THE DEMOCRATIC WAY

Joe Conason has an article over on Salon (“Poor, poor Gonzales”, www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/05/11/gonzales_hearing/print.html).

He’s reporting on the mind-bashing dumbness with which House Republicans strewed Quaint Al’s path with consolation during The Quaintster’s recent hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee hearing (which ran an impressive six hours).

Several ancillary thoughts occurred to me. It is refreshing to observe democracy at work, seeing the stupidity (real or feigned) among the Republicans that can get itself elected to Congress. I’m glad that there is no ‘authority’ in this country with powers sufficiently plenary so as to ensure that only intelligent people can get sent to Congress.

Nor – in the decades of their vigorous pandering to the Identities – did the Democrats accomplish anything less than strike down long-standing firewalls of Truth and maturity and critical, skeptical intelligence; indeed, the Dems made it positively incorrect to kick certain favored tires. Seeking to dilute any intelligence that might criticize urgent favoritisms, the Dems opened the screen-door of Our civilization, through which gigantic stupidities of pre-historic proportions flew or waddled back in. Think: opening the gate in the forest wall not to King Kong but to a herd of omnivorous dinosaurs with brains the size of a walnut. Bad judgment. Bad juju.

And we wonder why nobody could “connect the dots” in re the tortured singleton Cho at Virginia Tech? Of course it was clear that he was seriously unwell and in great and emergent need of psychiatric help. But what administrator in this Year of Sensitivity the Thirty-Sixth (more or less; I’m counting from don’t-blame-the-victim in 1971) would dare risk job and career to a) ‘label’ b) an ethnic minority by c) ‘judging’ him to be d) seriously whacked out. Nor am I trying to smuggle in a nostalgic vote for uninformed, yahoo, macho, bulldog decisiveness (look where that has gotten us in Iraq).

But in the revolutionary arrogance and impatience to totally transform everything immediately, abetted by the Democrats’ and the media’s full panoplium of power and influence, a lot of key American content and process was swept away. To be labeled ‘insensitive’ was (up until the invention of the ‘sex offender’ two decades later) the most awful and lethal opprobrium that might be heaped on a bureaucratic head. Who wanted to risk his/her career to exercise discrimination and authority and act decisively to either make this tortured soul get help or get him off the campus? Suppose some other ‘professional’ further along the chain didn’t back you up and declared him ‘well enough’? Suppose the parents went and got a lawyer? Suppose some pol with a political need to look compassionate got involved on the kid’s side? Suppose – the horror! – a bunch of sensitive and pained students showed up under your office window with ribbons and bunches of flowers and news-cameras? Oy. Better to be ‘sensitive’ and keep your mouth shut.

As Conason notes, the Republicans at the hearing seemed utterly unable to grasp the lethality of the challenge that Gonzales and all that he stands for poses to The Republic, to the rule of Law, to fundamental democratic process, and to the role of The People in the American scheme of things. Or, if they did grasp it, their need to remain in the odour of sanctity within their Party reduced such concerns to irrelevance.

So it came to me: here is the way that the Democrats can make their way back up to the High Ground while simultaneously coming to efficacious grips with the most dangerous threat to The Republic that We now face. Let the Democrats stand four-square for democratic process. Forget, for the moment, the ‘content’ – in the past decades the desire for liberation has led to speech-codes and sex-offender registration and the love of liberty has led to pre-emptive, invasive war. Let Us start off gently and simply restore democratic process. And if the Democrats have the right stuff to stand tall, then let Us have the stuff to exercise Our authority to support them.

Now, this is not a put-down of Republicanism. It is a recoil from the monstrous Frankenstein of Rove-ian Republicanism – that stitched-together medley of dead things Neocon, Fundamentalist, and Jingoist. When the more mature Republicans can get ahold of their Party again, then – to borrow an image of Abe Lincoln’s – Our trip will be made smoother, having a pumpkin in each saddlebag. For now, We’ll have to go to the job with the Party We’ve got: the Democrats. If they’re up to it. Who stands for The Republic?

DEMOCRATIC BARRACKS FLAT

Over on TNR-Online Casey Blake has an entry entitled “Obama and Niebhur” (www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity?pid=104944). Obama has been quoting Reinhold Niebuhr to spackle up himself and the overall Democratic position.

His heart’s in the right place, certainly. And he’s heading in the right direction. But, given the limitations imposed by the current Democratic ‘base’, he’s not gonna be able to go far enough along the runway to achieve liftoff.

Asked (by the histrionic David Brooks) what he thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, Obama replied “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” Now of course, since Darth Bush also had a favorite philosopher, back in the days when he was still the jug-eared, folksy moderate who was looking to take government off everybody’s back in a humble and compassionate sorta way, then maybe by this point a lot of folks will have sworn off philosophy and maybe even Jesus, but surely off any aspiring candidates verbally hugging busts of this or that cerebral Dead White European Male guy.

But Obama had done some homework. What Obama “takes away” from Niebuhr is “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate these things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter cynicism.” Woof! Woof-Woooooooof! Most impressive – Obi Wan has taught you well (to borrow a phrase). At this point in a college class in ’68, more than sufficient material would have been generated to justify the prof leading everybody outside onto the lawn under a tree to groove on the high of such concentrated stuff, such radically good stuff. Today, one imagines, students would be urged to circle their desks and share their most painful and outrageous experience of being victimized by bitterness and cynicism. God writes straight with crooked lines.

You can only applaud the Dems’ efforts to head back to the high ground, so hastily abandoned three decades ago. It has to be embarrassing when the only grounds for opposing the catastrophe in Iraq is that we’re losing, leaving unspoken the malodorously bloody implication that if this premeditated, mendacious, invasive gambit had worked, the Dems would have no objection or at least no grounds upon which to make an objection.

And they – and Obama – have culled Niebuhr for precisely those issues and prescriptions which recall the Dems’ Progressive and New Deal heritage: a clear-eyed acknowledgement that there is evil and hardship and pain in the world; the requirement that We be modest and humble in our efforts to eliminate those things (may the colloquial ‘totally’ and the more sinister official ‘zero tolerance’ finally be put up on blocks in a locked garage?); the necessity to relinquish the naivete that resulted in the whole-hog embrace of “utopian schemes” and “social engineering”; a sober abandonment of the “sentimental approach” (at least “to international affairs”).

But while it’s a lot, it’s not going to fly. There is no Meta, no sense of the Beyond that was the very fount and origin and sustaining energy of Niebuhr’s en-Visioned world: of the evil that cannot simply be reduced to misfiring neurons or human greed (individual or ‘institutionalized’) or ignorance or self-interest; of the Promise of Grace that fortifies and sustains the children of light far beyond the power of their own merely human motivation; of the workings of Grace that complement the inevitably imprecise and incomplete efforts of humans and upon the faith in which believing humans foreswear more ‘thorough’ and ‘efficient’ means of bringing about Good ‘by whatever means necessary’. Without that truly High Ground, without the Higher Belief – I guess we’d have to call it nowadays – then the simple recitation of Niebuhr’s derived observations and prescriptions are free-floating and unanchored, un-trellised and ungrounded.

The Dems, of course, can’t easily or quickly retake the High Ground without admitting that their previous decades’ of effort – and all the wrack and ruin caused thereby – were a colossal miscalculation, and – not to put too fine a point on it – fundamentally wrong-headed and wrong-spirited. It’s a dangerous thing to come about during a sea race or a sea chase: if you lose the wind, if she misses her stays, everything could be lost. And this is the run-up to a presidential election.

But on the course they’re headed, the Dems will have no real alternative to the spirit-proclaiming (albeit actually shallow and mendacious) Republican call to ‘prayer’, prayer preferably flag-wrapped. The Rove-ian Republicans are still the only folks talking ‘spirit’, however swinishly they manipulate God-talk to their own treacherous, reptilian ends.

And if the Dems are simply trying to talk-the-talk, then they really still don’t ‘get it’: there is most surely a Meta, and most of the citizenry sense that, and most of the citizenry will not rest easy with a Party that cannot carry that precious cargo for them; indeed, they may entrust their passage to the Party that assures them that it will carry that precious cargo regardless of that Party’s unpleasant baggage. And it may be a truly demonic temptation for the Democrats that in order to avoid biting the bullet of doing what it takes to reclaim the High Ground of the Meta they simply hope that the Republicans will have sooooo much unpleasant baggage that the Dems win by – for all practical purposes – default. And that We will then be subjected to years of government by the Party of Default (i.e. ‘At least we’re not Bush and the Rove-ian Republicans’). And if the Republican Party as it once was manages to exorcise the Rove-ian demons, and still possesses its lease on the High Ground, then the Dems will be knocked away again.

So, no Meta, no real Niebuhr, and efforts to embrace his derived prescriptions and observations will be no more substantive than sitting up the corpse of a dead king on the throne and claiming that the governance of the realm is in good hands.

Worse than that: Obama quotes from a Niebuhr of the early 1930s when – under the influence of the New Deal but also of the ‘revolutionary’ organizing that had been floating around in American labor (and understandably so) for decades: entrenched wealth and power would yield its privileges only to organized force; appeals to morality and progressive education would not suffice. Now this makes sense (and it implies that entrenched wealth and power constitute one of the great evils bethumping this world). But that ‘organized’ and that ‘force’ start to move us – and move Us – beyond the realm of democratic process, no matter how Good the cause, the intention, the desired outcome.

And Niebuhr’s exhortation to “non-violent coercion” moves Us further down that dangerous path. For while the Gandhian ‘non-violent’ is a refreshing and stimulating note, especially against the free-wheeling violence (official as well as unofficial) of those times, the ‘coercion’ once again moves Us dangerously beyond the ‘persuasion’ that is at the heart of democracy’s civic process. And this is precisely the point of fatal divergence where in the later 1960s and in the 1970s the Democrats – in Good causes – enabled the ferocious corrosion of democratic process and the very spirit of democracy, under a glowing parti-colored conceptual umbrella of Theory’s revolutionary process and the reflected glow of Martin Luther King’s Gandhian praxis (without, as always in America, the askesis).

So, Leon Wieseltier is right when the article notes that he calls Obama’s offerings “just uplift”. To really achieve take-off velocity, and to sustain flight, the Dems are going to need a fuel more substantial than hot air. And while Obama’s position is “thoughtful”, it perforce smells too much of the lamp: a shrewdly culled list of sound-bite ready phrases ungrounded by any quintessential core moral commitment to the Meta, to the High Ground.

As Christopher Sarandon’s vampire sneered to Roddy McDowall’s posturing cross-carrier in 1985’s “Fright Night”: “you have to have faith for that thing to work on me.” The Democrats are figuring to kill the vampire without having to go through the long Journey and Climb of Faith (the descent down from Faith was, after all, such kewl creative destruction). In seeking to avoid the hard spiritual work, this makes them as quintessentially American as the Bible Bhagwans. But it also ensures that the Party will remain only a wraith-like shade, without a true soul, and merely a shadow of those days now long ago when great Democratic souls walked the earth.

