to proceed to view themselves, instead, as the conclusion of that discourse. It is these elements, ironically, who think so much of situatedness, who fail to situate themselves.

How else, then, in consideration of the role AI and HRW purport to play on the world scene – organizations representing, as well as humanly possible, non-partisan advocacy of commonly held principles of human rights, fairly and objectively reporting on and opposing violations of those rights – how else, then, account for the fact that HRW has a commentary section of its website. There one may find, for instance, shared blog posts from the Huffington Post, criticizing the U.S. Congress for rejecting the Goldstone Report. One may find, even, regular commentary, by Joe Stork, HRW’s controversial Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, unidentified as such, endorsing the Goldstone Report, which has been so comprehensively and substantively dismantled, and lamenting the “sadly predictable disparagement [of it] by the United States.” In a single tendentious comment a legitimate point of view and policy position is dismissed as if it were a Soviet propaganda release.

What blindness is this?

AJA

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 12:41 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

“This is Baltimore. The gods won’t save you.”

(Hat tip: Jeffrey Goldberg)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 9:49 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under A Blue Guitar, Culture Clash.

A year and and nearly two weeks ago, Julia and I left Los Angeles to travel the country by motorhome and do research for our book on contemporary Native American life. Thursday we returned to L.A., not home quite – because we’ll be setting wheels to road some more, intermittently, throughout the next year – but to a surprising little hideaway on the beach, looking out at the Pacific.

Fifty-three weeks of travel – unthinkable for some, but for me and for Julia, as our lives have evolved, an almost pressing need. Our travels started uncertainly. They didn’t always go so well. We did not reach all of the destinations on which we had set our sights, but as John Steinbeck said, “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” Our destinations and our destinies are like a ball bobbing on the ocean, and we kicking behind it. Sometimes we do, in fact, direct it exactly to where we were aiming, and so we are apt to forget that the current might just as well have gone against us.

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

Among the fascinations about human life shared both by travelers and lovers of literature – so I am doubly blessed in what absorbs me – are the varieties of those human destinies, and the more one travels, the greater number of different kinds of lives one encounters. There are those among us, the larger number, who lead settled lives of varying degree. There are those – players in the great games of power and progress that posts on this blog often address – who are driven in their lives to consequential action. Their purpose is in the work of attempting to direct that water-borne ball over the waves, for themselves and for others, and their lives would feel otherwise aimless.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

Another kind of life is that of the other travelers making their way over the earth, most from starting points different from your own, some even choosing to remain where one of their journeys has taken them. In cozy mountain villages in Laos, rambling seaside retreats along the South China Sea, in Roman train stations or filling up the tank, one crosses trajectories with so many random destinies, as one randomly happens to others. There is talk of coming and going, places one should see, a beer in a café at sunset. And if nothing else, there is one thing you all have in common: a place exists in the world called home, in whatever language, and none of you are there. You are each held out into the void of what still remains to unfold in your life, as is everyone, only made more palpable because of the newness, at every step, of the ground beneath your feet and the unfamiliarity of every moment. “There are no foreign lands,” said Robert Louis Stevenson. “It is the traveler only who is foreign.”

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

Of all the elements of travel, the originating impulse is in the elation of setting off. Traveling over land by motorhome, picking up our home (not simply ourselves, and on to some hotel, but our home) and moving on when it suited us – this became a reinvigorating joy. It reminded us each time, having rutted our wheels in a place we had stayed long enough, of the essential freedom of what we were doing. The panoramic screen of our windshield looming before us, Homer and Penelope setting their chins to the floor, Julia would lock us down and I would shift into gear, counting time into Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again”:

Goin’ places that I’ve never been.
Seein’ things that I may never see again

“There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it,” said Charles Dudley Warner. In a motorhome, that delight can come every time you draw up your levels and pull in the slides. “I just can’t wait to get on the road again.”

