After the Future

The Week in Politics

There's not much to say because it's rather like watching the tide come in.  It's slow, but inevitable.

Or to put it another way, the Clintons are foundering.  It's just a question of time before they sink for good. Their flailing about has been unnecessary, and it makes them look desperate and quite frankly silly, especially Bill. It seems as though every time Hillary has a bad week, Bill has been in the news. All she and he have done is alienate the people, namely the uncommitted superdelegates--and some who are already committed to Clinton, whose help they need the most.  They are going down; it's just a question whether they will accept it on their own or be forced to.

I think Obama will come out of all this fine.  Every candidate has flaws; it's just a question of how he handles them.  And there will continue to be problems and  mistakes, and people will stay stupid or distorted things.  That's politics. It ain't a game of perfect. It's a game of imperfectly realizing certain contingent possibilities at a given point in time. And with Obama certain things will be possible that would not be if Clinton were elected. It's his moment, but that doesn't mean that what he makes possible will be realized, only that it will be more likely. I think the country with varying levels of awareness recognizes this, and it will look past Obama's flaws to elect him.

Obama slowly waxes and Clinton wanes. So now it's just a question of how it will play out, and I don't have a vantage point to have much useful to say about that.  I will  have some things to say, if I think my perspective offers something not read everywhere else, but I am more interested now in issues that pertain more to the cultural than the political sphere, and I'll probably be reading more and posting less, or maybe posting just in spurts. I want to get back into Taylor and I want to think more about this business of identity, about which my posts here have been my own way of flailing. But that's where my interests lie.

Cultural Identity II

In my post the other day, my fundamental point was that too many, probably most, people who call themselves Christian tend to look at the Gospel message through their tribal filters rather than to look at their tribal culture and its presuppositions through a Christian filter.  No one is able competely to transcend the culture into which he was born, but at least since the axial period, especially in Greece, Israel, and India a certain kind of individual appeared--a philosopher, prophet, or enlightened guru--who stood in relationship to the culture as someone who had one foot outside of it and one in. These figures, particularly in the West, have played a fundamentally subversive role because of their way of challenging the given assumptions of the tribal mentality and calling the tribe to move beyond their tribally defined, i.e., socially constructed limitations. These are the type for the fringe people to which I adverted in my last post.

The Judaeo-Christian stream differed from the Greek and Indian one because it validated time in a way the other two didn't. I and others would argue that a purely Greek or Indian idea of time would have made a Vico or Hegel or Marx, or even Darwin an impossibility. The idea of progress or of progressive politics is an impossibility without this biblically rooted mythos providing  the narrative context, even if it is not consciously acknowledged.

The Judaeo-Christian narrative sees time as having a beginning and end rather than in the cyclical terms the other two did.  Time begins with Genesis in a garden and ends with Apocalypse in a city, the New Jerusalem. I would argue that the implied progression here is from embedded consciousness to a re-embedded consciousness that we haven't yet learned what it is.  We're still in the last throes of disembedding and only taking the most preliminary steps toward re-embedding. The French and Russian revolutions were, I would argue, failed premature attempts at such a re-embedding because the people seeking to effect it in those societies were not sufficiently disembedded or mature enough in their individualism to succeed. I would argue likewise that the developed societies are more progressed in their indvidualism, but not yet mature enough to successfully re-embed.  That's at the heart of this awkward, neither-here-nor-there stage we're in at the moment.  We know we can't go backward, but we haven't a clue how to go forward.

So I don't think many people would argue against the proposal that the idea of historical progress depends on the biblical mythos, but who believes in historical progress anymore? Since the two world wars of the last century, the idea of progress has fallen on bad times because it was linked to Enlightenment ideal of rationality--that progress was linked to an emergence from or disembedding from superstition and irrationality into a disembedded world inhabited by free individuals ruled by reason and science.  But what we got was more confusion and bloody chaos. The transformation of one of Europe's most enlightened cultures into a pack of genocidal madmen and science's production of the nuclear capability to destroy the world several times over and the totalitarian subjugation of huge swaths of the globe by ruthless Jacobin/Marxists inspired by enlightenment ideals of justice and equality  put a little crimp in any optimism people felt about Enlightenment way of framing progress. 

