aftersomanythings

Pardon Me

2012-01-24T10:45:00.000-08:00

I do not ordinarily write in praise of Republican ex-governors of Mississippi, particularly dyed-in-the-wool conservatives such as Haley Barbour. I certainly tend not to come to their defense in the face of widespread social outrage as a result of a decision they have made or an action they have taken. All precedent, however, exists for the breaking. As most of you know by now, Haley Barbour pardoned over a hundred criminals under the jurisdiction of various wings of the Mississippi penal system, including parole boards. The decision provoked outrage not because it covered parolees, but because it freed four convicted murderers who can now, if the pardons stick—which they may not—vote, work, and, the real rub, purchase guns ostensibly so they can hunt. Coverage of this case that I have seen on CNN focuses on two principal issues. First, indignation over the release of men who did horrible things, and the fear of people who see themselves as potential further victims. Second, a technicality Barbour ignored, namely the publication a month in advance of the requests for pardon, not made in this case. In this case, the public and the press see Barbour as running roughshod over the law. Technicalities to some degree aside, I beg to differ. The technicality first. One can imagine the governor reasoning as follows. If the large number of pardon requests became public, particularly those of the murderers, Barbour might have had his hands tied in advance of forgiving so many, ostensibly one reason for the law requiring publication in the first place. He probably foresaw the firestorm and elected to risk the consequences, a luxury available to a truly retiring politician. He has no need of votes anymore. Which brings us to the second issue. Barbour made a fundamental judgment based on the notion that the penal system can reform its inmates, not just punish them with incarceration. Or rather, that some inmates reform themselves. Unlike those appalled by his decision, he asserted the remarkable position that if Christian values have any sway in this society—witness Mississippi’s position smack in the middle of the Bible belt—they must apply unilaterally, not just when they seem convenient. I generally disagree with Haley Barbour’s positions on any number of issues, but my respect for him has risen immeasurably. Here we have a man acting on his principles, and having his name taken in vain for it, as though Portia has proclaimed that “the quality of mercy is not strained” and thousands of Shylocks insist instead on their pound of flesh and nothing less. Phil Ochs once sang that Mississippi should “find another country to be part of,” a sentiment that will no doubt fall on self-righteously deaf ears in Jackson and beyond. The shame, though, lies not in the actions of a man willing to put forgiveness and faith in humanity ahead of insistence on the letter of the law, but in the shrill, frightened voices of those who cannot, will not see his point, who deny forgiveness any role in our legal system, especially insofar as it involves murderers. If we have come so far as to deny any hope for the humanity of those who commit inhuman acts, what does that say about our humanity? I used to make the drive from Lynchburg, Virginia to Charlottesville and back fairly regularly on Friday afternoons. Coming back I would often see a large, smiling black man standing on the side of the road and waving enthusiastically to passing motorists on US Rt. 29. For a year or so I thought him surely mad or retarded. It turns out he had killed someone, gone to jail, and gained release in circumstances none of which I know well. He had sworn to himself to do penance for his past every day by trying to make folks smile. I came to really regret those days when I drove by at the wrong time and missed him. Haley Barbour knew some of these pardoned men, including at least one murderer but I believe all four, from a governor’s mansion work detail. Surely prison officials thought highly of these individuals to send them on work release in the first place. As Barbour said, these guys worked around his own grandchildren. Haley Barbour saw the justice in forgiveness. Why can the rest of us not trust his judgment and respect his acting on his convictions within his powers as governor? Has forgiveness come to seem so naïve in our cynical world?

Chapel Hill, NC
January 14, 2012

Faith

2011-12-29T09:54:00.000-08:00

How do we define faith? As in faith in someone or something, faith that one can believe our leaders, faith in our own integrity and, ultimately, in God or some formulation of spirituality. Some, of course, profess to have no faith, at least not of the spiritual variety. God help them.
Few questions in our lives trump those that arise around what we find worthy of our faith. For many these never get beyond personal relationships and issues, matters such as politics having either no interest or yielding no figures considered worthy of trust. That way, one fears, lies despair, the absence of or emotionally absent refusal to hope. Such a malaise, for example, lies behind our lack of confidence in Congress at the moment.
Just as those in whom we have faith must earn it, we have to earn the ability to have faith. Four years ago Mother Teresa’s diaries revealed her struggles with faith, struggles that caused some shock among those who misunderstand the way faith works in our lives. Not a steady state, it eludes us at times in the face of events that confound it. Faithfulness does not imply immunity from such moments, it describes the steadfastness with which one fights against them.
I remember with some poignancy an acknowledgment of and exhortation to persist in this fight to preserve faith and the forms it takes in our lives. I had just entered a monastic community outside of Charleston, South Carolina as a prospective member, or postulant, postulating or hypothesizing myself as a monk, if you will. One of the older brothers who had recently transferred from another order leaned toward me one day in the hall that ran through the infirmary. In a monastic version of a famous scene from The Graduate—“One word: plastics”—he spoke one word to me: “Persevere.” Take everything that comes at you and keep going, no matter what. Expect difficulties and get past them.
I think of that advice often, albeit at the time I did not take it, leaving the monastery ten months later. So many times we have faith in the wrong thing, or in the right thing or person but for the wrong reason. The left-wing deserters from the Obama bandwagon come to mind as an example of misconstrued faith, faith that Obama would mirror their own desires perfectly. As a yoga classmate lamented recently, we do not come by perfection easily; perhaps we should prick ourselves when we think we have found it.
A Dominican friar recently gave an Advent retreat at my church. In his first talk he mentioned the opposition between fantasy, based in despair, and hope or faith, which yield imagination. It struck me as a useful model for me, however imperiled any such generalization and most binary oppositions as a genre of thought. My own thinking certainly bears out his logic. When I lurch from idea to idea now, I try to interrogate its motivation. It has become a useful exercise.
Faith acknowledges the positive in life, the fact that good exists, that our lot can improve, past or present evidence to the contrary. Faith does not expect crazy chances to triumph, but quiet perseverance. Faith does not give into despair, but fights it valiantly. Faith respects the steadfast and does not require the spectacular.
I wonder if our current malaise does not reveal a crisis of faith, a tendency to yield to despair. We need to recognize this crisis before we truly lose our bearings. If we do, God help us.

Chapel Hill, NC
December 23, 2011

Meds

2011-12-07T11:50:00.000-08:00

I watch a certain amount of CNN’s newscasts; apology complete. Over the weekend they ran a story that reiterated one that has cropped up in many forms in recent years: do we over-diagnose and over-medicate kids for psychological and behavioral disorders, autism and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) leading the pack? The question seems to admit the easy answer of “yes.” Too easy. For complex patterns of sometimes intertwined behavioral sets, no easy answer can account for all variables, let alone all outcomes, benign or otherwise.

Usually in such instances one can simply defer to the professionals, but in the case of childhood behavioral maladies we lack the consensus of opinion to render that recourse viable. The problem begins with the fact that kids will by definition sometimes come in an unruly package. Defining when that unruliness crosses a line to pathology poses problems even for professionals, let alone putting a name on the transgression, given the resemblances among the identifiable disorders, and the genetic relatedness of some. Autism and ADHD, for instance, share a chromosomal allele.
The plot thickens when we add medications to the story, for to some battered parents and teachers they seem to offer that elusive quark, the “quick fix.” And here some professionals object with many layfolk that we use too many meds too freely. Perhaps; and no wonder, since some really work, or seem to, or do for a time before our systems acclimate to them—the case with Ritalin, the wonder-drug of ADHD.

But at this point the story can get weird. Some argue that the alleged fact of ADHD’s or autism’s over-diagnosis—I have heard this case made by professionals particularly with reference to ADHD—suggests that the disorder really does not exist. I suppose Psychology Departments leave the teaching of logic to Philosophy Departments, but such thinking has serious ramifications for those who have a truly clinical case of whatever behavioral nexus we might consider.
I have gone through a couple of diagnoses as an adult—ADHD and manic-depressive illness, or bipolar disorder—that both illuminate and confuse the issue. The fact that doctors and other professionals find these disorders hard to diagnose, or may get stuck in a one-size-fits-all diagnostic rut or fad, does not eliminate the pain of those so diagnosed, the pain the meds can and often do ameliorate.

Often. Not always. I remember Prozac as though through a cloud of jello, and Depakote as a ruthless secretary re-filing the folders of my brain at painful will one weekend. Wellbutrin helped my depression but probably made me manic, or rather facilitated the emergence of a manic episode that cost me a career I had worked very hard to nurture. So, no, think not of all meds as benign for all patients. In the trial-and-error world of medicating, one claims universal efficacy for a drug at the risk of one’s reputation for sanity.

On the other hand, once having established that I do not tolerate lithium—it nearly killed me—my new combination of meds works quite well. I could have given up after lithium, but so could the mother of a child mentioned in the CNN segment, until she found the right professional with right answer for her child after he had received the supposed death sentence of severe autism. Instead she found a doctor who diagnosed the child as having ADHD, and successfully medicated him.
Health professionals forget at their peril—and their patients’—that they have lives in their hands, not classroom abstractions. And we forget that though diagnostic fads no doubt live longish and prosper, to dismiss the diagnosis as such misses the point: that some of us need some version of it at some time in our lives to flourish. Punish those who give out Ritalin as candy, but remember that the diagnosis of ADHD did not develop in a first-grade classroom, but in the practices of those who know something whereof they speak, and have the compassion to persist through their mistakes.

Chapel Hill, NC
December 5, 2011

The Clannishness of Sport

2011-11-28T09:57:00.000-08:00

Human societies have long organized themselves into some variant of the clan. Medieval Genoa built itself around a series of alberghi, not inns as the word means now but urban redoubts for the major clans and their adherents. My own Liaosingh ancestors in Ireland fought as major vassals to the ruling lord against the British interlopers. You belong to a clan, you follow the policies and customs of the clan, or face disgrace.
Certain of our institutions suggest nostalgia for such belonging, which of course has its benefits. Sport is one of a long list of half-hearted attempts we make to recreate clannish safety. Half-hearted, because the allegiances run so shallow and the symbols seem so wan. Forget about the precision of heraldry, tracing the etiology of an intercourse of families. We have Carolina blue, Harvard (and Alabama) crimson, Stanford cardinal red. Notre Dame has two colors, Marian blue and Irish green; talk about imprecision.
The obviousness of the clan-sport affiliation in American society hits home hard at Thanksgiving. The Detroit Lions play football on Thanksgiving Day itself, and countless arch-rivalries play out on collegiate fields over the following weekends, culminating in the Army-Navy game, the one that most resembles a true clan rivalry, heraldic meanings and all.
Plenty of writers have weighed in on this subject, but it took on particular significance for me in an incident that occurred yesterday. My dog Abby and I went to the library; well, Abby went as far as the parking lot. Said lot actually belongs to a shopping mall, the temporary home of the library during new construction. The same lot also serves as a “park and ride” location for football games at UNC-Chapel Hill. Yesterday they played their rival from the next town, the Duke Blue Devils (dark blue, as opposed to Carolina’s sky blue). Their fans occupied little patches of clannish turf as they celebrated the occasion in that most American of locations, the parking lot of a shopping mall. Shallowness incarnate.
If the Gospel according to Matthew has forty-two begats, intercollegiate football has, for all intents and purposes, one: tailgating. I commented to a Duke fan that doing it in a parking lot seemed so odd, what with the stadium a couple of miles away from us. As a child and then a graduate student, I tailgated at that very clannish rivalry, the Harvard-Yale game, in Yale Bowl’s sprawling practice field which doubles as a parking lot on game days, or used to, anyway. Chateaubriand, rack of lamb, pasta, burgers, you name it, washed down by anything from Heineken or Sierra Nevada to Chateau Lynch-Bages, a very good Medoc from the village of St.-Estephe, I think. Doing it at a shopping mall reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s wonderful line when he reveals the origins of his hero Earnest “in a handbag.”
One group from Duke took all this rather seriously, with pitch-the-hackey-sack games and, of course, a football tossed around with admittedly no little grace. Abby provided the liminal moment, the edge at which it all made sense. We had approached the Dukies from the other, open end of the grass island they had occupied, when Abby unceremoniously pooped. I scrambled to cover her leavings, to the relief of the rather caustic revelers. Little did they know that by the time I got back to the scene of Abby’s “crime” with some pine needles from the base of a tree, said scene eluded me. Abby had unwittingly passed judgment on the whole proceedings and I left that judgment undisturbed; who knows whether the Dukies did.
I write all this with a mild sneer, but nobody shot anybody at a football game yesterday, as happened at a Walmart the day before, retailers’ Black Friday, the day of profits. Nobody got trampled, as also happened on Black Friday and as has happened at European football (aka soccer in this country) matches. And yet a drum major at Florida A&M University died of hazing injuries this week, clannish behavior at its worst: you want to belong, let’s see if you can take the punishment belonging requires.
That death casts a pall on the whole pastime. Football games across the country should have had a moment of silence, but did not, at least not the three games of which I saw various parts, all played by predominantly white schools, unlike the predominantly black A&M. Football and its halftime ceremonies should not be worth dying for, and such deaths as occur bear acknowledgment, at the very least. Such acknowledgment, however, generally occurs only within the clan. Outsiders be damned, at least for sixty minutes of (American) football.

Chapel Hill, NC
11/27/11

Penn State

2011-11-28T09:51:00.000-08:00

Only one reason occurs to me as valid for wading into the mess that a single sexual predator has wrought in a college town obsessed with its football team: a fresh perspective. Hear me out; I think I have one.
Thus far we can only write about those on whose behavior in the Sandusky affair we have some at least alleged facts. For better or worse, that pretty much eliminates the victims, about whom we know very little at this point. That leaves Sandusky himself, Paterno, the Athletic Director, the Vice-President for Business Affairs, and the President. We will return to this group shortly, but one remains, a graduate assistant at the time of his remarks to Paterno about what he saw in the shower. McQueary has become an assistant coach, and given paid administrative leave.
Most observers see the issue for all these men as one of not going to at least campus police if not the legal authorities with what they knew of Sandusky’s pederasty, however they obtained that knowledge. I spent twenty years in academia, and really want to know what this argument has to do with the way college administrators conduct business. Has nobody noticed that a V.P. for business got involved as the Athletic Director’s superior?
Colleges and universities like to police themselves, to control embarrassing information that might cost them contributions. Football generates enormous sums and inspires intense loyalty at Penn State. Under no circumstances would any administrator at any academic institution want to go to the police, though a minority would anyway, as the right thing to do. Did the others learn nothing from the Catholic church’s pederasty scandal? Obviously not, at least at Penn State.
This case has complexities nobody has yet fully comprehended, but one individual clearly deserves to have his name cleared. Who on earth can reasonably expect a graduate assistant to go over the head of his boss, the beloved Joe Paterno, and approach the police? To think so flies in the face of collegiate hierarchies. He did his duty by telling Paterno, who did his by telling the A.D., at which point the buck gets harder to pass, but surely he or the V.P. should have gone to the police.
The fact that they did not condemns both them and the notion of separation of academia and state that the academy wants desperately to preserve. I still do not know if Paterno deserved getting the sack. The three above him in the pecking order surely did.

Chapel Hill, NC
November 12, 2011

Another Hospital Story...