DEMS DO LIBERAL VIRTUES

Just to show how far behind you can get, I just caught up with an article by a college professor, Kevin Mattson, entitled “The Book of Liberal Virtues”, an article in the February 2006 issue of “The American Prospect” (http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10829).

He has news for us: “… conservatives are winning the culture wars”. And with good reason, he goes on: “The right has done a superb job at exploiting certain weaknesses on the left; liberals in the meantime have become gun shy”.

Yes and kinda no. The ‘culture’ is being so ripped apart that it’s anybody’s guess what there’ll be left of it by the time the ‘war’ is won by one side or the other. The thing will have been destroyed in order to save it. Because at the same time that a decades-long ‘war’ has been waged, generations are now grown up who have no way to remember or imagine the ‘culture’ as it was before the war started.

It will be for us as Lincoln observed in 1865: “Each side hoped for a result less fundamental and astounding”. But where that war brought about some good, however imperfectly realized, the present decades-long culture war won’t yield any such ‘good’ result because the very trellis of maturity and citizenship is being pulled apart as the two extremes – left and right – gyrate with increasing violence, preventing the Vessel from returning to any semblance of an even keel.

When a culture wages a war against some ‘other’ it retains its own identity; but when the culture is itself being warred over, then when it’s all over there will not be any ‘there’ there. There will be versions of societal and individual immaturity – ala the right and ala the left – and assorted permutations and devolutions of the same, but that will be all.

Professor Mattson has fears and dark visions, but his nightmare alarm is brightened by one shining clarity: it’s the “right’s” fault; it’s the fault of “conservative postmodernism”. Amazingly, having broached this strikingly dissonant phrase, he says utterly nothing about its unspoken but densely present progenitor: the notorious ‘liberal postmodernism’ that carried the bacillus of Theory’s content and Revolution’s process into the heart of American culture some 4 decades ago.

Comprising the self-sustaining synergy of this conservative postmodernism, the Prof names “anti-intellectualism”, a “popular distrust of professionalism and higher education”, and a popular distrust of “objectivity”. There’s a psychological term for the phenomenon of selectively seeing the best in your own position and the worst in the other guy’s. The Prof seems unaware (or too young to personally recall) the anti-intellectualism of Theory as it was wielded by the early advocates of that early – feminist - revolution, which was all about “men” just “not getting it” and about how objectivity was simply an oppressive tool of the patriarchy and we should all be into our own intuitions and feelings and – flying the pot-whacked inanities of the Summer of Love into the stratospheric heights of Constitutional (not to say God-given) rights – our bodies.

Stunningly (he’s a Contemporary History professor) he proclaims that “for the conservative mind of today everything is political; there is no set of competences that rises about the struggle for political power”. Does he not recall that “the personal is political” was the battle-cry of those early fill-in-the-blank-Wave feminists 30 and 40 years ago? That it was that formally revolutionary conceptualization which destroyed the concept of and respect for ‘private space’ (i.e. personal space the government has no business being in) and, in consequence, a robust and vital appreciation of individual interiority? And can any of all that ever be brought back, do you think? And if not … ?

And he quickly adds (contra the conservatives, of course) that “Following from this there is no real truth”. Let’s assume that the American Pragmatism of such as William James is not ‘contemporary’ enough to be included in his professional purview; but the Theory embraced by the revolutionaries of 40 years ago was pretty hard on ‘objective truth’ even before the x-Wave started flaunting the superior sensitivity of the female as opposed to the brutish, loutish male.

He goes on (again contra the conservatives) that “there are only clashing viewpoints relative to one another”. Apparently he wasn’t around when you either got-it or you just-didn’t-get-it, and if you didn’t then you weren’t worth being listened to.

But he’s either very uninformed or sinisterly shrewd. Cutely he says “A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st-century. The looniest aspects of the far left during the 1960s morphed into the looniest aspects of the far right today”. The far left’s ideas in the 1960s weren’t “looney”; they were destructive in the manner of adolescent simplisticism mixed with utopian impatience and eagerness to impose a revolutionary sidestepping of ‘slow’ and ‘rotten’ democratic process through violence both physical and – against Truth, Objectivity, Virtue – conceptual.

Worse, once the war in Vietnam started to wind down (and the mid-‘60s college freshmen and sophomores graduated) the stereotypical ‘hippie’ and ‘yippie’ antiwar crowds dissolved. But their commitment to revolution-now was there for the taking, hanging in the very supercharged air of a society thick with late adolescents. The Black Power groups and the really fringe groups like the Weathermen deployed actual physical violence. Democracy had failed, in their view – and only revolution would serve to wipe out the infamous thing, if not to bring about a perfect society.

But the Identities – courted by the desperate Democrats – took a far more professional (almost “K Street”, we might say today) approach to matters: their ‘revolutions’ would be effected not by physical violence, but (even more dangerously) by doing an end-run around the slow-witted, insufficiently ‘concerned’ People and its democratic process – talk, deal, betray ideals – in order to bring about if not utopia then the glorious sunlit uplands of correcting historic and outrageous injustices.

So if there has always been an anti-intellectual streak in American politics – as Hofstadter says and as the Prof quotes him – yet that point is greatly insufficient to understand matters today. Prior to the 1960s and early 1970s anti-intellectualism had been embodied by uneducated and under-educated folks who were as much distrustful of mind-and-money allied in the Eastern urban ‘Establishment’, as they were simply uninterested in learning. Indeed, schoolhouses and ‘schoolmarms’ were one of the first concerns of new communities in the frontier era; it was not so much ‘education’ that agitated ‘farmers’ and ‘industrial workers’ as it was so-called ‘professionals’ who allied (for a price) their intelligence and knowledge with shrewd and unsavory corporate interests. Few Hahvuhd law school grads are recalled for their vigorous efforts in favor of the ‘little guy’, and few Hahvuhd business school grads deployed their talents on his behalf. And ‘he’ knew it; all of them.

But in the 1960s anti-intellectualism – embedded in the ‘Theory’ imported from Europe as a convenient tool to help crack open ‘space’ for the newly conceived and hatching Identities – was actually espoused by the universities themselves, and by many of the ‘professional’ truth-nurturers and truth-seekers such as the professoriate and the journalists. It was this awefull turn of events that wreaked so much profound damage to American culture and society. Fortified with the active support of so many of the ‘professions’, the advocates of the Identities – already committed to a non-democratic (hence revolutionary) method – for achieving their visions, went to work substituting their increasingly diverse if not also incompatible visions for any overarching ‘American Vision’, while simultaneously seeking to disable Reason, Tradition, Objectivity, God (as well as religion), and other capital-letter-concepts that might otherwise be deployed to impede their progress.

So there are two variants of ‘anti-intellectualism’: there is the version Hofstader described and discussed so well. Then there is the anti-intellectualism of the Left’s Political Correctness starting in the 1970s: this is not formally anti-intellectual, but rather functionally anti-intellectual: it never disparages thought and intelligence and education, but instead it requires you not to direct skeptical or even inquiring thought to an analysis or evaluation of certain ‘correct’ agendas and programs. Education is a wonderful thing and a mind is a terrible thing to waste; just don’t use it on subjects that we don’t want you to – not if you know what’s good for you.

This duplicity generated a pervasive agitation and a profound if inchoate sense of unease – and not only among the uneducated but among the middle-classes. And with whole swaths of the nation’s and the citzenry’s experiences off-limits to ‘thought’ or expression, then rational and logical evaluation and exchange – the very stuff of democratic deliberation – became derailed. And so the duplicity also dragged the tone and quality of public discourse down, back into the less advanced, more primitive modalities of childish, ad-hominem, visceral venting of unprocessed anger.

The level of public discourse that had been achieved theretofore was lost, and has yet to be found. The ‘center’ that is indispensable for democratic process – a sufficiently matured and socially competent citizenry, respectful of each other and of the deliberation which was their birthright, the alternative to which was dictatorship (‘tyranny’ in the classical usage) – was not only lost but branded as insufficient to the purposes of a ‘sensitive’ and ‘responsive’ society and its increasingly numerous ‘victims’.

The signature ‘emergencies’ and ‘outrages’ by which each successive Identity and advocacy jump-started itself up the ladder of national attention and priority required not deliberation but passion and action (a thoroughly classic revolutionary strategy); everything was ‘political’ and your politics had to be the ‘correct’ politics or you would be deemed – at the very least – insensitive and hateful. And so when the agitated finally organized themselves in later 1970s they did not formulate a ‘response’; they mounted a ‘pushback’. The time, as Jefferson Davis once put it, for compromise had passed.

Not that the righteous herders of the right have been any less proficient than the revolutionary trail-bosses of the left. Indeed, they are even better at it: they watched how the left did it and then improved upon the performance when they set up their own ‘emergencies’ and shaped public ‘outrage’ like explosive charges to blast more holes in Constitutional praxis and then went after international law and treaties.

So ‘intellectuality’ – the simple love (or at least respect) for the power of mind and of ideas – has been hugely compromised in this country. Concomitantly, the respect for and the competence in personal and public deliberation, discussion, and decision has also been degraded.

Mattson’s exhortation to the effect that “liberals need to show that the virtues of education and thoughtfulness are virtues open to all” is betrayed by the performance of ‘liberals’ over the course of decades. And it belies his own insufficient analysis.

And profoundly so. It isn’t that education and ‘thoughtfulness’ (a poorly chosen word: does it have to do with sending Hallmark cards? Perhaps ‘mindfulness’ or ‘concentration’ would be better) have been kept from certain ‘classes’ or ‘groups’. Much worse and a double-whammy: ‘Education’ and ‘mindfulness’ have been doubly derided and gutted in order to prevent their obstructing the agendas of the assorted revolutions of the assorted Identities:1) ‘education’ and ‘mindfulness’ are said to have no basis in the Great Scheme of Things and are merely mental tools of oppression and 2) We are given to understand sharply that they can’t be used on serious matters if they’re the ‘wrong’ matters – and anyone trying to think and discuss ‘incorrectly’ will wind up being labeled ‘insensitive’ (or – once the Republicans took over the game: ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘treasonous’).

And what is a ‘virtue’? Is it simply a nice or a desirable characteristic? What grounds the virtue such that you can rely on it as a shaper of your life and as a reliable guide to a self and a life that – when you get to the end of the road – you can feel ‘good’ about? What makes a ‘virtue’ a ‘Virtue’?