Does anybody believe in progress anymore?  What exactly do secular political progressives think we are progressing toward, anyway? It doesn't matter where we're going for most of these, because their tribe believes that all that matters is that humans progress away from all that murky religious irrational stuff from the past. They define themselves more by what they are trying to get away from than by what they are trying to move toward.  And so the scientific/enlightenment idea of progress persists among these for want of anything better, but I would argue that it trends toward the cyborgism I alluded to in my last post.  Progress and human evolution will be humanly engineered through biological and information technologies.   The potential disasters here of a spiritually naive and morally bankrupt human race creating such new beings has been well imagined in science fiction from Frankenstein to Battlestar Galactica.  It's also the story of the Tower of Babel. The "singularity" will be the true Apocalypse.

But my point is not to decry these developments.  I accept them as inevitable until a robust spiritually inspired alternative emerges. And now there simply is not one that has broad cultural credibility.  That's my reason for having little regard for the role of the churches in dealing with this monumental challenge. They have, to use the current argot,  branding problems that make it virtually impossible for them to be taken seriously except by those who are still tribally identified with them. I don't see this as a permanent condition, but renewal will come from the wilderness fringes, not from the establishment center.

For my longstanding argument here has been that we are in a decadent period, and by decadent I follow Jacques Barzun's definition as a temporary phase during which a culture loses any sense of future possibility.  As individuals we may have our ambitions and hopes, but as a culture we do not--certainly not in the way the West viewed progress in the 19th century. So the point of my last post was to argue that it is pointless to lament the spiritual darkness  into which we have been plunged and counterproductive to scramble this way and that to find some unworkable fix for it the way conservatives seem bent on doing. Rather than lament to the loss of what had been vital tribal and blood connections, connections to the land, and nature,  we should embrace their loss and plunge into the darkness as if into a Cloud of Unknowing.  Because unlike the Desert Fathers who felt compelled to leave the tribe behind by plunging into the desert wilderness, the wilderness has come to us and is stripping us of our tribal mentalities whether we will it or not. Not everybody can embrace the darkness in freedom this way, but if enough do, they will be the ones who will move us out of decadence to whatever is next.

Cultural Identity I

And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brothers?  And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brothers!  For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother. Mark 3:33ff

You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5:43ff

Do you have a cultural identity?  Do you need one?  Is it just given to you at birth by your family, or can you choose it?  Can you have several? At the same time?  Sequentially? If there's one thing Americans are confused about, it's their cultural identity. The American pastime of reinventing oneself, for instance, is only possible in a culture in which any sense of cultural identity has become so anemic as not to matter. But clearly it matters to some: those who think they have it either want to keep it or want to escape from it or trade it in for a new one, and those that feel they don't have it, try to get something like it by becoming part of something larger. It's understandable. The one thing that nobody wants is to feel alone and isolated. Solitude is to be escaped, not embraced. No one wants to be thought of as a loner.

And yet modernity seems bent on creating a society of loners, generating Mersaults by the truckload, so many isolated "strangers"  complacent that their flat, isolated, anomic, instinct-driven, talking-animal existence is all there is.  For this is what the human being without culture is--uncultivated  and soulless, not because he hasn't a soul, but because the soul only develops vigorously in conditions that favor it. Understanding what those conditions are for us now and here and promoting them is of critical importance at this time in this place in human history. 

For there are forces everywhere working for the destruction of the human soul, but precious little working for its cultivation. One cannot look to the churches for a solution, for they do not have one. The churches are themselves tribal enclaves, and they have rarely been the locus for creative problem solving; at their best they preserve resources for individuals and groups seeking solutions to draw upon. But the solution will not come from the churches and their leadership; it will come from the fringes, the wilderness places, from those who are monks and nuns, despite themselves, shorn of their cultural identity living in the cultural wasteland modernity has created, embracing it in solitude, absorbing it into themselves, learning from it, and then returning to teach the rest of us what they have learned. 