2011-11-28T09:47:00.000-08:00

… but not mine. The stories of this week—the second of the Herman Cain sexual harassment/assault saga, the first of the child rape tragedy at Penn State, and more heroically that of Veterans’ (or Armistice) Day—have overwhelmed the emotions of many. The Cain story has strengthened paranoia on both sides of split allegiances; the Penn State tragedy has produced as many allegiances as players, excepting any sympathy for the alleged perpetrator. Only the stories of vets seem to offer any reinforcement to our sense of humanity.
Not all vets’ stories end happily, obviously, but enough end with some reason for inspiration that they remain compelling in the telling and retelling, and particularly in the hearing. Perhaps some seek to escape the horror of war, or to overcome or even whitewash it. I suppose in a sense mine does all three, particularly because of a central element of it: my father never made it any further than Camp Croft, South Carolina, and a surgeon’s scalpel in Atlanta. My story also differs from most in that although my father plays the central role, a doctor played the role of hero.
My story takes place during World War II, at least the crux of it does, but involves two men who never fought a lick. The first of the dramatis personae, Russ Lynch, my father, played multiple sports in high school, a year of prep school, and college: football in the fall through his freshman year at Boston University (B.U.) after not making the team at Bowdoin College, hockey most winters except that freshman year at B.U., and baseball in the spring. Not only did those sports shape his life, they—at least football—may have delayed his death.
His freshman year at B.U. Dad, who played end in a two-way scheme tore the cartilage in his knee. The coach, thinking to do him a favor, brought the 160-pound convalescent the assignments for guard for the next fall. My father, his scholarship on the line, told the coach to get lost, rather less politely. Word reached the hockey coach, who saved his career by offering him the insane choice of playing hockey beginning his sophomore year. He took it, lame knee and all. He played defense for a year, then his natural position of center his last two years, captaining the squad as a senior.
I loved all his hockey stories as a kid, though he always left out the part about not making the football team at Bowdoin, whose campus and libraries I came to know many years later. That failure shamed him. Another did not: his failure to fight fascism in Europe or imperialism in the Pacific. In fact, he found it rather amusing, and a cause of gratitude.
My father turned thirty-one in early January of 1942, old for conscription into the military but not automatically exempt. Three separate doctors in three separate drafts found my father unfit because of his right knee, as well as his age. A fourth doctor in a fourth draft disagreed. The war bore on and the military needed men, period, fitness be damned.
En route to boot camp in South Carolina my father received his assignment as second man on a bazooka in heavy infantry. Perfect for a guy with a bum knee.
It gets worse. On the first day at Camp Croft, Dad had to climb and then jump off a twenty-foot wall on an obstacle. He warned his sergeant that his knee would not stand the fall. The sergeant took him for a slacker. He climbed and jumped, and his knee gave out so excruciatingly that when the sergeant tried to get him up with a swift kick Dad convinced the man he would risk his life if that boot touched my father. The sergeant got the point, finally.
The Army then did something remarkable. Instead of shipping Dad home, they hospitalized him. An orthopaedic surgeon looked at him. The doctor had developed a series of operations to reconstruct knees injured like my Dad’s. He offered my father six months in the hospital on the Army in Atlanta. My father became a guinea pig, and the surgeon improved my father’s quality of life immeasurably. I often thought of that story while watching my parents dance beautifully at our favorite restaurant on summer vacation.
So, yes, I grieve for the fallen, the amputated, the post-traumatic stressed, and weep with joy at those who return at least physically whole to spouse and kids and parents and siblings. I always used to think Dad cheated his way out of the war somehow, thus cheating me out of war stories to relish as another episode in my private cult of hero-worship. In reality, of course, that idiot drill sergeant and that inventive orthopod prevented my father—and possibly me—from being cheated out of a life.

Chapel Hill, NC
November 12, 2011

Civility, Again

2011-10-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Civility, Again
This blog has never served as a media review, nor will it so serve now. Read: but coming. The but: a point made almost longingly and certainly with an impatience bordering on indignance last evening on CNN’s John King USA. This writer missed part of the segment, but found the gist of it clear. A congresswoman from New York, a Democrat, has decided to found a new caucus, one based on the notion of bipartisan civility revolving around a simple social act: sitting down over a beer or whatever and talking.
They used to do that easily and regularly in Washington. As the congresswoman said, such interaction occurred after legislative hours and with no agenda other than sociability. The habit reflected a politics of constructive disagreement. We have descended into a politics of hate. As the Democratic political consultant Conrad Belcher pointed out, somebody elects these screaming memies—i.e., we live in a culture of hatred—but that seems only partly the point and merely states the obvious, however unfortunately. If Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Illinois and a Tea Party darling) could discover common personal ground with, say, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont, and an avowed socialist), perhaps he would stop whining about socialist plots to take over the government and start acting like an adult.
My first experience of Washington came as an only slightly stealthy Democrat on a Republican internship designed to introduce high school students to the workings of the Hill. True, we met with nothing but Republican Congressmen and Senators, including Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), a precursor of the Tea Party. And yet they all, Goldwater included, made it clear that they took for granted the necessity of working respectfully with the opposition. And they all had plans for a dinner party at least one evening that week at which they would have a Democrat within conversational distance. They took civility as part of the legislative landscape.
I came away from that week deeply impressed. We spent some time as a group in the office of a Rep. McCorkle (R-Nebraska), a friend of Rep. Stuart McKinney (R-Connecticut), the latter a beloved and widely respected moderate lawmaker when such a one could buck his leadership and not have to run for political cover. We then had a free afternoon, and I took up a staffer in McCorkle’s office on her invitation to come back for a while.
In the middle of my licking envelopes to send to constituents in Lincoln, the staffer interrupted me. The congressman wanted to meet me. This extremely nice man encouraged me to work as a volunteer for his Democratic colleague, Rep. William R. Cotter (D-Connecticut) who represented my district, or rather my parents’ since my first vote would not come till the following year. No irony in the suggestion, just generous collegiality. I wonder how many such interactions occur now in such a tone.
The media alternately marveled and caviled at the banality of the President’s having Skip Gates and a Cambridge policeman to the South Lawn of the White House for beers to soothe a notable case of incivility, by both Gates and the cop. The congresswoman from New York clearly sees past the banality of such gestures. Indeed. They allow us to live with each other. And that grace seems notably lacking at the moment.
Chapel Hill, NC
October 26, 2011

Patience

2011-10-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

Moammar Gaddafi, apparently, has died. The dictator is dead; long live the National Transitional Council and whatever follows it. How this news will resonate in Damascus and Sana’a one can only guess. One suspects, at any event, that the picture of a wounded or killed Gaddafi will acquire iconic status, unless its gruesomeness reminds too many people on all sides of the gruesomeness all around them in their streets and bazaars as the Arab Spring extends past summer into fall.
Before we get too far ahead of the facts on the ground—as I write CNN continues to exhibit caution about the reports of Gaddafi’s demise—we might think about how we got here. It appears, for example, that a NATO sortie may have fired missiles that hit Gaddafi’s convoy as it escaped the impending fall of his hometown, Sirte. This raises rather poignantly a couple of questions.
I have defended President Obama’s much maligned leadership style on this blog, and the fall of Gaddafi presents more evidence in its favor. When the NATO mission took shape, with us briefly in the lead and then in support over the not very long haul, the arrangement became the target of criticism from the right in the United States. Sens. Lindsay Graham and John McCain, in particular, characterized the plan as ineffective. One will find it interesting to see how they eat this particular crow.
However Graham and McCain preserve their integrity or not, their opposition to the NATO mission issues from a number of perspectives, not least the American exceptionalist position that we lead everything. Obama, instead, believes in partnership when appropriate, a belief based on a realistic assessment of American power and responsibilities. The Graham-McCain complaints, however, also speak to another oft-observed characteristic of our society: a lack of patience. Given a chance, Obama’s NATO strategy, run by an American admiral, did precisely what he said it would do, as CNN’s reporters have noted this morning. Given a chance.
We shock easily in part because we believe in instant truths, only to see them unravel over time. Steve Jobs founded Apple, then left in a conflict with the corporate style of its one-time partner AOL. Apple tanked. When Jobs returned to a basket-case version of his company noone gave him a chance to turn it around. Noone had the patience, in other words, to give him a chance. Shortly before his death Apple had a moment as the largest corporation in the United States.
What we think we know evolves over time. The competition in the media, one of our principal sources of information, to provide information instantly, serves us in the moment but does us a disservice over time. We cannot know everything at once, not even whether a new military strategy will work, or maybe particularly a military strategy.
Obama stands for a kind of politics of patience. This drives those who live by media-time and speak in sound-bytes crazy, and engenders all sorts of phony charges of weakness and ineptitude. In fact we have a very canny leader, if only we would let ourselves see patience as a virtue in a president. After all, how many Republicans considered FDR an idiot on December 6, 1941?
Obama has brought us a vision of the president as a patient philosopher-king, his recent spate of worried campaigning notwithstanding. I almost wish he would fall back on his oft-repeated willingness to serve a single term, a declaration we have not heard from him in some time. That way, if he must leave office—and I obviously belong to the “say it ain’t so” faction on this—he can do so with the consistency of one who valued more than political success.
PS—McCain exceeded even my low opinion of him.

Chapel Hill, NC
October 2, 2011

Vulnerability

2011-10-06T12:52:00.000-07:00

Doctors: who needs them? Duh, we all do. Even Steve Jobs did, after a futile attempt to avoid them, at least allopaths, the "conventional" ones. Like Melville's Bartleby, we "would prefer not to," in the same way we would prefer, say, never to get sick. As Jobs himself said, we "want to go to heaven without having to die," the way we try to avoid more trivial inconveniences in life. Heavy, large, slow computers, for instance.

Jobs learned; I have learned, though not through mortal combat as he did. A medication became toxic and decided to attack my brain, kidneys, major muscle groups and other innocent victims like my sense of balance and ability to speak clearly. A medication, mind you, something devised to help those of us suffering from a mental illness, manic depression. Of course, I helped by rebelling against lithium's side-effects and getting off it with inappropriate suddenness. Two weeks of hell followed, then two weeks in the hospital, and now recuperation.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in my adopted hometown, has built an enormous and interconnected complex of hospitals, in which I spent time shuttled among at least three. From one room, my favorite, I had a view that suggested a castle keep standing watch over a magnificent parade of clouds, disconnected from any terrestrial reference. I floated--when I managed not to fall off a chair and raise the ire of my nursing staff and everybody else who watched it all on a patient surveillance camera feed--in what I have heard described by New Yorkers as "the best place in America to get sick."

I cannot claim a fortune comparable to Job'; I have no money at all. UNCH's staff knew this. In fact, a financial aid officer started working with me during my stay and continues to do so. This serves their interest, of course, but it also serves mine in that she has introduced me to sources of help of which I had known nothing.

A university town such as Chapel Hill--a great university town, and I did not go to school here--attracts smart and gifted people, and more than my share of them cared and still care for me as both an in- and out-patient. What did I do to deserve this? Nothing more than something very stupid. Think if I lived in the boonies somewhere, or in an impoverished country. The next time you want to challenge traditional medicine--and I had my moments even in this hospitalization--remember the graces of my care by e.m.t's and nurses and doctors and physical therapists mostly there for the right reasons, and my outcome, walking with trekking poles, but walking, unlike when I entered in an ambulance. Steve Jobs died in the hands of Western medicine, but he lived unexpected years in that same care.

Chapel Hill
October 6, 2011

hard truths

2011-10-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

We hear a lot about the dynamics of race in our politics, particularly presidential politics. President Obama has, of course, served as a lightning rod for the attitudes race surfaces, but to the surprise and dismay of some, he does not go out of his way to enter this domain. We so easily think of him as black, and forget that he is half-white. And we forget that which “we” regards his race profoundly colors the way “we” see him and others. A case in point: the Congressional Black Caucus, both their members and their recent conference at which Obama spoke so forcefully and, to the private consternation of some attendees, challengingly. They understandably show great pride in having as president an African-American, whom they choose to see as one of them, and therefore theirs in some unique way the rest of us do not, cannot share. To their chagrin, the President does not share their view. He has more than one foot in their end of the pool, for sure, and when he speaks to them his cadence, his diction, his rhetoric, even his pitch lilt slightly toward the speech of southern black migrants to Chicago, with echoes of Dr. King. He speaks this way to one special constituency with which he shares much, but not everything, and to whom he likewise owes much—but again, not everything. We have not ended racism in the United States, but one begins to see a shift in how it plays out in our lives. Blacks no longer form the largest minority; Latinos have surpassed them. Herman Cain speaks eloquently to the fact that the black experience has ceased its more apparent than real one-time univocality, like him or not. Candidates such as Obama or North Carolina State Senator Ty Herrell insist that they represent all their constituents equally, not just those with whom they share—or not—a sub-culture and skin tone.
The assimilationist tendency of politicians such as Obama has one interesting side-effect that particularly irks the members of the Black Caucus. They have lost some of their sense of specialness, of uniqueness and yes, of entitlement, none of which they feel prepared to relinquish, and with some very good reasons. And yet they sometimes seem blind to others and their very good reasons for attention. Some, such as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), seem unaware or unconcerned that they come across as spoiled children in complaining that the President pays them too little heed. They do not have a special claim on him, but the same claim we all have, however unique both his role and their vindication in history: the claim to his very divided attention as chief executive to our national and personal well-being and freedom. Have we perfected the melting-pot theory of American cultural absorption? Of course not. Have we conquered racism? Hell, no. We have, however, approached a point where a black politician can eschew political blackness. Those of another generation and more left-leaning views—a Waters or a Cornel West—find this repugnant, but perhaps it has become almost safe to name such parochialism while remaining sympathetic to the particulars of its grievances. Or if not safe, then perhaps necessary.

Chapel Hill, NC
September 25, 2001

six bleak months later

2011-09-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

One cannot cover in one blog post everything important that happened during a six-month hiatus brought on in part by unemployment and illness, both of which redirect energies in predictable and unpredictable ways; other kinds of writing, for instance. Such an attempt at comprehensiveness would read like a premature end-of-year overview.
One can, however, do the political-energy equivalent of an MRI and ask, bluntly, what gives. Parochialism hardly counts as a neophyte in politics, foreign and domestic, but it seems to have taken anabolic steroids of late, and at overdose levels.
How else to explain the isolationism of the Tea Party and its courting nabobs of Republican intestinal bankruptcy, from Ron Paul to Mitt Romney and Rick Perry in between them? The nauseating rhetoric of American exceptionalism aside, we have behaved most exceptionally in civil rights and foreign leadership, screwups galore notwithstanding. If inevitable failure in the primaries shuts up Mr.Paul, so much the better for all of us.
The Tea Party obsession with eliminating budget deficits, in all its pathological ugliness, occupies the other side of the same coin. Whoever cares more about budgets than FEMA’s responsibilities, eliminating or radically overhauling entitlement programs—and I mean radical with a capital R for Republican right wing—more than creating jobs via infrastructure repair, and so forth, needs to have their humanity examined. That means Messrs. McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, Ryan, Walsh, and a helluva lot of company. We may say of them that some seem decent as people; as politicians, they have become something else.
The flavor of this past week, of course, went on display at the U.N. in a particularly unseemly display of chicanery. Right now I find it very difficult to sympathize with either side in the Palestine issue. Netanyahu ranks as the villain in the piece, as he should for sheer intransigence. His minions such as Mr. Ayallon match him for the credulity of their defense of indefensible Israeli positions on sttlements, and on borders always assumed but never spoken till Obama did the unthinkable and named them: 1967 or bust.
The Palestinians, however, blew another chance—one loses count of these blunders over time—to look like the adults in the room. Dr. Aswari and others on the Palestinian side do not seem to realize that their real complaints sound more like petulance the more we hear them repeated. One feels like a fan of Mohammad Ali booing his rope-a-dope tactics against Frazier et al. in the ‘70s. Arafat left them a legacy of encroaching irrelevance in his inability to understand the compromises required in diplomacy, a brown paper bag of futility out of which the Palestinians now seem frantic to punch themselves when only talking will work.
We even need to watch the Arab Spring, that it not devolve into less of a movement and more of a regionalized morass. Egypt wobbles, Libya has yet to walk, and we hear little from Tunisia, though that may betoken real progress. Syria bleeds, Yemen lines up for civil war, Bahrain suffocates, Jordan prevaricates, Turkey expectorates, and spring turns into fall and the heralds of winter. Parochialism in regional form, in other words.
A bleak assessment of our moment? Maybe. Because we have heroes, too, from the three hikers recently released by Teheran to the kids of Tahrir Square to the TNC guerillas of Libya to the martyrs of Syria to too many others to count. If governments cannot or will not do the right thing, individuals have to do it. Amazingly, they do. Witness CNN’s heroes. We abdicate, though, if we let government off the hook of responsibility, comparisons to European state paternalism (I can only wish…) be damned.

