Looking Forward To The Call

Unless America is invaded by Pakistan after getting nuked by both Iran and North Korea, I do believe Mitt Romney has managed to destroy his last, gasping hope at becoming the next President of the United States.

Honestly, Mitt should just call the President now.

Space For Wonder

Faith does not mean professing what we hold true in a ready-made formula, it means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life, and which cannot be comprised in any formula. It means that, from the very roots of our being, we should always be prepared to live with this mystery, as one being lives with another. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery.  -  Martin Buber

We live in a world filled with horrors.  Yesterday, I heard part of Hearing Voices' program, "Prisoners of War", in which Americans held by Germans in the Second World War recount their experiences.  It would be impossible for anyone hearing these old men talk about their lives without being moved.

Yet, we need not move that far back to encounter the many horrors we know exist.

On January 15, 1974, a chilly winter day, 15-year-old Charlie Otero began his afternoon walk home from school.  Charlie, his parents, and four siblings had recently moved into a quiet peaceful suburban neighborhood in a small frame house located at 803 North Edgemoor Street.

Charlie, happy that another school day had come to an end, walked gingerly up the side walk towards his home.  As he opened the front door and walked into the living room, nothing immediately seemed out of the ordinary. "Hello, is anyone home?" he called out into the quiet house.  There was no response.  Not even a bark from his dog. Such quiet was unusual. With some trepidation, Charlie walked toward his parents' bedroom.  A strange feeling of dread welled up inside him.

Charlie's father, Joseph, 38, was lying face down on the floor at the foot of his bed; his wrists and ankles had been bound.  His mother, Julie, 34, lay on the bed bound in similar fashion, only she had been gagged.  For a few seconds, Charlie could not move, he didn't know what to do.  Moments later his senses came back to him and he rushed out in desperation to get help for his parents, not realizing that he had experienced only a portion of the horror that the house had in store.

A neighbor who came over to the house to help realized that when he tried to call the police, the phone lines had been severed.

As the police searched the house, they were shocked to find nine-year-old Joseph II in his bedroom face down on the floor at the foot of his bed.  His wrists and ankles were also bound, the only difference being that over his head was a hood -- and according to one reporter, he had three hoods covering his head.

The worst was yet to come. Downstairs in the basement, Charlie's eleven-year-old sister, Josephine, was discovered hanging by her neck from a pipe; she was partially nude, dressed only in a sweatshirt and socks, and she had been gagged.

In Syria, the Civil War has taken the turn most such conflicts take.  The results are horrors that are both overwhelming and all too familiar.

According to the UN, Syrian armed and security forces have been responsible for: unlawful killing, including of children (mostly boys), medical personnel and hospital patients ("In some particularly grave instances, entire families were executed in their homes"); torture, including of children (mostly boys, sometimes to death) and hospital patients, and including sexual and psychological torture; arbitrary arrest "on a massive scale"; deployment of tanks and helicopter gunships in densely populated areas; heavy and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas; collective punishment; enforced disappearances; widescale and systematic destruction and looting of property; the systematic denial, in some areas, of food and water; and the prevention of medical treatment, including to children.^{[3]:20–4[6]:4–6[7]:2–4[8]:10–20} Amnesty International reported that medical personnel had also been tortured,^[11] while the UN said that medical personnel in state hospitals were sometimes complicit in the killing and torture of patients.^[8]:11 The execution and torture of children was also documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.^{[1]:30[10]:31–2[12][13]}Most of the serious human rights violations documented by the UN have been committed by the Syrian army and security services as part of military or search operations.^[6]:4[7]:1 The pattern of the killing, coupled with interviews with defectors, led the UN to conclude a shoot-to-kill policy was operative.^[3]:20[8]:10 The UN mentioned several reports of security forces killing injured victims by putting them into refrigerated cells in hospital morgues.^[3]:22

Rage would seem the order of the day that such a world exists in which human beings seem both capable and free to act this way.  Hate would seem the obvious response toward those who would torture and kill others.  Even death at times seems far too easy, not so much a punishment but an escape from the justice those who commit such acts deserve.  Were we to dwell on these and so many other stories of human brutality and violence, it would no doubt leave little inside us but bitterness, a species-wide self-hatred that would have us sneering at our fellows, knowing there is little separating the man sitting next to us on the bus or walking past us on the street from the psychopath, the soldier following orders, or just another face in the faceless mob that attacks and kills without reason or remorse.

Were we to stop here, where would we be?  The odd thing, as should be obvious, is that our life is filled almost to overflowing with beauty and love, with simple acts of kindness for others, with art that rips us out of our humdrum lives and lets us glimpse behind the veil at the beating heart of the world.  In our most intimate person-to-person relationships, we come to know that those who hold our lives in their hands are those with whom we cannot live fully without.  We see in the eyes of our children the possibility of life, the promise that someone will be there once we're gone to dust.

When I think of "mystery", it is this coexistence of terror and beauty, of mass death and love that I remember.  It should be impossible that such opposites should nest side-by-side in human life and history.  Were "justice" interwoven in the fabric of existence, the momentary eternity of the glance from one's beloved, the feel of a child's arms around the neck, the awe as we look upon a work of art could never count up against the horrors of Khmer Rouge, the lived-out fantasies of the serial killer, or the day-to-day inhumanities far too many of our fellows know.  Yet, somehow, they do, indeed.  Perhaps those moments we experience as love and beauty, as sublime peace and hearty laughter are so fleeting precisely because, unlike the seemingly endless horrors of the POW camp and torture chamber, state-sponsored terror and mass death and dehumanization, were we to experience them fully, we could not live to tell the tale.

The Christian faith, for all it would seem to answer any question on any topic some would put to it, at the end of the day, rests easy with that we call "mystery".  Not the mystery of gravity or the unanswered questions about "the good life" or which social organization best suits a fully human life.  These are not so much mysteries as either questions for which we don't have answers yet but shall or questions that are inherently unanswerable and thus best ignored.  In the incarnation, death, and resurrection, we have enacted the Divine Word on the mystery of existence.  That it is.  That it is taken up in to the Divine Life in the most personal, unique moment, as God becomes human, Creator becomes creature, and as such says, "Yes" to this most deep mystery.  It is now a part of God's life, part of the way we as those named and called by this God are to live our lives.  We are to live within this mystery as it is, that it is, no longer offering a "solution", but rather affirming it as it is, and declaring that it, too, is part of who God is.

Election Season, Part II: Cleaning Up The Messes

For some reason, one of our cats has decided to stop using the litter box.  He pees and craps, well, wherever, whenever the urge strikes him.  My wife, whose equanimity is a thing to admire most of the time, loses her nut about stuff like this, and with good reason, I suppose.  Trying to keep up with the constant flow (no pun intended) is at best daunting.  We do the best we can, keeping our cleaning stuff handy and ready to deploy when the need arises.

It's much the same in politics.  More and more platforms for communicating provide more and more opportunities to communicate crap.  While some folks insist "'twas ever thus", there is something brazen about this fact-free campaign.  When people working for a major party candidate for the office of President of the United States is on record saying that fact-checkers aren't going to control the campaign, we all know the tide has turned.  When Mitt Romney, whose parade of poop is well-documented, tells George Stephanopoulos that the President is going to stand on the stage and "say things that aren't true", how is anyone who pays attention supposed to respond?