For here's the paradox: the Judaeo-Christian tradition is one of movement from embeddedness to disembeddedness from tribal identity to individual identity, from submersion in the golden-calf worshiping clan to the lonely encounter with the I AM on the mountaintop, from exterior group enforced laws to the law that works intuitively in the heart.  For the people we have most to learn from are not those who know a lot, but those that have "wise blood", as Flannery O'Connor would put it. Her Hazel Motes is one of those monks referred to in the preceding paragraph.

The paradox lies in that we need to be a part of something, a larger living community or tradition, and we need to be stripped of everything.  We need to be connected and in communion, but we cannot cling to the encumbrances that get in the way of realizing the kind of connections for which we were created. The old tribal connections no longer work in a healthy way; we need to find a way of connecting that differs dramatically from the old tribal connections of blood and kinship.  We are all meant sooner or later to transcend blood and clan. Some in the past did it on their own. Now we're being forced to do it across the board as a society. Resistance leads to reactionary political and cultural movements and in the long run is futile. Embracing the loss of the old connections needs to be imagined as a way forward.

We need to find a way of connecting that is  counter-instinctual--that's the point of the admonition to love one's enemies, which is the extreme case meant to dramatize to our imaginations the enormous difficulty and unnaturalness of the task. To "love the enemy" is utterly different than "to love humanity". The first task is concrete, the second abstract. We know with vivid specificity who our enemies are. They are the ones who either get our blood boiling or those whom we do whatever we can to avoid.

Loving the Other is not something anybody does easily or consistently. But if one is serious about being a Christian, he has to think about how it might be possible and how the obstacles to practice of such a love might be removed. This is a life-long project in our personal lives, but it is also a challenge posed to us collectively in the cultural sphere.  For one thing is clear, it simply is not possible to love the Other in a world in which one's tribal loyalties come first.

And so in the past, when tribal loyalties were the primary reality for everyone, only a few extraordinary souls attained what we might think of as a more fully realized Christianity. We called them saints. Everyone else, though they may have been decent enough human beings, lived primarily as pagans, no matter what they professed to believe. For the main characteristic of paganism is tribal embeddedness. It's simply not possible to live as a more fully realized Christian if one is deeply embedded in a tribal culture.

Because I recognize that God writes with crooked lines, I am not a moral absolutist in anything--including issues relating to violence, war, and peace.  I won't, for instance, judge Bonhoeffer's choice, and I am loathe to judge any individual's choice of conscience in any matter.  But we must be vigorous critics of the public mood and the toxic groupthink it generates. We can judge it because we all participate in it and experience it to some extent. And the groupthink that supported this invasion of Iraq, for instance, was as contrary to the spirit of the gospels as anything I can imagine. To the degree that anyone was influenced to support the war by the groupthink complex that possessed war supporters in this country, he  is morally culpable.  The complex is evil, the people who participate in it are not evil except the degree they become servants of the complex. Someone like Dick Cheney has all the symptoms of a man deeply possessed, and John McCain is not much better.  There have been times when McCain made some sense, but it's as if the human being John McCain has stopped speaking and the power complex has taken over.

We are at a time now where there is no stronger moral imperative than that to transcend the tribal mentality and its groupthink to find a more healthful way to form human connections. That's the paradox of modernity: while on the one hand it has stripped us of the cultural supports that have traditionally nourished the soul, it has created the conditions on a collective level for us to transcend our tribal limitations and to create something new. So much depends on what that new thing will be. Will it be new forms of toxic embeddedness along the lines of what we saw in Germany, Russia, and China in the last century?  Or will it be something more healthful but as yet unimagined?

There's a lot more to be said about this, and quite frankly I'm just writing here not because I have any fully developed ideas about it. I am simply trying to work it out for myself as I'm going along here at this time and in this place. But here's where I think I'm going with it: We are entering a critical time in human evolution during which our understanding about what it means to be human will be dramatically re-imagined. Our understanding about what it means to be human is terribly muddled. Most people's thinking about it is an incoherent mixture of premodern ideas that embrace soul and spirit and modern/postmodern notions that humans are nothing more than talking animals or wetware machines.