Chapel Hill, NC
September 25, 2001

the practice of blogging

2010-10-05T00:22:00.000-07:00

The practice of blogging, cultural neo-nate or no, has already acquired a range of uses, and with each of those uses, different meanings. Blogs allow those suffering from a serious illness to keep a large circle of family and friends efficiently informed of their progress. A friend from Chapel Hill who had left for graduate school at Michigan State started a blog to take those of us who cared--a large group--through her (and her boyfriend's) successful battle with her breast cancer. She writes like the applied scientist her business card identifies her as, with an emphasis on succinctness and brevity. I would not call her blog a work of art, and I doubt she would, either, but she used the medium for her own ends very effectively, and to the lasting gratitude of her friends and family. Only certain of us could log onto the blog, so despite its exposed existence on the web, it remained a private document. We have become so accustomed to the smart but often craven use of blogs by performers and athletes to stay in touch with their fans that we forget or simply don't realize that such a private use for blogs exists.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, journalists such as Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times use their blogs for short pieces, often of either the op-ed or breaking news variety. Generally not as well-researched as pieces appearing under their print byline, these pieces tend to reach a wider or slightly different audience than their print pieces, even a narrower but valuable audience in some cases. Excepting online magazines such as Slate, The Huffington Post, The Beast and Politico, which do a number of short pieces aimed at the presumed attention span of an electronic reader, some of these journalists have found social networks useful places to alert potential readers to their blogs by way of links. Kristof, again, has made an art form of using his blog to engage readers and generate some of the best-informed discussion I see on Facebook.

I would not want to claim those examples as exhaustive extremes, but merely as the extremes that interest me for the purposes of this discussion. This blog disappeared for some months, and recently a friend reasonably asked why. The answer has to do with the different uses of the blog as a form. About the time I started writing mine, it came to my attention that a friend wrote one. A journalism graduate student, she writes strictly on deadline--as I mostly did in an attempt to follow her example--and on generally small subjects, though often with broad implications. They are jewels, but fenced in by the acceptance of the rules of a genre that requires sublimated ambition.

I have a background in the humanities where I learned to value the well-made, presumably dispassionate argument. One can indulge passion on a blog precisely because one does not have to satisfy academic standards of evidence. I do not back away from ad hominem debate as long as it has some demonstrable grounding in factual reality. Nor have I ever managed 250 words--except under duress--when a couple thousand would do so much more nicely; my dissertation stands as the glaring exception at just under 250 pages, very short by the standards of my field. Furthermore, the blog form permits argumentation on anything, as though one had carte blanche to write on the op-ed pages of The New York Times at will--an exercise in vanity restrained only by the attempt to say something important on a subject of broad interest worth engaging.

My friend and I made the mistake--I initiated it, if memory serves--of regularly commenting on each other's blogs. I say "mistake," because eventually the dissonance in our aims and styles became a source of confusion and friction. The first time a student in one of my discussion sections called me "intimidating" on an evaluation, it caught me by surprise. To hear--read--effectively the same thing from an adult graduate student in journalism took my breath away, especially in the context of suspending our practice of commenting on each other's material; though in fairness the disparity in the length and type of comment became obvious early, as did the possibility of tensions. I may have written one or two posts thereafter, but not much more. The exchange of comments had become integral to the writing process. Absent that exchange, the air had gone out of the blog.

I take two lessons from this. Vanity, ego, self-consciousness, call it what you will, express differently in different people. I have considerable vanity and ego invested in my writing; most academics do, whether currently in the academy or not. Add the ambition of commentator on the issues of the day, and one can sound like a pompous ass, particularly to those too humble to take on those issues by frontal attack. Training has something to do with all this, as well. I was trained to think large, though my blog addresses the issues of the day, not those of the sixteenth century my graduate studies addressed.

I am in a personal transition. My humility may receive a test. Writing without the consistent exchange of another blogger will take some adjusting, and my own trajectory may strain any efforts to revive this blog. We'll see. I'll take the challenge as an opportunity to write with a tighter leash on my ego. I do not speak with the authority of Nicholas Kristof and should not pretend that I do. Neither, however, do I find the observations of the small things of life my strength, and will generally leave that to my friend and others who do it well, though as Oscar Wilde said, "all generalizations are false, including this one." To paraphrase the title of one of the best books I've read on Afghanistan this year, by the British author Rory Stewart, I will try to stick to "the places in between."

L.G.B.T. vs. D.o.D.: When Subcultures Collide

2010-05-30T10:56:00.000-07:00

The controversy over repealing the military's never-satisfactory "don't-ask-don't-tell" policy has taken yet another contentious turn. As the military conducts a painstaking process to give its personnel a chance to voice their thoughts and concerns over the repeal of the policy that has required lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered military personnel to operate below the radar, the L.G.B.T. community has grown suspicious, restless, impatient, and downright rude and disrespectful. A prominent California gay activist has now heckled President Obama twice at events on the West Coast, the most recent this week's rally for Sen. Barbara Boxer. I have avoided Rachel Maddow and MSNBC of late, but one can just imagine whose side they took. I hope I err in saying that; more's the pity if I don't.

When I speak of sub-cultures colliding, don't think two-car crash; think train-wreck on a high-speed track in France or Japan, spilling carnage everywhere. In an election year, the Democratic Congress fears looking too submissive to the cautious pace of the military. They have as a partner--perhaps "had" puts it better now--Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, who approaches this issue not from the point of view of whether to repeal "don't-ask-don't-tell," but how to do it. One of his predecessors, retired General John Shalikashvili, has supported repeal for some time, having presided over the early days of the policy and seen the error of its assumptions and the evolution of the attitudes in the military itself, at least among some personnel. With voices in the military saying in a business-like way, 'we'll work with you, just give us till December to complete our review'--as the president wisely agreed to let them do--Congress has jumped ship and begun to ram repeal legislation through both chambers.

One can distribute blame, and even praise, in various ways in this conflict. The L.G.B.T. community, in addition to exhibiting feelings of entitlement once having helped elect Obama, has no historic cultural sympathy for the military; quite the reverse in many circles. Many wonder beyond their comprehension why one of them would even want to serve in the military. Some L.G.B.T. support for repeal, particularly the activist variety, amounts to hypocrisy of a high order--repeal a bill that discriminates against their community, the institutional identity and loyalties of that segment of the community be damned.

Admittedly, some live close enough to or even within the military community that they see it very differently. They do not cringe at the sight of a young man with tattoos and short-cropped hair if he doesn't wear an earring, as well, or see lesbians as having ceded female power by submitting themselves to military command. Some actually admire them--gasp--for doing things beyond their capacities. This attitude comes without flag-waving hero-worship, and without the pretense that the military has rid itself of gay-bashing rednecks or paper-pushing homophobes. It hasn't, and probably won't for some time. L.G.B.T. soldiers, sailors, leathernecks, fliers, and support personnel do something every day that requires considerable bravery: they go to work, whether in Kandahar Province or Baghdad's Green Zone, Ramstein Air Base or the Gulf of Mexico, Fort Hood or the Pentagon. They put their uniforms on and do their best to adhere to a code that for some, though not all, has become onerous and unbearable.

Another element has to enter this conversation. The notion of repeal comes harder to an older generation of military brass and civilian administration than to that of military service age. Again, with exceptions, largely based on class, religion, and regional background. Repeal can happen now; just don't expect roses to show up on the front stoop of L.G.B.T. military personnel, most of whom would not want it any other way. It has taken Mike Mullen a while to come to his current position, and Defense Secretary Gates has had the distinct air of a man following orders and looking for a way to demonstrate their lack of wisdom. This drives the activists crazy. I have one word for them: compassion (and believe me, I started to write something else, more John Wayne or Mark Harmon than Jesus or Buddha).

Understand the scope of this change. Understand the wisdom of this president in letting the military manage the repeal their way, on their time. Call me naive, but I believe Mullen, however much he may have felt his hand forced by political considerations, as indeed they have done. Activism and Congressional poll-watching may have just made this whole process more acrimonious and awkward, which ultimately will most hurt those it most seeks to benefit. One can always understand the thrust of Rev. King's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail"--'' why we can't wait"--but please explain to me why, in the case of "don't-ask-don't-tell" we can't wait till December for the military to do an orderly review? Do we have so little respect for each other? Do we have so little interest in the sacrifices the military personnel make to defend their belief in our system of government and way of life?

If you dismiss the notion that a kid dodging i.e.d.'s (improvised explosive devices--crude mines) in Afghanistan defends what you believe in, think about what you'd say as you watched him speed around your place of business on an artificial limb, as I did the other day. And--imagine this--it never occurred to me to wonder whether he was gay or straight or bi- or transgendered. The artificial leg rendered all that irrelevant. He asked for no pity, and frankly I felt none. Only awe.

Has any Room for Gray Survived the Sex Scandal?

2010-04-03T21:43:00.000-07:00

The Vatican sex scandal has reached a pitch that seems to have eviscerated any possibility for nuance or ambiguity. Some of us in the church, myself included, have refrained from referring to the Pope as Benedict XVI in favor of his surname, Ratzinger. The Europeans, especially the Italians, have long done this, alternating from Papa Benedetto to Papa Ratzinger. In American Catholic circles, it sounds unfamiliar and, as such, rather sinister, as many of us intend it to sound. The Pope we desperately didn't want got the benefit of the doubt from some of us on the left in the Church, both here and in Europe, led by the reasonable voice of Fr. Hans Kung. His honeymoon ended with the reference to Islam as inherently violent in his Regensburg speech. The gloves have come off in response to his pastoral letter to the Irish, which satisfied nobody in addressing the expansion of the scandal to that profoundly Catholic country, and a not terribly strong case against the handling of a sex abuse case on his watch as Archbishop of Munich.

I have joined some of the "off with his tiara" rhetoric myself, without expecting anything to come of it, least of all Ratzinger's abdication. More ominously, the controversy has reopened fissures along deep-seated fault lines in the Church, basically pitting those like George Weigel who travel in lockstep with the American Council of Bishops, against those, like Nicholas Cafardi and the Administrators of Catholic Hospitals, who see the imperative of obedience as less compelling than that of moral complexity. It seems very late in the day for adducing any ambiguity in all of this. Nevertheless, though I have not felt so inclined in the last few days, I will try.

My reasons for attempting what may seem impossible stem from personal experience. I know two of the priests caught up in the scandal. I admire both of them, for different reasons, as they have very different personalities and histories. Both of them have had their pastoral careers cut short because of sexual abuse they committed as younger men, though one seems to have gotten caught in a once-only case of very poor judgement, whereas the other perpetrated a series of calculated abuses over an extended period of time. Until this morning, I had never wanted to know what he did; I simply knew that he was living humbly and paying a high price for his fall from eminence. After a Google search, knowing some of the details certainly strains the image of him I have held. The other has appropriately suffered a less harsh punishment, able to pursue scholarship and carry on as though he were just another member of his order, but removed from any official contact with minors. He, too, has demonstrated remarkable humility in wearing his cloak of shame.

I have always had one nagging problem with the popular response to the sex scandal. Mercy and forgiveness lie at the center of Christianity. To a substantial degree they set us apart from other great religions. Some of the most maladroit handling of pedophile cases clearly stems from bureaucratic impatience which, repeated often enough, morphed into a heinous disregard for children under a diocese's pastoral care. That description fits Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who wound up as Archpriest of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome, which he has apparently run with a virtually Benedictine simplicity. Law certainly took some of the most deserved and intense fury as the sex scandal unfolded in Boston, still the epicenter of the scandal in the United States. Law's reassignment by his friend John Paul II to one of the great basilicas of the early Church hardly seems punishment, and does not satisfy many--it certainly struck me as a soft landing at the time, to put it mildly--and yet he seems to have taken it as the opportunity to live in a penitential manner. I have never taken it this easy on Law before, but I can explain why this point of view has some merit.

Every priest or monk, or one such as myself who has tried to live that life, knows its difficulties. I would not call them unimaginable to the lay population, but I would say that the clerical and monastic community will respond with instinctive compassion to one of its fold trying seriously to right a wrong. For this reason one of my reactions to Ratzinger's handling of the sex scandal when John Paul II had him read the case files in the early 1990s may seem counter-intuitive. "Filth!" he said and wrote, acting in one syllable as judge and jury. Many of us may indeed think of these men as filth. Ratzinger had the responsibility to form a more nuanced reaction, such as Cardinal Levada attempted to do in Portland in a case currently in the news. The public and the media tend to see only the Church's pastoral responsibilities, but Ratzinger and Levada had a second responsibility: to try and help men who committed their lives to the Church mend a heinous fault. Within such an attitude, finding the point at which rehabilitation gives way to punishment may present more difficulties than people now have the patience to admit, so far has the scandal gone, and so badly did misjudgment lead them to the abrogation of responsibility in some cases.

Perhaps one needs to live in a religious community for a year to understand that point of view; or perhaps I want to hold in tension two responses too inimical to each other. Certainly doubts about Ratzinger and his central role in aggravating the fault lines in the Church ever since his years as Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, through the miscalculations of his papacy play a role complicating this task. I would simply ask one thing of those standing in judgment of Ratzinger and the Church as the sex scandal deepens. Warning: it will sound hopelessly naive. Remember that the best of the administrators tried to treat these men as individuals with a calling, as they were taught by tradition and example to do. All their instincts as priests told them to hold this respect in balance with the advice of mental health professionals. The worst cases of both sexual abuse and administrative incompetence do not involve this concern, and they should be judged accordingly. But no more than all the abusive priests should be lumped under one heading as "filth," neither should all the administrators be asked to relinquish their office. As in Ratzinger's case, we would need to worry as much about what one bishop has done as about what his successor might do.

When Allies Aren't

2010-03-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

Everyone who follows international politics even a little now knows about the spat between Israel and the United States. Israel's Interior Minister released a plan for new residential buildings--settlements--in East Jerusalem, a place crucial to the future of a Palestinian state, and its projected capitol. The Israelis had promised to show restraint in launching such projects, without promising to stop settlements altogether, as the Palestinians insist.

The Interior Department announced the plan during Vice-President Biden's visit aimed at trying to re-start the peace process. Biden blew up. Tom Friedman of The New York Times thinks he should have left without a word said. Prime Minister Netanyahu claims he was "blind-sided." Pardon me if I sound disrespectful--I am, by the way--but sure, Bibi. In matters like this if he didn't know it simply demonstrates he doesn't have control of his coalition. Does that come as such a surprise in Israel?