Most newspapers have an office, called either "Ombudsman" or "Public Editor", who handles comments and complaints about their news stories.  The New York Times' Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan, addresses our post-truth campaign, and gets off to a good start.

Simply put, false balance is the journalistic practice of giving equal weight to both sides of a story, regardless of an established truth on one side. And many people are fed up with it. They don’t want to hear lies or half-truths given credence on one side, and shot down on the other. They want some real answers.

Then, readers notice she starts steering toward the cliff even as they're shouting at her to get back on the road.

 The trick, of course, is to determine those facts, to identify the established truth. Editors and reporters say that is not always such an easy call. And sometimes readers who demand “just the facts” are really demanding their version of the facts.

Red Alert!

“There’s a temptation to say there are objective facts and there are opinions, and we should only use objective facts,” said David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief. “But there’s a big spectrum. We have to make analytical judgments about the veracity of all kinds of things.”

What’s more, reporters and editors often have to make these calls on tight deadlines, as they did just after Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention last month.That speech carried some assertions that have been shown to be misleading, and other speeches at both political conventions have become flash points for the fact-checking and false-balance discussion. 

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

Several who wrote to me thought there was an element of false balance in a recent front-page article in The Times on the legal battles over allegations of voter fraud and vote suppression — hot topics that may affect the presidential race.

In his article, which led last Monday’s paper, the national reporter Ethan Bronner made every effort to provide balance. Some readers say the piece, in so doing, wrongly suggested that there was enough voter fraud to justify strict voter identification requirements — rules that some Democrats believe amount to vote suppression. Ben Somberg of the Center for Progressive Reform said The Times itself had established in multiple stories that there was little evidence of voter fraud.

“I hope it’s not The Times’s policy to move this matter back into the ‘he said she said’ realm,” he wrote.

The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression.

“It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.” 

When the bus exploded in flames, many analysts said it resulted in needless deaths.

Seriously, let's consider the particular example Sullivan uses here.  For a national editor at what is regarded as our national newspaper to say there is "reasonable disagreement" about voter fraud is . . . well, I'm not sure what it is.  There are people, largely Republican legislators in various states, who are quite brazen in their attempts to purge voter rolls, create various legislative barriers to exercising the right to vote, all because, in the words of the Ohio Secretary of State, they don't want minorities voting because they will vote for the Democratic Party. There are studies, including reports of studies carried by Sifton's newspaper, demonstrating there just isn't voter fraud occurring out there.  It isn't "litigating" anything to make clear that the machinations in various state legislatures to restrict voting rights is a brazen attempt to suppress the vote among traditionally Democratic constituencies, because some at least of the Republican politicians involved have been quite up front about what they're doing.  Are the Republicans who are doing this reasonable people?  Are they reasonable?  Are they, in fact, people?

In an age when it is increasingly easy to find pretty much anything, for reporters and editors to pretend fact-checking is some difficult operation is ludicrous.  Political speeches are handed out to reporters before hand. While they sit and watch and listen, following along the prepared text, they can use their phones to go on-line and check and see if a factual claim is accurate.  It's so easy to do.  When Mitt Romney says that Barack Obama says things that aren't true, check it out.  Does the President, in fact, have a history of speaking falsely to the public?  Does Gov. Romney?  Because a person or even a large number of persons insist something is the case - say, that global warming isn't caused by human beings overusing fossil fuels - doesn't mean reporters have some kind of duty to pretend their views have any validity.  So their feelings will get hurt.  Shrug, and move on.

It can be a difficult task keeping up with the volume of crap flooding our homes, the airwaves, and newsprint.  It seems noble, I suppose, to say, "What can I tell you?  One person says one thing, another person says another, who am I to judge?"  Actually, it's a dereliction of the fundamental duty of the press, in my opinion, to take such a position at an historical moment in which one side has, for all intents and purposes, abandoned any pretext of factual campaigning.  To move forward, knowing full well the Republican candidate for President is on record disdaining facts and fact-checking, as if the campaign has any integrity whatsoever, does a disservice to the public for whom the newspaper exists.

Ms. Sullivan puts responsibility for the demand for greater attention to factual accuracy on the internet.  She's correct.  All political sides are, indeed, demanding that the words of the opposition be tested against facts.  I think that's a good thing, as does she; I also think it's an easy thing, which she insists it is not.  With the first Presidential debate just a few weeks off, I think it would be a great thing for reporters covering it to pay attention to Twitter, various news sites, Facebook, and other social media to get a good read on how well and accurate the candidates actually speak.  They can keep the browsers on their phones open, type in anything a candidate says that might sound "off", and check it out in just a few seconds.  It isn't hard, and it takes very little time.

There is a whole lot of nonsense out there.  Sorting what is and is not nonsense, however, has never been easier.  Lazy bloggers like me do it all the time.  I think reporters shouldn't lag behind us.

Election Season, Part I: A Piece Of Advice

As the calendar pages are torn off, time inching ever closer to Election Day, the amount of political writing will increase exponentially.  Like a funnel, time is forcing more and more crap in to less and less space until, come November 7th, one side can lick its wounds and the other can celebrate a bit.  No place is safe from people talking, shouting, demanding, propagandizing, or otherwise stumping for one side or another.  While the stupid question, "Does this election really matter?", gets bandied about by people who talk about politics without caring about it, there are millions of Americans who understand we have a vested interest in who wins and loses.  Every election matters.  Every vote counts.  Whether it's town council, county commissioner, state comptroller, House member, or President - what these people do in office effects every aspect of our lives in some manner.  We may not like that, but it's just reality.

As the tidal wave of politicking rises ever higher, the demands on Facebook not to say anything about politics are becoming just as deafening.  I respect the fact that not everyone concerns themselves with matters of public life.  I also respect that there are people for whom the welter of political stuff on Facebook can be overwhelming, especially if one gets bombarded, as I do, with many images and writings that span the spectrum of American politics.

If you are one of those people who post political things on Facebook and friends are asking, then demanding that you stop, then unfriending you because you refuse (it hasn't happened to me yet, but it might), I would urge you to just keep going.  If you are one of those people who just want Facebook to be about funny pictures and memes about women shopping and demonstrating to the world how awesome your children are (and you, as their parent and therefore by extension, share that awesomeness; let me just say I am VERY guilty of this particular habit, as I shout praise about my daughters all the time, knowing full well I want some of the credit for their greatness, even when I say otherwise), all I can say is the following:

Don't read them.  You see a status update about the election, or a link to an article about a candidate, or a meme or photo or something else about politics, and you just want to grab the person who posted it and scream, "Knock it off!", just close your eyes, take a couple breaths, and keep scrolling through your news feed.

A related note.  If any of the people who are doing this kind of thing are people you encounter on a regular basis, don't let it spill over and change how you relate to and with them.  That really cool guy who likes the Chicago Bears and posts links to microbreweries but also posts a ton of stuff in support of Pres. Obama is only doing what anyone in America does: expressing themselves freely and passionately about things that are important.  Likewise, the accomplished accountant and mother of four and wife whose husband is homebound due to an injury might go on a rant about liberals and their crazy ideas, and that's OK.  Politics is not personal, at least not "personal" in the sense that folks should get offended when others express opinions that differ from ours.  At the very least, we now have an even more rounded and full understanding of the people with whom we relate, and that is never a bad thing.