The the animal/machine idea is abhorrent, but the soul and spirit ideas are linked to tribal and cultural supports that are no longer sustainable and which now clutter things up to make the re-imagination task more difficult. The trend toward one form or another of cyborgism wins by default unless we find a way that retrieves elements of the premodern and represents them as a robust postmodern alternative that does not depend on the older tribal loyalties and other cultural accoutrements of the past. Christians, rather than looking at the loss of their cultural identities as an evil to be resisted, should embrace it as the necessary movement from embeddedness to disembeddeness which has been at the heart of the Judaeo-Christian impulse since the time when our father Abraham was called to leave Ur to go into the desert.

The Judaeo-Christian impulse throughout history has been fundamentally about moving out of the past and into the future, and that has meant out of embeddeness into increasing levels of disembeddedness. Those who have lived from this impulse have given up the comforts of the past to believe in seemingly impossible promises. They have trusted, like Job, that even when everything is stripped away, that their essential identity, their 'I am'  created in the image and likeness remains, and that if the great saints are to be believed, it's only when everything else is stripped away  that we are revealed to ourselves and see no longer through a glass darkly but face to face. It is not possible to willfullly strip everything away, but we should not resist the historical forces that gradually peel off the layers that hide and too often suffocate the unconsuming fire that burns within.

Class vs. Race

From Sarah Churchwell:

Everywhere Obama is praised for "telling the truth about race" -- but the success of his "race speech" is incessantly measured along class lines, because Obama actually charted a course through the crisscrossing lines of race and class, a complex social web that he described with great delicacy, but never named.

What was most remarkable about this speech to my mind was not that Obama confronted race "head-on," but that he repeatedly, and correctly, called race "a distraction," on both sides of the color line, from class issues. Just as black anger often proved counter-productive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze -- a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans also widens the racial divide.

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: Race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will be distracted by the specter of race. So why has no one noticed that the much vaunted "race speech" is also a class speech?

The answer to that is very complicated, but its roots can be traced in large part to what Obama referred to as the nation's "original sin" of slavery. In order to tell the truth about race in the U.S., we must tell the truth about slavery: which is that slavery was not racially motivated; it was economically motivated, and justified by means of race.

Race was invented in order to rationalize slavery: If black people are inferior, they deserve enslavement (or so went the logic). Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld. Slavery was simply replaced by a new feudal system known as sharecropping. The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty -- and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

It's harder to talk about class in America than it is to talk about race. It's not surprising that Churchwell writes for a paper in the UK.  It's simply not a subject that an American journalist would touch if he wants to have a career in the mainstream media.

We think about class in cultural categories rather than in economic categories, and all the confusion follows from that.  We don't see George Bush as a member of the power elite because he's a fundamentalist Christian and talks like a redneck. Many Americans deluded themselves into thinking that he was a regular guy that they could sit down and have a beer with: "He's alright.  Not like that Al Gore fella, or Kerry."

Americans think that they have a classless society, but they are profoundly committed to class, even if they are not aware of it.  Instead they call it the American Dream. This dream stipulates that any American or one of his  children can become royalty, you know, like Donald Trump. So we can't critique class arrangements  in America because to do so would require a critique of the American Dream. America isn't America if it doesn't give everybody the "opportunity" to become a millionaire, or now with inflation, a billionaire.

It's part of our dysfunctional mythology, a mythology that surreptitiously measures human worth primarily in economic terms and comes up with all kinds of excuses to justify it, just like the southerners justified slavery and Jim Crow. Most Americans would probably insist, good Christians that they are, that they don't measure human worth materialistically, but they still subscribe to the validity of the underlying economic-worth mythology. The contradictions are not something these Americans are prone to think about too much. It's just part of the cruder level of the Calvinist narrative they unconsciously absorbed in childhood.

Nevertheless, this is the big contradiction that shorts out the brain and makes it impossible to think clearly about our economic arrangements. It's a contradiction that makes cogent analysis seem un-American rather than just plain common sense.  And this in turn structurally reinforces the elements in the American system that insure over time that the rich to get richer and those in the middle and at the bottom get poorer.