The next step came as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton apparently read Bibi the riot act over the phone for 43 minutes the next day--the number seemed to matter to the State Department. One would love to have heard that call. If, as reports suggest, it focussed on Israel's embarrassment of the United States, that seems unsatisfactory. One might argue that Clinton's support of Israel makes her a logical Secretary of State at a time of great tension in the Middle East. One could turn that around, as well, and consider it her Achilles heel.

Embarrassment is not the issue. Neither, as Biden suggested, is a lockstep relationship between us and our cantankerous ally, if one can call the Israelis allies at the moment. Not that such closeness does not indeed make for a stronger negotiating position. It does. One cannot achieve such a relationship, however, with a supposed partner who does not really want to negotiate.

I have no expertise in diplomacy, and it shows in these blog posts. Nonetheless, I always remember one of two moments for which former Secretary of State James Baker, III earned my admiration, despite my opinion of him otherwise. On one occasion some time after Operation Desert Storm he reported back to President George H. W. Bush that the refugee crisis in Iraqi Kurdistan had reached horrific proportions that required action on our part. On the other, he famously announced to a Senate committee hearing that he had lost faith in the seriousness of the Shamir government in Israel, suggesting that he had better things to do than tolerate Israeli orneriness. He had a solution, though; when they got serious, they could call him, reading out his telephone number at the State Department digit by insulting digit. Shamir, unsurprisingly, did not take kindly to this brilliant piece of diplomatic grandstanding, but eventually took Baker's point, as he had no choice but to do--as Baker's stunt dramatically reminded him.

Tom Friedman thinks Joe Biden tried too hard to maintain civility, showing up pointedly late at a state dinner in his honor, but still appearing, at the moment Friedman thinks Biden belonged on Air Force Two. While I admire Biden's gesture of combined pique and personal restraint, Friedman has a point. Part of the problem would seem that while we might get this or that promise from Netanyahu, the conservative elements in his government, including his Interior Minister--a very important portfolio to the religious parties such as Shas--could care less. That announcement came out last week precisely to make that point, and to embarrass or at least pressure Netanyahu as much as Biden.

Which makes one wonder what we can accomplish by hosting talks with Netanyahu in Washington. I realize that the Israelis find our attempt to dictate internal policy infuriating, especially on a matter as crucial as settlements. We still need to listen to the Palestinians and the Arab world, so jittery right now that some major players have begun to peel away from the negotiating process. We have hit a point where the center has shown signs of not holding. We cannot risk a complete collapse of the regional framework for negotiation. If the Israelis resent our telling them what to do, how the Palestinians feel about Israeli pronouncements. One cannot forget, either, the importance of the Israeli lobby, to one important element of which Clinton is about to speak. Everybody here feels pressure, which, unfortunately, Netanyahu understands all too well.

So, here goes my wildly over-the-top (un-)diplomatic suggestion. Bibi speaks to the same group Hillary does. Even I know we can't deny him entry to the country. We can, however, freeze him out of discussions at the State Department and White House. No scheduled meetings with Hillary or Secretary of Defense Robert Gates or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen; no meetings of apology with the Vice-President; definitely no scheduled meetings with the President; not even any meetings with U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. Giving Rahm Emanuel a chance to pound some reality into him couldn't hurt, maybe in a good-cop-bad-cop tandem with President Obama's other Jewish senior advisor, David Axelrod. Do it in Rahm's tiny office; the claustrophobia will help make the point. Only then do the President and Vice-President call them into the Oval Office for a carefully-timed hour or so with Hillary and Joe and Bob and Mike and Susan. Unscheduled, of course, and completely off-camera. No questions for the press afterwards. Make sure he gets back to the Israeli Embassy forthwith, and that his plane heads back to Israel that evening.

My point: unchristian as it sounds, humiliate him. Rub his nose ingloriously in the consequences of Israeli intransigence. Make it as crystal clear as we can that if Israel wants to go it on its own, they have every right, we wish them well, but don't tell us we didn't warn them when the next Intifada erupts. Hamas has quieted their guns and missiles for now. How long they continue to do so lies in the hands of the Israelis as much as those of Hamas and their patron, Iran. If they really don't care how hard we've worked to save them from sinking their own ship and bringing the rest of the Middle East with them, screw 'em. Sounds like a good line for Joe Biden. Rahm will already have put it more obscenely, maybe even in Hebrew. I'd like to hear that.

Biden thinks we can have no distance between us and Israel to negotiate effectively. Right now, we may have no credibility without distance between us and Israel. Selfish, and more in our interest than the Israelis, even the Palestinians? Perhaps. President Obama does, however, have other items on his agenda. Let Netanyahu worry a little about just how far this new guy might be willing to let Israel slip in his priorities. Maybe drop a hint about Special Envoy Sen. George Mitchell needing a vacation in Maine, a long one. Netanyahu will not think of such a withdrawal by us on his own. We have to nudge him. Okay, hit him over the head.

Bibi Netanyahu is a very proud man. Such treatment will get his goat past anything we can imagine. He'll pillory us for abandoning them. He'll accuse us of playing into the hands of Shas and the other extremists he got into bed with in order to form a government. His choice.

He'll also realize that Israel can't go it on their own. That he'll have to find a way to force the extremists and settlers to see that their way leads to hell, and takes the Palestinians with them. He doesn't need to go home in a chipper mood. In fact, he needs to go home pissed as hell, but aware that Shas brought him to this pass and that they, and the settler movement in general, are the obstacle between him and a place in history. Only he has the conservative credentials to break this impasse, as only Nixon could open us to China. We, in this sense, are stuck with him. He can't achieve a historic position for himself in Israel while winking at the obstructionist shenanigans of the right wing of his government and his electorate. And he can't do it while harboring any illusions about how hard the Obama administration will come down on his back (think lower, think what Rahm would say) if he continues to prevaricate.

The Vancouver Winter Olympics: Afterthoughts

2010-03-07T17:09:00.000-08:00

During the Salt Lake City Games of 2002, I sat over lunch with a colleague, an economist. He had some derision to get off his chest one day about the coverage of the games. Why, he asked, should we have to put up with those silly, sentimental profiles of athletes, "up close and personal," referring to the moniker ABC gave this sort of story back in the days of Jim McKay. He wanted to see the sports, period; forget about the contrived melodrama.

One can agree with my cantankerous colleague on one point. The networks need to avoid contrivance in such stories. NBC has, in several ways, improved the genre of athlete profile, and did a better job in Vancouver than in Utah eight years ago, where they probably got themselves more entangled in the pairs figure-skating controversy than they would now consider seemly.

This year, for example, they handled Evgeny Plushenko's temper-tantrum over Evan Lysacek's victory in men's figure-skating more adroitly. One had a clear choice to make between the pro-Plushenko arguments of former Olympians Sasha Cohen and Elvis Stojko--Plushenko did a quadruple jump, the quad represents the future of men's figure-skating, Lysacek, who has performed a quad but stayed away from it because of a stress-fracture in his landing foot, did not insert one into his program as he considered doing, therefore, Plushenko wins--and the pro-Lysacek arguments of Scott Hamilton and Dick Button, admittedly with Lysacek in the room.

Did they mount a campaign for Lysacek? Clearly the Costas interview with Lysacek, Scott Hamilton and Dick Button enthroned him by inclusion in the company of two of our greatest Olympic figure-skating champions. If one listened carefully, however, and considered the inclusion of Stojko's and Cohen's opinions in a separate interview aired on one of Mary Carillo's late night segments, the answer seems no.

They mounted, instead, a hearty defense for the new scoring system, which Plushenko disdained to exploit, whereas Lysacek exploited it to the hilt, while giving both camps their due. The tempest came down to who skated more intelligently and, as Hamilton put it somewhat archly but in his gentle way, who had skated and trained harder and longer, Plushenko having returned to competitive skating only six months ago after a three-and-a-half year absence, compared with Lysacek's legendarily obsessive training regimen. The in-rink commentary team, which also included Hamilton, made another point. In the scoring, Lysacek and Plushenko tied on artistic merit; Lysacek won on technical merit. Translation: he skated better, as the new scoring system defines it, including a reward for more and difficult jumps deeper into the program, a scoring opportunity Plushenko foreswore.

If anything, though, NBC did themselves most proud with a series of stories--mind that word--of a more personal nature, done particularly in one case with admirable tact, as some in the media have observed. The production staff had a terrible decision to make before the games even got underway when a luger from the Republic of Georgia died in a practice run on the single most controversial facility of the games, the sledding hill. Apparently they ran the tape of his accident once, and then, with a carefully worded statement from Bob Costas, elected not to show it any longer. One can see it on Youtube; gruesome only begins to describe the sight of a man flying in midair at 90+ mph into a steel upright, his sled skittering along on the ice behind him.

Another tragedy came a week later. A French-Canadian figure skater, Joannie Rochette, lost her mother to an out-of-the-blue heart attack. Two days later she had to skate her short-program. As has been noted elsewhere, rather than try to get within the Rochette circle, Costas interviewed NBC's expert long-track speed-skating commentator, Dan Jansen, who lost his sister on the day of a race in which he was favored to win gold. He didn't. As he described it to Costas, the morning Jane died he conferred with his family about whether he should skate. They all agreed that Jane would have felt terrible about becoming the reason Dan didn't compete. Not so simple, though. Suddenly, after days of great practices, he didn't have his legs. He fell in a turn early in his first heat, then did the same thing in another race, and had a disastrous Olympics. Six years later he recuperated all that with a brilliant games.

Jansen sent Rochette an email, not sure whether she knew his name--she did, as it turns out--urging her to skate, to put all her heart into it, and to know that her mother would want that of her and for her. NBC let her alone from then on, until after her perfect skate in the long program that secured her the bronze medal. For this observer, Costas' studio interview with Rochette constituted one of NBC's best moments, and one of his. A very good interviewer, he asked her questions that gave her scope to describe her emotions, her mother's role in her life, her worries about her father. She talked about how, in fact, she'd heard Dan Jansen speak about coping with loss, and another speaker on the same subject, both times sure it would never happen to her. By that point, she'd had time to collect herself, time to be articulate, graceful, humble--herself. That interview completed the story elegantly and respectfully.

So many stories. Hannah Kearney in moguls, a delightful personality unknown to all but moguls maniacs, among which do not count me, though I loved the competition. Alex Bilodeaux, another moguls skier, with his own story--Frederic, his older brother who has a severe case of cerebral palsy--Shaun White, Lindsey Vonn, Apolo Ato Ohno, Bode Miller, the men's hockey team, Steve Holcomb, who came back from blindness to drive the gold-medal sled in four-man bobsled, the men's Nordic Combined team. A glut of great performances and gutty individuals.

Appealing as some of the major figures were, Shaun White particularly, some of them did not handle themselves as well, but arguably the network shared some blame. NBC got a little too close a couple of times when they should have given the athletes and their coaches more space. Julia Mancuso handled her rivalry with Lindsey Vonn badly, but she had the right not to be filmed crying at the start-house after a course official stopped her in the middle of a run because Vonn had fallen in front of her and hadn't gotten off the course yet on a day of bad weather and compressed schedules. Let her cry in private, and let Shaun White's coach pump him up with bed-and-bath language without a sound boom within reach. They already do amazing things on a very public stage, give them a little room to let disappointment out, and give the coaches the chance to say something more inspiring than "Win one for the Gipper." Ron Wilson had the privacy of the men's hockey team's locker room, just as Tim Johnson had the women's team's locker room to sprinkle whatever salt he needed. A halfpipe coach deserves at least the illusion of same.

Hannah Kearney flopped at Torino; she flew to gold at Vancouver. Costas, in a studio interview, let this very bright, articulate, bubbly personality have her stage. Disappointment to training to success, and the obstinacy of the training to achieve success. They did a better job than I remember a network doing before of emphasizing the athletes' training, though this may be unfair to earlier production teams. We saw Apolo Ohno running up loose-dirt banks, Shaun White doing tricks into huge containers of foam blocks, learned of Evan Lysacek's unheard-of insistence on skating his long program every day in practice. Stories of persistence, stories of grace, and, unfortunately, a couple of stories of childish petulance.

Stories connect us. Well-told, they give us insight into what these athletes have done and how, and against what odds. The network hedged their bets and had a few in the can they might have saved--one got a little tired of the over-exposure of Shaun White, Lindsey Vonn, and Apolo Ohno--but they showed their best lights when they had to improvise and rise to an occasion. Though it took them a little time to get the luge story right, they handled the figure-skating tragedy-cum-triumph with aplomb. The Olympics, after all, aim to bring not only the athletes together, but that part of the world--I doubt they have tv's in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, but who knows--that can watch them, as well. Great performances on snow and ice connect us, certainly, but emotions do, as well. Do not count me among the Olympics "up close and personal" curmudgeons. I will be ready when they converge on Sochi in four years to ski, skate, sled, jump, curl, face off, and shoot. Meantime, there's London in 2012.

To Write a Book About a Time When...

2010-02-10T18:09:00.000-08:00

I talk--and write--a great deal about a time in my life not long ago (but long enough) when I lived in a Trappist monastery as a postulant, i.e. someone desiring to enter the community as a monastic brother, a monk. A friend who knows me well and followed my monastic odyssey by email popped a question today on, of course, email. Why not write a book about the experience? An audience exists, I have things to say about that time, some clear, some funny. It could have some importance as a project. Sufficient distance might present an issue, but think about it. So went her gist.

Think about it. I actually started thinking about it while still a postulant. The monk who served as both Vocation Director and Associate Novice Master (now Novice Master) had hinted even in the discernment process before I entered that he had uses in mind for my writing, though if the Abbot shared those inclinations he never let on to me. I had received his permission for a photography project and that suited me fine. Writing, however, would have engaged a better-developed side of me. And the Vocation Director had dangled in front of me the idea of the Order's need for a new voice like that of Thomas Merton--the one Trappist monk whose name people might know if they otherwise know none. The same Merton, as the Vocation Director at Mepkin's mother house had emailed me, who had something to do with everyone's entering, and whom one needed to get over quickly upon entering. A heady precedent for one entering a Trappist house, probably too heady for one with an ego the size of mine.

Out, Merton continues to lurk, but less relevantly and certainly less stiflingly. A writer such as Kathleen Norris writes knowingly about the monastery from the outside--several of us, when I was an "us," used to say she "gets it"-- and so in one sense becomes the voice that echoes on one's computer screen. But not really. Kathleen, a Protestant and occasional preacher, writes as a gifted and trusted observer, given insights by monks she has gotten to know over the years and by her own experience of the monastic rhythm--as a visitor. Never having contemplated putting your heart and mind in the hand of an abbot for life changes everything.

This reminds me of one of my favorite stories from my monastic year. In the novitiate one day my brother postulant, a native of Peru immersed in its very traditional pre-Vatican II liturgical practices, asked for the umpteenth time squared, or so a couple of us thought, why "the Church Fathers" chose to abolish the 400 year-old liturgies of the Council of Trent. A former teacher myself, I complimented the Vocation Director after class on his juggling of three very different personalities. He smiled with a little mischief. "Oh, you mean that [one of you] wants to turn the clock back to 1955, and [another] has his eyes glaze over every time I mention that we had a Church before Vatican II?" He chuckled. "So that puts me in the middle," I offered, thinking of my difference in perspective as someone who, as a child, lived through the transition from Latin to English. As we came to the part of the monastery where we needed to observe silence, he chortled. "No, no, no, no, no. You've already drafted the constitutions for Vatican III."