And here’s where Mattson demonstrates – no doubt unwittingly – the plight of the ‘left’ or the ‘liberals’: there’s nothing in their ideal ‘world’ or in their ‘world-view’ that can turn a virtue into a Virtue and thereby make it worth living for (or dying for). To the great human thirst for participation in meaning and Life, they can only offer spectatorship of esoteric public melodramas played out regardless of consequences.

As ‘election’ ‘news’ starts to fill the media now, a lot more is going to be said about What the Democrats Have To Do or can do or some such. And how the mess our civic life is in is the fault of the Republicans (who can remember life 12 years and more ago?) and we only have to put the Dems back in because – during it all – they have stayed ‘normal’ and ‘good’ (but still ‘patriotic’ and ‘strong’). Yah. None of them Dem thinkers have watched ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’, I think. It’s 1946 and the Dems are like Germans who want to blame it all on the now-self-destructed Nazis and just ‘move on’.

Well the Republicans of this age can certainly play the bad-guys role for this scenario; but the Dems are in no position to play any role but that of The Rest of the German People. They helped this monstrosity develop and continue, and the fact that the Party of the Twelve Years is over and gone doesn’t make everybody else ‘good’ by default so that the country can just pick right up where it left off twelve long years ago and proceed happily (and normally and goodily) on.

What can the Democrats do? First, I think, they can recommit to democratic process: too much change has been rammed down American throats with no questions asked or allowed, but merely on the ‘authority’ of the fact that ‘it’s a good thing and we should do it’– and ‘it’s an emergency and an outrage and anything less would be ‘insensitive’’. The process of genuine democracy has been sidestepped and sidetracked, by revolutions masquerading as consumed by a laudable (and un-opposable) zeal for righteousness.

And consequently, the People have been sidestepped and sidetracked. Did Bush tell everyone not to worry after 9/11 and that he’d take care of everything and We should all just go shopping? Well, that’s pretty much what the Democrats told us for decades as this and that huge change became Democratic dogma overnight. We let them get away with it because they were doing it in a ‘good’ cause and who wanted to wind up on the evening news labeled as ‘insensitive’ or ‘hateful’? Did we think that the Twelve Years just sorta materialized out of nowhere? That’s like thinking the 9/11 gang simply materialized out of nowhere. We are too old for fairy tales, if not too grown up for them.

Revolutions have no respect for The People, as individuals or as an entity of Constitutional standing. That was the monstrous danger within the Dems’ “New Politics” that came a cropper as early as McGovern’s shockingly compleat defeat. And yet the Dems couldn’t stop their own stampede by then, and probably couldn’t see any other options. Much like a cavalry charge: after a certain point, you really don’t mind that the horses no longer respond to the reins and just gallop en masse toward the enemy – after all, the closer you get to the shock of armed contact, the less you need your troops having any philosophical thoughts, let alone transmitting them to the horses.

That was the Dems’ undoing: they forsook The People and the democratic process for the sake of votes. Well, to be fair, it was a matter of survival: no votes to replace the Southrons and the fading blue-collar industrial workers and there might well be no Democratic Party after a while. So, since it was a matter of survival (an ‘existential threat’ as might be said today) then steps had to be taken ‘by any means necessary’.

But the Dems have an even bigger problem that they brought on themselves: in a country that is hugely ‘religious’ in some form or other (and in which a large fraction of the citizenry believe the world is less than 10,000 years old) and among a species – the human – where Meaning and Presence anchored Beyond this ‘world’ constitute the abiding and ceaseless hunger of all … in a country like this the Dems – to ease the rise of their new voter-blocs – not only had to impose massive social change, but had to Flatten the ‘world’ of human experience in order to disable those Beyond-things that might be used to ‘judge’ that change.

This is where the Dems abandoned the High Ground, which was thus left undefended when the whackjob Fundamentalists were mustered into Republican service and told to take and fortify the heights in order to cover the low-ground advance of their new allies, the better-dressed but equally whacked-out Neocons. In a country and among a species hungry for Meaning and the Presence of something Beyond, for the Substance and intimation of Things Beyond, the Dems committed themselves to perceptions and appearances and spin.

And yet the Dems also committed themselves to a version of the Straussian ‘Noble Lie’: it’s not true, but it should be, and if we can get them all to believe it, then maybe over time the fact that they believe it’s true will actually help make it come true. Interesting theory – although a tad manipulative for a democracy, but hey – it’s an emergency and these be existential times.

Now we hear and will continue to hear the Dems trying to recover the High Ground – or at least the appearance of it … - without actually admitting that they’ve ever left it in the first place. Sort of a version of the Pentagoon play: Nothing is wrong and we’re fixing it – nothing to see here, folks. As Ward Bond's Irish beat-cop might have said: G'wan home, the whole a'yez!

But although the monstrous failure of the Republicans to decently govern affairs domestic and foreign is undeniable, there is no guarantee that the Dems will be able to make themselves anything more than the default Party. How the Dems will be able to lead without holding the actual High Ground is a mystery to me. And how the Dems will be able to reclaim it without indicting their performance over the past several decades and alienating some of their most implacable new Identities … that’s their biggest problem.

So it’s not to my mind a matter of the Dems reclaiming the authority to ‘lead’. First they have to restore the democratic process based on a respect for all of Us as The People. And maybe they can gin up the courage to do that by relying on strength and wisdom from Beyond. God knows, the ‘wisdom’ of French literary Theory has helped them not at all. And it has helped so weaken this Republic that the Rove-ian myrmidons and this unspeakably awful Unitarium got into power as easily as the Unitarium then let the 9/11 hijackers get to the planes.

Waves washing back upon each other, echoes resounding back against each other, illusions feeding appearances serving lies that can’t clearly be labeled because the Truth they betray can no longer be discerned … “so much remains to be done”.

COULTER-KAMPF

Lots of material out there about Ann Coulter’s latest. Glenn Greenwald (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/03/06/cult/index.html?source=rss has isolated the Ur-question: Why is she invited to speak at major Right events?

Why indeed? She doesn’t engage ideas, but rather makes fun of the persons she doesn’t like. To enter her world, to live at her level, is to go back to grammar school and the taunts of the agitated children who cannot yet separate thoughts from persons, and who are still so emotionally primal that only violence – even if only verbal – can provide them with a sense of relief, release, satisfaction and achievement. (It’s a primal, not to say primitive, emotional and conceptual world that children inhabit – condemned to it by the brute facts of human development – and our recent national fascination with children – and especially the ‘innocence’ of children – needs to be put up on the lift and its undercarriage closely examined.)

It’s greatly accurate to say that she is invited because she is needed: the Republicans as presently constituted need her because she speaks to a very crucial aspect of their programme and of their membership. It’s even more acute to realize that they need her because she pretty much incarnates their programme: childish, unconceptual – almost anti-conceptual – emotional violence is what the Republicans do now. And Coulter does it best. So far, so true, so sad.

Republicans – male and female – are appealing to the primal even more than the primitive, in voters. They are appealing to the quick-burning default-level of our least-developed brainparts, the earliest ones, the limbic stuff that was around long before the prefrontal cortex, the very primal and visceral emotional responses of Fight or Flight, Own (still too early for ‘Love’) or Hate, the dark suspiciousness that responds to the unfamiliar and the strangeness of the ‘other’ with reflexive violence.

But again and again and again: this revolting state of affairs – so ripe for the pronouncements of Chester A. Riley (go look that one up if you have to) – was called into being in its present incarnation by the prior 40 years of Theory’s and Identity’s insistent demand that the American people not only believe many impossible things before breakfast, but swallow them whole with no questions asked as if they were a tasty and nutritious meal.

It has taken a long long hard slog for us as humans to climb the Ladder of Interior Development to reach the point where we can at least impose some semblance of order on our dark and raucous primal interior aspects, and thereby permit the development of what are now ‘quaintly’ known as our ‘higher capacities’. The remarkable record of civilizations over the past five or six millennia of recorded history cannot be gainsaid. This is not at all to say that things have been perfect – the human is still a flawed being and thus are all his works and, surely, all his pomps. The Eastern concept of ‘dukkha’ – dissatisfaction with what is – speaks greatly to this abiding incompleteness in the quality and quantity of genuine life in the world, especially when compared to what might be.

If at this present critical juncture in our political life we take the easy way out and merely choose to blame it all on the Republicans we condemn ourselves to ignorance and eventual repetition of the unhappy history. We may recall Mussolini, in front of the Fascist Grand Council for the last time on that summer night, defending his and their situation by bawling “The Germans are responsible for the whole thing!”. Not in Italy the Germans weren’t. In fact, it was to the already-established Mussolini regime that the slouchy, pudgy fedora-topped new German Chancellor turned for ideas on how best to arrange, manage and clothe a budding Fascist imperium. That the pupil so outdid the master has tended to cloud history’s awareness of the original dynamics of the relationship.

There has always been a ‘paranoid’ streak in American politics, as Richard Hofstadter masterfully pointed out. This may have an origin in political science – that, perhaps, we as a democracy can give voice to those who feel and who are left-out – but it must also originate in the nature of the human: we are a material being with primitive and to some extent dark beginnings, and it is only with effort and much blood, toil, tears and sweat that we grow into – or at least toward – our higher potentials, mental and emotional and (what the hey?) spiritual.

But that ‘paranoia’ or proto-paranoia, that pre-disposition to paranoia, has for quite a while been seen as something we’d want to work on. Suspiciousness of the different and the strange leading to immediate feral violence – conceptual and emotional as well as physical – came to be considered as disabling in a world where nascent civilization was providing a bit more safe ‘space’ for the higher-capacities to develop and be expressed. In this type of new world – ‘civilization’ – you were probably going to be running into more than a few curious things, and immediately whacking them with a club would probably close off a lot of potentially valuable possibilities.

But in each human being, the climb has to be made – up the Ladder into the higher capabilities. And depending on a number of factors within and outside of the individual child, that climb into more mature mental and emotional functioning will happen quickly or slowly, and qualitatively more or less successfully. But in any case, civilization and ‘maturity’ are mutually dependent and have always been so. You can have a civilization with less mature, less independent citizens – but if they cannot provide the order and structure to their own lives, then some force outside of them must provide that order, in the society if not within each individual.

The West has evolved toward a mature and self-governing citizenry; and by self-governing we mean not only that the citizens vote and ultimately validate their own governance, but that each adult citizen is expected more or less to govern his/her own self.

All this went overboard when – in an infection whose path and consequences are still not sufficiently appreciated – European ‘Theory’, discarded by the French in the 1950s, was taken up by American ‘elites’ in the 1960s. Among the concepts that came as part and parcel of the plague-package were: ‘civilization’ itself is simply an effort to suppress the natural and to oppress the many for the comfort of the few; ‘history’ and even ‘Truth’ are simply constructs meant to oppress; the poor are by nature virtuous and the ‘primitive’ is by nature the most genuine and authentic expression of the human while the ‘civilized’ is artificial; there are no universal values and thus no universal ‘entities’, and thus there is no Mankind, and there is no ‘Man’ but only different humans in different societies such that no society or culture can impose its values on another.