That this is happening since the so-called Reagan Revolution is obvious, and the evidence for it is powerful (start with the hardly radical Kevin Philipps if you need to be eased into it), but still we refuse to talk about it. It's too hard to think about; it requires understanding something about big picture. And even though it's the common experience so many Americans who are feeling the squeeze, It's not common sense to talk about it because it has been branded as leftist class warfare talk. That's what those leftists in the universities talk about, and Main Street does not see them as part of their tribe.

The Materialist American Dream is a mythology that structurally reinforces the power elite's strategy to divide and conquer, and so we all lose by default.  And so the power elite during the Reagan/Bush period, most intensively since the Robber Baron era, have gradually imposed its agenda without a whimper of resistance from the Main Street citizenry who pay the price for it. And people with any sense wonder why the media gets all caught up in whether Obama is wearing his flag pin or whether his pastor or wife hates America? The power elite smile that Cheshire cat smile. It's just too easy to keep Americans distracted.

Churchwell ends her piece with these two paragraphs:

I am not saying that race per se doesn't exist, or isn't a problem in the U.S. On the contrary. But we will never solve the problem of race in America until we do exactly what Obama suggests: See it for the distraction it is. It was invented to deflect attention away from economic, legal and political inequalities. And the longer the Democrats ponder the complexities of identity politics, the more distracted they will become from the issues that are actually driving voters -- including their utter disillusionment with the current administration and its catastrophic policies.

The irony is that Obama's speech urging us not to be distracted by race has so far had quite the opposite effect. Obama now needs to confront with equal candor the lesson we were taught by that "first black president": It's the economy, stupid.

At some point, let us hope, Americans are going to learn how to separate out the cultural from the economic issues in the political sphere.   Until they do so, things will remain hopelessly muddled.

I Approve This Message

Pretty funny:

(h/t TPM)

Obama's Race Speech III

I think this has been a good week for Obama.  We knew the race question was going to come up in a more explicit way than the innuendo strategy promoted by the Clintons; it was just a question of when. And it was also a question of how Obama would respond.  It's hard to think that he could have handled it any better.  And the polling at the end of the week seems to bear out the hope that most Americans would see it that way. 

That impenetrable thirty percent on the far right will never be swayed; the question, as always, is what the thirty percent in the middle is thinking.  There are some in that middle group, including Democrats, that still lean more right than left on questions of race, but I think the shift among Democrats, toward Obama, if it wasn't already, is now clearly evident. Two events yesterday mark it.

The first was the Richardson endorsement and the second is the Allen and Vanderhei Politico article getting a lot of attention in which the writers point out the obvious: that Clinton cannot win. So what if she wins PA; she still can't win the nomination without the superdelegates. No one in the media wants to say it, and Obama supporters don't want to say it for fear of jinxing it, but the superdelegates simply are not going to give it to Clinton.  If anything, after Richardson, they might now give it to Obama to put an end to this madness. 

That's maybe too much to hope for, but the superdelegates' ability to end it now, it seems to me, would be the main benefit of having superdelegates. If they have any doubts about Obama, they should be dispelled after that speech. This guy is more presidential than any Democrat, including the Clintons and Gore, in the last half century. Richardson is right: he's got something special: real leadership capabilities rather than being the typical game-playing political hack. And the superdelegates can put an end to the Clintons' desperate efforts to do anything they can to make us think otherwise.

P.S.  The psychology in the media regarding Clinton's strength is oddly persistent. Yesterday on NPR I heard the newsreader talk about Clinton's win in Texas. It's as if the presumption of a Clinton victory has been so deeply ingrained in our national consciousness that we cannot bring ourselves to believe that she has lost even when she has. But the Allen/Vanderhei article might break the spell. I hope so.

P.P.S.  Josh Marshal thinks along the same lines here: "I wonder whether the collapse of the revote negotiations, the revelation that the campaign is in debt and the Richardson endorsement together are collectively forcing a moment of realization."