Translation: I am not Merton; I didn't stay. I'm not Kathleen Norris; I'm a Catholic, and I entered. Then I left. She feels the safety of refuge at the Benedictine and Trappist houses of the upper Midwest, and even Mepkin, where she has visited, though not during my time. I long for Mepkin the place, the community, but find going there akin to walking through a minefield.

My last time there, my first since leaving, I felt for two days like a skater on a deep lake in which one has scuba-dived. The ice cracked the third day and I felt there again. Long enough to start bawling after the Kiss of Peace during Mass, administered as something just shy of a hug from my right by an older monk I adore and deeply love, one with whom I sang--both baritones, we were the "sopranos" in the small choir, which we found very amusing--and silently horsed around in pantomime every day cleaning dishes in the kitchen after the midday meal, the main one. I thought I saw a tear in his dry eye as he turned; I may have fooled myself. Half a turn later and my face was tear-streaked, to the inscrutable notice of another of the older monks, one with whom I'd had less contact, loved as a brother, admired as a practitioner of rigorous discipline, liked as an acerbic wit. Not one who had taken me under a short, rugged but gentle wing.

I write about monastic life as a third voice, and hopefully not a third wheel. One for whom joy and love mingle with pain and confusion. My story won't sound like either Merton's or Norris'. Granted, Merton's later journals grow increasingly troubled; forget about the speculation surrounding the trip at the heart of The Asian Journals. He died, in Bangkok, a Trappist of Gethsemani. I will almost certainly not die a Trappist. I can, however, tell a story of a soul and psyche torn between competing loves of the mind and heart, one who can translate for those who can't imagine it and for those who have tasted some of it what it means to live as a monk. For awhile, at least.

The Recollected Mitzvah of Mindful Jihadi Dharma

2010-01-23T18:46:00.000-08:00

During our undergraduate years at the University of Virginia a friend of mine took a course on church history in the Religious Studies Department. My friend grew up the son of a Baptist minister in the Tidewater area of Virginia. His professor came of Irish-Catholic stock and the rigorous training accorded ordained Jesuit priests. Since the course began with the Reformation, they amounted to a train wreck waiting to happen.

Happen it did. The professor began a lecture early in the term by positing a classroom at the University of Paris in the sixteenth century in which sat two--here comes the crucial part--very similar young men poised to have enormous influence on the history of the Church: Jean Calvin and Ignacio de Loyola. This stunning parallelism, not of their later influence but of their essential similarity, required more tolerance and perhaps humility than my friend possessed. As I recall, he dropped the class that afternoon.

Suggesting similarities across confessional lines within disparate strands of the same faith carries considerable risks. Expand the process to a consideration of spiritually cognate practices across faiths and the trains wreck while carrying hundreds of tankers of jet fuel each. Think World Trade Center; in fact, do think World Trade Center. It makes a good if more than just literally explosive place to begin.

After a brief digression. A friend--my boss--posted an article by Mark Galli in Christianity Today on her Facebook page the other day. The author argued that many people place too much emphasis on transformation in spirituality, which usually involves arriving at a state that feels better than our current one, and thus involves using God as a kind of Good Humor man of the skies. He argues instead for the importance of crisis as the moment in which grace can enter our lives. This same notion occurs in the Greek kairos, a favorite among monastics. Kairos, unlike the hyperactivity of willed transformation, involves waiting, a lot of waiting, something about which monks know a great deal. When the grace-filled moment comes, one acts, but under the aegis of inspirational grace, not one's own self-interested initiative.

Which brings us back to the World Trade Center. My own reading on Islamic countries and their traditions, among them spiritual, has not progressed to a point that makes me any kind of expert. It has become apparent to me, however, that the nineteen young men who kidnapped four planes on September 11, 2001, and succeeded in crashing three of them into their intended or at least secondary--i.e., the Pentagon--targets, believed in a notion of jihad that has two implications for us here. First, most Moslems subscribe to an understanding of jihad that concerns internal struggle, a purifying process, emphasis on process. In Galli's terms, the jihadist who blows himself and a few thousand innocent bystanders into incinerated ash in order to attain martyrdom and a place in Paradise belongs to the camp that ascribes to the transformational fallacy. A jumbo jet or an AK-47 or semtec explosive has replaced the Good Humor man, but the motivation remains the same: self.

Jihad as internal struggle to find Allah within; recollection, the monastic practice of self-reckoning to see where one has strayed from and where one has approached godliness in one's daily life; the Jewish notion of mitzvah, or service, that the Good Samaritan understood better than the priest and the Levite; mindfulness, the Buddhist practice of constant awareness that brings us back from our wanderings into distraction; and dharma, the Hindu notion of calling, or life's purpose, something like what we would call vocation. None of these notions exactly replicates the other, though to perform a mitzvah a state of recollected mindful jihad in one whose dharma called her to service would certainly help--if one could get past all the labels.

Theologians, spare me your quibbles about the (mis-)use of complicated terminology herein. We all struggle, many of us about more or less the same things. We all misunderstand each other. We think that in every Moslem household lurks a Qur'an and an AK-47; the Israelis suspect them all of Judeophobia; the Moslems suspect us--why, one can hardly imagine--of unimpeded hedonism; Buddhists think they alone have preserved monastic traditions; and Hindus are probably more tolerant of others' religious beliefs than the whole lot of us.

And yet we all have language suggesting our interest in the path to God/Yahweh/Allah/ nirvana/atman. We all acknowledge our frailties--just not to each other. So much in recent literature on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, and in my own experience, suggests how easily human contact can bridge the chasms of misunderstanding. A Hazara cook for an American NGO in Lashkargah, Afghanistan; a group of Sufi dervishes welcoming an English traveler in Herat near the Iranian border; an Israeli poet with whom I used to amicably if intensely argue about Ariel Sharon; the Pakistani student who begged us at our small college on 9/11 not to blame all Moslems.

All these meetings are moments of kairos, moments when through recollection, through a spirit of mitzvah, of doing service, of sincere jihad, of mindfulness, and of attention to our true dharma, we can experience within ourselves more than ourselves. More indeed than each other, and certainly more and other than our preconceptions of each other.

From Port-au-Prince, with Dread

2010-01-14T20:10:00.000-08:00

As I write my watch has 11:08 p.m., about the time or perhaps even a little earlier than when my friend David Baron used to meet me at the University Diner (the UD in Charlottesville parlance) for various odd-sounding concoctions featuring either grilled doughnuts and ice cream (a grilled-with) or even greasier double-cheeseburger with bacon and a fried egg (one-eyed bacon double cheeseburger). I had a weakness for the latter; we both had a weakness for talking till 2:30 or 3:00.

David and I became friends accidentally. We both had a friend in common who had a passionate relationship going, then going south. David loves to tap into other people's stores of opinions and analyses; I tend not to shy from offering either. So, despite an age difference of several years, we became regulars at the UD. Our mutual friend got us drunk at his party as he left the country for a post-graduation round-the-world odyssey that became both. He thought he espied a homosexual note in the air. Though he wasn't altogether wrong, he didn't exactly have it right, either, and certainly not as a description of my friendship with Baron.

We continued the habit with markedly less frequency later when we both lived in New York , and had a memorable few days at his parents' on Long Island. We were in his parents' car when the news came over NPR of the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II, which gave me hope, later disappointed. Later that fall I developed mononucleosis and left New York. Baron--what some of his close friends from Charlottesville call him, though not all--wound up in New Orleans as film critic for The Times Picayune, in which capacity he continued to serve for twenty years. I had a couple of jobs in the art world, then got a couple of graduate degrees en route to teaching for just over a decade. We lost touch, in different worlds.

When I left academia and mental illness took me to the deepest bottom I have known, somehow the idea of Baron appealed to me as one of the logical people with whom to reconnect, after emailing our mutual friend for publishing advice, and hearing in response that he felt sure Baron would love a phone call. I have a tough time with phone bills, and David--that name does come up from time to time--abhors email, so our contact has been fitful. Same old Baron, though--eliciting my reading of the behavior of mutual friends, or rather one of mine and two of his. Somewhat wiser me, pointing out that my erstwhile romantic interest in her hardly qualified me as an interpreter of her husband, whom I had never liked, both for the obvious reason but also because I had never liked him, even before the obvious reason became obvious.

Baron, ever the novelist and critic, needed to see every nuance, and if he couldn't get to enlightenment himself would enlist the help of a guide. Annoying as I sometimes find this tendency--we spend our conversations very often on subjects in which I had little interest--it speaks to a kind of humility on the flip side of the obsessive curiosity. While this may sound hopelessly gossipy, even catty, I would never describe it that way. He simply wanted to know why people treat each other as they do and what precipitates behavior he doesn't understand. Baron is nobody's idea of a saint, and yet his interest in people has always had an element of purity about it, mixed in with some good old-fashioned Eastern European earthy realism. He can shine with the joy of surprise and sting very easily at a slight, real or imagined.

One of his joys has come from teaching, and in a specific place: Haiti. This is why I have allowed my wandering in and out of present and past tenses to stand. As I have gathered, he probably arrived in Port-au-Prince on the 10th, and remained there through the earthquake. I don't know yet if I've just written an obituary for my friend or not. Surely others in our group have stayed closer and have better claim. I just find it very difficult--aside from the fact that we have no facts except that noone apparently has heard anything (no news is no news, I hope)--to shift to the past tense. I see him alive and talking, perhaps even trying to carry on a conversation under the rubble as the only way he knows to stay and keep others alive. Baron babbling in Creole; I'd love to see that.

He has suffered from a long-term illness; the irony of a violent death would have elicited his characteristic low, tailing chuckle. I am at an age when I can begin to expect coevals to succumb to this illness or that. One doesn't imagine losing them this way, if indeed we have lost him--not knowing all manner of thing is the most difficult part of this, for now. I've felt numb all day, and guilty about it. The gaps in our friendship helps account for that, but also the not knowing what to feel because of not knowing what has happened. No news is no news. And yet even the possibility makes scenes from thirty-five years ago come alive.

Perhaps our reaction to a death, or the possibility of a death, parallels the experience of death itself, a kind of mental editing of the important, so that finally one can get it right one time, at least, and quickly. I hope David has time to worry about that; I hope a hospital has him and simply doesn't know his name. If not, I hope he has had the perfect conversation with himself, just once. And, perhaps, with One other...

Postscript, 1/15: David survived the earthquake. To paraphrase Mark Twain, fears of his death were somewhat, if understandably, exaggerated.

In... a... mon...astery?

2009-12-30T16:43:00.000-08:00

This does not feel like the week for jeremiads on unconnected dots, or the President's laconic delivery of bad news. It seems as though only David Brooks has the class to leave those subjects to others. Well, admiring him though not necessarily always agreeing with him as I do, something else seemed to call for my attention. Note the presence of the word "call" in the previous sentence.

Applying to a Masters of Divinity program at a largely Methodist school--Duke--has led me to wonder about the reaction my experience as a postulant for a year in a Trappist monastery will receive. That year has had a disproportionate influence on my spiritual practice, though of course without an affinity for the contemplative life and tradition I would never have wound up there at all. How will someone with a year of Trappist formation fit in a Methodist environment--or any environment other than a Trappist monastery where, paradoxically, I did not feel I fit on one level even though on others I did?

I hope to avoid the "what were you running away from?" questions; resisting the temptation to ask the questioner what they run away from in their daily life might take superhuman discipline. Same goes for the social justice questions. Why does helping to care for one's brother monks not count as social justice; do we only perform good works if the people we help have a different skin color or a life sentence for murder or for running a Ponzi scheme?

Of all the Protestant denominations only Anglicanism, to my knowledge, continues to support the monastic life. The others have either never known monasticism, as with Methodism, or came into being at monasticism's expense, as with Lutheranism, itself founded by a former monk of the Order of St. Augustine, which managed to survive without him. This does not necessarily signal a fundamental difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. It simply speaks to the fact that the mystical voices either side of the Reformation divide speak different languages, with the occasional convergence--the Shakers for one--so occasional as to provide no real foothold for the one to recognize the other as treading the same path.

This works the other way, of course. I took a Reformation History class as an undergraduate. I wrote a good paper on Albrecht Duerer, Meister Eckhart and Heinrich Suso for that class, but otherwise loathed it, a response that cannot happen again. Martin Luther simply struck me as repulsive, and the other reformers even more so. Had I possessed the maturity to approach the issue honestly, I'd have admitted that Luther, like Augustine, touched lodes of self-disgust in myself that made both of them unbearable for me to read. I finished Augustine's Confessions for the first time about three years ago, shortly before entering the monastery, and then only by forced march.

Perhaps this gives me my bridge. We read the history of faith through the history of our own, hopefully not in an exercise of vendetta--Catholics seeing Episcopalians as descendants of a king and his confession that closed the monasteries and executed Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher, or Sunnis seeing Shi'a as heretics, any Christian seeing Jews as the murderers of Christ, and Buddhists of competing traditions attacking each other on grounds alternately esoteric and jealous.

Monasticism, in other words, remains for Roman and Orthodox Catholics as a viable practice for contacting not only our relationship with the divine--Orthodox would put it in terms of becoming divine--but our history. Surely the Early Church, specifically the Desert Fathers, belong to all of us who go by the name of Christian? Luther spat at what those traditions had become, but need we lose their 4th and 5th c wisdom to a 16th c quarrel?

As I pointed out in one of my two required essays for Duke, I find it no accident that I've spent the last few months reading for my morning lectio divina (sacred reading) a book by a Spanish Franciscan mystic in a tradition of contemplative theory profoundly influenced by one of my early intellectual heroes, Desiderius Erasmus. Yes, the same Erasmus who waited in the view of some unforgivably long before attacking Luther, who basically ignored his clerical duties for most of his adult life, and whose works were placed on the Index of forbidden books within a generation of his death. What seems so profoundly Catholic, in other words, and in the country that perfected the Inquisition into an instrument of torture and execution, was so nearly not.

Our confessions have traveled different paths; it makes no sense to minimize that fact as a Jesuit church historian has tried to do. Give it up; we've come too far. If not, re-unification talks at the Vatican would have progressed much further than they have. It does make sense to point out, though, that we each have traditions that overlap; we simply tap into them differently or not at all. In that different tapping or refraining we need to recognize different ways of legitimately reaching back to or moving on from shared roots. If we can learn about community from Sufi gatherings, why we can we not learn about fellow Christians by understanding what survives of what we once shared and still do as heritage?

peace on earth?

2009-12-24T20:07:00.000-08:00

Peace: we all want it, some of us desperately. If somehow you have trouble imagining what such a desire looks like, consider the photos taken in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan in Greg Mortenson's new book, Stones into Schools. Even the one with Angelina Jolie in her UNHCR role, her most important one. The problem with peace, of course, comes when we discuss how to achieve it. Which leads us to postulate number two.

Paradigms: we all invest in them, act according to them, see the world through their assumptions. As Shakespeare wrote of greatness, so with paradigms. We are born into some by inclination and gifts; some we achieve as the result of hard work and ambition, or even hard work and humility; and some we have thrust upon us by circumstance and the unmistakable evidence of reading and research--one hopes sufficiently wide while knowing full well otherwise. Cornel West likes to say that the problem with postmodernism is that there is so much to read.