These ideas, which had once been eagerly loaded aboard by European elites in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, had been by the end of World War 2 seen in all their profoundly corrosive and destructive consequences. But they nonetheless served as a conceptual fig-leaf for levering open political space for the ‘non-aligned’ and ‘developing’ nations in the international arena and in our domestic arena for the Identities that the Democrats were so desperately trying to erect as voting blocs to replace the Southrons enraged over Civil Rights and the industrial workers whose role on the national scene was now passing.

And so two huge elements came into play that would lure the Paranoid and the Primal out into the light of day: the Southrons came to see the Washington eggheads – waving pieces of paper such as court orders, Presidential directives, and the Constitution – as seeking under the guise of ‘progress’ and ‘justice’ – abstractions that have little hold on the primal brainparts – to destroy their life and their world. Meanwhile, the Identities, created like so many Frankensteins to do the electoral bidding of the Democrats, began to control their controllers, making demands that brooked no debate or even deliberation let alone objection, insisting on immediate gratification and satisfaction of their agendas.

And ‘maturity’ and ‘deliberation’ were seen politically and conceptually (that Theory, remember) as oppressive and artificial; and Reason itself was cast as a tool of oppression. Reason, civilization, maturity and interiority and character and virtue – all were cast off. Our society was headed for a Lord-of-the-Flies situation; yet out of sensitivity and respect, the media and the elites insisted that it was wondrous progress.

This was where the ‘high-ground’ of civilization was abandoned, and it was abandoned by the Democrats. And it was abetted by a media that found ‘objectivity’ to be oppressive and ‘truth’ to be an artifact, and therefore took the easier and lower road: find something you can feel good about, or that people will feel good about, and that will be your ‘report’.

Meanwhile the Southrons and the increasingly anxious industrial workers (in 1969 we were surpassed in certain key areas of heavy production; in 1970 we ceased to pump the majority of our own oil) were joined by the increasingly restive middle-classes as all of them – made uneasy by the massive subsurface economic shifts that were issuing tremors – were more immediately occupied by the ‘strangeness’ and ‘difference’ of this and that demand of this and that Identity, strangenesses and differences that the government and the media were insisting were perfectly normal and were progress. To doubt that it was all progress was to be ‘politically incorrect’ – a phrase and a reality first established in Russia during the earliest years of the Communist revolution.

And Vietnam was lost.

And all of those who had cultural misgivings about the ‘progressive’ changes, and all of those who wanted to ‘believe’, and all of those who were getting mighty worked up and maybe never had a lot of patience with abstractions or even maturity anyway … all of that wood was piling up, waiting for a shrewd matchmaker.

Thus the present Republican gambit: gather the disaffected, ignite the quick-burning fuel of primal emotion and dark, suspicious, violence, and if the Democrats say there’s no such thing as maturity then by God and by gum we’ll show’em just what immaturity can do! Toss in the Apocalypse for a bit of uplift and to beat on the Democrats with if they try to wave that damned Constitution in your face.

Thus our modern American reality.

Of course, we can add that as immaturity and paranoia and fundamentalistic whackiness started to govern our domestic affairs (and PC fundamentalism and the ‘science’ deployed to justify this or that gambit of an Identity had already given ‘science’ and ‘reason’ a bad rep), so too it came to taint our vision of foreign affairs. And those eternal sharks, the government police power and the military-industrial complex (mutated monstrously beyond Eisenhower’s time), sensed the blood of power and profit in the waters.

Thus our modern American reality again.

The immaturity of this country's current political and national discourse screams to the world even as it demeans Us and corrupts our ability to further the heritage entrusted to Us. Worse, things are evolving (or devolving) to the point where immaturity is structurally required for the type of politics that are being practiced. The Republicans have been able to make immaturity the primary citizenship and political skill because the Democrats had abolished the ability or authority to identify and discriminate against immaturity and abolished the grounds for pursuing maturity and - functionally - any excellence, or even character, at all.

Thus if for the purposes of election-season we now overlay this whole rot with the happy fiction that it's all the Republicans' fault and the Democrats will fix everything up when they are voted in - or indeed that the problem will by definition be fixed by the simple fact that the Democrats were voted in, or even by the mere fact that the Republicans were voted out ... well, that's not going to really get to the heart of the matter. As they used to teach in grade school, you aim the extinguisher's hose at the base of the flames, not at the smoke.

We are regressing. As a nation and as a People. This is not the same as 'declining' in the usual historical sense of the word, as it applies to nations. We are regressing as a society and - after all these decades of young being raised in a Flattened if overheated 'world' - as individuals as well. Our regression will do nothing to prevent our decline. In fact, as the awareness of something deeply wrong starts to gnaw just under the awareness of folks, expect even more vivid and violent childishness; that will be registering the anxiety with which there is no mature capacity to deal. This is the future if the present is ignored.

So Coulter is indeed what holds the Republicans together now. Her performances, it has to be said, are an even lower exhibition than Goebbels’s at the Sportpalast in that February of ’43 just after Stalingrad had been lost. At least Goebbels had the guts to address the problem squarely and ask (his picked Nazi audience): Do you want Total War? And the people shouted back: Yes! He didn’t try in 1943 to run the same type of rally that he had run in 1933 or 1938; he was at least in touch enough with reality to realize that he had to somehow take cognizance of what was happening out in the world (i.e. that much of the world was now heading toward Germany in a very bad mood).

Coulter’s asinine and violent immaturities are precisely designed to appeal to the primal in her audience so as to distract them from the huge problems and consequences that are heading toward them. And so she becomes more hysterically immature as her audiences become more hysterically agitated, hoping – as the immature always do – that if they just do more of what they’ve been doing then ‘this time it will work’. Yah.

Meanwhile, the architects of the catastrophe, the neocon elite, are trying to position themselves as brilliant (so you can still pay to listen to their thoughts) but unheeded (so they can’t be held responsible) paragons whose vision and maturity will yet save the day.

The generals are putting their trust in Jesus Christ and Stonewall Jackson (but not – officially, anyway – Elvis). Their wounded soldiery will have to fend for themselves.

The Unitary Deciderer is in his bunker scraping up the last 8,200 troops that will stop the flood in the East, and threatening to unleash his wonder-weapons that will turn the war around overnight. He needs no advice; he has God. That God might indeed be looking forward to getting His hands on him – has not apparently crossed the Deciderer’s mind. Perhaps, if He has the temerity to disagree, God’s bunker clearance can be revoked. The military-industrial complex that cannot seem to make tanks that can withstand shells nor planes that can stay in the air nor Coast Guard ships that can stay in one piece – may yet have developed an angel-proof bunker.

But as Lincoln might have opined: if there is a strong People, then angels will not be required. Nice thought. Kind of ambiguous though. Not for the immature.

SCHLESINGER GONE TO HIGH GROUND

E. J. Dionne has a piece on Arthur Schlesinger’s death (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/01/AR2007030101325.html) “A Historian Who Saw Beyond the Past”.

I’ve always felt that Schlesinger had some good observations, but that he failed to preserve a certain independence because of his so-close relationship to the inner-circle of JFK’s administration and – after that – to the Democratic Party.

Back then in the mid-'60s, it was never actually allowable to discuss whether the content and methodology of the Revolutions of the Identities were really the next-logical-step, or any sort of viable step, in the extension and revivification of the New Deal voter-coalition; by 1965 that coalition was shredding due to growing affluence, the Southron rage at civil rights, and the incipient demise of the industrial worker.

The Democrats were too desperately in a hurry; they would not permit this whole vision to be debated and deliberated publicly, even among Party members. They needed a working majority of votes immediately and there was no time for the hemming and hawing built into democratic process. And the advocates and revolutionaries of the Identities, being advocates and revolutionaries, weren’t partial to the time-consuming uncertainties of democratic process either; like the Fundamentalists who were to come after them, whom they were to draw into national prominence (the hot ironies!), the advocates and revolutionaries wanted immediate change – on their terms and according to their numerous agendas – and they wanted it right now if not yesterday.

In order to at least make a case for such ram-rodding, the herd (they could not afford to let us be The People) was told that certain things simply could not be discussed (and still can’t to this day), and that there was an Emergency created by a great Evil and that the herd was either for Good and this agenda or for Evil, and that to be against the agenda and cause of the moment – to be so ‘insensitive’ – was the new ‘treason’ and no ‘insensitive’ or ‘hateful’ ideas should even be listened to or – come to think of it – allowed to be spoken. Nor should any of the foregoing ever be discussed again, or even noticed. The pinnacle (or nadir) of this line of thought was the college handbook that listed among topics of speech forbidden to students: the mentioning of the fact that some topics of speech could not be mentioned.

Whether all of this was the logical or viable extension of Schlesinger’s beloved New Deal and the Democratic Party he knew as a young man … was a question that I think it is now obvious needs to be addressed and widely deliberated. Although, of course, so many “facts on the ground” have been created that – as in Iraq – the wrong things already done have created present realities that make it impossible to do the right things now. When a damaged ship reaches this point while you’re trying to keep her afloat … well, there is need now for Our minds to be concentrated wonderfully.

As the aweful 1990s unfolded under the still-not-properly criticized Clinton vision (the oral sex, as ever, was the least of the dangers), Schlesinger began to sound some legitimate warnings, although he didn’t really give the Democrats their dark due as being greatly responsible for the ominous events unfolding domestically; he was not only a public intellectual but something of a court intellectual, and there is always a cost for that cachet.

Which is too bad because at his age and with his mind he could have been a vital source of deliberation for the hugely difficult situation the Democrats now find themselves in. It has been mentioned elsewhere on this site, but here it is in a nutshell: the Democrats cannot without endangering their new-historic (since the ‘60s and ‘70s) allies re-occupy the ‘high ground’ of Vision and Capital-Letter-Words that they purposely abandoned in order to smooth the path of their hastily erected and vigorously espoused Identities. Was Common Sense or Reason or Tradition or Truth or Morality or Excellence or Virtue or God going to be used to obstruct the desires of this or that advocate and revolutionary? Then it had to go; they all had to go. All of Them. Politics became a matter not of formulating and supporting a shared Vision, a deep yet shining wave of Belief and Purpose that would sustain The People as America made her way through Time. No, instead politics became a matter of quietly putting together small tactical coalitions of interests for this or that sop, with no concern as to the larger implications of what was about to be officially made law or policy, and with no candid public discussion or deliberation allowed.

Does any of that sound kinda familiar?

With the high ground abandoned, the Democrats lost whatever opportunity they might have had to keep the big picture of the field as the Fogs of Life rolled in and roiled around down on the low ground.

