After the Future

More on Dubai Ports Deal

The defenders of this deal make an argument that comes down to this: anyone who thinks this is a bad deal is racist. Arabs can run our ports as well as, say, the Chinese.  We're living in a global economy--a flat world as TF is won to say. This is how it works.  Stop being such a provincial, nativist rube. 

So OK. I'm not saying that some people don't think that way, and I suspect this kind of nativism might be one of the influences motivating  so many Republicans to oppose this deal, but that's not my reason or the reason of anybody with any common sense to oppose it. This is not about American attitudes toward Arabs; it's about Arab attitudes toward the U.S.

This  argument is another example of the elephant-in-the-room scenario that I posted about yesterday.  We have this way of not being able to talk about the obvious because we're concerned about how it might make us look.  It's the fear that most people have of feeling foolish for declaring that the Emperor has no clothes.  So, Gee, if people think I'm against abortion, they'll think I'm a right-wing wacko looking for an opportunity to firebomb a clinic.  Or, gee, if I think that the biggest political issue of the day is the aggregation of power in the hands of the wealthy, I must be a communist who wants to foment class warfare.  So for fear of being branded, lots of people refrain from pointing out the obvious. You don't want people to think you're a Bush hater or an Arab hater, so let this Dubai Deal pass.

After all, it's only my bias that prevents me from recognizing the bigger truths: the UAE is a staunch American ally, and officials there mean us no harm.  They have a stellar reputation.  They are as competent a company in performing these tasks as any you'll find in the world.  You're just a liberal hypocrite who's looking to pile on when Bush does something that looks stupid.

First of all, I'm not a liberal.  I'm a radical centrist, so don't brand me as a liberal because on some issues I happen to agree with them. Second, Is anybody saying that the management of Dubai Ports is in collusion with Osama and is working secretly with him to smuggle a nuke into New York harbor?  Of course not.  But the company's official position is not the position of most Arabs regarding their feelings toward the United States. Do we really think that Arab sentiment in Dubai is significantly different than it is elsewhere.  It's one thing what the Arab elites think and feel, and it's another what they think and feel in the streets. 

So let's call an elephant an elephant: Most Arabs are not taking a dispassionate business-like attitude toward the U.S., and so it would seem prudent that no matter what the official policy of the company or its government, it is not necessarily the attitude of its employees.  And it would be a matter of prudence that we would want to minimize the risk of putting employees, even if they bear no ill will toward the United States, in positions where they would be vulnerable to terrorist influence because of family or other connections.

That's just common sense.   We're vulnerable enough as it is, but we're increasing our vulnerability by a factor of ten with this kind of a deal.  Again, this is not about American attitudes toward Arabs; it's about Arab attitudes toward the U.S. At this time when Arab hatred of the U.S. and its policies is so intense, you don't give an Arab company a  contract  like this. We should be into minimizing our exposure to risk, and infiltration is one of the biggest risks, and this deal increases exposure instead.  There's  got to be a better alternative.   

I'm not always an Arianna fan, but I think she nails it in a post today:

You don't need to be a member of the Council on Foreign Relations to grasp that a country that embraced the Taliban, was a financial hub for the 9/11 attackers, and whose own ports were used by notorious Pakistani scientist A.Q. Kahn to smuggle nuclear components to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, probably shouldn't be handed the keys to shipping operations in New York, New Jersey, Miami, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Orleans . . .

This deal is a nonstarter and a no-brainer. A Harriet Miers debacle to the hundredth- power. Next thing you know, the president will be assuring us that he knows what's in the heart of Dubai Ports World, Inc.

But instead of pulling back from the deal and hurriedly looking for the port operations equivalent of Sam Alito, the president stomped his feet, held his breath, and stuck out his veto.

Bush hasn't vetoed a single bill in five years. Turns out his line in the sand can be found in the deserts of the UAE.

Here are just some of the questions that need to be answered: Why was it approved in little more than half the 45-days mandated by Congress? Why didn't the president find out about the deal until it was already done? Why wasn't Congress briefed about the transaction before it was approved? What role did the corporate connections of Treasury Secretary Snow and newly appointed Maritime Administration head David Sanborn play in winning the White House's backing? Was the deal tied to the pending trade agreement the administration is negotiating with the UAE?

It also needs to be said, that this administration has given us no reason to trust it. They have proven themselves colossally incompetent, especially in matters as they relate to the Middle East.  It has lost all right to the benefit of the doubt. You cannot consider this deal in isolation; it has to be understood as having occurred within the larger pattern of Bush administration thinking and behavior. My assumption is that they are doing things for the wrong reasons until they prove otherwise. You don't have to be a Bush hater to think that.  It's just a matter of common sense.

The Elephant in the Room

Imagine a scenario in which Karl Marx, Ronald Reagan, and an American journalist are in the room. There's also an elephant, which is owned by Ronald Reagan. Karl Marx points out that there is an elephant in the room. Ronald Reagan, who has his reasons, says there is no elephant. He then looks at the journalist and says, "Karl Marx says there's an elephant in the room. Anybody who agrees with Karl Marx is a Communist. What are you going to report to the American people about what's in the room?"

The journalist looks at the threadbare Marx, who appears rather sullen and resentful. He looks at the elegant and affable Reagan, and thinks to himself:  "Talking about elephants doesn't look like a very good career move. Who really cares anyway? It won't be a lie if I just avoid saying anything about it. And there's so much else to talk about that Americans are really interested in."

There is an elephant in the room, and nobody in the mainstream is talking about it, and this elephant is not hard to see if you choose to look. It's the connection between wealth and power and how that connection is destroying (has destroyed?) our politcal system. It's standing there in the middle of the room, and we all know it's there, but we walk around it and pretend it isn't because to talk about it makes you sound like a Marxist. The Ronald Reagans of the world will start to say that you're promoting class warfare. You'll be branded as an un-American, leftist flake.

Because America is all about people having the freedom to pursue their dream, and if someone's dream is to become fabulously wealthy, and if he has the brains and the ambition to achieve it, who are the rest of us to stop him? 

In this mythology, Donald Trump has come to symbolize what it means to be a great American. He has come to  represent what is finest in the American spirit. Every week on his TV show we can watch obsequious young Americans striving to be what they think he wants them to be.

And in this American mythology, and those who are its true believers think something like this:

People who dream big dreams make our country great. Would it be better if they did nothing and collected food stamps? So what if there is an elephant in the room? He's an American elephant, and we will arm ourselves to the teeth to make sure no one does it any harm. It’s for these dreamers and their God-given right to get rich that our soldiers in Iraq are fighting to protect. If you don't like it, move to Cuba. And, besides, each of us can own a piece of that elephant.  OK, I may not own a piece now, but maybe my kids will. That elephant is what the American Dream is all about--the idea that anyone of us could someday be famous, rich, and powerful like Donald Trump.

The idea that "only in America" do the humble have the possibility to realize such ambitions is absurd, but it's a myth that serves the interests of the already rich. People with talent and drive rise in every modern society, but like all the Trump wannabes, they do so by ingratiating themselves to those who already have wealth and power. And their doing so insures that the basic pyramid stays intact.

Having a Donald Trump here or there isn't a threat to republican ideals so long as he's content to have supermodel wife and his ego massaged by Nielsen ratings. The problem lies in his reinforcing a myth that allows the already wealthy in our country to tighten their grip on the levers of power.

So what's the matter with the pyramid? Isn't a pyramid inevitable? Well, you could say that pyramids are natural; pyramids define how most societies stratify when the strong are allowed to dominate the weak: there's a wide base of very poor, a middle group, some of whom are independent, but more of whom are a retainer class performing services for those on the top. Such is the way of the world.