Obama's Race Speech II

On one level, this is a statement of racial solidarity. But on another, it's an argument that the church is the embodiment of the community it serves, with all its imperfections, which Obama bluntly describes. This is a very old, very "Catholic" idea of the church as an organic expression of "the people" as they happen to exist. It is likely to be baffling to those white Protestant Americans who think of church membership as more of a matter of consumer preference, doctrinal agreement or family heritage (none of which seem to have been major factors in Obama's original "conversion" at Trinity UCC) and who also probably don't understand why Obama didn't just choose a different congregation the first time he heard something objectionable from Wright's pulpit.  Ed Kilgore

Kilgore's piece at TPM Cafe is worth reading. Obama may have chosen this church rather than to have been born into it, but does any sane person question the  sincerity of his conversion and his loyalty to the man who was instrumental in effecting it? I can understand why secularists might be puzzled by this, but any believer should not be.  And that's why I think Main Street will be receptive to Obama's speech.  That's why this speech, IMO, was so skillful and effective; it appeals to both Main Street and the puditocracy.  The pundits do not think Main Street will appreciate it for the same reasons it does, and they are right about that.  Main Street will respond because the speech talks to its every day experience.

Kilgore also tries to put Wright's "God damn America" comment into a broader context of prophetic preaching style. Isn't he just talking about "blowback", and isn't blowback just a word for the ancient biblical idea that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children and grandchildren. If you are uncomfortable with biblical language call it karma or think of it as 'what goes around comes around'. 

Past generations must be held accountable to us, just as we must be held accountable for what we don to future generations. It's an idea either incomprehensible or too embarrassing to take seriously by most in the puditocracy, and it's an unpopular idea in the corridors of power, no matter how ostensibly "biblical" our leader in the White House is. But deep down most of us recognize the validity of the idea that actions have consequences, not just on the physical level, but on a moral level as well.

And while white America seems to be in a permanent state of denial about the sins of its forefathers, black Americans for good reason are not. Whatever the politics of the situation, it's clear that Wright was not talking utter nonsense, but about a reality most Americans would rather not face up to. That's what prophetic preaching is supposed to do. Our government has often acted badly, and particularly in the last seven years.  At some level it is morally accountable. 

Anyway, regardless whether you agree or disagree with the legitimacy of Wright's ideas, Obama cannot be associated with them; neither will he be disloyal to his friend just because there's a risk that many Americans will be simplistic in their interpretation of Wright's preaching style. I'd bet a good chunk of change that this "complexity" isn't alll that hard for Main Street to understand, though. I think it mirrors the complexity of most people's relationships. The biggest obstacle is the the libertarian/consumerist mentality, which, as with most things, makes people obtuse:

. . .the whole argument still relies on some religious exceptionalism. Something like: "It's okay to belong a church where you don't agree with what the pastor says because the church represents the community... good and bad." We don't tend to make that argument about any other institution. If I were a regular at a bar where the bartender was a fascist, wouldn't you say: "Uh... why do you go there?" If I shopped at a store that exclusively sold products made by child labor (or worse, if I shopped at Wal-Mart) wouldn't you say: "Uh, why do you shop there?"

I just have to reject the notion that different rules should apply to a church just because it's part of religion. destor23

I suspect this consumerist notion is at the heart of many people's concern about Obama's relationship with Wright. It's an idea that is  so alien to me that I find it hard to take it seriously. Nevertheless, I'm sure lots of people think this way.  My hope is that most people understand their lives more like I do, or like DancingBear does:

I think the point is that bartenders, pastors, grandmothers, uncles--in fact, any of us, are not simply "racists" or "fascists" (or liberals or conservatives or whatever).

Perhaps your bartenders has some stupid political views which he occasionally expresses, but never really does anything about. But you also know that he looks after his patrons, gently cutting them off before they get too plastered, getting them a ride home, talking to them about their troubles. And he is respectful of his wife and caring toward his children. And you know there is this bartender down the street who expresses political views which match your own, but you know he's an ass in his personal life.