And then the Republicans – with their new-found allies, the formerly-fringe Fundamentalists who burst forth with their own revolutionary-like certainty and dogmatism and impatience, so similar to the Democrats’ allies – took the high-ground. It reminds me of some version of the French and Indian War: The ‘professional’ fighters, the European soldiers, are outnumbered by their respective Indian allies, who universally have a much more vigorous and unstructured approach to operations, and who cannot be controlled by their erstwhile masters. So too now: the ‘professional’ politicians (meant in the good sense: knowledgable and shrewd discussers and compromisers) in each Party are now rendered helpless by their obstreperous ‘allies’, the revolutionaries of the Identities on the Democratic side and the Fundamentalists and neocons on the Republican side. This is a monster of a problem.

And of course the Democrats have already yielded the high ground, almost burning their bridges back to it. (How, say, can you as a Democrat re-espouse ‘God’ without frightening the abortion advocates? Support ‘excellence’ and ‘performance’ without appearing ‘insensitive’ and ‘judgmental’ if not indeed ‘racist’? Suggest that the sex-offense mania is not only ineffective but ungrounded, counterproductive and constitutionally dangerous, without appearing as a closet child-molester?) It’s going to be a hard thing to turn your formations - especially your obstreperous 'allies' - around in the press of battle, and then while maintaining formation and a sufficient rate of fire make your retreat back toward and then climb up to the high ground. Which, as aforementioned, was taken as low-hanging fruit by the Republicans after you abandoned it and is now held against you.

This should be a very sober pre-election season indeed. But my fear is that rather than try to deal with the realities, distracting diversions, either of the entertaining or the frightening variety, will be hastily ignited so that the real work needn’t be done, or the problems faced. This, famously, is not the spirit that built the West. But it is our modern American reality.

But Schlesinger brought high-ground back, even though he couldn’t quite bring himself to admit how high-ground was lost in the first place. In 2005 he brought the thought and writing of Reinhold Niebuhr back into the national discourse, such as it is. Writing in the September 18, 2005 “New York Times” (“Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr”) Schlesinger asks – but does not answer – the very good question as to why this evangelically-trained best of America’s theologians is not discussed by current faith-based folk of Left or Right.

My own thought is that Niebuhr deploys a mature character and informed mind to consider the height and depth and breadth and width of whatever topic he examines, and that’s a task utterly beyond the competence or the patience or the interest of most erstwhile activists – of Left or Right – nowadays. They have been ‘emergencified’: there’s a crisis, there’s no time to think, just act … or, better, let the gummint do whatever it thinks best. Left and Right have brought us into these dark and fatal woods as surely as Varus led his legions into the Teutoborg and Braddock led his columns into the Pennsylvania woods.

Schlesinger noted some of the salient points made by this Missouri evangelical preacher’s son (born 1892) who went to Detroit in the 1920s and ministered there in those times of huge labor-capital strife.

He was critical of “national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion”. Americans have a tendency to erect their ‘innocence’ into an article of faith, not an impractical gambit for a society that has built itself on the eradication of one people, the enslavement of another, and the colonization of others. When we encounter a killer who is convinced of his own innocence even as he admits that he has killed, we feel the strong urge to put him into a locked mental institution. But when it is an entire country, and our country … we consider such ‘innocence’ as one of the surest signs of God’s election. Niebuhr didn’t go the psychological route, but rather the theological: all humans are possessed of an innate tendency to do evil things and nobody is ‘innocent’; as Clint Eastwood put it through the character of Will Munny: “We all got it comin’, kid.” This is a lesson Americans have never really grasped, although the immediate future may hold great opportunities.

Consequently, it’s theologically worse-than-useless to go around dividing up the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Nations may have interests, but that doesn’t make a particular people ‘Bad’ for opposing the interest nor does it make a particular interest ‘Good’ simply because it’s something that the nation may want.

We are fragile-ly ordered and volatile beings, we humans. Perhaps it’s that “original sin” that used to be part of the high ground; or perhaps we as a species still haven’t evolved to the point where we can reliably sustain our actions and interior lives in the higher ranges of human characteristics and capabilities, but instead are constantly pulled down (as St. Paul observed) into our lower capacities, or are constantly confronted with the results of others’ lower-capacity acts that intrude into our own life. The human aircraft is not one that its pilot can prudently leave on auto-pilot. Curiously, Bush and Rumsfeld both had pilot’s training – they must have missed some classes.

Nor are we perfectible in this life. Hence we should not be buying into quick-fix or sure-fire agendas that promise ‘total’ this or ‘zero’ that. Neither humans nor their lives nor our common life together can be so purified. Revolutions are not to be trusted in a democracy; indeed the more urgent the revolutionary demand, the more carefully and democratically it should be examined. Thus too he opposed the ‘messianic’ consciousness that has soaked the modern world in blood: Marx and the nobly-intentioned vision that found incarnation in the brutal and bloody Soviet revolution, Hitler’s revolution to save his Volk. We might add that some of our domestic messianic revolutions need to be looked at carefully, on the Left as well as on the Right.

And to be simultaneously ‘innocent’, ‘infallible’ and a ‘messiah’ is hugely inaccurate and unTrue and a profound danger to others, especially in a democracy. And especially for a democracy.

Lincoln was a favorite political model for Niebuhr. Lincoln had a certain well-grounded relativism. It was not the relativism of object:‘God’ could be anything so ‘God’ isn’t a strong enough concept to model your own life or compel other lives. It was the relativism of perceiver: We humans are simply too limited to know for certain what God wants or does not want, and so we have to be humble and patient and proceed with care and deliberation. And so for Lincoln there was indeed a God, and a ‘Beyond’, but neither could be known so clearly or fully or with such certainty that any human being could become either complacent and overconfident about one’s own rights and goodness or become proud and certain about forcing others to do one’s will.

“The combination of moral resoluteness about immediate issues with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment …”, says Niebuhr, enables us to stay vitally active in the thick, problem-choked life of this world and this dimension, while at the same time remaining loyal to a larger Beyond (and God) through which/Whom we have our shared human creaturely nature and the democratic process that is our great heritage and awesome responsibility.

And thus one can engage on the low ground while maintaining the core position on the high ground. Of all the things that have happened to Us over the past 40 years, it is the abandonment of the high ground and the refusal to deal with it (let alone debate it beforehand) that has caused the most death and damage, to Us as well as to the country and to others around the world.

It is not in the article, but the thought arises that Bush the Fundamentalist – in immaturity if not in sincere belief – is seeking to be to that faith-based ‘core constituency’ what the Pope is to them Kathliks: a ‘pontifex maximus’. The greatest high-priest of the mysteries and of the State, not so much like the Pope, really, as like the Emperor of Japan in its pre-1945 days. The Kathliks already having the pope, the Fundamentalists have to invent one, to which end they are striving mightily; we look on their works and are tempted to despair.

Niebuhr’s vision – his schematic – of the full operating space of Life, is far more complex and robust than the Flattened world and self of the assorted modern-day revolutionaries of the Left and the Right. There is a Vertical as well as a Horizontal, an Up and a Down as well as a Sideways, and there is a capacious and vital Beyond as well as a Flattened and Foreshortened Present, and there is an Interior to the Self as well as an Exterior, and there is Substance as well as Appearance.

And he was able to operate in (though not ‘dominate’) all of that ‘spectrum’ in order to practice a dense yet supple and vital politics. This is a capability no longer open, it must be imagined, to today’s politicians. It’s almost bizarre: our military brass bray about ‘full spectrum dominance’ but neither they nor the civilian leadership of either Party really understand the Life-space of our species.

Niebuhr had it (dead white European male though he was). Lots of other folks throughout Western history have had it. But We don’t have it – not any more. The problem today isn’t that We just don’t get it; it’s that we had it and we threw it away.

MOYERS ONE

A trio of articles by Bill Moyers have gotten my attention. I’ll Post a bit on each of them.

He’s got “Discovering What Democracy Means” on Tom Paine (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021307A.shtml).

He is as valuable for his apt quotations as for his thoughts; and he draws upon a wide knowledge. Martha Nussbaum is brought in with her gravid insight that the Greek dramatists had no “message” except “simply the revelation of life as seen through the sufferer”. But this is hardly a small thought. To be able to develop a wide and widely-informed empathy is a significant achievement in maturity. It is vastly seen in its absence in present-day Washington City, even more than one would usually expect in those precincts; and the consequences of a failure of empathy for – and of knowledge of – other human beings are now bearing their awefull fruit on the Eastern front.

I think I’ll take this opportunity to point one thing out. It’s a major concern of this site that what are here called the Revolutions of the Identities have borne some very damaging consequences of their own, greatly corroding democratic praxis, jurisprudence, the structure of the Republic, and the weakening of the Peopling skills of the citizenry. This is not at all intended to be some coded understatement to the effect that we should bring the 1950s back again. It is not first and foremost the substance of the Revolutions (although some of the claims are surely questionable enough to have deserved far more public deliberation); rather it is the method of proceeding – the revolutionary method – that has created the most serious damage.

It is true what was obvious even to contemporaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: that once Jim Crow was established in the South no normal democratic process was going to be able to reverse it. But once the great march to the Glorious ’65 was successfully completed, then the more-revolutionary and less-democratic methodology should have been set aside in favor of the longer, more complex and frustrating process of grounding public consensus through wide public deliberation.

Instead, the advocates’ resort to increasing Federal involvement in ever-deepening and ever-more-specific aspects of public and private life – especially in the deployment of criminal law and prosecution – was fraught with dangers that are now bearing their poisoned fruit. And of course, this dangerous dynamic was only intensified as subsequent Revolutions of further newly-hatched Identities sought to jump-start themselves and quickly create their own beach-head of ‘facts on the ground’.

That all of this took place in incessant waves was bad enough. That it took place just as the United States had passed the zenith of its postwar position that sustained its stupendous economic growth and predominance was a profound irony whose significance and consequences are still not fully realized.

Little can be reversed now and I am not proposing such a bootless undertaking. But We must realize just what damage was sustained in the journey to our present situation so that We can take corrective action even as We pursue the course that has been set. Surely, the inherent nobility and humaneness of trying to see events from the point of view of the sufferer is a desirable and an indispensable trait of the character of the People who engaged in or at least permitted such revolutionary activity on a vast and pervasive scale.

But the methods of revolution are inherently inimical to the skills and virtues of a democracy. And empathy is neither the equivalent of nor the substitute for carefully and widely considered policy and law. That the Right (hardly to be called ‘conservative’ in its present incarnation) is the current wielder of Jacobin power is obvious to all; that the Left (hardly to be called ‘Liberal’ in the classic sense) wielded it to Our great detriment for decades and indeed created the vacuums that evoked and enabled the Right must be seen far more clearly than heretofore.