But America was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be a society in which the the bulge was in the center. It was supposed to be a society in which not too many people would be poor and not too many people would be rich. It was supposed to be a society in which the power would be in the hands of the self-reliant, educated people in the middle: small businessmen, farmers, mechanics, teachers, professionals--not in the hands of those sitting in corporate boardrooms. That's what Jefferson and Lincoln thought. There will always be elites, but they should serve the interests of those in the middle because those in the middle should have the power of numbers.

America was not supposed to be a society dominated by a super-wealthy overclass. That was the European model that the founders revolted against. Such societies, even if they have elections, are democracies in name only. In a robust democracy, power lies with a well-informed, economically stable middle. The goal is to get those at the bottom into the middle, and to find ways to protect the bottom and middle against those at the top aggregating too much power for themselves. That's what the New Deal was moving us toward, and the Reagan/Bush GOP hated it. That GOP has come to stand for completely opposite goals--which is to turn the country into just another run-of-the-mill, stratified oligarchy.

In other words the American experiment has failed to the degree that we allow it to become like every other stratified society that has existed. Maybe it's inevitable. Maybe that's what Franklin meant when he came out of the constitutional convention and in responding to someone who asked what they had made said, "A republic, if you can keep it."  I don't know if it's lost yet, but we're losing it. 

That's the elephant in the room that nobody wants to look at. We want to believe we have a republic, but it's becoming one in name only. Maybe we want to believe the elephant stands for the republic, but it is rapidly becoming  something altogether different, and we all stand around shrug our shoulders as if nothing important is happening. We're OK with it so long as we have our bread and circuses, our beer and our reality shows.

Dubya's Dubious Dubai Deal

One of the world historical snow jobs perpetrated by the GOP on the American people is that the Republicans are more trustworthy on matters of national security and ficscal responsibility, and that they are the party of the morally serious grownups.  If you voted for Bush rather than Kerry or Gore, ask yourself:  Do you really think either would have messed up thnigs as bad as this administratiion has done on both counts?  It's comical that anybody should have ever taken these guys with their short-term, make-a-buck, crony mentality seriously when it comes to responsible government. 

I've got my problems with the Democrats, but please--the Republicans?  How long will it take us to dig out of the whole they have dug us into? To think that at this point we still allow them even to frame the terms of the debate.  No serious, sane person can extend to them even a shred of credibility. They should be laughed out of town. Enough of the obvious belabored.

Religion & Politics

I've found it useful to think about any society as having three separate but interpenetrating spheres--cultural, political, and economic. Long-time readers of this blog are familiar with my use of the terms, but I thought they might be worth revisiting because I want to use them later as a way of talking about pluralism and consensus development in a globalizing world, particularly about economic matters. 

So this post is a little abstract and on the long side, but I hope you'll give these ideas some of your time and play with them to see if they work for you. Toward the end I show how thinking with these categories can help to think clearly about two areas where religion and politics collide--gay marriage and abortion. 

First, the cultural sphere in social life as I want to talk about it is governed by a fundamental principle—freedom. The rights we talk about in the Constitution—freedom   of speech, freedom of religion, etc.--are simply specific instances of this more fundamental right. Freedom means that each citizen is given the scope to live in any way he or she wants so long as he doesn’t infringe on the rights of others.  It's the sphere of where we pursue the things that give our lives meaning and enjoyment--religion, philosophy, the arts, learning, for the sake of learning, sports, hobbies.

The key point is that all the fundamental rights derive from this basic right, and they do not depends for its justification on moral beliefs or religious traditions.  Freedom is a secular value which nevertheless  insures that everyone can live with whatever religious or other values matrix he or she chooses.  The cultural sphere is the sphere that makes sacred a pluralism of beliefs.

Americans, especially conservatives, talk about freedom as their most sacred value--well this is where it’s up to them to put their money where their mouth is. In this sphere, people should be allowed to be as good or as bad, moral or immoral as they want to be, so long as they respect the rights of others and live up to their civil obligations.

The cultural realm, therefore, is where freedom and individuality are celebrated and given free reign, and it’s where the government has no right to intrude. The government never has the right to legislate morality; it's simply not within its jurisdiction.  The government can only intrude on the freedom of the individual when he infringes on the freedom and rights of another or when he fails to live up to contractual or other civil obligations.  Murder may be forbidden by moral law in any given religious tradition,  but in the politcal realm it's not a question of morality; it's an infringement by one person on the right of another person to life and liberty.

Second, the political sphere has both active and a passive aspects. It is active in   the sense described above in that it has a policing function to insure that the rights of individuals and groups in the cultural sphere are protected and in enforcing civil obligations. It is passive in the sense that it is responsive to shifts in the cultural mood, which in turn has a shaping influence on the nature and extent of a consensually determined set of civil obligations.

When the mood in the cultural sphere is conservative and individualistic, the scope of those civil obligations tends toward the minimalist end of the spectrum (small role for government); when the cultural mood is expansive and progressive, those civil obligations tend toward the maximalist end of the spectrum (big role for government). But whether minimalist or maximalist, the basic rights of individuals and groups in the cultural sphere—their freedom to live as they please—cannot   be infringed upon.

I think that one of the mistakes that the libertarians make is to assume that the liberty proper to the cultural sphere is also proper to the economic, the third sphere in our social triad. But the essential principle that governs the economic sphere is obligation, not freedom. If freedom were the principle governing the economic sphere, it would lead to the law of the jungle in which economic   might makes right. If freedom were an absolute in the economic sphere, as it is in the cultural sphere, then the government would have no right to tax, no means to govern, police, and defend even in the slightest degree. The richest and most powerful could dominate the poltical apparatus and could ignore the civil rights of other citizens.  The police serve the interests of the rich rather than to protect rights, because might makes right.  Government would then become a tool by which the rich dominate the poor.  Kind of what you see in authoritarian Latin American oligarchies, and kind of what I'm afraid we're trending toward in this country. Equality before the law and equality of fundamental rights is the key principle governing the poltical sphere.

And while there have been many Americans who have tried to make the argument for minimalist interference  by government in the economic sphere, and that the law of the jungle should prevail there, it is in the final analysis not one based on principle, but preference. We can argue about what is practical, what works best, but to make it a question of principle is misguided.  And so, as suggested above, the political sphere is where the interests or preferences of individuals or groups hammer out a consensus about the extent of the individual’s obligations, and those obligations usually pertain to some level of constraint or obligation in the economic sphere. The tax to pay for even a minimum amount of government is still a constraint on individual liberty.  The principle is clear; it's just a question of how much government you want and are willing to pay for, and that something to be worked out through the poltical process.  Big or small government is not a question of principle; it's a question of preference.

So ok. I know this is kind of abstract, but what I’m trying to do here is come up with a way of thinking clearly about our current liberal/conservative logjam.  I believe that a lot of what makes our situation so difficult now comes from applying what’s proper in one of these three spheres to our thinking about what’s proper in one of the others where it really doesn’t have any business.  Let's look at two issues where these factions collide: gay marriage and abortion.

The gay marriage issue is a problem because people who hold one set of moral values think that they can impose them on others by using the power of the state. But this is a confusion of the moral realm, which is proper to the cultural sphere,  with the political sphere, which is the realm of rights. Moral values and civil rights are two different categories of things. The former, moral values, is protected by the society's commitment to civil rights, and moral values can never infringe on another's civil rights. It doesn’t matter what the cultural moral values consensus might be about certain behaviors, those minority behaviors are protected by the freedom principle that rules the cultural sphere.