I guess what I'm saying is this: Lighten up a tad, folks.  It's an election year, and some folks care a great deal about these things.  No one believes the political stuff on Facebook is going to change anyone's mind; I certainly don't.  It's just sharing who we are, which is kind of what Facebook is supposed to be about.

Beauty

I've been indulging my enjoyment of Baroque music in recent weeks.  I even have a channel on Pandora dedicated to Baroque choral music, centered on the English composer Henry Purcell, the Italians Alessandro Scarlatti and Gregorio Allegri, and Georg Phillip Telemann.  Of course, Bach gets tossed in there.  Even more than the Classical and Romantic era, there's something about the structure of Baroque choral music I find very uplifting.

Last Christmas season, while listening to a holiday channel on Pandora, I heard the following song and I stopped doing whatever I was doing so I could listen:

Now, in most ways one can imagine, the structure of this piece is about as far from Baroque as one can imagine.  At the same time, the piece seemed to embody the essential understanding of beauty from canonical aesthetic theory: in which constituent parts are assembled precisely to create a whole that transcends their individual perfections.  Baroque music does this by its insistence on avoiding dissonance, creating soaring harmonies that fit the composer's goals of reflecting the divine harmony in creation.

Eric Whitacre is that occasional phenom: the really popular composer in the classical idiom.  Along with choral pieces, he has composed for symphony orchestras and various ensembles.  He composed an oratorio rooted in Japanes anime using contemporary instrumentation, yet loosely patterned after and so entitled, "Paradise Lost".  He premiered it at Carnegie Hall, with an orchestra and a 425 voice choir.  Steve Smith at The New York Times wasn't as impressed as the audience.

The virtual choir was Whitacre's idea.  Response to his first, shown above, was so good, he tried it again with his composition, "Sleep", and then "Water Night".  It includes over 3700 videos submitted from people in 73 countries.  Moriah's high school chorale is preparing this same piece for a concert, and while certainly not as LOUD as the collected voices of three thousand seven hundred forty-six people, the aesthetic and emotional power of the song should work well even in a group of about thirty or so.  This is so not because of the harmonies.  Rather, Whitacre's music is affecting because of the intelligent use of dissonance.

The reason for this, as well as my initial, "Wow!", reaction to "Lux Aurumque", lies in what the title of one piece analyzing this composition calls "The Physical Properties of Sound Itself".

How exactly does Eric Whitacre’s ‘Lux Aurumque’ work? How can it move us so deeply, so mysteriously? It does this in part through Whitacre’s extensive, deliberate use of beat-frequencies between the parts. For me—and maybe for you as well—the effect is not just the richness of a clashing pair of notes; it’s also the ‘phantom’ note that the beat-frequency of a note-pair implies: the ‘implied’ note that we hear when the dissonance is sounded. That implied or ‘phantom’ note has a pitch equal to the frequency difference between the two dissonant notes—the beat-frequency of the difference in frequency. Close-harmony like this is like a human analogue of ‘voix celeste’ on an organ—phantom notes expressly created by the dissonance beat-frequency. Yes, a choral tune is set as a cantus firmus—but it isn’t purely horizontal: there are all of the vertical/harmonic implications as well as the contrapuntal associations. . . .

This relationship can be expressed as a mathematical equation:

The author continues:

Mathematically, we should hear the sine wave (f₁ + f₂)/2 as the average of the two pitches. But the sine part of the right side function alternates between negative and positive values many times during one period of the cosine part, and when this happens only the absolute value of the envelope is perceived. So the beat-frequency we hear is just the difference between the two frequencies: (f₁ − f₂).

The piece goes on to give a history of the use of these harmonics, as well as demonstrate from Whitacre's score how the composer achieves it in context.  It's certainly fascinating, and more than a little disconcerting that beauty can be described as precisely as a mathematical equation (although, I suppose this does answer the conundrum about whether or not beauty is something "objective"; I figure if you can write a trigonometric equation to describe it, then the answer is "Yes").

All the same, it boils down to this: Whitacre's choral compositions (I've listened to some of his instrumental pieces, and for some reason they don't work quite the same way; perhaps it's some property of the human voice that makes his choral compositions work so well)  have a quality most listeners call "transcendent" because the human ear resolves the dissonances of the notated score by offering a middle tone that isn't vocalized.  Perhaps these harmonics work on the physical structure of the human ear much the same way as sympathetic harmonic vibrations work with guitar or piano strings; if you play particular chords on a guitar or piano and watch carefully, strings NOT played vibrate, not in consonance like a wine glass breaking to a high tone, but in harmony.

Much the same principle is involved in Barbershop Quartets, with what is called "the fifth tone", an overtone that one writer says "produce a ring or overtone -- a fifth tone that nobody is singing, but that we all can hear."

After hearing "Lux Arumque" for the first time, I spoke to the choir director at church.  She is a musician, and I told her "It's like he's inventing chords."  In a way, I was right.  Whitacre is an extremely smart composer, being very deliberate in the way he structures sound so listeners "hear" notes that aren't even articulated, creating an even bigger sound.  Thus, the parts are indeed constructed in such a way so the whole is, indeed, something more.  So, I have little fear that Moriah's chorale will sound less somehow than the thousands of voices here:

Those Who Don't Know History

A friend of mine on Facebook has the following posted on my news feed:

There are so many things wrong with this, I'm not even sure where to begin.

In 1985, a German disco was bombed.  Among the dead were several American service personnel. The Reagan Administration advertised to the whole world that Libya was responsible.  After several months of discussions, several American F-111 Fighter Bombers flew from Great Britain around the Iberian Peninsula and attacked targets in Libya, including Moammar Qaddafi's house.  Among the dead was Qaddafi's young daughter.

Within a few days of the attacks, it was revealed that the Germans had determined the disco bombing was carried out by Syrian operatives.  It didn't take too long for American officials to admit, on the record, that they goofed.

A couple days before Christmas, 1988, an Eastern Airlines flight from Germany to the United States exploded in midair, the pieces landing in Scotland.  Among the dead were several students from Syracuse University, returning from studying abroad for a semester.  Claiming jurisdiction because the bombing occurred in their air space, the British determined the perpetrators were Libyan.  When confronted, the Qaddafi regime admitted involvement, claiming the bombing was a reprisal for the 1986 attack by the Americans, carried out from bases on British soil.

As for the whole apology thing, I'm still waiting for someone to tell me who apologized to whom, when, for what, and how even if that happened, it has anything to do with the deaths of four American diplomats.

I don't care if you don't like Barack Obama.  I don't care if you think Ronald Reagan was a Great President.  I don't even care if you think, somehow, Barack Obama bears responsibility for the deaths of those diplomats.  I do care, however, that there continue to be people who perpetuate made-up events and pass them off as reasons for holding whatever political opinions they might have.