On Christmas eve, the night of peace for Christians, this subject has particular aptness. Liberal/progressive orthodoxy--a timely notion--holds that we can only achieve peace through peaceful means. Thus spake Einstein, Gandhi and King, and who are any of us to gainsay that tradition? Greg Mortenson stands very firmly in that tradition. I have not read the new book yet; I received it as a Christmas present only this afternoon. I have read his argument for relying on regional shuras or councils, and heard him articulate his passionate belief in that approach in an interview with Rep. Mary Bono Decker. Paradigm one.

Paradigm two. We have just witnessed the remarkable occasion of a war president defending war as the path to peace while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. Squirm. Or not? Of Americans in Afghanistan, though the ambassador has serious qualms, while the former journalist and now apparently full-time military advisor Sarah Chayes does not. This paradigm argues that military power alone can eliminate or marginalize those elements who through destabilizing policies and campaigns most threaten the development of conditions that bode well for peace.

Idealism vs. realism; dogma vs. pragmatism. The Mortensons of the world would not want to hear it put that way. Mortenson himself has accomplished so much through peaceful means and by his gentle demeanor, which wins so much support as a tonic to the bluster of political and military personas, with both of which he has become quite familiar. Mortenson has to answer one question. Yes, he has produced one paradigm shift, of helped, in that some elements of the Taliban now accept the education of women, a very significant change. What about the Hekmatyars and Mullah Omars and the rest of the Islamicist subculture that won't? Do you win them over in a shura? The history of the last twenty years and then some suggests not.

I considered declaring myself a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. World War II stopped me; its ugliness notwithstanding, its fundamental justice spoke very clearly to the at least occasional justice of war. I agreed with Joe Biden that we belonged in Bosnia when President Bush I didn't, and Bill Clinton that we belonged in Kosovo when we led a NATO interventino there. I disagreed, quietly, with all of my friends in graduate school, and I mean all of them, who opposed the first Gulf War. I don't care who your foreign friends are, if they're your friends for whatever distasteful reason and you've pledged, out of whatever ill-considered logic, to protect them and someone, even your lackey in the country next door who you badly misled about your likely response to his likely actions, invades them and they, for whatever lack of foresight on their part, lack the means to defend themselves, you defend them. Period.

Bush II was another story. We had no reason to invade Iraq. Period. I marched as I've never marched before or since against that war, the wrong war.

On September 11, 2001, I felt plunged into sadness, and saw a war looming before us unmistakably. I didn't want it, I didn't welcome it, I didn't lead any cheers in its favor. I simply didn't see how any president, even Al Gore, could have avoided such a war, and for that reason didn't oppose it. Eight years later, those who oppose Obama's escalation of the war forget something crucial. We took a powder on what we started in Afghanistan to invade Iraq. I would love to see Rumsfeld brought to trial, not so much or merely for war crimes in Iraq, as for treason for his incompetence in directing the war in Afghanistan. His incompetence in tying Gen. Franks' hands at Tora-Bora is obvious; treason because of the damage to the United States caused by his failure to the fight the fight that bore fighting in favor of one he made up whole cloth withe cowed collusion of the CIA and Colin Powell, inconceivably and just about unforgivably.

With all the complexities of Afghanistan--and Pakistan--including the likely fact that Osama bin Laden is across the border in Pakistan, President Obama has it right. One suspects he would like to say much in defense of this war that he cannot. He deserves this credit, as well: he sounds every bit the reluctant warrior, someone who would prefer not to drink from that particular cup, but must and therefore will. Peace, after all, is both a state and a process, something one lives and strives toward. The progressive paradigm would like to essentialize peace, but even in our daily lives we know better. Peace is a process. Mortenson would argue that you therefore give peaceful activity a chance; Obama would argue that the most peaceful thing you can do is dismember al Qaeda and reset the table in Afghanistan so the Mortensons can accomplish more. Reluctantly I fear he has the better argument; the one encouraging factor in all this is his own reluctance.

The Qur'an Pass

2009-12-09T17:42:00.000-08:00

Don't get out your atlas; it exists on no map. It speaks to to an existential divide that separates Westernized (more on that in a moment) secular society and the traditional Islamic world. Not all who have navigated that pass--Sarah Chayes and Greg Mortenson come immediately to mind, and others I have written about such as Jason Elliot and Rory Stewart--see the landscape on the other side in the same way. Though both Chayes and Mortenson have advised the U.S. military on how to deal with traditional society in Afghanistan, Mortenson finds President Obama's plan unnecessary. He would rely entirely on local shuras or councils of village headmen from a region. Chayes has long championed a vigorous military role, integrated with close contact with those same headmen and shuras.

It comes as no surprise that they arrive at their conclusions from very different perspectives. Mortenson owes his life to a headman in Baltistan in Pakistani Kashmir, and has built schools there and across northern Pakistan and northeastern Afghanistan, especially for girls, ever since. No cooperation from headmen, no schools. Chayes has reported as a journalist, worked for an NGO, founded and run a cooperative, all predominantly in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, and--crucially--advised the military herself, which has led her now to Kabul. She has a complex understanding of a wide range of issues from the price of essential oils-grade rose petals relative to opium poppies, to how to bully warlords, even how to stop a Taliban raid with minimal personnel and limited firepower, the less likely to kill civilians. At a speech this year in Nebraska, which I just watched on youtube, she tells a story of an American battalion commander, a friend of hers and the father of a young family, who prayed with the family of children killed in a mortar attack he ordered when his forces requested it. After praying with him, the families of the dead children forgave him.

I find the most important element of that story not the battalion commander's demonstration to the villagers whose house his mortar rounds hit of the exact circumstances of his troops that night, or even the fact that when he realized he'd killed children he looked at the photos of his own kids on his desk, but that he prayed with them. I'd love to know what they prayed, or what the Afghans thought of how he prayed. Little of that likely mattered to them; it mattered that he prayed, that he knew how to pray, and that he humbled himself, battalion commander or no, to pray with them, thus eliminating the notion that either of them thought of the other as the enemy.

Jason Elliot gained a remarkable insight into the intersection of religion and politics in western Afghanistan when he spent a night with a group of Sufis at a major shrine outside Herat. He didn't so much pray with them as observe them in their remarkable rituals. He observed something just as remarkable; as the night wore on they received a steady influx of Taliban joining them very respectfully, after stacking their Kalashnikovs in the corner by the door. I know of no other journalist who has witnessed such a scene. Mortenson has prayed at mosques, and received correction on his miscues, but condemnation. Rory Stewart one might almost say prayed his way across central Afghanistan, though he certainly would not put it that way himself.

We in the west have no monopoly on secularism. The chants of Allah-u-Akbar stilled called from Tehran rooftops spring, for the most part, from political, not religious motivations; so believes an Iranian Facebook friend. The secularization of the Shah never entirely went away, and one suspects the same holds true for the formerly cosmopolitan city of Kabul.

As a former monastic postulant (the first step of the novitiate), one element of Islamic societies strikes me with particular force as these writers who have lived in it relate their experiences. An Islamic city, town, or village runs on a schedule very much like that of a Benedictine or even an Orthodox monastery, with collective prayer at set times of the day. A bell and a paging chime at a Benedictine or Trappist monastery, a bell alone at a Carthusian charterhouse (witness the movie Into Great Silence), a bell or a striking board at an Orthodox monastery such as those of nuns I visited in Romania, or a muezzin's call in the Islamic world, live or taped, amplified or no. All serve as summons to prayer.

Some monastic Christian orders--the Trappists, the Carthusians--tend to place their houses in the countryside. Benedictines do that, as well, but will also show up in or near cities. The less fully monastic orders such as the Dominicans and Franciscans favor cities. In this they endorse the norm in Islamic society, the refusal to remove the practice of religion and religious community from society. Not that Islam sanctifies society, but it does insist on the visibility and audibility of the sacred within society. This does not Afghanistan or Iran or Pakistan nations of monks, but it does make nations of people ever aware of the presence of Islam, and not necessarily in a punitive mode. We live, in many parts of our country, almost embarrassed of such enmeshing of religion with daily life. We can conveniently hide behind the establishment clause here. There, we have to negotiate the Qur'an Pass.

A group of which I know ministers to Christians in Pakistan. I have very mixed feelings about this project. Pakistan does not tolerate non-Islamic faiths as does its neighbor India. We may find this abhorrent, and the Christians may indeed lead lives of terror. Surely helping them has merit. But the path to working with the Pakistanis or any other Islamic country does not consist in seeking out their oppressed minorities. It lies along the way of finding common cause, of demonstrating common commitment, among other things, to religious values, however different the values themselves. Crudely put, they think of us as heathen, infidels; we have to give the lie to some part of that misconception, as best we can, in terms they can understand, in those cases when "infidel" has more force than merely that of a label. Walking a fine line between aid and proselytizing does not seem best calculated to serve this aim.

My argument may sound more like Mortenson's, except that a soldier accomplished the feat of traversing the Qur'an Pass in Chayes' account, just as Mortenson himself has done it so often he need not do it anymore because of the acceptance he has gained and honors he has received. The Afghans need what security we can help provide; but it will help enormously if they can see that the security comes from men and women who can pray as well--even if if not quite as well--as shoot. Come to think of that errant mortar round, perhaps we can pray even better.

The Codes of War

2009-12-03T17:36:00.000-08:00

No, not encryption, but the coded language in which the principals discuss everything they do that pertains to war. The war in Afghanistan--itself a code for a conflict broader than the borders of that one country--offers a case in point, or rather a slew of them. The codes and the issues that occasion their use reveal something about the situation on the ground, and in many cases its greater seriousness than the White House and the Pentagon would like to admit--and they admit freely to its seriousness. Just not all of it.

Take one example. President Obama wants to see significant change in the attitudes of the Karzai government in Kabul. Secretary Gates reinforces that in a Senate hearing the day after the West Point speech by saying we will happily seek out partners in provincial governments if the Kabulis cannot deliver on the promises of Karzai's second inaugural address.

The code, though it will surprise nobody: the White House is having a hard time deciding whether Karzai's incompetence trumps his corruption, or the other way round. They want to encourage competent, upright, reliable provincial administrators to step up beyond the reach of recalcitrant Kabulis to rein in the provincials' cooperation. They have done it before, notably in the case of a governor of Kunar, during our Babylonian Captivity. Gates means to say that it will not happen again.

This problem goes deeper than what the President has said, and one presumes he knows it. If we call ourselves a melting pot of myriad peoples, the Afghans comprise a relatively small number of ethnic groups--four major ones and a few minor ones in border regions--"organized" to use far too strong a word by tribes, especially in the case of the Pashtuns. This organization, if you can call it that, explains the emergence of Hamid Karzai in the shura or council at Bonn that proposed a preliminary government after the overthrow of the Taliban, and his confirmation in the loya jirga or grand council that followed in Kabul. A Popolzai Pashtun, his father had led the Popolzai tribe, and the Popolzai have long had a prominent place or even pride of place in Pashtun affairs. He came in, one could say, as heir apparent on one very big assumption: that the Pashtuns had the best case for leading the country.

One of the great difficulties in governing Afghanistan lies in gaining inter-ethnic cooperation. Before the Taliban Kabul had a fairly cosmopolitan mix of ethnic groups. Herein lies the irony the underlies and undermines, along with bad behavior, Karzai's government. He rules as the head of a minority group, but the largest of the bunch. The Hazaras, Uzbeks and Tajiks, along with a few Kyrgyz and others, out number the Pashtuns as a group, but see their strength not in alliances, which they make and break like the rules in a billiards game at Mark Twain's house, but in pursuing their own regional agendas. Hence the Pashtun ascendancies of the Taliban and Karzai.

Our main difficulty there will derive from the very fluidity with which they understand themselves. The Pashtuns along the Durand Line that delineates the border with Pakistan laugh at its legal standing. They do not so much move back and forth between the two countries as move within what they take as the natural range of Pashtun territory. Obama's language at West Point became very vague on the issue of our pursuit of al Qaeda into safe havens by appropriate means. I have spoken to at least one Special Operations veteran who, without quite saying so, seemed to want me to infer that he had served not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan. Code again. No one will say so, but if the Taliban ignores the Durand Line, it behooves us to do the same thing. What exactly will the Pakistanis do in protest?

One final point along the same lines, which will include a final cavil cum observation. CNN's coverage after the President's address featured Mike Ware and Wolf Blitzer looking at, in effect, a war map of Afghanistan. Their graphic artist had placed the national flags of all the NATO countries to represent the deployment positions of their troops. Mike Ware, an experienced British war correspondent, observed that all the Stars and Stripes sat in the south and east, and all the other flags in the north. We, the Canadians and the Brits, he strongly and dramatically asserted, have taken on all the "hot spots" while our allies have it easy elsewhere.

Two points. This characterization may (more or less) accurately reflect the situation now, but historically some of the bloodiest fighting has taken and may yet take place in the north, particularly the notoriously impregnable Panjshir Valley and Nuristan, and the northwestern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. This occasions a second and much broader point. The most interesting writing on Afghanistan that I have seen has come from a diplomat and journalists, but not from war correspondents per se, or at least not writing as war correspondents. Rory Stewart, Ahmed Rashid, Christina Lamb, Sarah Chayes, Jason Elliot eschew bomb-chasing--though Jason Elliot describes a colleague's days as consisting of little else, and Rashid got caught in a firefight while lunching in a garden in Dushanbe, Tajikistan--in favor of understanding the cultural melange we call Afghanistan.

The really useful writers want to understand the cultural complexities as well as the little rebellions, such as the so-called "sewing circles" Christina Lamb writes about that kept girls' education alive under the Taliban in the culturally rich Persian border city of Herat. Bomb-chasers and embedded reporters have a difficult and very dangerous job. I admire their guts. They are not the code-breakers, however, not the ones who will help us understand what, who, where, and how we must fight. We will do well not to take too seriously their reports from the field, or standing in front of fields of flags in the CNN studio in New York--they simply cannot step back far enough to get appropriate perspective. Their reports constitute part of the code. The military wants them where they allow them for a reason. The story, the important story, will almost always happen somewhere else, underneath the radar of the bomb-chasers, in the places and involving the personnel the code seeks to conceal.

We must hope for a day when we need no longer speak of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia in code. Inshallah, God willing, we will get there. For the sake of Afghanistan, let us fervently hope that we do.

Happy Thanksgiving... Prime Minister Singh

2009-11-25T22:02:00.000-08:00

Now, I have not throughly read the response in the press nor viewed that of the media punditocracy to the visit and recorded remarks of Prime Minister Singh of India, nor to the significance of the Obamas throwing their first state dinner not for a long-acknowledged friend but for the head of a state with which we have had an often difficult relationship. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain purportedly felt miffed at not receiving such a dinner during his visit earlier this year. If he sulked then, how must he feel now?

What I have seen so far has centered on the menu--largely vegetarian in respect of Mr. Singh's dietary habits--who came, whether by invitation or no, what Mrs. Obama wore and the fact that she used Indian-American designers and wore lots of bangles, who played as house musicians, and so forth. All very well, and I actually consider the fact that the First Lady wore bangles and dresses with a lot of cloth-of-silver thread important for the respect they suggest of traditional Indian clothing and fabrics. She might have respected Indian modesty by not going strapless agains the Indian First Lady's sari. But so far so good--I guess.

Except if that's all we have to say about this visit, this dinner, this guest, and most of all this timing, then we deserve the shrinking influence so many scholars and journalists attribute to the United States now and into the future. Some of what follows depends heavily on Ahmed Rashid's Taliban (Yale, 2000), an acclaimed account of the rise of the Taliban and the climate in which they developed. That would include the geopolitical climate. Enter India.