And if gays and lesbians want to enter into a committed or covenantal relationship, what right has the state to deny them that? Call it civil union. Call it civil marriage. It’s just a civilly recognized contractual agreement, no more, no less. This Constitutional Amendment proposed by the religious right makes no sense, and sets a dangerous precedent because it establishes that rights in the cultural sphere can be given and taken away, and they just can’t, because they just are. They are not subject to the whim of the consensus majority.

This cuts another way when considering another issue in which the civil and moral are confused, namely abortion. Pro-abortion groups have framed this as a moral values issue proper to the cultural sphere in which the freedom principle should apply. If your privately held values tell you that it’s wrong to have an abortion, they would say, don’t have one. But if it’s framed as a civil rights issue, that logic doesn’t apply. For in the political sphere, the morality or immorality of abortion is irrelevant; it’s rather a question of civil rights. And in this instance, it comes down to a conflict of rights between a woman’s right to control what goes on in her body vs. the fetus’s right to live.

If you believe that the fetus essentially has the legal status of an appendix or a gall bladder, then it would logically follow that the woman has a right to have the fetus removed as she would an unwanted or diseased organ. But what if you think the fetus is a human being? There’s a problem then, isn’t there? It’s not so easy to say, “Well, it’s just a matter of choice.”

I agree with the people on the right here who say the conflict is not unlike the ante-bellum disagreement about the human status of slaves. A certain faction within the population insisted that slaves were not human and that they were property to be disposed of as the slaveowner was free to choose, and that view was upheld by the courts. There was a basic conflict of rights, that of the property owner vs. that of the human being to liberty. The same situation, in my opinion, pertains today regarding the status of the human fetus, and this is something that needed to be worked out in the poltical process, not the courts, which in effect declared the right of the woman to choose to take precedence of the right of the fetus to life. 

Is that indeed what most people thought in 1972 or think now?   If most people in America  believe that the fetus has the same status as a gall bladder, then abortion should be permitted.  If most people believe that the fetus is a human being, it should not be permitted. If people change their mind one way or the other, the process should be flexible to permit it.  Then it would be up to people on one side or the other to make their case and persuade others that their position on the question is right.

Rather than enshrining this as an absolute principle on one side or the other it should be left to debate within the cultural sphere for a consensus to develop about whether the fetus is a human being or not. The reason abolition as law stuck, was not primarly because of any legal precedent, but because the prevailing moral consensus in the cultual sphere was that slaves were human beings, not property.  The situation with regard to the human fetus is admittedly more ambiguous, but the conflict needs to be resolved in the cultural sphere before being settled in the political sphere. This was not for the courts to decide.

The reason I bring abortion into the discussion is to show that when it comes to a question of rights it shouldn’t be just a matter of liberals vs. conservative, the one group wanting to impose its values on the other. It’s a matter of principles being applied in the proper spheres and of intellectual coherence, which is pretty much lacking in any discussion of the most controversial issues of the day, particularly in the way culture and politics interact. Reasonable people can disagree about the applicability of any of these ideas, but it helps to know in which sphere you’re operating and which principles apply when a particular controversy arises.

Later I want to talk about how movements that begin within the cultural sphere can  properly influence the developments within the poltical sphere.  I've used the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties in this country as a model of relgious values inspiring action to make changes in the political sphere.  The key thing to remember was that it was a religiously motivated movement that translated its concerns into the lingua franca in the political sphere, which is the language of rights.  I want also to talk about how liberation theology as it developed in Latin America had a similar effect.  I think it has a particular relevance to what's happening to us in the U.S. if I'm right about our drift toward a Latin American oligarchical politics. It might be a stretch, but I think it's worth talking about.

Faith & Knowledge

A Sunday thought for the day:

By "faith" is understood not the upholding of one's own--much less other people's--ideas as true, but the grasping of a growing reality of the supersensible world, and making it the concern of one's own will. That which is already there can be either known or not known--but that which lives as a possibility in this world and a reality in a higher can (in the sense of the Gospels) be only believed or not believed. . . . Such a purposeful grasp of the future is called "faith" by Christ Jesus.  . .  Whereas the world as it is already created is known through knowledge, faith shapes it anew. . . . For, in reality, Faith, as the word is used in the Gospels, is nothing else than knowldge, which is not only thought and felt, but also willed. . . . Faith is therefore nothing other than knowledge which has taken hold of the whole man. When a man knows not with thoughts alone, not with thoughts and feelings alone, but with his faculties of thinking, feeling, and willing, then he has faith in that which is known.  What the whole man has come to know--that , in the Christian sense, is Faith.   --Valentin Tomberg

Here's the point: empirical knowing is only a knowledge of the surfaces of things.  Faith, true faith, is a mode of cognition that penetrates to the core of things. It is  the lamp by which the mystery at the heart of the world can come into view, and without it the mystery remains in impentrable darkness. And so therefore faith is not about intellecutal assent, It is not a question of believing or not believing a set of propositions, but of learning how to see and trust one's cognitions and in the inclination of one's will. The intellectual part comes in evaluating and testing these cognitions, and the only proof of whether your trust has been foolish or wise will come in the fruits.  The measure of our faith in the long run is the measure of our fruitfulness. 

And the reverse logic also applies. Where you are most fruitful in your life is where your faith lies, whether you think of using the word 'faith' or not. To what ends is your will already inclined? Hitler had a profound faith in his mission and bent his will toward the establishment of the Third Reich. His fruits were in the nightmare world he created, and ultimately so much dust when it all crumbled. 

So obviously you are free to believe in whatever you want, but it is not a matter of indifference. Be careful what you believe in, for surely you will produce its fruits--not just for yourself, but for the rest of us as well. 

 

 

The Spirit of Whiggery

One of the things I'm trying to do is to think through for myself a critique of the American political and economic system that isn't dependent on Marxism. The Marxist critique, no matter how trenchant, will always be perceived as un-American. It's always going to be associated with the secular left, which, whether its members have read Marx or not, is dependent on an interpretive frame that depends on Marxist ideas. And besides, Marxism is a creature of the modern sensibility, and that's a sensibility that I've argued elsewhere, like Enlightenment rationalism, can no longer capture a postmodern imagination. The critique might be accurate, but its mythic dimension no longer inspires.

You don't have to be a Marxist to see that we are living in a society that with each passing decade is becoming an entrenched plutocracy. You have to be blind or not paying attention not to. And yet we will do nothing about it until we are forced to, and by then it might be too late. I'm right there with every one else doing nothing because at this point I haven't a clue what to do. The Democrats are hardly the answer because their office holders are, with a few exceptions, almost as deeply implicated as the Republicans in the plutocracy, and their active base is hopelessly captive of the secular left. 

That's why they can't win elections. It's hard for too many people to feel that they stand for anything they deeply care about. There's no inspiring myth, and the myth part is what the GOP understands and exploits very effectively. The Democrats still think politics is about rational choices based on one's perceived economic self interest.

Nevertheless, while I have learned much from the smartest and most thoughtful people on the secular left, I am not one of them. I believe that the best minds of the secular left have something very legitimate to point out about how things work, but what they see has to be absorbed and transcended. I think economics is important, but I am not an economic determinist. I am someone who thinks that spiritual impulses have a far more powerful influence in shaping human affairs than economic ones. Show me the inclination of a man's spirit, and I'll show you his economics and politics.