Republican Fantasy Meets Reality. Guess Which Loses

The background to Gov. Romney's statement Tuesday (and repeated at a news conference at a campaign stop yesterday) regarding what were still unfolding events in North Africa and now the Arabian Peninsula has yet to be made clear by many people.  I thought I'd perform a public service.

The Republicans think Obama has gone overseas during his time in office and apologized, well, to pretty much everyone.

Evidence?  Who needs evidence when Rush Limbaugh talks about "Obama Apologies Tour"?

In February of last year, I did a Google search and discovered exactly one apology Pres. Obama made on behalf of the United States.  He told the President and people of Guatemala he regretted that the United States performed experiments on human test subjects, prisoners in Guatemala, in the late 1940's.  So, um, yeah, a little late but that's a pretty necessary apology to make.

Other than that?  Nothing.

Don't take my word for it.  Put "Obama Apology", "Obama Apologizes for America", or some other iteration in Teh Google Box and, voila, all you get are links to right-wingers insisting it's happening without ever once actually pointing to a place and time where it has, in fact, happened.

The whole "apology" thing came up again and again at the Republican National Convention and most of the press ignored it, much the same way most people ignore the really stupid, rude drunk at an otherwise polite party.  Events in Egypt, Libya, and now Yemen, however, are bringing it back around again, however, because the right is convinced, without needing any evidence, that Barack Obama hates America, loves foreign countries more (sometimes it's European socialism, sometimes radical Islamic states), and spends much of his time abroad telling the world how sorry he is for America being America.

When Gov. Romney stated, falsely, that the Obama Administration sided with the mobs who attacked the American Embassy in Cairo, he isn't "lying" in the way most of the rest of us would understand that word.  Rather, he is acting upon a deep-seated impulse within much of the American right that Pres. Obama apologizes for the United States.  When confronted by the reality that the things he said were factually inaccurate, he reiterated his point (along the way making a totally irrelevant correct statement that one cannot deal with counterfactuals and such; the problem, of course, is the question was stupid, giving Romney a moment to look smarter than the press corps) even as many Republicans were shifting away from him, ever so slowly, trying to pretend he wasn't around.  By the end of the day, even his running mate put a bit of space between himself and his Number One Guy.

The President has, in fact, done pretty much what any (sane) President would do in a situation such as this: he's condemned the attacks, spoken with the leaders of the countries involved, offered prayers to the families of those killed, reiterated American resolve in the face of mob violence, and spoken of "bringing to justice" the people who killed Americans overseas.  Mitt Romney has continued to claim that the President apologized first, which he didn't, and hasn't been strong enough since, which all the evidence demonstrates is just not true.

At some point, reality and fantasy collide, and fantasy always crumbles to dust.  Except, alas, in the minds of those who have invested far too much in that fantasy to admit it is just that.    I made the point a couple weeks back, and the redoubtable Charlie Pierce has broken it down in to its constituent parts: Barack Obama is blessed by his opponents.  Mitt Romney is displaying all the adroitness of a troupe of tap-dancing walruses, gift-wrapping the election for a President who should, under normal circumstances, be facing the very real prospects of losing.

No Good Deed

I took a bit of heat last year for speaking out against American involvement in the Libyan Civil War, as anyone can see from the comments on this post.  It is with sadness I read this article, a late-breaking headline from The Washington Post.

U.S. Ambassador to Libya John Christopher Stevens and at least two other embassy staffers were reported killed Tuesday in an assault on the American consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi.

--snip--

The violence in Benghazi followed protests in neighboring Egypt, where a group of protesters scaled the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday evening and entered its outer grounds, pulled down an American flag, then tried to burn it outside the embassy walls, according to witnesses. On Wednesday morning, a sit-in of several dozen protesters continued outside the Cairo embassy. 

I suppose people will say that these protests, spawned from anger at an anti-Islamic film made by an American, are "unrelated" to the events of the Arab Spring of 2011.  Sure.  Because anyone paying attention will know that, were Hosni Mubarak and Moamar Qaddafi still in power, these protests and deaths never would have happened; or, is those gentlemen were still in power (or alive), the protests would have been worse; or, the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi would have included elements of the Qaddafi regime.

"What if's" are fun, but miss the point.  That the Libyans enjoy a measure of freedom today is directly related to the American military preventing the military of the old regime completely destroying the rebels.  We were fortunate not to lose pilots and aircraft during that air campaign.  Now, we've lost three American diplomats, the leader of which seems, from the article, to have been deeply committed to seeing post-Qaddafi Libya succeed.  The Libyan people lost a good and able friend yesterday, killed by their own.

You're welcome, Libya.  And, I'm so glad all those who supported Pres. Obama's ill-considered decision to "do something" have felt vindicated all these months, because everyone needs time to celebrate being right.

So, let's do this again!  In Syria!  Iran!  Heck, why not go in whole hog and declare war on Pakistan, since we're already killing people there left and right?  Oh, and who can forget Yemen.

Liberal hawks are no brighter than their conservative counterparts.  They just have less excuse because, usually, they demonstrated sense and thoughtfulness when conservatives decided to start shooting Muslims.

"The Entire Governmental Power"

I had some time on my hands last night, and because the Internet has everything available I decided to fulfill a long-held wish.  I knew from Roy Jeynkins biography that there existed a recording of William Gladstone.  It was actually quite easy to find; the problem is, Gladstone was standing a bit too far from the recording trumpet; despite being cleaned up and filtered and having all the digital bells and whistles applied to it, the listener has a difficult time hearing Gladstone, which is a shame. At his height, known as "The People's William", Gladstone was among the first important political figures in Britain who had the ability to attract and hold enormous crowds when he gave speeches.  The recording just doesn't give listeners any hint of this.  It doesn't help it was recorded when Gladstone was approaching eighty years old, many of the fires in his life long banked.  For all that, it was strange and wonderful to sit in my comfortable 21st century house, earbuds in my computer, and listen to one of the great statesmen of the 19th century, the many years between us disappearing in an instant.

The Internet Archive is a marvelous resource.  Holding not only the Gladstone recording, but thousands of others, I decided to do some playing around.  Finishing up a book on the First World War, I decided to check and see if there were any words from Pres. Woodrow Wilson.  His wonderful, clear baritone coming out of the buds made me realize that, having been a college professor, Wilson learned early how to speak clearly to people.

Moving on from Wilson, I thought, "Why not?" and tried Theodore Roosevelt.  With the exceptions of Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, Roosevelt is perhaps the one American from our somewhat distant past whose voice I have wanted to hear (Lincoln died before voice recording was invented; I tried to find one, but there seems to be no record of Twain recording his voice).  TR was  a bundle of contradictions, barely held together by his tight vest and jacket.  Short, sickly during his childhood and youth, Roosevelt overcame his physical limitations through that most vaunted of 19th century human attributes - sheer will.

Looking at photographs and considering his vigorous lifestyle, so reminiscent of another former sickly child who felt the need to prove his masculinity (Ernest Hemingway), one would think Roosevelt would have had a sonorous voice, rising and echoing from his voluminous middle.  Alas, hearing TR speak across 100 years, one hears a slightly nasal, high tenor in a sing-song cadence that is the one thing that hints at the energy its owner possessed.