India? What about Pakistan, our supposed allies in our funding and their stage-managing the fight against the Soviets from 1979-89, and now? More pointedly, why India, and why all the talk about the Indian-American partnership as though between equals, less than a week before President Obama lays out his Afghanistan policy in a speech at West Point next Tuesday? Why, indeed.

If Gordon Brown probably has a sulk on, one can imagine chairs thrown at television screens in Islamabad, and the senior officers of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in apoplectic fits. You remember the ISI, the Taliban's chief handlers and enablers, who see the Taliban as the leading edge of a pan-Islamist movement. Unfortunately, the Taliban's Pakistan-encouraged extremism has scared everyone in the region and beyond. The Taliban take the Wahhabi movement within Sunni Islam to a bizarre fare-thee-well that even their longtime backer the Saudis, themselves the chief advocates and stewards of Wahhabism, found alarming. They voted with their checkbooks. This all gets us to the situation about ten years ago, before 9/11 and its aftermath.

Some things have changed. The geopolitics have not, except that the Pakistanis have made a half-hearted show of fighting their own Taliban movement--the word simply means "students," as in students at Islamic madrassas, some funded by Pakistan, some by the Saudis. They have attacked South Waziristan with great fanfare. The experts on the Afghan conflict think they need to but will not go after more dangerous groups in North Waziristan. In short, our very unreliable "friends" in Pakistan continue to do little to contain let alone turn the tide of this war, even as it threatens to erupt towards their heartland as much as across the Afghan border.

Once again, enter India. Pakistan's arch-enemy and the excuse for so long for Pakistan to keep their military pointed east toward their borders in Kashmir and Punjab and ignore the Pathan/Pashtun tribal areas along their western border with Afghanistan. But if you stop for a second and see Afghanistan as a problem that leaks across international borders, following both ethnic and sectarian relationships, you see a different picture, one Rashid saw ten years ago. Iran nearly invaded Afghanistan over the Taliban's massacre of the Hazara, a Shia ethnic minority. Turkmenistan stands, or stood, to make a great deal of money in a pipeline deal, but not through a country engulfed in civil war. Uzbekistan watched its ethnic compatriots massacred and at one point worried, with its neighbor Tajikistan, about a Taliban invasion of Central Asia. Even now some Taliban elements operate outside their normal range in northern Afghanistan. They could hardly succeed militarily, but could their warped vision of jihad--which primarily means interior spiritual struggle--have an influence the Tajiks and Uzbeks cannot control?

And India--at last. They have already felt the lash of the extremist whip wielded by Islamist militants bred in Pakistan. Witness Mumbai, witness infiltrations across the Line of Control in Kashmir. Of all the countries Afghanistan and Pakistan border, only China remains out of this, largely thanks to the spectacular wall of the Karakoram that guards its border with Pakistan, and the puny and remote fragment of border it shares with Afghanistan at the eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor.

So, a grand arc of countries, from Iran in the west, through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and probably including even Russia in the north, through India in the east have interests in this conflict. Pakistan, of course, would like to keep it to themselves. That will not happen. And what better way to say that loudly and clearly in the language of diplomacy than by having the Indian prime minister to the first state dinner at a White House that clearly does not plan to give a lot of state dinners, if their first year says anything. Gordon Brown, get over it. Pakistan, take notice. We have other games to play than yours.

We can, of course, hide behind claims of all the other matters we have to discuss with the Indians, which of course we do. But if you think Singh and Obama didn't discuss the geopolitics beyond India's western and northern borders, think again. And if you don't think the Indians would love to have a role in humbling Pakistan in the region, then you really need to read up on your history. And if you think Obama will lose sleep worrying about what the Pakistanis will make of the visit, the dinner, and the timing, forget it. I'll bet he'll split his time the next few days among the West Point speech, enjoying Camp David or wherever he plans to spend Thanksgiving with his family, and getting in a couple rounds of golf. Pakistanis? Not on the agenda this week. Maybe next week...

Memo to the President

2009-11-10T21:22:00.000-08:00

Mr. President:

Your election, as you know, both reversed and validated the intertwined histories of racism and the civil rights struggle in this country. Your election makes no sense, nor can one make sense of your presidency, without understanding that history. So, too, must an understanding of history inform your decision regarding whether or not to deploy more troops to Afghanistan, how many, and under the aegis of what mission.

The difficulty of defeating and holding Afghanistan often comes up in arguments against an increased deployment. History actually gives a rather ambiguous record on this score, since part of the tragedy of Afghanistan lies in its so often falling to invading armies, whether Persian, Hellenic, Mongol, Moghul, British, Soviet or American. All of those great powers struggled, and some had more success than others in holding onto their Afghan vassals. My point is probably obvious: we seek no such dominion over them. Kindly take those arguments with a large bag of Morton's salt.

Have we found it a tough place to fight? The mountains pose enormous challenges; just count the relics of Soviet armor in the Panjshir Valley of the Hindu Kush northeast of Kabul. Helmand and Arghand would make great terrain for tank warfare, except the Taliban have no tanks, just RPG's (rocket-propelled grenades, but you know that) and mines. We need more Dari and Pashto speakers, not more armament.

One other obstacle, though not altogether ignored, has gone under-reported. David Martin touched on it in his interview with Gen. McChrystal for CBS News' 60 Minutes. One could hardly not notice it. In a village in Helmand Province villagers wore loose-fitting pants and long shirts covering the knees, all for modesty, and either soft hats or turbans. Our troops, by contrast, wore uniforms sufficiently snug-fitting to appear immodest by Afghan standards. We've dishonored their culture--and our own--before we even open our mouths.

At one point in Martin's piece McChrystal waves his group of bodyguards away, and further away, to seem more approachable. I don't know how much that helps. The troops have so much obvious body armor on that can hardly look anything but terrifying to the average villager. We think of our uniforms as sensible, but stretched as the analogy will sound, so did the British when their red coats gave Afghan fighters the same juicy targets they gave our own militias in Vermont and the Carolinas.

Some cultural problems will take years--yes, sir, not months--to address. This one shouldn't. Presumably the Army and Marines have uniforms in a wide range of sizes. Instead of the expensive though perhaps preferable solution of redesigning the uniforms, reissue current uniforms two-to-three sizes larger than a given soldier ordinarily wears. They will discover the wonderful usefulness of the belt.

They do need at least one piece of clothing they now lack. Every Afghan male--and the women would do well to dress like men, which they do already, anyway--carries an item that combines the uses of shawl, blanket, and turban. If the Taliban can fight in them, why can't we? For all I know--and you would know this--the Special Forces may already dress this way. Surely we have uncut bolts of camouflage material in some garment factory somewhere that could be put to such a use. We don't need to dress as Afghans, as though we'd ever hope to blend, but merely with respect for Afghan norms and values.

One more thing on the McChrystal visit to Helmand, and then on to harder issues. I have read that Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea has become required reading for the military in Afghanistan. If that no longer holds true, it should once again. If it does, McChrystal needs to read it again. His approach to the villagers comes across as fantastically (quite literally, to the Afghans) American, and not in the complimentary sense of the word.

We value terseness, directness, informality, McChrystal apparently more than most. Businesslike to us means let's do business now and we can think about drinks later. Much as the Afghans would respect his abstemiousness--if they know about it, and it should be a priority that they do--he would accomplish so much more in his conversations with village leaders if he let them set the pace. Let them show him hospitality, a tradition of which they are proud. I suspect they find his fly-bys insulting.

His pace suggests arrogance, an unwillingness to spend time--the key word here--in their houses, drink at least one cup of tea, and listen while the village mullah takes the lead in the conversation. Let them find out about us, then we can find out about them. If that slows down his schedule on his days in the countryside, good. You know all about bubbles, sir, and he lives in one in Kabul, as he acknowledges to David Martin. He needs to learn how to be a guest before he can really accomplish anything else. And he needs to learn the meaning of it in Pashto and Dari, Helmand and Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and Faizabad, if he can get into Faizabad without getting blown to smithereens.

Every writer I've read on Afghanistan speaks of the Afghans' hospitality and kindness. What the Afghans--a term that makes no sense to a Panjshiri, a Herati, a Hazara, or a Pahstun-- find incomprehensible about us is that we make such ungrateful guests. If loose uniforms and drinking tea have tried your patience, please stay with me here. I know we went there in 2001 to take down the Taliban and get bin Laden. They don't see it that way. However Brzezinski and Rumsfeld might have thought we camouflaged our contributions to the anti-Soviet jihad--which as you certainly know does not mean holy war, but merely struggle--the mujaheddin knew perfectly well the source of the money that bought their weapons.

To them our presence goes back to 1979, and our failure to help them rebuild after the collapse of the Communist regime counts to them as our reneging on an implied promise to help them rebuild. From 1992 to 2001 the warlords--Hekmatyar, Massoud, Dostem, and Omar--finished the destruction of the country Brezhnev had begun. Then we swoop in, dump more bombs, just like the Soviets, and help set up a provisional government in meetings in Bonn, a place of which most of them have never heard. We breathe a sigh of relief when the loya jirgha rubberstamps Karzai, an old associate from his days in the Mullahs Front of the men who later formed the Taliban, and for all intents and purposes we disappear again. And we wonder that they don't trust us.

And now the hard part. Sir, I respectfully disagree that our main mission in Afghanistan is to capture and disarm al Qaeda. That said, by all means send--or keep sending--Special Forces troops and Predator drones into Pakistan to accomplish that part of the goal, amd probably the less the Pakistanis know, the better. McChrystal may want more troops than you want to send him for political reasons, but this isn't a political conflict. Call it nation-building or whatever you want to call it, but this is a moral conflict that will play out in the political sphere. If we have any integrity as a nation, we stay in Afghanistan. We build schools and infrastructure, where and as they want it. We sit on Karzai and whoever wins the next election until they realize that we will not be gone on the next C-130. Then real change can happen, and we can begin to repay the debt we owe.

Karzai is angry at you right now for forcing him to negotiate an election runoff with Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, before his former Foreign Minister decided to save face by pulling out and and calling for a boycott. As for Karzai's anger, good for him; let him stew in his own juices. If we're going to undo our mess, and the mess he and his friends in the mujaheddin made with more than a little help from the Soviets, we are quite willing to listen to the innocent; the guilty will have to prove themselves worthy of our trust all over again. You will note that I adhere to the perhaps unpopular theory that there exists such a thing as innocence in Afghanistan. Relative innocence, anyway.

More to the point, however, while we have to support civic institutions on all levels, from Kabul out to the countryside, the most important issue here is not your trust of Karzai or his of you--you're stuck with each other (isn't democracy great?). The most important issue is the mullah McChrystal met in Helmand. If he, and a critical mass of others like him in Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kandahar, even Faizabad, can see that we're trying very hard to change our spots, then and only then will we have the chance to pay the debt we've owed them for twenty years. Brzezinski and Rumsfeld may never have signed that promissory note, but it seemed clear to the Afghans that they had.

That has to be good enough for us, and that has to be our mission. Some in your administration won't like it; some loud voices in the Senate will hate it. Call London to speak with Jason Elliot, who wrote An Unexpected Light. See if he can arrange for you to visit Ali Khan in the upper Panjshir Valley. McChrystal will tell you not to go. Go. You'll need a Dari translator, probably Dari Tajik. (Ask Jason.) Drink some tea with Ali Khan and his neighbors. Listen to their stories of fighting, and of disappointed expectations. If part of you objects that the Afghans' unrealistic expectations are not our fault or concern, listen. See if you still feel that way afterwards. And whatever you do, don't wear your American flag lapel pin; in fact, don't wear anything with a lapel. Call Sarah Chayes--you remember The Punishment of Virtue and her interview(s) with Charlie Rose; she'd be happy to consult. If she can cross-dress as an Afghan boy (at 5' 9"), she can give you some pointers on how not to intimidate a medieval Afghan who can operate an RPG, courtesy of Zbig and Rummy.

Fear and Courage and the Travel Book...

2009-11-05T18:50:00.000-08:00

... by which I do not mean Rick Steeves, Fodor's, or The Lonely Planet, and definitely not Baedeker's (someone here must have read Forster). I mean the genre to which I have exhibited periodic episodes of addiction over the years. The cast of characters--Eric Newby, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Rory Stewart, Christina Lamb, Sarah Chayes--comes from a much more colorful background and couldn't give a hoot whether people follow their tracks. In many cases they would prefer for a variety of reasons including safety that people go somewhere else altogether. Unfortunately, their writing has so fixated people on particular places that they become obsessions, which have a tendency of winning out over common sense in the end. If I start posting from Kabul or the Wakhan Corridor, you will know what happened.

After all, travel literature has a fundamentally escapist underpinning. Theroux left London to get away from a very painful divorce. Traveling with his portable kayak through Melanesia from a beginning in New Zealand and Australia seemed likely to readjust his perspective. Chatwin lived a notoriously impulsive live open to everything from bisexuality to Greek Orthodox monasticism with a little African post-colonialism and Australian Aboriginalism thrown in for good or ill. Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush ties Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania for best or at least most sarcastic title. Newby left London with a friend who'd flown in from Rio de Janeiro and wound up in Nuristan, challenged for remoteness in Afghaistan perhaps only by the Wakhan Corridor.

Then come the writers--don't worry, I have no intention of cataloguing the types of travel books, just the ones that have appealed to me--drawn by war or its aftermath. These bear some correspondences to the first group, pun intended, since most of them have worked as journalists at one point or another, though none wrote their books as journalism. Rory Stewart, a former diplomat, harkens back to Newby's diplomat companion; more obviously, his book tells the tale of a very long walk in the western Hindu Kush. He encountered enough danger, including getting shot at by a petty warlord and nearly freezing to death, that the warning of Ismail Khan, the very substantial warlord of Herat, that he not take on the trip and certainly not in winter, looked prophetic or at least shrewd in retrospect.

Lamb and Chayes take diametrically opposed approaches. Lamb moves around the country, between Herat and Kabul; Chayes, after a hair-raising ride in from Quetta, Pakistan, spends most of her time in Kandahar, with the odd run to Kabul, Boston, or Washington. The little people interest Lamb as much as the major players. She titled her book The Sewing Circles of Herat after the underground schools that bucked the Taliban's prohibition of women's education, not Ismail Khan and the Fall and Rise of Medieval Afghanistan. Chayes has an instinct for power paired with not just a nose for but an insistence on integrity. She fixes her book in orbit around the Police Commissioner of Kandahar and follows his subsequent career in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, until his assassination, probably by the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) or their Afghan pawns.

Which brings up perhaps my most important point. Chayes' book The Punishment of Virtue, a play on the name of the Taliban's morality ministry--The Department of the Promotion of Virtue and the Punishment of Vice--may not strike some as a travel book at all. When she gets to Kandahar she looks around, as a good travel writer should, but then she moves in, which a travel writer definitely shouldn't. She met the Police Commissioner then, because he didn't think she should move in, either. The single most important thing she does in the book, it gives her a perspective into the life of her hosts that among the other writers mentioned here possibly only Stewart and Chatwin (The Songlines, about Aboriginal central Australia) approach. Like Stewart, she does it in the face of considerable danger.

I promised myself not to write another post on Afghanistan this soon, and in a sense i have only partially broken my promise to myself. I know that nobody will design a radical new course at Duke around the insight that we read travel literature to liberate ourselves from the entrapment of familiarity. That and $2.75 or whatever... Nor does the element of danger hurt an author's sales, necessarily. I do think, though, the people who actually had the courage to do what titillates us both fascinate and frighten us. Fascinate, because of their audacity; frighten, because of our lack of it. We read their books because we know we will never do what they did, or suspect we will not.