The point of my post yesterday was that the Whigs arose as a potent spiritual cultural impulse in England that was carried for the most part as the Political manifestation of the Puritan Calvinist spirit. Hardcore Whigs were disgusted by everything the Catholic Stuart dynasty stood for--its autocracy, its popery, its moral laxity. The Whigs were the first "progressives" of the early/middle modern era. They were anti-royal through and through--true republicans, and the spiritual impulse that drove many of them to New England was also the impulse that drove them 150 years later to dump tea in Boston Harbor and to take up arms at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill a year before any Declarations of Independence were composed or signed. 

They were independent-minded, cantankerous, morally serious, literate bourgeois who hated everything that the spirit of royal privilege stood for. They saw it as corrupting to the human spirit, and they founded the Massachusetts Bay colony in the hopes of creating a model society based on self-reliant citizens who through their hard work and democratic institutions would create a new society, a city shining on a hill, that  their English brothers and sisters back home would emulate. They were, at the beginning anyway, religious idealists. And its been this idealism that has remained at the heart of the American spirit. Even if only ambivalently embraced by most Americans, it's still the best thing about us.

After the Revolution the Whig politics were mainly expressed through the Federalist Party under John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, and it was opposed by the southerners Madison and Jefferson. The southerners' party eventually evolved to become the Democrats during the Jacksonian era. The Federalists dissolved but reemerged to become the Whigs and eventually the Republicans during the Lincoln era. The Republicans were the party of federal control, civil rights, and Northeastern/Midwestern educated elites; the Democrats were the party of the states-rights, southern aristocrats, and poor working whites. The Republicans were the party of the industrial north; the Democrats the party of the agrarian south. 

Lincoln was perhaps the greatest of the Whigs in terms of his moral sensibility, but his party after his death became the party of the wealthy northern bankers and industrialists known as the robber barons. The Civil War, whatever its moral concerns, was ultimately about the defeat of the Jeffersonian agrarian vision for America by the money-centered, industrial vision of the northerners, the triumph of Hamiltonian impulse over the Jeffersonian. 

And for the next hundred years the southerners licked their wounds, stewed in resentment, created good literature, and otherwise tried to maintain their traditional way of life as an impoverished, quasi-third-world backwater. America belonged to the northerners. The attitudes of the old south were considered, at best, charming but irrelevant. At worst, racist and reactionary.

The dark side of the Whig Puritan spirit was its love of wealth and its compulsion to control. Think Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life." The movie is a fairy tale about the Whig spirit by contrasting two different styles of banker, an emblematic Whig occupation. And the battle for the American soul became a battle between these two factions of Whiggery, the Potters vs. the Baileys with the Baileys winning out in the New Deal, a compromise worked out between the next greatest American Whig after Lincoln--FDR. 

So the point I was trying to make in my "Last Laugh" post yesterday was that while the Potter wing of the Whig impulse was brought under control. The big corporation, the invention of the factions which defeated the south, has now been adopted by the southerners who have no interest in the compromise effected by the Yankees in the 1930s.  The corporation for them is the new plantation adapted to new historical circumstances. Think Wal Mart. And they are using it and its power to destroy the great Whig compromise we came to take for granted as the New Deal.

I know I need to explain this better, but what interests me here is not so much the economic dynamics, but the spiritual-cultural dynamics. Because what the southerners represent is a regressive spiritual tendency I have called elsewhere Lot's Wife Syndrome. They are dragging us back rather than moving us forward, and that is never a good thing. The human spirit is saturated in nostalgia for what has been lost in the past, but its health lies in finding a way forward. The trick is to take with us from the past only that which is necessary. We have to travel lightly if we are to make our way forward. The Whig Spirit for all its limitations was a progressive spirit, and its gains for us Americans are being eroded by a different kind of spirit, which for me is symbolized by Texas.

The South Gets the Last Laugh

I've been tough on the Puritans in recent posts, but I'd like to put in a good word for the historical Puritans, those Whiggish, crusty revolutionaries who had a passion to establish a country inspired by religious and republican ideals.

One could argue that the English Puritans were the first real moderns in the political sphere, and their hatred for the throne-and-altar narrative of premodern Europe led to the Puritans vs. Royalists civil war in England. The Puritan/Whigs won, beheaded the king, and ran the country under Cromwell for about a decade in the mid 1600s.  But the English weren't quite up to rejecting their premodern past so easily as that, so they figured out a way to keep someone on the throne in the great Tory/Whig compromise called the Glorious Revolution.  The Puritans in New England were watching, and said among themselves, “No way we’re gonna compromise,” and their continued resistance to the crown-and-altar narrative culminated in the American Revolution about a hundred years later.

And so the United States became the first of the genuinely modern democracies,  but there was still a problem, namely the South. Because while the oligarchs down there were OK with not having the King butting into their business anymore, they really didn't get the modernity part of the new modern American narrative, and so they continued to live out of the premodern, feudal narrative. They wanted to run their fiefs without any interference from above, whether it be the King or the federal government. That’s the real narrative behind the “principle” of states rights promoted mainly by the southern elites--"Leave us alone so we can run our duchies the way we please." 

Jefferson was a smart guy, an intellectual infatuated with the most up-to-date modern ideas from France, but when push came to shove, he didn't walk his talk. He remained a slaveholder aristocrat in the premodern style.  We could call him,  anachronistically, what we use to call his type in the sixties: a limousine liberal. His agriculture-centered imagination of America was very different from the Whiggish Puritan vision typical of the New Englanders, and it's a conflict of visions that eventually led to the Civil War. Those crusty northern Puritans didn't like that the Southerners wouldn't get with the new program, so after decades of bickering about it, they finally went down there and beat them into the modern age. 

The Civil War in America was really a replay of the the Civil war in Britain two hundred years earlier. This time the Whiggish, Puritan roundheads won the more permanent victory over their Tory Cavalier adversaries in the South.  But it still took another hundred years before the South really joined the modern world, and that's what we meant when we began to talk about the “New South” in the 1970s. Or so it would seem.

At first glance it seemed to mean that the South would no longer be a third-world, one-party, commodities-based, plantation-centered oligarchy, but that it was finally becoming integrated into a modern, capitalist market economy. For a moment, anyway, that's what it looked like was happening. But really the idea that the south was morphing from a one-party system to a two-party system was a transitional illusion. 

Sure, all the black Republicans became Democrats and all the white Democrats became Republicans, or Reagan Democrats, which is the same thing (Think Zell Miller). But did anything really change at the core of the southern system?  Gradually the South morphed into what it had been before--a white dominated, one-party oligarchy. But now just about everybody aligned with the opposite party.  The party of the northern Whigs--the Republicans--gradually got hijacked by the southern plutocrats, while the party of states rights, slavery, and populism--the Democrats--became associated with the party of federal regulation, civil rights, and the northern liberal elites. 

This is a historical irony that is surprisingly only rarely commented on.  And it has a lot to do with our current political confusion, because the parties we support are intellectually muddled with regard to their historical missions and animating principles. 

The southern republicans have since then worked pretty hard to transform the historical party of the Whigs and to reshape its republican/Whig ideology into a neo-Tory ideology. And I think that this has been possible because while the Whigs won the states-rights argument with regard to the relationship between the feds and the states, it has not yet been won with regard to the feds and the corporations. And the reason is that they, too, are profoundly implicated in the corporate system, because they invented it.  And that's the irony and the reason for the southerners' last laugh. Because the corporation is where the old southern plantation mentality still thrives--the corporations have emerged as the new duchies, and the people who run them want to be left alone, just as the old southern plutocrats did: Let us run our duchies as we please. That's really what we mean now by the New South--the same old oligarchic mentality but  transposed from plantation to  corporate  board room.