Moyers continues his quotation of Nussbaum: it is greatly valuable to see “the complexity that’s there, and seeing it honestly, and without flinching, and without reducing it to some excessively simple theory”. The ability to appreciate and tolerate complexity is another hallmark of maturity. And again: if such maturity is brutally absent among the Unitary Incumbency’s minions, it had also been ruthlessly – if more ‘tastefully – absent among the advocates of the assorted revolutions. And if the utterly fatuous ‘theories’ that underlay the strutting neocons’ dreams of invasion are now revealed for the bankrupt lunacies they have always been, the utterly corrosive consequences of Theory as it has been propounded domestically by our elites for decades must also be recognized.

Moyers proposes that we might nurture “the higher affections of our intuition – what has been called our ‘inner tutor’”. I think that he demonstrates for us here the newly-recovered strength and the long-entrenched weakness of the Left – and the Liberal – agenda. He introduces again the use of a Vertical dimension to the individual, and that Vertical presupposes an individual’s Interiority as well. Both dimensions have been unforgivably de-emphasized in Theory’s decades-long occupation of our cultural and societal discourse.

Generations of children, many now adult, have grown up with a working conception of Life in which these two dimensions of being and acting have been largely absent. Verticality implied ‘judgment’ and the imposition of ‘values’ and the truly sensitive and enlightened did not do that. Interiority led to a certain social ‘passivity’ and ‘withdrawal’ that did not sufficiently get out and force societal change; one’s status as either victim or victimizer and one’s actions as one or the other (not even, as most often happens among us humans, as both) were the only significant aspects of living (one’s robust consumption of material goods always being taken as a given). Thus Our selves and thus our lives – as individuals and as a society) were much shrunken, and even desiccated.

But that other vast and wondrous and utterly indispensable dimension of life and Life, of being and existence – the Beyond, the Meta – is still almost unspeakable. We have an “inner tutor”. This is as ‘spiritual’ as even Moyers dares to be in his article. We could say that this does not even rise to the level of the spiritual, but is simply ‘non-material’, which is hardly sufficient to meet the voracious – indeed the constituent – hunger of the human spirit. And if we must contemplate in muted shock the ‘enlightenment’ that demands the willful ignoring of the human spirit – shades of Lenin – then we must also reflect ruefully that it was precisely the creation of this abyss that sparked and sucked into awefull life the violent derangement of Fundamentalism and rammed open its path to the pinnacle of our ‘polis’. All to Our great detriment.

So carefully that I can’t figure whether he is treading carefully or isn’t quite aware of it himself, Moyers then quotes Thomas Jefferson’s reprehension of the “bastard muses”, those special-pleadings for specific causes that calculatedly mask themselves as a comprehensive and undeniable ‘wisdom’ and insight into the heart of ‘reality’. Truth is lost; the ability to perceive Truth shrivels. While we might take some heart that such pernicious folly as it was evinced among the neocons and Fundamentalists and even the ‘realistic’ Macher of Washington City is now betraying those who so cockily and arrogantly tried to ‘hire’ it, we must also accept with a justifiable fright that such inability to seek and apprehend Truth is now pervasive among Us.

He quotes – but valuably – Leo Strauss, who had noted that “vulgarity”, the coarseness and crudeness which is a hallmark of boyo and macho and Fundamentalistic hubris, rises from an “apeirokalia”, “the lack of experience in things beautiful”. “Beauty”, like Truth, is not congenial to the profoundly immature, the ‘unripe’ – and we are all born more or less unripe. Beauty and Truth are also irrelevant to revolutionaries, whose harsh discipline of Outcome requires them to focus on lesser, more immediate things. In that sense, of course, ‘business’ and ‘revolution’ are sisters under the skin. Thus visions of both the Right and the Left share a common poisonous root.

And he goes on then that today “we are all institutionalized”. Yes, and it is not so much that Our civilization has reached a complexity that erects numerous ‘institutions’ as that Our civilization has ignored the human-ness – in all its marvelous heights – that would enable Us to remain the masters of those institutions. And We are also – he omits to say – “balkanized”, divided and sub-divided into numerous squabbling Identities as well as shrunken into the hot or cold, hard surfaces of surfaces and Appearances.

Thus has the government power – through the National Security State and the National Corporate State and the National Crime State, artfully wooing the macho and the ‘sensitive’, the ruthless and the socially ‘concerned’ – taken advantage of our weakened and divided condition – as individuals and as a society – to raise itself up as our Primary Protector and Provider, roles previously ascribed to the Beyond – however conceived. The reliance upon the government power as that Primary Protector and Provider quickly shades into a functional idolatry, a functional paganism. All to Our great detriment.

Are we as a People now become merely “a fiction”? Are we become a shadow? A wraith? A shade? For Us as for that tortured princeling of Denmark the urgent question remains: To be or not to be?

CRIME AND GOVERNANCE

Max Boot has an Op-ed in the “Los Angeles Times” (“Keys to a successful surge”. www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-boot7feb07,0,4299148,print.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail).

He discusses the cutting-edge in Counterinsurgency Theory. Several points draw his attention: A) The population will be governed in its loyalties by which side demonstrates the most strength and can control violence to its own purposes; B) Insurgents will not be hindered if when arrested by lawful authority they can take advantage of “the many normal safeguards built into the judicial system” to effect their quick release; C) “Clearly, more than any other kind of warfare, counterinsurgency must respect the principle of a single direction. A single boss must direct the operations from beginning until the end”; D) “Control of the population begins obviously with a thorough census. Every inhabitant must be registered and given a foolproof identity card.”

Let us pass over with only a moment’s serious regard the fact that you can’t – apparently – start operating a Democracy if you’re faced with a counterinsurgency. The best you can go for appears to be some form of military-authoritarian boot-camp society. Let us note soberly that having once ensconced a military and a junta-government in such a strong position as this Theory requires, the odds of thus further developing in an orderly fashion into full popular Democracy are somewhere south of zilch.

Let us instead give full and undivided attention to the thought that this very same Counterinsurgency Theory seems to be the operative model for governing here, at home, domestically, in these United States. Whether pressed by the Neocons for the purpose of spackling up the population to serve the needs of empire, or by the Fundamentalistics in order to spackle up the population to serve the needs of a vengeful “Jee-zuzz”, or by assorted Identities to ensure no popular opposition to their various agendas, or by the ‘soccer parents’ to ensure that their children – increasingly carrying on in their parents’ absence – will grow up (as if in compensation) in a risk-free, totally secure ‘world’ … this Counterinsurgency Theory seems to have become the many-rooted, de facto governing model for this Republic.

And that means that We The People are now simply envisioned as “the population”, an easily excitable, not very with-it, herbivorous herd that needs to be controlled and headed in the ‘right’ direction. Among whom there are un-named hordes of wild criminals of various violent proclivities, seeking to do to “us” on a daily basis what was done to the Twin Towers all in the space of a few minutes.

Staring at those disturbing tea-leaves, wondering where all this came from and how it has managed to become the domestic policy of the United States, then pick up the newly-published “Governing Through Crime” by Jonathan Simon (Oxford University Press).

Simon’s thesis is that somewhere in Time our government ceased to simply ‘govern crime’ and sought instead, and with a sustained and mighty effort, to govern THROUGH crime. The ideal ‘citizen’ and the ‘idealized political subject’ of the government then ceased to be ‘the yeoman farmer’ of the early 1800s, the pioneer, the industrial worker of the later 1800s, the immigrant of the early 1900s … but rather became ‘the potential victim of crime’. And the job of the government has thus mutated into serving that idealized citizen-victim by avenging and even preventing the crime that endangers that idealized citizen. This has become the American ‘Script’, the American ‘Story’ for this era.

We are well-advised to consider that if it goes on, it will also be the last-ever American Story, at least insofar as we are a Republic.

The job of the American government is thus not the preservation of rights, nor the protection of pioneers, nor the opening up of ‘new lands on the frontier’, nor the protection of the worker’s rights and the owner’s rights, nor the provision of jobs and great public works nor the guarantee of decent wages and reliable jobs, nor even the provision of decent education (who nowadays can say what should be taught?). Indeed, given the peaking of the American postwar production hegemony in 1969, the government wasn’t going to be able to keep any such promises. And given the Vietnam War it wasn’t going to able to guarantee ever-victorious military undertakings either.

What then was a government to do?

J. Edgar Hoover, of course, had been an early federal-expansionist via the police power of the government. Taking over the predecessor to the FBI just after World War I, he quickly cut his teeth on ‘Reds’, and when that ‘Scare’ was surfed out, he was on to ‘gangsters’: not, curiously, the big mob bosses, but the more vulnerable independent (if showy) entrepreneurs, especially ones who drove automobiles across State lines. Here was a fine new frontier for the Federal police power to colonize, and it did.

After the diversions of World War Two and the occasional Nazi spy, there was another Scare involving the Soviets and Joe McCarthy, and then – amazingly – it was Bobby Kennedy – himself a former prosecutor – who saw ‘crime’ as an excellent vehicle for enhancing his brother’s and his own political service.

After the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, and RKF himself, and the profoundly jarring experiences of the urban riots of the later ‘60s, and the overall Anything Goes attitude of the Boomers (in their youth), the Omnibus Safe Streets Act of 1968 becomes, for Simon, the foundation for an American “National Crime State” (my own term) that rivals Gore Vidal’s description of the National Security State that arose after World War 2.

It is the unspoken and rarely seen growth and subsurface efflorescence of this National Crime State – its mentality, its vision of the place of the individual citizen and of the role of the government (Federal and State) and of the prosecutor, and the ‘changes’ (to put it nicely) it required in American law and justicial practice – that Simon isolates as the great and dangerous development underlying the challenges the Republic faces today.
When the Democrats (see the earliest Posts on this site) embraced the assorted Revolutions of the Identities in the later 1960s and afterwards, the (hardly unrelated) spike in ‘crime’ – from ‘pot’ to ‘drugs’ to all sorts of violent acts to all sorts of arguably ‘deviant’ behavior and acts – became a richly potent wedge for the now-waxing Republicans, precisely as the ability of the Federal government to continue the essential New Deal preconditions of constant expanding economic well-being decreased. Nixon was a ‘law and order’ man who was gonna get ‘tough on crime’. He and Agnew and Mitchell …

The Reagan-era, ushered in by his election to the Presidency in 1980 but pre-figured in his tough-on-crime governorship of California in the mid-‘60s, capitalized on the crime issue, focusing on the South American drug-lords (while barely noticing the S&Ls being devoured by assorted well-connected Republican-leaning piranha and sharks). To meet the emergency and the threat posed by those South American drug lords the ‘war on drugs’ was declared, and all manner of jurisprudential damage was done to constitutional structures in an effort to get a clear line of attack on drug-lords, drug-sellers, even drug-users.