Some of what you can understand through travel is as plain as the West Texas expanse or a Tennessee woodland: how could people living in those places, with their histories and their struggles, possibly see the world in the same way as someone from New York City or Los Angeles or Miami or Seattle? Why should they? It is a wonder they all make up a single country. If one travels for the only profound reason a person should – to come to know the world, and oneself, and not simply dip a toe and shrink back from the cold water of the new and strange – one might reject a little less and abide a little more. Tolerance, rightly understood, is not a PC shibboleth, a guilt-ridden principle of holding no principle dear enough except the one of tolerance – it is essential humility before the immensity of experience. The whale is not greater than the eagle.

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

There are the people, the places, and yourself. There is the world that contains them all. In 1981, I traveled to Greece. I had just left my corporate life and almost certain fortune behind (offered, by the company’s owners, the final promotion on Friday – the last rung on the ladder to the top – I resigned on Monday) and was beginning, not for the first or last time, a different life. I flew first to Rome, later took a taxi to the Roma Termini railway station to catch a train to Brindisi, from where I would travel by ferry across the Adriatic Sea, along the coast of still closed and mysterious Albania, to Greece. At the rail station in Rome, I encountered two young men, one still in his twenties, like me, a slight, long-haired and wispy-bearded Canadian, the other an athletic and red-headed eighteen-year-old Brit. With all three of us headed to Greece, we chose to travel together, and for a week were the fast friends that found traveling companions can become.

The young Brit was exploring Europe on a parent-financed escape from grief. His twin brother had died, and he was seeking whatever there was of recovery in the distraction and education of travel. The still hippieish Canadian had been living overseas for ten years. At about the Brit’s age, his girlfriend had left him, and left him devastated. He took off for Europe and had returned to Canada only once: some years of living in North Africa had created havoc with his intestines, and he had returned to Canada for surgery. Now he was living in Greece on tourist visas, which he renewed every ninety days by traveling to Italy and then reentering the country. He had bowel problems that the Brit and I patiently accommodated while we remained a threesome.

“The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” – William Least Heat Moon

The Brit, of course, considered the Canadian and me vastly more experienced older fellows, and was duly impressed to learn the Canadian had been at Woodstock. I missed Woodstock because my closest friend and I had flown to California on the first independent travel of my life, while still in high school: we were ticketed for vagrancy on the Sunset Strip, hitchhiked up the Pacific Coast Highway to camp illegally in Big Sur, and made our way to Golden Gate Park and Berkeley, where our acid connection awaited us. The “promised land of my people” I called the golden state of our travels in my senior-year creative writing class.

Well, I was even younger then than the Brit.

The Brit, Canadian and I explored Brindisi together, rode the Adriatic waves to Patras, and traveled from there by bus to Athens. We hunted cheap hotels, cheap food, and toured the ruins. Then our destinations led us apart as I took another ferry from Piraeus, the port of Athens, to Crete. We exchanged addresses, determined to write, and never communicated again.

“When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon

On Crete, I walked for miles. I visited the Minoan ruins. I traveled by bus over the central mountains to the southern coast – mountains Julia would traverse twenty-five years later, though without the bus driver who crossed himself at every mountain’s-edge, unrailed switchback. At last, I landed in Matala, a former 60s hippie haven (the fossils still remained from when they shat in the caves) where the residents lived in cliffside shacks, the Greek Orthodox women black-robed from the head down in the still strong, late September sun. I set out to sit with my own long-mending heart. I checked into a pension for two dollars a night, and proceeded to shave, for the first and last time, the beard I’d sprouted on my return home from Berkeley at seventeen. I stared hard in the mirror at the man I had become since I’d grown it.

“All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

On the beach each day, I lay staring out at the wide Mediterranean sky and the sun-speckled sea beneath it, saw under sail on an imaginary horizon the ship of Odysseus, he tied to the heaving foremast by his men that he might hear and withstand the sirens’ song. In the evenings I sat on the porch of the beach taverna indulging the short-lived taste for Retsina I had acquired in Athens, smoking cigarettes end to end and contemplating my life. The sky was star-shot and beating with an elemental pulse. Once, from the tavern sound system, “Light My Fire” vibrated in the ancient night around me.

The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire

“Try to set the night on fire.”

The next morning, curious for news of the world, I walked the half mile up a dirt road to the kiosk for an International Herald Tribune. On the front page the images spread before me, the headline was bold: Anwar Sadat assassinated in Cairo.