The corporation has morphed into something its Puritan creators would never have imagined, and it more than any other force in modern society has undermined the Puritan republicanism that was at the heart of their American experiment to become "a shining city on a hill."  The Whigs won on the battlefield in 1865, but they lost in the longer-term struggle. Our society has evolved since then into a plutocracy not all that different from the one that those revolutionary Puritans fought against. We're no longer dealing with a landed aristocracy, but a corporate one. 

And that's what interests me about the way that the Armstrong Ranch has come into the public spotlight in the last week. For there you have perfectly symbolized the integration of the Old South with the New. It's a place where republican elites can do their hunting, just like the landed aristocrats of yore, but it's also a meeting place where the folks from Halliburton and Enron can kick back and talk about their partnership with big gummint. That's what the new southern elites have figured out: If you can't beat them, coopt them. Hey, the last laugh on those sanctimonious Puritan prigs with their self-righteous republican airs. We southerners are the real Americans.

Getting Intexicated

What is it about Texas that is so toxic?

Don't mess with Texas?!  What sane person would want to? It's enough of a mess already. It borders on Mexico and seems to emulate its third-world, poltical style.  I just wish it wouldn't export its mess to the rest of the country, which is what the rest of us are allowing the thugs who come from there to do. If you're from Texas, I'm sure you're a fine person, but tell me, how can you bear it?

I wrote a piece last October after the Miers nomination about how understanding it can be a big help in understanding how the crony capitalist system being promoted by our president is an extension of Texas society.  (I also wrote a piece about this called "The Southernization of American Politics," which, if you're interested, you can find here.) Along these lines, Sidney Blumenthal has an interesting piece in this morning's Salon that shows how Katharine Armstrong's ranch plays a pivotal role in that society--a subject at least as interesting as whether Cheney was drunk or not when he shot Whittington. 

The point is that royalty doesn't have to live by the same rules as the rest of us.  Understanding the dynamics of a society  ruled by royals is what we really have to understand.  Blumenthal's article ends with a paragraph, which I think draws an interesting analogy to Jean Renoir's film The Rules of the Game.

The curiosities surrounding the vice president's accident have created a contemporary version of "The Rules of the Game" with a Texas twist. In Jean Renoir's 1939 film, politicians and aristocrats mingle at a country house in France over a long weekend, during which a merciless hunt ends with a tragic shooting. Appearing on the eve of World War II, "The Rules of the Game" depicted a hypocritical, ruthless and decadent ruling class that made its own rules and led a society to the edge of catastrophe.

Understanding the quasi-banana Republic mentality of the Texas political elites can give you a good insight into the kind of place Bush, Cheney, Rove and their gang of plutocrats want to take the country.  Read Michael Lind's  Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics if you  want to read a more sustained argument about how this dynamic in American power distribution is a key to understanding the shift to the right since 1980.

Since Salon is a subscription only, I'll excerpt some of Blumenthal's aricle here to give you some sense of the bloodlines and alliances that determine the "rules of the game."

Both the vice president and the deputy chief of staff [Karl Rove], as it happens, owed their previous, lucrative jobs in the private sector to their relationships with the Armstrong family. Anne Armstrong, Katharine's mother, was on the board of Halliburton that made Dick Cheney its chief executive officer. Tobin Armstrong, Katharine's father, had financed Karl Rove & Co., Rove's political consulting firm. Katharine herself is a lobbyist for Houston law firm Baker Botts, a major Texas power broker since it was founded in the 19th century by the family of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and close associate of George H.W. Bush's. . . .

Katharine Armstrong is linked to two family fortunes -- those of Armstrong and King -- that include extensive corporate holdings in land, cattle, banking and oil. No one in Texas, except perhaps Baker, but certainly not latecomer George W. Bush, has a longer lineage in its political and economic elite. In 1983, Debrett's Peerage Ltd., publisher of "Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage," printed "Debrett's Texas Peerage," featuring "the aristocrats of Texas," with the King family noted as the "Royal Family of Ranching." The King Ranch, founded by Richard King in 1857, is the largest in Texas, and its wealth was vastly augmented by the discovery of oil on its tracts, making the family a major shareholder of Exxon. The King Ranch is the model for Edna Ferber's novel of Texas aristocracy, "Giant."

John B. Armstrong, a Texas Ranger and enforcer for the King Ranch, founded his own neighboring ranch in 1882, buying it with the bounty of $4,000 he got for capturing the outlaw John Wesley Hardin. In 1944, almost inevitably, the two fortunes became intertwined through marriage. Tobin Armstrong's brother John married the King Ranch heiress, who was also a Vassar classmate of Tobin's wife, Anne, who came from a wealthy New Orleans family.

The Armstrong Ranch developed far-flung holdings in Australia and South America. Meanwhile, President Ford appointed Anne, a major Republican activist, U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, and President Reagan appointed her a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is reportedly Anne's best friend, and Anne was instrumental in launching her political career. Tobin, for his part, worked as an advisor to Texas Republican Gov. William Clements, where he first encountered the young Karl Rove and decided to give him a helping hand when Rove struck out in the political business on his own.

The Armstrong family's Republican connections have continued and strengthened down to the latest generation of Bushes. Gov. George W. Bush appointed Anne a regent of Texas A&M University and Katharine a commission member of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the agency that filed the report on the Cheney shooting. At Tobin's funeral last year, Cheney delivered the eulogy.

What to Do

The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.  WB Yeats

I was talking to a friend lately about how bad things had gotten for our country under the Bush administration.  He is a Vietnam vet who voted for Gore but tried to be positive as positive as he could about Bush's election in 2000--much more positive than I was capable of being.  He's a silver-lining kind of guy, and I've always admired that about him. And I've always relied on him to give me perspective when I'm in a pessimistic funk.

But in this recent conversation he was saying that he thinks it's time to take to the streets.  He's outraged and frustrated as he watches what this administration is doing to our country, and he can think of no other course of action.   He doesn't see the consultant-driven Democrats as having what it takes to take the country back. And my response was, again typical of my pessimism,  "Well, what are people going to rally around? What concrete goal can they hope to achieve by demonstrations? What would be the point?" 

And that's why I thought the 'impeach-ins' idea that I posted about yesterday was worth considering, and still do.  What else is there to rally around? It can give some constructive focus to the frustration so many of us feel, and even if it doesn't succeed in removing Bush from office, at least it will be an outlet for constructive action and an opportunity to talk about the things that need to be talked about at a grass-roots level. But there is a danger:  Will it also become an outlet for the passionate intensity that is the worst that comes out in the best of us in political conflict?  That's another cause for pessimism; it probably will.

Along these lines, MZ's comment under my "Impeach-ins" post yesterday is well taken, and he points to a fear that I share: these impeach-ins will more than likely become a polarizing Bush hate fest.  True, but he's more optimistic than I am that the Democrats in office will be able to deliver.  I see them as useful as a way to stop Republicans from doing more damage, but I don't put my hope for the future in their hands.  Something has to arise from the grass roots.

When I think about what it means to take political action, I think about the sobriety and dignity of the early civil-rights marches--serious ordinary people, grass-roots people, asking the country to look at and do something about a serious problem, and all decent, right-thinking Americans recognized it as a shameful legacy that needed forceful remediation.  MLK was among the "best," but he combined a sobriety with passionate moral intensity that we need badly at this time.  For now the "best" are as Yeats described them, lacking conviction about how to find a way forward.

But what most people think of these days when they think about political action is the way political dissent was coopted by  the secular left during the sixties and seventies, who are now for the most part the same people who organize all the anti-war protests now.  For too many people their leadership, fairly or unfairly, de-legitimizes political dissent. They find it difficult to join with them because they fear being associated with a world view and values that they don't share.  Don't get me wrong--my hat is off to the secular lefties, even the flakiest among them, for getting out there and doing something--but so long as they are perceived as defining the values center of any protest against the government, legitimate protest will be easy to discredit and marginalize. 