There are two TR speech recordings in the Internet Archive, both from the 1912 Presidential election*.  Clicking on the first, titled "The Liberty Of The People", I was shocked and surprised by what I heard.  I knew right away I wanted to make it the subject of this post this morning, but I was afraid that taking the time to transcribe the speech would prevent that.  So, I fired up Teh Google Box and, sure enough, there are several transcripts out there (the next time someone says they can't find something on the Internet, I am more convinced than ever that must mean it just doesn't exist).  The link at the top of this paragraph takes readers to the two Roosevelt speeches.  I encourage anyone and everyone to click the link and hit the "Play" button and listen to Roosevelt speak, the time between him and us disappearing in the second or so it takes the recording to load.  Below is the transcript, found here:

The difference between Mr. Wilson and myself is fundamental. The other day in a speech at Sioux Falls, Mr. Wilson stated his position when he said that the history of government, the history of liberty, was the history of the limitation of governmental power. This is true as an academic statement of history in the past. It is not true as a statement affecting the present. It is true of the history of medieval Europe. It is not true of the history of 20th Century America. In the days when all governmental power existed exclusively in the King or in the baronage, and when the people had no shred of that power in their own hand, then it undoubtedly was true that the history of liberty was the history of the limitation of the governmental power of the outsiders who possessed that power. But today, the people have actually or potentially the entire governmental power. It is theirs to use and to exercise if they choose to use and to exercise it. It offers the only adequate instrument with which they can work for the betterment, for the uplifting, of the masses of our people. The liberty of which Mr. Wilson speaks today means merely the liberty of some great trust magnate to do that which he is not entitled to do. It means merely the liberty of some factory owner to work haggard women over hours for under pay and himself to pocket the proceeds. It means the liberty of the factory owner who crowds his operatives into some crazy deathtrap on a top floor, where if fire starts the slaughter is immense**. It means the liberty of the big factory owner who is conscienceless and unscrupulous, to work his men and women under conditions which eat into their lives like an acid. It means the liberty of even less conscientious factory owners to make their money out of the toil, the labor, of little children. Men of this stamp are the men whose liberty would be preserved by Mr. Wilson. Men of this stamp are the men whose liberty would be preserved by the limitation of governmental power. We propose, on the contrary, to extend governmental power in order to secure the liberty of the wage- workers, of the men and women who toil in industry, to save the liberty of the oppressed from the oppressor. Mr. Wilson stands for the liberty of the oppressor to oppress; we stand for the limitation of his liberty thus to oppress those who are weaker than himself.

Few people running for office today could sum up so well, and so colorfully, what is at stake in this Presidential election one hundred years later.  Whatever else may be the differences between the Republican and Democratic visions of governance, it seems clear enough that, while the tables may have turned over the course of a century, the fundamental argument is still the same.  Roosevelt's expansive view of the role of public power to check the private abuse of power is rooted, as he makes clear, in the need to benefit the whole nation, not just "the job creators" of his (and our) time.

This shows that there really isn't anything new under the sun.  It also shows that Obama and the Democratic Party and the voters who support him stand in a long, proud tradition of some of the best America has to offer***.

*This was back when there were no restrictions other than tradition on the number of years and terms a President could hold.  TR had served out an almost complete term after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, then was re-elected on his own merits in 1904.  He was unhappy and restless as a former President, deciding to run against his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, bolting from the Republican Party to do so.  He actually outpolled Taft in '12, coming in second to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.  Because there was little distance between Roosevelt and Wilson in matters of economic policy, but huge differences in questions of civil rights and foreign policy, I've often wondered what those years would have looked like had Roosevelt managed to eke out a win.

*This is a reference to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of the year before.

***I'll save for another day criticisms of TR's war-mongering.  In this, too, he is represented by our current President.

No Such Thing As Fringe Research

A recent bugaboo of mine is blinkered vision offered by the major parties and their candidates for the future of America.  Rather than challenge us as a people to achieve something difficult, we are told by both Gov. Romney and Pres. Obama the best we can look forward to over the next four years is a better economy.  Without, of course, talking about anything more specific than taxes and Medicare.  That Gov. Romney thought to make a laugh line of Pres. Obama's 2008 speech in which he offered the thought that we Americans might find a way to work together to curb the worst effects of global warming demonstrates to me there are far too many Americans who just don't believe it possible to do anything great or good beyond fight wars without end and, at best, have a basic, functioning national economy.

It was nice, then, to read this morning that at least one member of Congress is trying to point out how publicly funded scientific research benefits all Americans.  Especially, perhaps, when it sounds really silly.

It is human nature to chuckle at a study titled “Acoustic Trauma in the Guinea Pig,” yet this research led to a treatment for hearing loss in infants. Similar examples abound. Transformative technologies such as the Internet, fiber optics, the Global Positioning System, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computer touch-screens and lithium-ion batteries were all products of federally funded research.

Yes, “the sex life of the screwworm” sounds funny. But a $250,000 study of this pest, which is lethal to livestock, has, over time, saved the U.S. cattle industry more than $20 billion. Remember: The United States itself is the product of serendipity: Columbus’s voyage was government-funded. Remember, too, that basic science, the seed corn of innovation, is primarily supported by the federal government — not industry, which is typically more interested in applied research and development.

I wrote a year ago about the occasional nonsense politicians who know nothing about anything get up to when it comes to publicly-funded research.  It's nice to see that we are moving beyond Proxmire in an effort to celebrate some of the things that make America a great and good land, including funding basic scientific research.

Oh, and if you write a comment on this post using your Google Account, please don't bash federal funding for basic research.  If you are using a computer, don't bash federal funding for basic research.  If you use or used to use a calculator, particularly a Texas Instruments calculator, don't bash federal funding for basic research.  If you have all your immunization shots up to date, are eating a well-rounded healthy diet, don't bash federal funding for basic research.

Basically, if you are alive and reading this, and want to bash federal funding for basic scientific research, you've already lost your own argument.

Christianity And Our Nasty Political Moment

A friend of mine shared this article this morning on Facebook.  While the author's intentions are good, the article itself is a mush of good feeling and misplaced earnestness, such as the following:

Rather than engage in the political process, Christians have a duty to elevate it. Like any other sin, we are called to stand above the partisan dissension and demonstrate a better way. Should we have an opinion? Yes. Should we care about our country? Yes. Should we vote? Yes. But it’s time we talk politics in a way that models the teachings of Jesus rather than mocks them.

The piece goes on to list seven things that while true in some general sense are also irrelevant to the specifics of our virulent public debate.  I tend to be wary of general principles, although I do have my own unexamined and unfalsifiable ones.  They can serve us in certain situations, but are wholly inappropriate for others.

Since I had a discussion on this very subject not that long ago with my dear preacher-lady wife, I think it only fair to make clear my own position on this particular reality within which we all live.  I am doing so by altering, ever so slightly, the wording and thoughts behind the seven points.