My late Italian-American father-in-law expressed many ethnic and racial slurs. But he had many more black friends and business associates than I ever will, through his years of working as a fight manager and nightclub owner. As I grew to know him, and to learn about the course of his life, I understood how this paradox had developed in him. And I could love and respect him for the totality of what he was, while I rejected his occasional hateful language.

What Obama said was that he knows much more about Wright than what is in those clips, from many, many other sermons, from his many private discussions with him, and from watching his actions and interactions as the pastor of a church which, from the reports which I've seen, appears to be very much in the mainstream, and a very positive social force in the community.

And Obama said that he understood how Wright's background had led him to a certain point of view about racism being endemic in this country, but that he thinks Wright is clearly wrong on that point. But that given all that he knows much more about Wright than his position on that one point, he still believe Wright deserves his love and respect for the entirety of his person.

Isn't this the way most Americans operate? Do we love people less because they occasionally say things that make us cringe?  Sure, some people impose an ideological litmus test to determine who will be their friends, but it's pathological if that's the only thing they care about. If I dislike someone, it's not because of his or her political views. Obama's standing by his friend humanizes him, and while the idiots with the consumerist libertarian mentality might take him to task, I think Main Street understands where Obama is coming from and will cut him some slack.  There will always be a significant idiot factor, and all of us are idiots some of the time,  but I refuse to accept that most people are idiots most of the time.

P.S. Along those lines, forestwalker, I hope that the people to which you referred are just going through a temporary bout of idiocy and will come back to themselves shortly.

Obama's Race Speech

I haven't written about the Wright affair because it doesn't matter what he said or what people think about what he said. What matters is how Obama handles it, and this morning he did about as good a job of it as I could imagine.

It's refreshing to hear somebody speak truthfully and thoughtfully about issues no one ever talks about because they are considered radioactive.  But that's why this guy needs to be our next president.  He can pull it off. You should listen to the whole speech--it lasts about forty minutes--but if you are short of time start around the twenty-minute mark.  Here's an excerpt where he talks about black and white resentment:

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination.  That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.  Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.  For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.  That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends.  But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.  At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.  The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.  That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.  But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community.  Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.  Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch.  They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor.  They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.  So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. 

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company.  But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation.  Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends.  Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.  And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding. 

This is where we are right now.  It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.  Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

Obama has impressed me time and again with his ability to take problems and to turn them on their heads. It's this ability to speak in a way we can all understand and relate to while eschewing safe political cliches that makes him so important for us at this time.  Everyone in the field has seemed like the hollowest empty suit when they stand next to him. And this speech is another example why that's true.

For some politicians, their words are, in fact,  just words, because there are no ideas being expressed in their words.  Their words are simply tactical. Words are the windows through which  the message sender's ideas are released to his audience, and if the words are empty of any real content, of any alive ideas, they simply have no effect. But real ideas have real effects. And I trust that this speech will have effects.

Local Interview with Samantha Power

This is worth reading to get a feel for both the woman and the candidate she served.  We can only hope that she finds her way back to a role serving what we hope will be the Obama administration. An excerpt:

Q: What is the biggest lesson you have learned in the aftermath of your controversial comments about Hillary Clinton?

A: Well (pauses) ... what is so abhorrent about my comments is not only are they hurtful and hateful; they don't reflect my real views of Senator Clinton. These are not thoughts I had been having alone in my own home, storing up to vent over these 14 months.

I really just had one of those bad moments when you lose your temper and you say something that sticks. It sticks out there as something associated with Senator Clinton and also with me -- all because of me.

What is the lesson? The lesson is that I wish somebody would invent a device that would allow me to go back in time. (Chuckles.) People keep saying to me that the lesson is: Don't say anything off the record. But I think the real lesson is don't say hateful and hurtful things anywhere. I know that sounds too ponderous. You got to keep control of your temper and not let the heat of the campaign ... cause those sentiments to bubble up in you.

God forbid we have foreign policy advisers who actually take responsibility for their mistakes.