People like King, Mandela, and Gandhi were so widely accepted because they appealed to the deep moral sense, to what everybody knew deep down was right, and they did so by using religious language and appealing to religious ideals.  They were all very traditionalist in that respect.  They did not let their darker passions--their fears, their anger, their resentment--get the better of them.  And you can be sure their refusal to be ruled by those passions required enormous spiritual discipline. 

The civil rights movement in this country lost its way after King's death because no one had his moral authority to prevent those negative passions from being unleashed.  And civil right became associated with militant black power that had a polarizing effect.  That was not the case in South Africa, which was far more successful in engineering a justice-based reconciliation of oppressed and oppressor, because the progressives there were led by people with religious ideals.  They were able to purge the resentment and effect a genuine peace, a peace we never really achieved here in the states.

And that's still our problem in this country beyond the lingering problems surrounding race relations.  There's no one who has emerged in our time who has real, universally acknowledged moral stature.  So there is no one to oppose this administration who has the moral authority to speak the truth that needs to be spoken in a way that all fair-minded, decent Americans can hear it. Everything sounds like propaganda, and everybody  hears only  what he wants to hear.

Americans know that things are much worse with Bush than they believed a few years ago.  They're beginning to see the deceit and the corruption that has always been hiding behind the smokescreen about religious and traditional values.  But they accept it as the default, because who's offering something better?  Who's offering them an alternative that will call them to a deeper sense of what the American ideal is? 

I think there  are many, many decent people in both parties, but they are as Yeats described the "best": lacking all conviction.  They don't know what to do--it's all so complex.  There is no clear path forward, and that's just the way it is.  There is simply no one with moral stature on the national stage today to point the way. But, like my Vietnam-vet friend, I'm ready to take to the streets, to do anything if it thwarts this death spiral we're in now.  It may be futile in the long run, but at least we will be able to tell our grandchildren that we tried.

A Call for Impeach-ins

Jamie B. Raskin, a professor of Constitutional Law at American University has some creative ideas about how to take back our democracy:

We obviously need a strategy to close the gap between citizen Democrats, who see impeachment proceedings as a moral imperative for the return of democratic legitimacy, and congressional Democrats, who see impeachment as an implausible diversion from a practical political agenda.

The key is to think of impeachment not as a single event but as a series of steps to restore the rule of law and reassert the practices of popular democracy that have been trampled ever since the Republican Party and five collusive Supreme Court justices derailed the presidential election in 2000. We should follow these three specific steps to restore constitutional law and order:

1. Moral Impeachment: One meaning of impeachment is to charge with malfeasance in office, but the other is “To challenge or discredit.” We can debunk the administration's policies all over America, especially with the excellent work done by Rep. John Conyers and his staff on the fraudulent rush to war. Institutions with moral authority like universities, municipalities, unions and churches should conduct their own “Impeach-Ins” to impeach the various frauds and policy deceptions of the administration. The Federalist Society and others who support Bush should be invited to defend the constitutionality of Bush's actions.

2. Electoral Impeachment: We should nationalize the coming elections and use them to “impeach the Republican Party,” which has been captured by its most extreme elements and now poses a real threat to the Republic. The Abramoff-soaked Republicans in Congress have presided over dangerous political corruption, deficit spending, violation of civil liberty, and military and national security lawlessness. The 2006 elections must become a nationwide referendum on corruption and restoration of the rule of law at every level of government.

3. Congressional impeachment: If the Democrats recapture Congress or at least one chamber in 2006 and evidence of the administration’s law-breaking continues to mount, the moral, political and legal predicate will have been laid to introduce articles of impeachment that can actually be heard and passed. If President Clinton can be impeached (though not convicted) for lying about sex, why can't President Bush be impeached for lying about weapons of mass destruction, for spying illegally on Americans, for violating the Constitution and international treaty obligations, and for criminal dereliction of duty before, during and after 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina?

Click here for entire article. Any thoughts on whether we could make such a thing happen?

Mental Templates

The argument between the left and right is not about the dots; it's about how we connect them. A big part of the problem, of course, is that in matters of public policy the dots themselves are pretty slippery, and you can argue endlessly about whether a dot is really a dot. So it's easy for the dots to become secondary to the ideology we are inclined to accept as the most effective dot connector.   

But it’s interesting how long it’s possible for an ideology to resist recognizing that certain dots exist because they don’t fit into the ideological template.  It’s also interesting how very often a dot that really isn’t there seems real if it fills in a blank spot on the template. Propaganda works because because we want to believe whatever conforms to our preexisting ideas abut the way things are even if what we are told is untrue. And we resist propaganda (or the truth) to the degree that what is proposed does not fit into our pre-existing template. 

I think to a large degree this describes how we got ourselves involved in Iraq. There's a difference of opinion about how cynical the motives of the architects of the invasion were.  It could be that they were deliberately lying and twisting the truth to promote a justification for the war most Americans would support.  It could also be that they were so sincerely convinced of the righteousness of their cause that it became a template that prevented them from seeing the dots that didn't fit into it. I think it's possible that they really thought that Saddam was buying yellowcake from Niger. They wanted to believe it so badly that it became in their minds the truth.

But overall I think it was a mix of both cynicism and credulity.  It's clear that no matter what their motives, their judgment about what  they could achieve was profoundly flawed because of their blind spots. They thought they knew better. They thought they connected the dots in the most effective way, but now it's clear that there were too many dots that they didn't see or dismissed as irrelevant. 

I don't know that this invasion of Iraq could have succeeded if any one else had led it, but it is abundantly clear, if it wasn't in 2002, that this particular group was doomed to failure from the beginning. They were flawed both in motive and in judgment. Their motives, like those of any human being, were mixed.  I don't expect to find purity of motive in anyone, but look rather to discern whether their is preponderance of motive that is just or unjust. And with this group of neocons I believe the preponderant motive was vainglory and powerlust, and only secondarily to fight terrorism. 

Their judgment was flawed because clearly they did not understand what they were getting into; they were blinded by both their militarist ideology and by their vainglory. But powerlust and vainglory do not necessarily lead to failure. There have been too many successful tyrants through the ages who were far shrewder than the neocons directing policy now in the White House. This group is doubly foolish, both with regard to motive and their ability to develop an effective strategy to accomplish their goals. 

That's what rankles people like Bill Kristol and other promoters of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) who saw this as an historical opportunity for the assertion of American power in this strategically critical area of the world. After the fall of the Soviet Empire, a power vacuum was created, and the oil fields of Iraq were there for the taking. They would invade to insure that these fields would become more productive. Iraq would be made into a democratic city shining on a hill, a model for all the Middle East to emulate, and the U.S. would become the benign, tough-loving big daddy caliph to the world effecting a new global order and a Pax Americana. 

That's the delusional, vainglorious part and I think lots of the neocons sincerely believed that what they were doing was in the best interests of world order.  But this group of incompetents blew it, and now American prestige is lower than it's been since the Vietnam War, and they've created a bigger mess in the Middle East than they found before they invaded. I'm sure there are lots of true believers in the PNAC vision of the future who still think that this could have been pulled off. 

Ideologies are essentially mythologies, narratives that for whatever reason each of us have adopted that explain how the world works—or should work. What we're doing in the Middle East right now is a reenactment of the Ur-myth of redemptive violence found in the Enuma Elish which was first articulated in Mesopotamia where it's now being acted out with such brutality.