Simon doesn’t spend as much time as might be spent on a couple of other monster developments, but he raises them and limns them accurately enough. First, the development throughout the 1970s of womens-liberation issues in such a direction that women’s vulnerability to men was presented as primarily a violent-crime issue, toward the meeting of which ‘emergency’ and the ‘suffering and outrage of the victims’ Federal police power had to be expanded even more than it had been in the civil-rights era of the late 1950s and the whole of the 1960s.

Second, the (distracting) framing of many of the Democrat-connected social changes as ‘moral’ and ‘religious’ issues, abortion quickly passing pot-smoking and ‘free love’ as a powerful trellis upon which oppositional forces could shape themselves, with (Republican) governmental help. To add to this the Fundamentalistic sensibility – Manichaean, intolerant of ambiguity and impatient of dissent or delay in the gratifications of its vision – created (I would say) an intensely powerful cultural fire, one that could be stoked to power large engines indeed.

That the Fundamentalistic sensibility as described is in a sense a mirror-image of the ‘revolutionary’ sensibility of that age’s feminism and the advocacy stance of other emerging ‘Identities’ merely indicates how inter-tangled these powerful societal and cultural forces were beneath the surface appearances of polarization and ‘total oppositeness’. And the governmental march toward enhanced police powers, necessary to re-authorize itself as the Avenger and Crime-Preventer to the American citizen (white, black, male, female, young, old … any victimization would do, so long as it was not economic or ‘class’ related).

He spends some time with one of the most powerful loci of these titanic forces: the sex mania that united ‘parents’ and ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘women’ against (the least numerous forms of) men and the most outrageous, if rare, types of sex-related crime. That this mania is still raging and Mr. Simon still has a scholarly career to keep might explain his less-than-extensive treatment of this still-roaring conflagration, but he does discuss the issue and everything he says is accurate.

And he does give substantive treatment to the sex-offense mania’s immediate predecessor: the domestic violence surge, which resulted in liberty and privacy being interfered with by the government merely on the allegations of an individual – a hole cut in the watertight bulkhead of Constitutional protection which – whatever its good intentions – has created damage that may never properly be mended.

Very interestingly, within this National Crime State he distinguishes between the enhancement of the role of the prosecutor and the weakening of the role of the judge. This, I think, is one of the quiet and almost counter-intuitive developments that has helped militarize (and thus threaten) the classic constitutional praxis of law enforcement and the administration of justice. The judge in the American system, in his/her sentencing power, wields the power of mitigating punishment if – s/he decides – this particular case so warrants. But it is precisely the need of the National Crime State to demonstrate its authority to the citizenry, and strengthen its bond to the (law-abiding) citizenry, by most vividly if not also floridly demonstrating its punitive power and resolve.

To secure that objective, the role of judges has been publicly defamed and – the pols eagerly piling on – statutorily restricted and decreased. Prosecutors, as the efficient avengers of the victim and comrade-in-arms of the sturdy but hard-pressed police, can cut through the ‘crap’ (we think of Max Boot’s counterinsurgency theorems) to secure the objective, the victory, of conviction and maximum imprisonment.

And prison itself – once a method of rehabilitating and ‘correcting’ the inmate – now becomes a technology-saturated ‘warehousing of garbage’ operation, the objective merely being to make the inmate’s life as risk-free (to any of the staff) as possible by isolating him (mostly ‘him’) from human contacts. But there are few supermaxes, although it’s a vision to sweeten the dreams of far too many victims, advocates, media types, pols, and citizens – although not, I think, of so many prison-administration professionals.

And more abstractly but hardly less cogently, he spends some time on the consequences of this National Crime State (again, my term, not his) on American civic and societal and cultural life. The embrace of the illusion that there could ever be anything such as perfect security or total safety or zero-tolerance; the formulation of one’s personal and social identity as a victim – whether passive and ‘devastated’ or enraged and vengeful; the acceptance of the non-humanity and the non-rights of (large) numbers of citizens, whether having been convicted of a crime or not; the approval of the government’s authority to ‘preventively’ incarcerate persons targeted as ‘potential’ criminals (and who isn’t?); the learned and reinforced mistrust of large numbers of other citizens, be they strangers or family members or persons of societal or cultural ‘authority’ … what will be the effects – specific and cumulative – of all these?

I would add, in the light of Max Boot’s musings, that the needs of the National Crime State and of the National Security State and of the National At-War-With-Terrorism State and the National Empire-for-Survival State … they all require sorta the same type of folks for their populations. And that type is not the Citizen, nor in the aggregate The People, nor necessarily educated nor independent nor mature nor spiritually nor morally developed.

The challenges that faced 1st Lt. Watada (see the Post immediately preceding this) are facing Us as The People. Our rendezvous with destiny is here now, calling Our name.

CHICKEN HAWKS

The world never spent much time in 1946, listening to the assorted Nazi bigwigs still around explain how things happened the way they did. The Nazi project was so reprehensible that nobody was interested in spending any more time on them once the war was over. Assorted generals and field-marshals wrote memoirs, and later Albert Speer – the brilliant young architect who wound up running Nazi war production – did a bravura turn as the brilliant but too-trusting subordinate who had served his 20 years in Spandau and was now on the lecture-and-book circuit.

The January “Vanity Fair” has an illuminating article by David Rose entitled “Neo Culpa”. (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/01/neocons200701). The author goes around interviewing assorted major players among the neocon war-urgers. The overall impression is that they are not only looking to avoid some American version of Spandau, but are actually looking to keep up their creds for the policy-making and talking-head circuit.

None of them have demonstrated the truly impressive skill that Speer deployed in actual hands-on management of crucial affairs in the service of the nation. They ‘think’, mostly at self-serving think-tanks but occasionally on the faculty of ‘reputable’ institutions of higher thinking and learning.

Their pleadings are various. It was a good plan but the Bush Administration really screwed it up, beyond any reasonable thinker’s ability to imagine such a colossal “Schweinerei” (as the Germans might say). Ach ja. The Leader was an incompetent monomaniac who presided over a rigged planning-process staffed by fawning toadies and too-clever-by-half apparatchiks who thought they could handle him. Who knew? Who could imagine that such things could have gone on in our modern and enlightened world? Surely we wouldn’t blame the thinkers. And they’re sorry now.

Well, no, they’re not. To say they were sorry would be to make Nixon’s mistake of admitting one had screwed up. And look where that got him. No, mistakes were made, and good thoughts were pigged-up by lesser beings elsewhere on the food-chain. Would we care to engage a lecture on the topic? The fees, alas, must reflect the tremendous stresses and strains of maturely sitting by and watching one’s visions trampled by kine and swine, lower down or even “at the center”.

Apparently these honchos were simultaneously movers-and-shakers and yet not so close to “the center” that they could reasonably be held accountable. In the British series “World At War”, made in the early ‘70s, Speer cannot – even after 20 years’ imprisonment for his sins – shake his pride of place: “Everyone else had to go through Bormann to see Hitler. Except me. I had the right of direct access to Hitler.” Ach, such power. Look upon me, ye mighty, and despair.

Things have gone terribly wrong, but was one expected to be “delphic”? Can one be held accountable because one is not a god?

And were we not seeking merely to use our power as a force for good in the world? Didn’t we at least try? That’s more than the wussies with their morality and ethics and international laws would do. Don’t we get credit for trying? Is it our fault that such a noble and beneficial plan was poorly executed? And after all, you may take our word for it that at the outset the war was “a doable do”; they love to strut the man-stuff, these neocons.

We wasted “thousands of hours” before the war, confides one Player, “searching for middle-ground which most of the time will not exist”. The logical gap between relating what actually happened and then suddenly shifting to the ungrounded assertion begs for further ‘unpacking’, as they say. But this is not to blame the interviewer: these characters didn’t allow themselves to be interviewed in order to humbly do their bit in shedding light on the Truth; they are all trying to ‘position’ themselves to survive the wreck of Iraq. Eating regularly in Georgetown can get expensive real quick if you aren’t on a number of dinner-party guest lists or ‘cleared’ for the White House Mess (again, the irony …).

After all, given the moral and manhood failures of the U.N. and everybody else, it was only “American armed might” (if they do say so themselves) that was left able to ensure “a world at peace, a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies”. That their efforts have been effected through war and the violation of laws international and national, they do not appear to notice. That their programme has resulted in a ‘freeing’ of the Iraqis “to find their own destinies” comparable to the ‘liberation’ of the Cherokee to do likewise on the Trail of Tears can be attributed to the brutal fog of war, which not even the most competent and realistic planners can totally disperse. Now people … people can be dispersed, and divided, and hung and drawn and quartered, but realistically, the fog of war and events is just one of those things. It happens. Anybody who really knows what the score is knows that.

But while “a huge strategic defeat” is almost inevitable, not to worry. “The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch we can still pull ourselves together.” That’s encouraging, if it’s as true as is going to be necessary. We’ve taken some serious hits in the ‘capability’ department since the end of the ‘60s and even since the (remember it?) fall of the Soviet Union. Theory has flattened our world, the government is happily presiding over a nation of victims, adequate jobs for those who seek them are in short supply, and for lack of anything better Congress has been channeling its predecessor of the Gilded Age and the last Weimar Reichstag. But perhaps a war with Iran will give us all the opportunity to stick-it-out and find ourselves.

Those of Us who can’t keep up on this glorious March or Griff, or doubt the wisdom of it … well, we obviously aren’t worthy of our birthright. And perhaps God will arrive at the last minute and Rapture all the good ones and toast everybody else. So what’s the diff? Why do your homework if the world will end before final exams? That thought had been proposed by more than one enterprising school-child the night JFK announced the blockade of Cuba; the tests went on after sunrise nonetheless.

Photographs accompany the article. In the practice of journalistic photography these days, the portrayed is allowed to control the mise-en-scene. They have all been shot in sober black-and-white, much after the style of Karsh, the great portrait photographer of World War Two, whose camera captured Churchill and … whoever. Well-coiffed, expensively suited, perhaps chin in hand pensively “pondering the imponderables of war” (in Shelby Foote’s acute description of General Halleck).

Except for one Mr. Professor Doctor Cohen, who stands sideways to the camera, head turned to look sharply at you over a raised nose and chin, eyebrow raised as if alert to the exigencies of those imponderables, hair just a tad mussed, one hand decisively flat on his lap, the other arm half-stretched forward with the hand half-curled in tensive thoughtfulness; he seems to be going for either Lincoln or Grant, but he’s careful not to let you see his arm resting on the classic Civil War-era half-column prop, so it looks like he might have just had a stroke.

A woman, an ‘expert’ at one of those think-tanks, in unadorned simple black, was apparently trying to go for decisive arms-folded, but instead looks like she’s hugging herself, whether out of habit or fear of still-pending consequences, it is not clear.