1.  Neither party cares about religious faith.  Whether it's Christianity in its many varieties, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, or no religion, political parties exist not to encourage and foster people of faith, but to promote and advance particular agendas for attaining and maintaining power.  At heart, that is what politics is about.  How that is achieved includes manipulating symbols and the emotional responses to various institutions from the family through racial and ethnic groups to religious organizations and their principles.  Neither party is innocent of this particular amoral failing; the Democratic Party's rush to make sure there was a statement about belief in God demonstrates the silly lengths to which they will go to assuage the feelings people express.

2. The things about which we argue, sometimes with heat and vitriol, are important.  Reducing our public discourse to entertainment and commerce has lowered the quality of how independent journalists cover the process.  Rather than important matters that impact all our lives, the notion that all this stuff is little different from "Casey Kasem's Top 40" or "Real Housewives of Atlanta" has made it impossible to communicate to people that politics as a means of gaining and maintaining power in order to do some things and not do other things for the country as a whole.  Instead, our journalists all act as if our politicians are celebrities, Congress is a game show hosted by some guy named Boehner, and there is little need to be either serious or thoughtful because "everyone knows" none of it matters.

3.  Patriotism is not the point.  The next time you see someone driving down the road in a car with one of those "These Colors Don't Run" bumper stickers, remember: Anyone who feels a need to express such a position must, somewhere deep, have far more ambivalent feelings about the United States.  Indeed, as a practical matter, looking at the actions of various figures in power from the parties, I sometimes wonder how it is possible the myth of hyper-patriotism has any strength left, what with all the oxygen stolen from that particular room by all the people talking without actually doing anything.  If you want to know what it means to be a patriotic American, read the Constitution (it's short) and The Federalist Papers (longer, but still doable).  Anyone says anything else, well, they're just ignorant.

4.  If you insist on agreeing with every position your party takes on any particular issue, you're not a Christian.  For all those who blather on about "sin", invoking the Old Testament as if there weren't a New Testament that clarified what the stuff in the Old Testament meant for us Christians, you'd think idolatry would be something they understood.  Apparently not, though.  If you identify with either major party in the United States to the extent that you keep pointing out things in the party platform as reasons, then you are a member of the Republican Church or Democratic Church, rather than the Church of Jesus Christ.

5.  Jesus prayed for everyone.  Jesus also took sides with the powerless and outcast.  Any good and honest Christian reflection begins not with this or that verse of the Bible.  It begins with the reality of the crucified, dead, and risen Jesus Christ.  We aren't "the Body of Paul", or "The Congregation of Leviticus."  We are called by the risen Christ to be His Body in this broken world.  Incarnational living, through the Spirit, brings us back to the Jesus who ignored the social and religious and political mores and laws for the sake of the people outside polite society.  He didn't turn down invitations from folks in positions of power and authority; he did not privilege them, their ideas, or practices, however.  Taking refuge in the admonition to "Pray for your leaders," ignores the reality that we are also called, first, to live out the ministry of Jesus.  That means taking sides, ticking off the folks who hold the keys to the earthly kingdom, and getting our hands and feet and reputations dirty by being known as drunkards and people who would be with prostitutes.

6.  Fear Not.  This is, actually, the only one of the seven with which I agree whole-heartedly.  I don't subscribe to the kind of nonchalance about the repercussions of who gets elected; I would insist, however, that we Christians remember that our God has many titles in the Bible and President just isn't one of them.  Even more, remember that God transformed Divine leadership in the person of the risen Christ from the earthly line of the old Kings of Israel to create a new Kingdom embodying the reality that was and is and will be Jesus Christ.  Just because they are not in any way ultimate decisions, however, does not make them unimportant; how we vote, the positions we take and candidates we support do have important, life-changing and history-changing consequences.  They just don't have anything to do with God's Providential governance of creation.

7.  Every election is important.  Treat the reality of politics with the respect it deserves.  The first election in which I cast a ballot for President was 1984.  To say I was "excited" is an understatement.  I was thrilled.  I also had no illusions about who was going to win.  By the time I filled out the absentee ballot, it was clear that Walter Mondale had all but surrendered the Presidency to Ronald Reagan, despite demonstrating in the first of the two debates between them that he could knock the President off his game pretty well and people responded to it.  1996 was much the same, only in reverse.  The Republican Party, true to form, chose as their candidate "the next in line", an elder statesman of their party who, for all we should all be grateful for his long life of service to our country, was just outmatched by the younger, vigorous incumbent.  By the time 2000 rolled around, so many voices were shouting from every source possible that we were entering some Fairytale Land of Peace and Prosperity Forever (Bill Clinton's presence at the Democratic Convention this past week brought a passel of folks reminding us How Wonderful We Were Back Then; we weren't but there were moments it certainly felt that way even then), and the next President need only be a semi-competent manager of the marvelous Machine of Prosperity.  Thus it was that we ended up not with a capable manager of the status quo but a set of reactionaries intent of dismantling the last remnants of the social and financial safety net the kept the wolves from breaking down the door; we ended up with war-monger-turned-war-criminals, thousands upon thousands of dead Iraqis and Afghans as we over-reacted to the events of September 11.

Politics is about acquiring, maintaining, and using power.  The religious life, at its best regardless of the particulars of doctrine and creed and claim about deity and humanity, is about setting aside power for the good of the larger community.  Christianity in particular is about living out a life in which human power is set aside for the power of God incarnate in the dead and risen Jesus of Nazareth.  God's power was revealed in that Act as powerlessness by any human definition.  We are dealing with two very different realms of human action, with very different presuppositions and assumptions and goals.  It is possible to be a faithful Christian and stand up for one's political and policy aspirations with strength and determination even in our historical moment of deep distrust and verbal vitriol, as long as we remember politics and parties do not define us.

We are marked by the Cross at our baptism, rather than the letters "R" or "D" after our name in the county clerk's voter rolls.

Making Elections Interesting

I have long thought that we need to change the way Electoral votes are apportioned in this country.  All the states except Nebraska send all their electors for a particular candidate if that candidate won the popular vote in that state.  In Nebraska, if a candidate wins the state, that candidate wins the two Electors apportioned from the US Senate.  The rest are apportioned according to which one was victorious in each House district.

Picture the Electoral college map in such a scenario in, say, Texas.  Mitt Romney might have the two electors  from the US Senate.  Barack Obama, however, might just win a few in and around, say, Houston or San Antonio.  On the other hand, Barack Obama would easily take New York, but venture outside the concrete halls of New York City to the mostly empty spaces of western and northern New York, and Mitt Romney might just do well enough to sneak a couple Electors in to his pocket.  Except, of course, for the cities of Rochester and Buffalo (although Buffalo is a pretty Republican town, so who knows?).

Obama might even have had to campaign in his home state, convincing down-state Illinoisans that he deserves four more years.  As it is, the Prairie State is a lock and the President will be conspicuous in his absence as will Gov. Romney.

There would be a few states, to be sure, that would be off the Electoral radar, like Wyoming and, perhaps, Alaska.  New Hampshire might get a visit or two, as might Vermont.  California would be the real prize, with over fifty House seats, and most of them needed to keep the election out of the House of Representatives.

I suppose I'm dreaming here, because no part is going to pass a law in any state that would disadvantage its candidate in the Electoral College.  It would, however, steal elections away from consultants and the drone about "swing states".