There's a part of me, the hopeful part, that thinks that maybe this myth has come full circle, and we will all see how it leads to futility and needless destruction. It was a myth that understood power in the most primitive way, and now in an interdependent globalizing world it's a myth that has become dysfunctional.  We've got to come up with something better, but you just don't make up myths; they have to be rooted in deeply grounded transcendent truth.  Myth, Narrative, ideology, mental template--whatever you want to call it--we've got to come up with a better one than this tired old story that blinds us to new possibility. I believe the resources to do it are there, hidden, but ready to be retrieved. So much depends on whether, one way or another, we do it. 

More on the Puritan Mind

In the Anglo-American experience there were three bloody civil wars--the one in England led by Cromwell, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. Each was a phase in a long-term struggle of the Puritan “moderns” to defeat the Tory “premoderns.”  I have come to think of the American Revolution as the Puritans' finishing a job in America that their British cousins could not.  The English slid backwards when they brought the King back after Cromwell. And then the American Civil War was about the Northeastern Puritans finishing off the last remnants of medievalism as it lingered in the manorial plantation system of the south.
   
These struggles have always been framed by the Anglo-American Calvinist mentality as a struggle for democracy and freedom over autocracy and tyranny. Now obviously there is no argument about whether democracy and freedom is superior to autocracy and tyranny, but there should be an argument about the means by which the former asserts itself. The Puritan way is by violence, and this violence is justified by a demonization of the premodern whether it be the Jacobite subversives, Catholics in Ireland, witches in Salem, King George on his throne, the slaveholders in the South, communists in Moscow, or now the Islamic fundamentalists throughout the Middle East. 
   
Puritans don’t work things out with enemies like these because there is no negotiating with the irrational. The Puritan mind reasons: “Well of course the witch doesn’t want to be saved from her own evil. That’s why we must save her from herself by burning her at the stake.”  Sounds absurd, but we heard it again from that American major who said after the destruction of the village of Ben Tre in Vietnam: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." A true Puritan there. And now look what we're doing in Iraq. Think Fallujah. We're burning the country at the stake. It's a form of mental illness, but it's a sickness we all accept as normal.

Terrorism is the latest encounter of the Puritan mind with the irrational, and the traditional Islamic culture that promotes it will just have to be destroyed to save it. World politics will be so much more hygienic once we exterminate the vermin. I wasn't all that surprized to learn that Tom Delay had been an exterminator before he entered politics.  He's the poster child for this tragic illness. Would that Jerry Lewis have a telethon to raise money for its cure.
   
A key element in understanding the Calvinist mentality is its need for control and its willingness to use whatever level of violence necessary to repress the “irrational” elements in human experience, and the premodern in the Puritan demonology is full of irrational images triggering fears in need of suppression—magic, witches, Catholic ritual, shifty Jews, hot-tempered Italians, voodoo practicing Africans, the savage Indian.  J.K. Rowling’s “muggles” and  their fear of magic is a kind of sendup of this mentality.  Theirs is a tight, priggish, white-bread, control-obsessed world, sterilized of anything that suggests mystery, transcendence, or the non-rational in general. 
   
The Puritans and their Calvinist cousins the Scotch Irish, of course, didn’t invent priggishness, nor are they, obviously, the only ones in the history of humanity who have justified the violent repression of their enemies for religious reasons.  But theirs is the peculiarly modern form for the religious persecution of the enemy, and it lingers in Anglo-American culture, and is so much in the cultural air we breathe that we cannot see it clearly.  At the very heart of modern “religiosity,” whether in its Calvinist or its more secular versions, is fear of the uncontrollable non-rational. 
   
The American right's fear of communism/socialism is more akin to the Islamic fear of modernity, which is the fear of an uncontrollable future. If fascism derives its mystique from a mythological past, communism derives it from a mythologized future. Progressives look to the future. Conservatives look to the past.  Progressives distrust the past and its premodern irrationality; conservatives distrust those who look to the future with an irrational utopianism.

Progressivism is experiencing hard times these days because during a culturally decadent period like the one we're currently suffering through, we don't know what to hope for.  We have only the weakest sense of plausible future possibility.  We are capable of seeing the future only as a variation on 'more of the same', and that is not a vision that inspires concerted action. 

That will change someday, but for now it's the conservatives' time because when our imagination of the future is weak, we fall back on the past for want of something better. And we find ourselves voting for mediocrities like George Bush rather than mediocrities like John Kerry for the same reason. The first represents the solidity of the past; the second a fuzzy future for which we can muster little hope.

But we’ll come back to this lack-of-a-future theme another time.  I’m more interested in this post to talk about our American fears as they relate to what haunts us from the past. That’s what this encounter now with Islamic terrorists signifies. As traditionalist Muslims fear the future, we American Puritans fear the past.  Muslims are to us Americans what the papists like Guy Fawkes and his gunpowder plot to blow up Parliament were to the 17th Century English. In the Puritan mind there is always such treachery lurking in the shadows. And our fear of it creates the conditions that make such threats grow and become real. Fear is the enemy.  All we have to fear is fear itself. Never a truer word was said by an American public figure. Too bad so many Americans seem so incapable of taking it to heart.
   
I think it was Abraham Maslow who pointed out that “people who are good with hammers see every problem as a nail.” For Americans guns are their hammers, and the violent defeat of everything that scares them is the standard American modus operandi. If you’re a hardliner, you can argue, I suppose, that it’s a strategy that has worked in the past. But at what cost?  Paving your garden to take care of a bug and weed problem is a strategy that will work, too.   

Have Muslims in the Middle East perhaps a justified fear that our strategy is to destroy them in order to save them? I would say so. Like witches, better that they be dead and saved than alive and possessed. Is their resistance irrational or is it the most perfectly reasonable response we should expect? This is a lesson we should have learned in Vietnam, but it's a lesson that is impossible for the fear-soaked Puritan mind to soak in.

The next time you hear some hardliner's cant about how the world is a dangerous place full of bad guys who want to do us harm, ask yourself whether he’s not talking about something that has a kernel of truth that is blown out of proportion by his fear of the irrational and his need to exterminate, Delay style, what he cannot control. 

The enraged American Indian fighting for his homeland was dangerous, and he could inflict harm, and he often did so. But was he really a significant military threat?  White Americans treated the Indian as if he were a bug problem, and clearly his military subjugation and humiliation was not the only way for the whites to deal with the threat that he posed.  If we Americans had it to do over again, who among us would endorse a similar militaristic policy toward the American Indian? Is drawing a parallel to what we did then to what we’re doing now in the Middle East so farfetched?
       
I would like to raise a question, even if it seems somewhat naïve: How might things be different in America if in the 19th century white Americans had expanded more slowly, less avariciously, and with more respect for the indigenous peoples who lived in the territories into which they moved? What if the American government rigorously enforced treaties and respect for territorial and cultural boundaries? Would not intermarriage and the slow integration of the American Indian into a new fusion America have been inevitable?  And if the respect was there, would not the white American have benefited as well in having regained from the American Indian that part of his soul that he had been sterilized in the process of his having become a modern? 
   
I’m not talking about the regressive inclination to  “go native” here.  I’m talking about retrieving what was lost. But for this question to make sense, you have to acknowledge that something has been lost. If you don’t see that, then nothing I say here will make sense. But I also want to say that merely focusing on the past without an openness to the future can very easily become a sterile exercise in nostalgia. The Renaissance in Europe at the beginning of the Modern Age was both a retrieval of lost riches from the past and a stimulus to imagine a different kind of human future.  We’re in need of such a renaissance now.