I headed home to New York.

Most obviously, maybe most simply and surprisingly too, travel is about movement. It can be disorienting. A question for the traveler becomes how well he can accommodate, even welcome, that loss of bearings. In a motorhome, you maintain a constant living environment – you are taking your home along with you. So for a year, no matter where we were, at night particularly, the shades drawn, when we ate at the same table and slept in the same bed, wrote and backed up images and interviews – watched TV from our satellite – everything was the same. Outside might be the high Apache desert, suburban Atlanta, a Wal-Mart parking lot in Oxford Mississippi, a Virginia woodland, but inside – more than once, for a moment, I didn’t recall where I was.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

But for all I love of travel, I think I have come to appreciate nothing more than the actual motion of it. At just the right convergence of movement and what surrounds it, travel achieves a meeting of adventure and architecture. The adventure might be in sitting at the edge of the open cargo door of a small plane, a chute on your back, preparing to push yourself out on your first jump. It might be skimming the Baja coast in an ultra light or getting launched into the whispering sky in a glider, to soar and bank above the Green Mountains of Vermont. Pilots experience this all the time, ship’s captains in a different way, mountain climbers. It isn’t just the thrill of the risky challenge; it’s the motion on or over the earth. Architects do not, of course, just design constructs: they conceive spaces in which to be and move, and part of the success of the design is in the experience of moving in that space, in relation to what contains or abuts the moving body.

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

To stay confined to the grid of one’s town or at the bottom of high metropolitan canyons is to lose the sense of one’s bodily relation to the sphere one so remarkably lives upon. Climb above it all, withdraw from a part of it, as from a continent, speed over it with little or nothing of the human in your way, as the sphere itself turns, without regard to you, and you perceive your relation to the earth, the universe, in a different way. I recall the night lights of Brindisi fading in the distance, as they would have for Virgil almost two thousand years before, one land receding, a far one waiting, and all our lives, on all the ships, bobbing on the water. I can still recover to my senses the worldly stillness and silence of the upper Mekong River, in Laos, as we motored beneath the high banks, the lone fisherman on a skiff oblivious to us as we passed. The clouds that revolved around the peak of Machu Picchu as we climbed. The mesas that loomed and receded as our home on wheels moved on.

“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

The explorers and builders of civilizations who follow such routes of travel may feel emboldened by the enormity of the nature they reach to conquer; if they are wise beyond the norm they understand that the measure of their achievement is in the smallness of the conqueror.

“A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse… and thinks of home.” – Carl Burns.

Before we continue our travels here at home next year, we will fly in January to Buenos Aires and Uruguay. Julia will be teaching a photo workshop there. (It is a fun and seasoned group of travelers going, by the way, lovers of photography all, and there are still spaces open, if you are a photographer at any level who would like to learn from the teacher PhotoMedia Magazine named its 2008 “Photo Person of the Year.”)  We were last in Buenos Aires in 2005, and though we had hoped to make it to Montevideo then, we didn’t manage it. This time Carnival Week there is part of the itinerary. The most scenic way to travel from Buenos Aires to Montevideo is by boat, an hour or three, all depending, across the Río de la Plata, as it opens onto the Atlantic. I anticipate it even now, the sense of great waters beneath me, and of an ocean ahead, our boat breaking the waves as the wind tears up my eyes, and I squinting for the first sight of a new destination, standing, for all my life, in the utter joy of moving in its direction.

“The map is not the territory.” – Alfred Korzybski

AJA

Photography by Julia Dean

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 7:58 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under On The Road.

BloodLotus

"Georgia's mask" by Megan Pinch

Issue 14 October 2009

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Global Viewpoints

Indigenous Peoples

My poem “Myth” appears in the latest issue of BloodLotus, just hitting the screenstands. “Aboriginal Sin,” which originally appeared in Tikkun, is now reprinted in Global Viewpoints: Indigenous Peoples. The textbook anthologizes significant works and statements on the situation of indigenous peoples around the world, and for teachers provides a comprehensive collection specifically prepared for whole course or single unit instruction. It is an excellent overview for the general reader too.

AJA

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 6:28 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country, The Singularity.