If My Grandma Had Wheels She'd Be A Wagon

Let me just say that I agree, in principle, with the policy positions outlined by Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein.  The problem I have is the remarkably silly ideas in the following snippet:

The emotionally inflammatory issues that divide us are promulgated by the media, politicians, and even some religious leaders.  These red herring issues draw us away from the basic issues that unite us: our economy and a vibrant democracy

If we the 99% were able to stay focused on these issues basic issues and vote for candidates who would address them when they were in office, we would change our nation in one election by electing candidates who represent us and not the corporations, the lobbyists, or the military-industrial establishment. There are moments when our ability as a mega-majority to change our nation to serve our needs seems so obvious that I marvel that we haven’t already done so.

"Red herring issues" include things like abortion rights and women's rights; civil rights and the politics of the culture wars.  Why are these red herrings for Dr. Stein?  For the millions who care about them, who shape their approach to selecting a candidate for whom to vote they are hardly red herrings.  For the millions who work to ensure women's rights to quality health care, or for whom matters of school choice are a deeply personal, family matter, these are not red herrings but matters of utmost importance.

To call the abundance of issues outside socio-economic matters "red herrings" is, in a trite yet ignorant turn of phrase, to dismiss the concerns of one's fellow citizens as irrelevant.  It is to announce to potential voters they are too ignorant, too easily led by "media, politicians, and even some religious leaders," to understand what's really important.

Like the now-infamous book What's The Matter With Kansas?, the assumption here is that the politics of the culture wars are a dodge used by conservatives to play upon the fears of ignorant voters so they will vote against their own economic best interests.  The argument has the single virtue of the economic numbers on its side; what it dismisses is the fact that all those folks voting against what is, objectively, their own economic interests might be voting for other reasons, with matters of economics far down the list.

To say, "Geez, if everyone else understood things the way I understand them, we wouldn't be in this mess," is no less authoritarian than the current Republican push to restrict voting rights for the poor and minorities because they fear those people would vote Democratic.  It is an expression of fear of democracy, fear of the people, and the assumption that those who really know what's important and not a red herring should be given the keys to power.

It would be nice, I suppose, if folks set to one side their preference for particular issues that are less important to others.  It would be nice, for example, if at least some Republicans understood that the elected officials with "R" after their names don't really care about restricting abortion rights (God knows they've had plenty of opportunities to do so and haven't).  They won't though, and that's OK.

I would much rather have an electorate like the one we really have, one that concerns itself with all sorts of issues some believe are red herrings, than have politicians who come to the people and tell them they're too stupid to understand what's really important.  Politics isn't like that.  People aren't like that.

I agree with Jill Stein and the Green's when it comes to some matters of policy.  Their wishes - If people thought like we do, the world would be sunshine and fluffy kittens! - demonstrate an ignorance of the reality of politics and a dismissal of real democratic values.  It's kind of sad, because a Green Party President would at least have the virtue of offering an interesting four years.

I Am A Woman: From Sojourner Truth To Michelle Obama

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

--snip--

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them. - Sojourner Truth, 1851

 So maybe Michelle Obama was supposed to humanize her on Tuesday night, in her big speech. Maybe she was even supposed to humanize herself. But she wound up doing something very different, and something far more rare, and something that not only answered the people who insist that she is not like them but also had to shame them: She was simply human, and so as American as any of us could hope or dare to be. - Tom Junod

So Michelle Obama gave a speech last night, and like many politicians, she became a blank sheet of paper upon which the audience could create an image from their hopes and fears.  That she did what she did is a testament to the rise in prominence of the First Lady since Nancy Reagan; somehow it seems necessary, at least to political consultants, that the American people be reminded the President is above all else a person within some kind of relationship.  Thus it is we have Presidential candidates' wives trotted out to speak on behalf of their husbands, testifying to their basic goodness (regardless of the facts; Reagan was a pretty lousy Dad, according to the testimony of his children; the basic soundness of a Presidential parent becomes irrelevant the moment myth-making is needed).

Yet, at Tom Junod's piece at Esquire, we see a further hurdle Mrs. Obama is forced not so much to leap but clamber over: Even here, at a titularly "liberal" site, Michelle Obama must first demonstrate her fundamental humanity to many for who skepticism on this point continues to matter.  'Twas ever thus, one could say, in particular for women of color who have had to establish not only their bona fides as women, but their humanity as well.  Thus it is that even an accomplished, intelligent, attractive, thoughtful person such as Mrs. Obama has, in the words of Mr. Junod, to make herself look human.

Were I married to Mrs. Obama, I'd smack him up side his head for such presumptuousness.

Thankfully, the First Lady demonstrated not only through her poise but also her courage, standing in front of an in-house crowd of thousands and a television crowd of millions doing what most of those watching could never do; she also demonstrated that she feels no desire to assuage the doubts of people like Junod who think that it is always incumbent upon minorities to calm the fears of the majority.

In 2008, there were wild rumors abounding that a video existed . . . somewhere . . . of a speech Mrs. Obama allegedly gave . . . somewhere . . . in which she spoke of her hatred of white people.  Of course, no such thing exists, yet the rumors continue, and there are many on the right who believe this video has disappeared through some wild machinations by the President.  Even those who don't believe crap like this, however, still think Mrs. Obama had some task to perform to settle their good liberal fears that she might just be that Angry Black Woman of American mythology.  Instead, of course, she told a typical American story that resonated with those in attendance in Charlotte because Mrs. Obama has answered Sojourner Truth's question in the affirmative, demonstrating that, indeed, as an African-American female she is every bit a woman, and an American woman at that.

That kind of courage, to set to one side the expectations so many white men seem to demand in their silent looks of expectation, demonstrates the necessity of remembering Truth's question.  It also shows that Mrs. Obama knows to her bones this is the reality she faces and doesn't care.  She is who she is, a woman indeed with strength and ability, and she just doesn't care whether or not some folks are nervous or upset about that.

A Couple Things

President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.  My promise is to help you and your family. - Mitt Romney, August 30, 2012

Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth - Barack Obama, June 8, 2008

The line got all sorts of cheers at the expense of Barack Obama.  "He's going to stop the oceans from rising, isn't that funny?!?  The guy thinks he's the Messiah or something!"  Then, Romney turned it around, the single most clever moment of his Presidential campaign yet: He made a simple promise that people could understand.  No grand vision of world-changing events; just simple, honest hard work for the American family.

Let me just say I admire this, the best rhetorical moment in Romney's acceptance speech.  Playing off the ridiculous idea that Barack Obama considers himself some kind of Messiah, it lets folks who oppose the President get that particular freak on, all the while making Mitt Romney's candidacy (and potential Presidency) look all the more down to earth.

All the same, if you actually look at what then-candidate Obama said, it becomes clear that Romney, yet again, gets it wrong.  In fact, he gets it wrong in a really important, substantive fashion.  He gets it wrong the same way all those who insist Pres. Obama suffers from megalomania get it wrong.  Whether as a candidate or as President, one word Obama rarely uses in speeches is "I".  In particular during campaign mode, candidate Obama was and is very careful to use the plural "we".  Obama is very clear that the vision he outlined in the speech after clinching the nomination four June's ago is not a vision of what "he" will do.  Quite the contrary.  The speech is about his hope and belief and vision that the American people - "we"; remember it's plural here - will do the hard work and make the tough choices and sacrifices to make America a great and good land.