Left & Right Wing Puritans

Moby Dick is our national national myth. It's cognate with the story of Marduk and Tiamat. It's the story of the attempt to repress the forces of chaos with a violence that justifies itself in the righteous quest to impose law and order, but instead creates even more lawlessness and disorder. 

It's a myth that's playing out right now in Iraq.  It's a myth too many Americans haven't the sense to see through because of their inveterate Puritanism.  The Puritan mind seeks out the infernal in its various manifestations with a compulsive need to eradicate it. The irrational is a sibling of chaos and it presented itself to the American Puritan mind in the guise of papists, witches, and Indians; now it’s Arabs.  It used to hate the demented god Dionysos and his sacrament alcohol; now it hates tobacco.

If we accept Melville as our national prophet, we must accept that this hatred of the irrational creates a collective psychology that leads to inevitable disaster. We must also recognize that the violent, repressive tendency of the right-wing Puritan which seeks violently to impose its angelism on the bestial is complemented by its opposite. The secular rationalist tendencies in American culture compose what I would describe as the left-wing of the Puritan mind. If right-wing Puritanism tends toward an angelism that seeks to eradicate the irrational/instinctual, the left wing tends toward the secular materialist mentality typified by neo-Darwinist thinking—humans are merely animals who are ontologically no different from apes, whales, and porpoises except for their superior brain power.

The left-wing Puritan is just as militantly moralistic as his right-wing counterpart. It's at the heart of the  left liberal campaign on behalf of a romanticized imagination of nature. This isn't all bad--at its best it seeks to save the wildness of nature from its destruction by the demon-machine that crushes the life out of everything that is wild and joyful. But at its worst, it's at the heart of prissy political correctness found among smug academics, radical feminists, and self-righteous environmentalists. It's behind the sanctimonious vegetarianism that screams "meat is murder." It follows, does it not, that if the human being is only animal that his killing and eating of other animals is a kind of cannibalism.

Another way of putting it is that the right-wing Puritan worships the father god; the left wing Puritan the mother god. (A similar point is often made by George Lakoff.) The first bows to a principle of dissociated masculinity, the second to a principle of dissociated femininity. Both create more problems than they solve insofar as they demonize the other and insofar as they seek to eradicate the other. 

Left-wing Puritanism is more radically rationalist than the right wing, and in a curious way therefore more “spiritual” because of the priority it gives Mind.  But its rationalism drives it to affirm only what is given by the senses, and so the left-wing understanding of Mind is utterly and paradoxically materialistic. It worships matter/mater/mother. Perhaps in another post we can explore that paradox, but the point is that for the left-wing Puritan anything that is not given through the senses is mysticism, and there is hardly a word with more pejorative connotations in the left-wing Puritan’s vocabulary if by mysticism we mean something fundamentally spiritual. 

For the left wing Puritan there is nothing outside of what is given to us in the natural world.  And yet it is comfortable with different varieties of nature mysticism, and has no problem with longing for a rapturous merging with nature and the natural world, with longing to be free and unconflicted as animals are. 

If right-wing Puritans see human beings as angels who have bodies that they’d rather not have to deal with, the left wing sees the human being as only a body, as so many atoms complexly arranged, and any reference to the angelic or spiritual element is illusory.  If the right wing mistrusts what is “below” in nature--ie, the sub-rational animalistic/instinctual--the left wing mistrusts what is “above” in the angelic, ideal, and super-rational.

There you have Calvinist-dominated culture succinctly, if somewhat simplistically, summarized. The angelism of the right wing is symbiotically linked to the materialism and instinctualism of the left, even though they see themselves as in opposition to one another. It’s a conflict most famously symbolized in the Scopes trial, and is being played out now in the ornament war in which the evangelical Christians’ ichthys—the fish symbol you see all over the place on the trunks of cars and trucks—is being swallowed by the smart-assed Darwinian, legged version of the same symbol.  Creationism is nutty, but so is secular materialism in another way--but because it's the dissociated nuttiness of intellectuals, it has more style.

For me the problem lies not in that one or the other is completely wrong, but that each does not see how it needs the other.  Effecting such a coincidentia oppositorum, is the trick that somehow or another we must pull off if we are to move beyond the sterile culture war that now defines our decadent era. 

How Bad Does It Have to Get?

And will it be to late when it gets that bad to do anything about it? That's my fear.  I believe we are drifting inexorably toward an authoritarian police state not unlike that typical of what you find in Latin America.  Drifting isn't dramatic--it happens slowly, incrementally. 

One little thing taken in isolation doesn't make much of a difference in people's imagination, So it's hard to fight; it's hard to galvanize public opinion around a single issue, whether it's the Alito nomination or the Medicare prescription bill, a clever piece of legislative legerdemain emblematic of the big money dynamic that makes this administration run.  It was made to look like a benefit for the elderly but is mostly a benefit for big pharma and the insurance companies.

So one by one there are these victories for the big-money right, and in the short run our lives don't seem to be affected much by it.  But at some point it's all going to catch up with us, and it won't be pretty.  And it will be too late to do anything. It's probably already too late; that's why it doesn't matter that the GOP, and its leadership in the Congress and the White House at the lowest ebb of their popularity can still pretty much do as they please.  We've drifted far enough already that nothing can stop them.  The Alito nominnation was a bellwether.  The House elections this fall will be another.  I'm not optimistic. 

Bad Calls Steal Game from Everyone

The refs may or may not have robbed the Seahawks of a Super Bowl victory, but they surely robbed football fans of what could have been a very exciting, competitive game with several lead changes and ending in a tie.  If just two critical calls, among several which almost everyone agrees were egregiously bad, if these calls were never made, the game would likely have ended in a 21-21 tie and continued into overtime.

The first was the ticky-tack call that nullified Darryl Jackson's touchdown catch in the first half; the second was the holding call against Sean Locklear in the second half that nullified a Jerramy Stevens' catch on the two-yard line. There's a third bad call we'll concede to Pittsburgh--the Rothlisberger bootleg touchdown, which even he didn't believe was a touchdown. But let's assume that the call stands or that the Steelers punch it in on fourth down-- the two teams would have finished the half tied 7-7.

In the second half the Steelers come out roaring with Parker's 75 yard run and go up 14-7.  Seattle comes back with the touchdown pass to Jerramy Stevens that did count and which would now tie the game at 14. And then if we assume that the refs don't make the call on the non-existent hold by Sean Locklear, Stevens' catch on the two-yard line stands,  Alexander, the record holder for most TDs in a season, almost certainly runs it in for a touchdown, and the Hawks go up 21-14. 

Then the Steelers come back with their gadget reverse pass play to Hines Ward to tie the game.  Think how much more that would have meant in that situation.  It would have been a great moment for all football fans, not just Steeler fans. In the game as it was played, that play was just the nail in the coffin for the Seahawks. The game just petered out after that.   But if that play were the one that tied the game for the Steelers, the momentum may have carried the Steelers on to an OT win--or not--but either way it would have been a far more compelling game. 

Two bad calls made the difference between our watching a forgetable game that was sloppy and full of mistakes on both sides rather than a game that could have been riveting and exciting to the end--we'd never remember the mistakes. It also makes the difference between our remembering Jerramy Stevens as a hero or a goat. He dropped some passes, but the two he caught would have been remembered as keys to the game.  We're not talking today about the balls that Hines Ward dropped in the first half for one reason:  the Steelers won.  If the Hawks won, Stevens might have been the MVP and Rothlisberger or Ward the goats.  That's how thin the line is here. 

Bottom line: The refs didn't steal the game from the Seahawks; they stole it from everybody.