Another is bearded, looking either thoughtfully or shiftily off to his left, perhaps eyeing the arrival of those same consequences; the expertly trimmed beard makes it look like a simple change of collar and type of tie would make him one of the Kaiser’s advisers, or one of Franz Joseph’s – and considering the sorta Central European dynastic froth out of which the neocon agenda of empire stems, that’s not so off the mark.

Our accounts have not been managed well. And our managers appear far less impressive than the troops who remain obedient to their word. We should do something about that.

BRAVE BIG WORLD

Gary Kamiya over at Salon has a piece on the Internet’s mega-expansion of the reader feedback phenomenon and its effects on writers (“The readers strike back”, www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/01/30/writing.html).

It’s worth the read, especially since it’s backlit by an insightful writer’s sensibility: on the one hand you like to read what others think about the pieces of handicraft you send forth into the world, yet on the other hand you can’t take too much negativity or even prolixity and you always have to keep a weather eye on those “who threaten to damage the fragile, half-permeable membrane writers use to keep the world from being too much with them”. Bingo. Although for some writers, I think, a crash course in Vauban’s fortifications is closer to what they require, or one of those star-trekky type capabilities of avoiding damage in this dimension by remaining slightly out-of-phase with it. This possibly was what the Gospel writers had in mind when they describe Jesus as passing unruffled and unharmed through the midst of pressing crowds. To a writer, such a capability would certainly intimate an aura of the divine.

Reading the blogospheric feedback gives one “an unprecedented snapshot of America”. Just so. There are times one wonders if The People are an actual fact-on-the-ground or merely an ideal (a ‘kanon’ as the Greeks put it, a ‘canon’ as the Latins did and still do put it in the Catholic Church). Is ‘The People’ a true – so to speak – descriptor, or is it a lie which we must nobly embrace at the outset in full knowledge of the deception and then live strenuously to ‘make true’? Or might we put the revolutionary, Leninist, Theorist ‘suspicion’ aside and simply accept that in this life nothing is ever perfectly and fully ‘realized’ or ‘actualized’ and that the best a pilgrim can do is to press on as smartly or at least as resolutely as may be? Or we might simply accept that the thing is a ‘noble lie’ (emphasis on the ‘lie’) and then figure that since nothing is ‘on the level’ we can and must cut whatever deals we can to ease our paths in life.

Such a question is gall and wormwood to the fundamentalistic mind, a Manichaean, melodramatic sensibility – so Hollywood and script-friendly – that requires a Good guy and a Bad guy and a final, decisive struggle between them in the third reel, and the Good Guy winning. And getting the girl. And Jesus. Quite a two-fer … no wonder the Fundies are so excited.

We are in the glorious days of “disintermediation” when the old mainstream media ‘gatekeepers’ have been outflanked and the power to publicly speak one’s mind on any subject is now available to anyone. It has turned out to be a decidedly mixed blessing: for every ten loudmouth (loud-fingered ..?) baboonish rants there is one worthwhile, substantive comment. But of course, it’s only the Internet and whacking a keyboard, even repeatedly, entails no physical violence to anyone else whomsoever.

To the extent that the Internet ‘liberation’ reflects the assorted liberations effected by the assorted revolutions of the assorted Identities – whatever they might be – this, unhappily, is not the case. Out in the actual world, all sorts of folks have been liberated from the need for maturity, and they make full use of their ‘right’ to flaunt their undeniable
(non-)achievement. And many folks just aren’t ready or willing or able to operate out of the ‘higher end of the human range’. Yet they wish to be heard and who’s to say one might not get a usable idea or a useful insight from their participation?

And if there is one thing that the Internet has done, it is to do its own end-run around the fortified check-points of Political Correctness (that leftish, revolutionary discipline that so un-disciplines the mind and heart and – I’ll say it – soul). Harking back to JFK, the hardy denizens of the Internet opinion-sphere embody the assertion that “(W)e are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

What has happened to us since he spoke those words? We have to ask and We have to answer that question. Nor can We make the revolutionary and simplistic deduction that since JFK himself surely didn’t share “everything” then his statement is totally false and untrue and he himself was utterly nothing more than a sleazy two-face. JFK may have been caught between the Ideal and the Real even within himself: a situation utterly beyond the fundamentalistic mind to comprehend, though the natural operating terrain of them-Kathliks.

What has happened to us? We have, I would say, been ‘revolution-ized’. We are slap-happy from the sustained yet un-nameable assault waged by the revolutions not so much on the content of the ‘American dream’ as on the very processes of the American spirit in its approach to conceiving and sustaining a life and a society and a culture. Unable to speak what we think, unable to speak for ourselves, unable to think for ourselves, unable to imagine ourselves except as victims (and thus so desperately in need of a strong government to preserve us).

In the Founding generation and for quite some time thereafter, it was the ‘strong government’ that they wanted to see caged; they’d take their chances with Life and Death and all the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Now, perversely, even as the Horsemen and even the capital-letter words are considered to be childish fantasies, the ever-dangerous government is being welcomed into the hearth of The Republic by right-thinking citizens who fear the possibilities of life’s experiences even more, now that there is no Life and no Beyond-Life; and in that fear they turn to a government more than willing to purr promises of perfect safety into their ears.

Revolutions have inevitably wound up ensuring that they have mostly followers and only a few acolytes, a small vanguard-elite ordained into the Mysteries. But of course the revolution’s initial great effort is undertaken – blood and all – ‘for the people’. It is only later, too late, that the revolution has second thoughts. Too late for the people who embraced it or at least acquiesced in it, hoping that indeed any tomorrow is better than what they have today. Discovering too late that they were hugely mistaken.

If some writers do indeed need “ivory towers” in order to craft their work, they must still from time to time look out of those towers, long and hard. They must look Out and Down and Around and Up as well as Inward, although we cannot require – as the Sixties did – that they also be able to compose masterworks while sitting in the back of a paddy wagon, warbling some hootenanny ditty to establish ‘solidarity’. Solidity is many-splendored, if indeed it is ‘solid’ at all. Perhaps it is merely energy behaving densely. But then even more so: there are many ways to be ‘solid’, some of them as ponderous and adamantine, some of them almost diaphanous and tensile yet highly charged. So many ‘solidities’.

But bumptious or serene, in your face or reticent, Truth-tellers are always disconcerting. How could they be otherwise, since we each and all need so much untruth to cushion our flawed passage through Time? It’s quite an art-form, learning to balance the mix between Truth and untruth in our lives, individually and societally. Just as most of us all have mornings when we’d rather stay in bed, all of us have moments – or entire months – when we’d rather not have to deal with the Truth: of our lives, of our nation. Fantasies, like ice cream, go down a lot easier than veggies. Broccoli, for example, is like garlic to the elder Bush. And are we reaching the point where garlic might be the best defense against his son? Would that it would be so easy.

What has happened to us? And now whatever it is that has happened to us, is dividing and sub-dividing and the energies thus sub-divided are now colliding with each other. In Framingham, MA a regional medical facility wants to address a community/public-health problem: child obesity. Excellent. It deploys and ad campaign using billboards. Good. The illustration thereon portrayed is a grainy black and white photo of the back of a 10-12 year old boy; he has no shirt on (pants on, not to worry) and he is most obviously overweight. It is painful to look at the rolls of fat hanging down from under his arms and around his waist. Nor is there any ‘enhancement’, such as his being daubed with glossy oils to heighten the effect. It’s a simple photograph that clearly and insistently illustrates a problem that is endangering public health and children.

It has to be taken down. That’s the pressure being put on the facility. A professor at a state college up there sniffs that the ads represent a “fear campaign” (her term). Which will (the article says – ‘Boston Herald’, 1/31/07, ‘Scales Tip Against Obese Boy Billboard’) “only work for people who don’t have a problem”. Huh?

I don’t know which Theory leads her to that learned conclusion, but we have 1) a problem that 2) threatens children and 3) threatens the community and yet it cannot be clearly limned in its effects so as to mobilize awareness.

And we’re not talking publishing photos of aborted fetuses in order to stop abortion here. We’re talking about a photo of the back of a child who is burdened with the effects of the problem that we’re seeking to address. And we see children and adults in this condition (and worse) daily on our streets or even at social or family gatherings.

Predictably and sadly, the paper – having shocked us – doesn’t dare examine the matter further. There is the obligatory pro-con passer-by comment (one pro – “It’s direct and to the point”; one con: “It’s over the edge”) through which the paper can hint at the issue without having to commit itself either to the hard work of reporting or the hard work of thinking or the dangerous work of taking a position on such facts as it has unearthed.

What has happened to us? We are now suffering from advanced-stage Advokitis: there are now so many conflicting demands from the assorted Advocaies that we are now trying to appease the demands of so many Advocacies that we are becoming paralyzed. Once upon a time there was only one and then a few more of these things, and folks were still able to keep track. Now there are many, each with its own insistent PC admonition and demand. Thus in this case here the laudable goals of addressing a credible threat to children and furthering public health has run smack into the self-esteem PC doctrine that obese persons are a victimized minority and must not be in any way even potentially subjected to possible ridicule (and we all know that schoolyard kids are capable of remarkable, often (but not always) thoughtless cruelty). Thus far, then, a stalemate.

But something else is at play, I think. What has happened to us is that we are now unable and/or unwilling to face unpleasant facts, even for the purpose of grasping the threat to ourselves and formulating a common and efficacious method of dealing with that threat. We are afraid to go up on deck and see what’s happened out there with the iceberg. We don’t want to be ‘insensitive’; we fear becoming ‘shrill’; we want to remain ‘optimistic’. Well, a sensitive radar is better than an insensitive one any day of the week; the whole purpose of a siren or an alarm bell is alert us through its shrill insistence; and there is an unsubtle but gravely real distinction between ‘optimism’ and ‘denial’. Thus paralysis and worse – a form almost of collective dementia.

Writers have to be sensitive, their whiskers twitching so that they can discover things about life and living that the more rugged or coarsely-made of us will not or cannot perceive. But unlike the PC of the revolutionaries, the writer seeks what is True, rather than seeking to impose what is Desired by the revolution. Writers must be sensitive, but they cannot be dictated-to because Truth itself will not be dictated-to. Thus they must be sensitive, yet made of a tough, resilient steel. For at the first scent of an approaching Truth, far too many will turn to repel it and its bearer. It’s the way of this world. It’s what humans do, at the lower end of their range.

But at the higher end of their range, humans are capable of remarkable things. And so we must strive for that higher-ness of Self, in season and out of season, in good times and bad, til death do us unite with the fullness of Truth.

Here’s to all writers – and especially to Molly Ivins – who have brought the light of Truth’s fire – in some small way – to this darkling and bloody ground that our world has always been and that it threatens more intensely to become. Let us, as LBJ would have said, continyuh.