Now, we can argue about these matters on the merits.  What we cannot do is say, "Obama said x," when in fact, he never did.  We cannot pretend that Obama's saying x indicates something about his personality when he did not in fact say x.  Indeed, insisting he did say x actually says more about the people who insist he did so than about the person who never said it.  So, Gov. Romney . . . why do you believe Pres. Obama said he'd heal the oceans when there is no record he ever said any such thing?

Furthermore, I would like to know what is wrong with what candidate Obama said in 2008.  Is it bad to tell the American people that working together we can make a difference?  Is it wrong to tell the American people that the specter of the looming effects of global warming - something with which we have become all too familiar the past year - need not be inevitable if we work together to change it?  Is it wrong to tell American families that serving and helping them includes making sure their homes aren't washed away in the rising tides, or their farms burned to a crisp in the scorching drought?  Is it wrong to let the American people know that all of us can, indeed, do great things despite what the nay-sayers and doom-preachers insist is so?

Because, Gov. Romney, I have to tell you, I much prefer a President who challenges us - us, now; in case you've forgotten again, that's the plural meaning a whole bunch of us - to face our problems to one who invents quotes from his opponents, then insists these quotes contain some kind of political or moral or personal error by making of them some kind of punchline to a really clever rhetorical move.  I admire the rhetoric, Governor.  I don't admire what's behind it.

Peace, Love, And Understanding

There was something implacable about all this, above all; it seemed inanimate. . . .  You could see nothing of the agony and passion that gave each little moving human dot its own individual character and made them all so many worlds.  All you saw was the material development of a clash between two huge material forces. - Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, letter to his sister from the front, 1918

This generation has no future, and deserves none.  Anyone who belongs to it lives no more. - German Lt. Rudolf Binding, A Fatalist At War 

 

Having finally made my way through the essays in Stephen Jay Gould's Dinosaur In A Haystack, borrowed from my parents' house after my visit in late July, I have begun a long-delayed re-read of Gregor Dallas's 1918: War and Peace.  With many thoughts still on our troops in Afghanistan as well as the thousands of veterans from there and Iraq and their myriad problems (especially the suicide rate among both active duty and veteran troops from the wars), I have been wondering to myself about the inner strength of our military personnel.  Not in a detrimental way, certainly.  Our troops have been fighting under conditions that are unique in our history: they continue to carry out their missions with an invisibility - except when their names pop up on casualty lists - that is remarkable.  Had Johnson and Nixon managed to wage their wars in southeast Asia with the kind of opacity Bush and Obama have managed, the history of the last quarter of the 20th century would have been very different, to say the least.  No, my concern was whether our troops, professional volunteers from a land of opulent abundance, comfort, and security, experienced the shock of warfare in ways that stripped them of the psychological defenses needed to remain sane in insane situations, then return to their normal lives without widespread psychic damage.  The numbers certainly aren't encouraging, and while the military is certainly continuing to improve the assistance given our troops, I guess I'm a little worried that we are forgetting our own responsibilities to our returning veterans.  How do we here back home not only make the invisible visible again, but hear them in a way that helps them return home?

It is with something like relief, in a sad way, that I turn to this first horrid total war of the past century to discover that British, French, German, Russian, and American troops were no different in kind from their American great-great-grandchildren.  While our social and political and economic and cultural realities are far different, the suffering our troops endure after their tours are over and they return to the quiet and safety of civilian life, that front-line veterans recognize a near-infinite distance between themselves and any who has not experienced the horrors of their recent lives is a constant refrain.

The First World War occurred in the midst of many social revolutions, including a steadily rising standard of living, the expansion of literacy and education, and the beginnings of clinical psychology that all blended together to create a literature that was different from other post-war memoirs.  Going all the way back to Julius Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul, generals have sought to justify their actions to people by presenting their case for the conduct of military operations.  The 20th century saw a flowering of these kinds of writings, to be sure.  It also saw the emergence of literature from the front-line soldier.

Not just memoirs, but novels and, in the case of the First World War, poetry.  The great, tragic Wilfred Owen.  The high moral dudgeon in the midst of contradiction that was the poetry of Sigfried Sassoon.  These poems shaped the way many came to understand the lives of troops in the trenches, the horrors of that war of mud and gas and mass death.  There were the novels of Ernest Hemingway, such as The Sun Also Rises. The most famous novel about the First World War was Erich Maria Remarque's All's Quiet On The Western Front, presenting to the world the realization that, regardless of the uniform or cause, at least in that horrible war the experiences of soldiers differed little.

A constant refrain from our returning troops, suddenly visible to the public after a twelve month or eighteen month absence, is the inability of any save those in the midst of the surrealism of front-line combat to have any grasp or understanding of their time.  Friends and loved one seek out this information, I think, not only to reconnect with their loved one, but to remind them that the reality of life in war, life at war, is not the only reality; that there is, indeed peace and love to be had with family and friends, but only through understanding.  While civilians have, I believe in no small part thanks to the literature that has flowed from veterans of previous wars, a grasp at the very least of the reality of the distance between troops at the front and their own lives, we are still waiting for those first real confessions and poems and novels from troops from our decade of war.  In the meantime, far too many of our American soldiers and sailors, our Marines and airmen and pilots suffer not just from post-traumatic stress, but the seeming inability to bridge the gap back to their non-combat lives; perhaps they should learn the lessons their not-so-distant ancestors learned, and take what they experienced and write it down.

Will we understand?  Of course not; not in the way those who have lived and been wounded or died there understood it.  We will, however, understand our lack of understanding, and hear in the voices of our combat veterans the reality of the unreality that is war in its most immediate experience.  In that sharing, the mutual need to understand and be understood, to love and receive love, to come together by communicating the reality of the distances between us, we might yet have some peace, love and understanding.

Something For Everyone

I've read quite a few complaints recently, not directed at anyone in particular, about the abundance of political status updates on Facebook.  There's even a meme going around making the obvious point that these things don't change anyone's mind.

I have a FB friend really into knitting and sewing.  Reading about her discovery of an old sewing machine, then remembering a conversation my sister and cousin had about our mothers' sewing clothes for us (like what I am wearing in this picture, around the time I was four years old)

I decided to write a post about my Mom, that old Necchi sewing machine, and what it meant for us as a family, and how those musings led to thoughts about what is and is not real in this world, and how those relationships work themselves out for us.

I'm not capable of sewing.  I cannot and would not even try to knit.  I would never, however, be so forthright as to write something on Facebook to the effect that I'm quite tired of being forced to read all these posts about yarn and quilting and sewing and needlepoint because, God Almighty, I couldn't care less.

The fact is, it's an election year.  There are folks who find this stuff interesting and important.  No one is forcing anyone to read anything.  You don't like to read about politics?  Feel free to skip right over it and move on to someone's latest grandchildren pics or the meme about women scolding men for being men.

Please, however, don't pretend that Facebook is "about" anything other than folks connecting and OMG LOOK AT THESE BABY RED PANDAS!!!!!