Racism vs. Tribism

Racism in America after slavery, I would argue, has been less about skin color and more about power clashes between tribal cultures in the North as well as in the South. Southern racism is different from northern racism because the tribal alignments and conflicts are different. So it's not really racism, but "tribism".  Humans have a deep need to define themselves as us over against an "Other", and in  doing so race and religion play a role, but they are secondary to tribal/cultural affiliation. Tribe is primary, religion is only relevant insofar as it supports the tribal worldview and its interests.  Being a Protestant or Catholic in Northern Ireland, for instance, has  nothing to do with the Christianity of the gospels.  Religion (or race) are simply tribal markers, significant not in themselves, but only as they point to likely tribal affiliation.

The persistence of racism in America is deeply linked to the resistance of African American descendants of the slaves to assimilate the way most of the European immigrants did, or even the new African immigrants like Obama's father. This is not only because the descendants of the slaves who sought assimilation were refused; it's also in large part rooted in the fact that African American culture is rich and venerable; it was "home" for American blacks, a home that Europeans immigrants didn't have in America in the same way, so the Europeans were more motivated to assimilate, although of course many did not. 

Many, maybe most, American blacks felt no need to assimilate, and to the degree that any minority refuses assimilation, it is looked at by the already-assimilated as the Other. I would add that the situation of the descendants of the slaves in America is very similar to that of the American Indian. Neither group immigrated here in the hope of becoming assimilated Americans, and the idea of joining the culture of those who oppressed them smacked of treasonous Uncle Tomism. It still does. 

A similar phenomenon is the way ethnic blue collar types loathe yuppies, especially the ones that left the old neighborhoods to become one. Yuppies, when they are assimilated former ethnics, are people who want to forget where they came from. They have left the tribe and its values behind to become deracinated narcissists concerned about their careers and investments more than their tribal loyalties and responsibilities. That at least is how they are caricatured. The film "Namesake" is an interesting study in this regard.

Assimilation, though, is inevitable in a generation or two for people who for whatever reason no longer live in those old neighborhoods. The kids just don't get it, and the lure of the consumer fusion culture is too strong. Cosby, Smiley, Oprah, and Obama are assimilated blacks, the way I'm assimilated Irish. Once you're assimilated, you get along with everybody because your old ethnic or racial tribal identity has become virtually meaningless.  But back in the old neighborhoods, the Irish, Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans and Blacks couldn't stand one another; it's only after they left and experienced some degree of assimilation that they could get along.

I think that explains in part the initial lack of enthusiasm in the black community for Obama's candidacy.  He looks like them, but he has signaled in so many ways that he is not really one of them--and he isn't. His father was an immigrant; his mother was white. He went to Harvard. He's about as assimilated as you can get. That's why educated whites feel comfortable with him. It's not that they are less racist than anyone else; it's just that he doesn't send off the Otherness vibe the way Al Sharpton does. Obama is black the way John Kennedy was Irish Catholic. and, like Kennedy did, Obama charms Americans because he's just different enough in his having retained an atavistic black eloquence the way Kennedy retained an Irish eloquence and wit.

But the one is not black nor was the other Irish in the deeply tribal sense, even though their blackness and Irishness causes or caused discomfort for nativists and know-nothings. The level of "racial" comfort/discomfort non-Blacks feel for Blacks is primarily cultural or tribal, not physical, and Obama feels comfortable. Much of Obama's core support comes now from assimilated educated Americans, in other words people very much like Obama, and more recently from African Americans who have now come to embrace him as Irish-Americans embraced John Kennedy. 

So why do the blue-collar ethnic tribes seem to prefer Hillary? I think lingering racism plays a peripheral role, but it's certainly not because these ethnic blue-collar types see her as one of their tribe.  I think it has more to do with her being a known brand, and predictably bland, i.e., not trendy, no surprises,  so therefore relatively more trustworthy and down to earth. They could care less about transformational politics, and they buy the argument that Hillary's competence and experience are more likely to get things done than Obama's eloquence.  She's postioned herself as a fighter and a hard worker and contrasts that with Obama as merely a talker.  To the degree that they buy that characterization of the two candidates, Clinton aligns more with what they feel comfortable with.