In the end, it takes a certain skill on the part of the authors to make sure that we still find them sympathetic by the end of the book. At the end of The Happy Isles of Oceania Theroux, who has risked sounding a bit spoiled while lounging at a Hawaiian golf resort, knows enough not to stop there. The book concludes with Theroux and a local guide paddling with spinner dolphins off the Na' Pali coast of Kauai, than which a more glorious conclusion to a travel book I cannot imagine.

Rory Stewart, on the other hand, closes The Places in Between in tears over the death of his canine companion on the trek, Babur, as a result of misplaced kindness in Pakistan the night before the dog was to fly to his new home in Scotland. After an account in which he had spent a great deal of time revealing as little of himself to some of his hosts along the way as possible, that revelation to us came as both a confirmation of what we had been permitted to see and a glimpse into the fragility of the seam between there and here, the possible and the impossible.

Roland Barthes wrote that "we read because we forget." Perhaps we read travel books because we recognize our fear and want to experience courage, if only vicariously, in a place that resembles our own as little as possible.

Why I'm not Watching the World Series, Game 1

2009-10-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Well, for one thing, I give myself a deadline for finishing a new post of Wednesday midnight every week, which I've only missed once--last week. The time is now 9:58. So I have some work to do in the next two hours. I may turn on i-Tunes and listen to some 15th- or 16th c. music, but the World Series would definitely hijack my attention at worst, or dilute it at best. Why are they cheering? What did A-Drug do now?

That last epithet may sound mean-spirited, and one really can't gainsay that charge very well. And yet my use of it speaks to another reason I have the television off this evening, as most evenings lately. I'll tell you the one program I do watch in a moment. You may have guessed by the time we reach the moment of revelation, but perhaps not. How else to create suspense?

The World Series for me involves memory, a rather profound cluster of memories. I have, for some reason, a very clear memory of the Pirates and the Yankees, Yogi Berra and Bill Mazerowski. I had the tv to myself and found it very exciting, this in the days before I had learned to hate the Yankees. Even this does not explain my not having the World Series on tonight.

The cluster of memories involves the summer 0f 1967 (by which time I did hate the Yankees). Some of those memories, most of them, in fact, took place far from Fenway Park; I don't even remember the game I saw there that summer (or was it the next?) Some of the fondest involve not a tv but any of a number of radios. One of my most important took place on a beach where we went on Cape Cod every summer. My father brought a transistor down to the beach to listen while the Red Sox played an afternoon game at Fenway, an hour-and-a-half away by car. The Sox were in a wild four-way pennant race, and had shown signs of fading. Lately, though, they had, as my father would say, "started playing some baseball."

I don't remember what they did that day, but I remember a tremendous sense of sharing with my parents, sitting on the sand gathered around the radio, my father fiddling with reception every now and again, losing it altogether once and getting it back a few minutes later. I remember my sister getting interested as the season wore on, she realized Jim Lonborg, their ace, was really cute, and that they had a legitimate but fragile shot at the pennant. I do know Tony Conigliaro's career effectively ended with a fastball too far up and way too inside while we were at the beach. Mr. Mooney, a high school principal I thought of virtually as a grandfather and who rented a cottage a couple of blocks from ours, attended that game with his real grandson. He told us of the sickening sound. Conigliaro's demise had a great deal to do with the imposition of the batting helmet.

I remember squeezing in a trip to get cider with my sister and then watching the "impossible dream," as the announcer Ken coleman dubbed it, play out the last day of the season. They had to win the last two games against Harmon Killebrew and the front-running Twins, and then wait for the White Sox, I think, and the Tigers to lose. Lonborg was brilliant, one domino fell, then the Angels of all teams--still a new and not very good franchise--beat the Tigers in Detroit as early evening set in on the East Coast. The Red Sox had made it to the World Series.

Then came the awful realization that they would play the St. Louis Cardinals. Not awful because of the Cardinals' prodigious talent. The Red Sox took them to seven games, and had the home field. Awful because my favorite team had to face my favorite National League team. My favorite group of players had to play my single favorite player in baseball, the tenacious right-hander Bob Gibson. That same Bob Gibson whose inspirational autobiography I'd read. He who took possession of the record number of strikeouts in a World Series game against my Red Sox, as my seventh-grade music class, pre-empted for once, watched in deepening horror. Gibson allowed two runs in game seven, on a quirky inside-the-park only-in-Fenway home run by George Scott, a beloved, porcine first baseman who would never make it in this steroid world.

I had no idea adults considered Gibson all-but-too aggressive as a pitcher. I heard the accolades; the criticisms remained too subtle to overcome hero-worship. We considered Ken Harrelson "colorful" then; I wonder what writers would do to him now. Which brings us back to A-Drug. No doubt kids in New York, New Jersey, northeastern Pennsylvania--where there are very few Phillies fans--and southwestern Connecticut find his talent mesmerizing, his accomplishments galvanizing, and his timing breathtaking at times. Let them have that; let them have Jeter's brilliance and neither know nor care about the off-field stuff. They deserve those memories, high-fiving their mom after a particularly timely home run. They'll have those moments for as long as they have a memory.

None of that can have the same charge for me anymore. Sure, Curt Schilling's bleeding tendon impressed me, but I know too much about his politics. Besides, once they ceased to rely entirely on their farm system they ceased to be the old Red Sox, Tom Yawkey's Red Sox, and became Theo Epstein's Red Sox, a not altogether different thing than George Steinbrenner's Yankees. Pardon my Anglo-Saxon, but yuck.

Memory may deceive, but its value lies in its very purity, even if the things remembered lack such purity. I didn't see the viciousness in Bob Gibson, just the speed, the grace, the efficiency, the intensity. It didn't matter that George Scott weighed too much, he was a gentle soul from Alabama who knew how to reach the Green Monster, the famed left-field wall. Memory certainly has access to pain, and a great deal of it, but athletics offer those of us brought up on them a refuge for sharing. The griefs take on a particular pain over time, or they blur willfully; the joys take on a particular shine, exaggerated or no does not matter.

My favorite tv show? A combination of grittiness, violence, humanity, even eccentricity, brilliance, and passion organized around a complicated but decent man dedicated to the simple but difficult principle of the Marines, "Semper Fi." If you need me to tell you the name of the show--N.C.I.S. (Naval Criminal Investigation Service)--you watch less tv than I do.

Knowing Something about Your Enemy--and your Friends

2009-10-22T19:55:00.000-07:00

A recent acquaintance who knows of my fascination with the Afghan conflict--really the Afghan-Pakistani conflict, for several reasons not entirely relevant here--has begun emailing me articles on the subject from The New York Times. He sent me a disturbing one yesterday. A delegation of U.S. diplomats headed by Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke recently visited Pakistan, ostensibly to discuss trade. Holbrooke spoke as encouragingly as he could, while trying to say as little as possible. The reason: Congress may make the kind of exchange he wants to encourage so difficult as to become meaningless.

Meantime, a State Dept. official had an even more disturbing conversation, this one with a journalist known to oppose Pakistan's alliance with the U.S., its tolerance of Predator, C.I.A., and Special Forces operations in their country, and our war on al Qaeda and the Taliban. His general characterization of his frame of mind regarding us and of people who agree with him: "We hate you."

His view may represent the thinking (or feeling) of well less than half of Pakistanis. Still, it struck me as disturbing that we have even among the educated classes and the mainstream press such visceral enemies. This led me to pose a question. In formulating a military strategy and designing tactics to achieve its goals, one basic teaching applies to any and every combat theater: know your enemy. Intelligence estimates, the reading of history and memoirs or textbooks (Patton's reading of Rommel comes to mind), all serve this end. It reassures me, for one, that Gen. Stanley McChrystal devours not only intelligence reports but also history.

So, my question (and if it seems a bit pedantic, I taught for eleven years plus two in graduate school, so get over it): how much do Americans know about not so much our enemy, not to mention our friends, but something more basic than that--where we're fighting, and where our fight goes on quietly or by proxy? A very rough and entirely unrepresentative sample of my fellow workers today revealed a disturbing answer: not much, nor did it seem particularly to disturb them.

So, for what it's worth, I offer you a pop quiz on Afghanistan and Pakistan, based on my own reading over the last couple of months. This will not reflect expert knowledge, merely what an admittedly obsessive general reader has picked up from non-scholarly memoirs and journalistic writing, plus more than a little studying of maps. It is entirely possible (in fact likely) that an error or more will creep in unintentionally. Feel encouraged to find any such, and even correct them. Final hint: feel entirely free to cheat without shame. This quiz, if it accomplishes nothing else, will hopefully teach you a little bit of what you don't know about these two countries at the intersection of central and south Asia--which suggests as good a place to start as any.

1. Name the countries that bound Afghanistan and Pakistan (hint: two countries share a border with each of them).

2. Name four important cities in each country ("important" having a slightly different connotation than "major," and "cities" used somewhat loosely).

3. Name the conflicting religious groups in each country ("Moslem" will not do as an answer).

4. Name four provinces (Afghanistan) or states or territories (Pakistan) in each country.

5. Name the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

6. Name the two major languages in Afghanistan and the principal language of Pakistan.

7. Name our three major military opponents in Afghanistan (confession: the Pakistani Taliban insurgency remains a bit beyond my range).

8. Name the major mountain ranges in Afghanistan and Pakistan (extra points for one that defines part of Afghanistan's northeastern border; points deducted for "Himalayas," even though the major range in northern Pakistan forms their western reaches).

9. Name the principal ethnic groups of the countries (bragging rights if you can name impoverished and neglected ethnic minorities).

10. Name the book that has taught you the most about each country (even if you've only read one book, as is more or less the case with me for Pakistan, though many books on Afghanistan have necessary interludes or starting-points there).

My uncribbed answers, for what they're worth:

1. Afghanistan: Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and Pakistan; Pakistan: Iran, Afghanistan, China, and India.

2. Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Herat (also Jalalabad); Islamabad, Karachi, Peshawar, Lahore (also Quetta, important by location rather than size--probably more important than Lahore right now, certainly strategically).

3. Sunni, Shi'a, Sufi; largely Sunnis among themselves, including the Wahhabism imported by "the Arabs," i.e. bin Laden, et al. in al Qaeda, and their financial backers in Saudi Arabia responsible for the building boom of fundamentalist madrassas in Pakistan that has benefitted the Taliban; Shi'a in northwest.

4. Kandahar, Arghand, Hazarajat, Kunar; North Waziristan, South Waziristan, Beluchistan, Northwest Frontier.

5. Hamid Karzai (pending election runoff with Abdullah Abdullah); Ali al Anzari (not confident here--the widower of Benazir Bhutto).

6. Pashto and Farsi (Persian spoken in two strains in the west and the northeast); Urdu (also remote areas such as Baltistan harbor obscure languages such as Balti--my Greg Mortenson is showing).

7. Mullah Omar; Commandhan Dostum (still alive?); Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (perhaps the most violent and extreme of the three, for all our focus on Omar and his Taliban).

8. Hindu Kush, Pamir, Karakoram.

9. Pashtun, Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek; Punjabi, Sindhi (from Sindh, Bhutto's home and base in south--shaky answer)

10. Tie, partly because one author goes south and the other straight through the middle: Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue, and Rory Stewart, The Places in Between; Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea, probably the one book on this region that people have read who have read no others.

Grade: who cares? We're all more aware of what we know and don't know. The issue I still haven't sorted out: what exactly we do about it, except keep reading. In my case, that means a so far wonderful book by Christina Lamb, The Sewing Circles of Herat, available in the Chapel Hill, NC library as soon as I finish it and a few other titles.

Finding Our Souls in Our Selves

2009-10-22T19:29:00.000-07:00

The soul: picturing it as a swaddled newborn doesn't quite work for us as it did for el Greco. We've mapped a great deal if not all of the brain and have yet to find it. We cannot confirm that it consists of anything material, and have no scientifically verifiable means of explaining how we come to have one. Some would insist that we don't, that what we call "soul," to the extent we perceive one in ourselves, merely stands in for vain hopes of immortality or our most fundamental sense of our humanity.
osuna
brooks
wilber

Mountains: They Are, Indeed, There

2009-10-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

Way back in the 1920s, some uninspired British journalist asked George Mallory probably the most pedestrian question one could put to a mountaineer. Why did he want to climb a massive piece of rock in the Sagarmatha Zone along the Tibetan-Nepalese border in the eastern Himalayas we know as Mt. Everest (phrasing mine, thanks to Wikipedia)? "Because it's there," Mallory allegedly replied, in one of the most famous ask-a-stupid question-get-a-disingenuous-answer exchanges in the history of mountaineering.

And yet the fact that he--or a journalist putting words in his mouth--could give that response speaks to something that we know for a certainty about Mallory when he gave that answer. We have somewhat less certainty now. Conrad Anker's 1999 discovery of Mallory's remains at about 27,000 feet on the Tibetan route to the summit underscores the evidence of failure on a third try, at least failure to get down the mountain. Though he may have climbed the mountain on that final atempt, he never came down to the people who live in its ever-present shadow, having done something they never in their wildest dreams aspired to do. They go as high as the ibex, one of their major sources of protein, and no higher--unless paid to do so by climbing expeditions. Some of them fear dishonoring the mountain. Hold that thought.

Mallory died in 1924. He had tried previously in two expeditions in the early 1920s. A photo exists of his final expedition gathered in camp looking like a slightly ratty version of an Edwardian men's club. Mallory wields a pipe, just the thing for one's lungs at extreme altitude. They might as well be in the Alps for all their awareness of the meaning of those mountains to the Tibetans and the Sherpas, a Tibetan people who live on the Nepalese side of the mountain.

In 1953 two men finally attained the summit of Chomolungma, the Tibetan word for Everest (an English surveyor's choice). The bee-keeper Edmund Hillary of New Zealand did his best to make sure that his Nepalese climbing partner Tenzing Norgay Sherpa got the credit he deserved. He also decided he would work to improve the lives of the Sherpa people in the Khumbu district around the base of Everest and its several impressive neighbors.

He has built schools, medical clinics, and two airstrips for emergency evacuations. He reckons it more important than the climb. Some mountaineers have followed him in this vocation; many have not. Some go back repeatedly to reclimb Everest for various reasons, financial among them; Hillary came back for other, more substantial reasons, dispensing what money could buy for a people he'd come to love.

Fast forward. The book "Three Cups of Tea" has achieved a lot more attention than one would expect for a book about a climber who failed in his one shot at K2 (the second mountain surveyed in the Karakoram in Pakistan's North-West Territories by the British and the most technical climb among the 8,000 meter peaks of the Himalayas). Nursed back to health by people into whose lives he literally wandered, Greg Mortenson came back to help the people who helped him, building schools and at least one bridge.

How charming or even quixotic this seemed outside the climbing community, but not within it. And how ironic that the project, which has persisted, takes on an iconic significance now as we fight the products of radical Islamic madrassas--schools--in Pakistan and Afghanistan, precisely where Greg Mortenson builds his schools. Unlike the madrassas, most of Mortenson's schools are for girls. So deeply has Mortenson assimilated himself to the cultures of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush that his book has become required reading for the U.S. Army forces and officers engaged in the Afghan conflict.

As for honoring and/or dishonoring mountains, it matters a great deal that we understand such notions. And it particularly matters that we avoid patronizing cultures in which mountains receive veneration either as gods or as the haunts of gods. For one thing, in doing so we would patronize our own cultural roots. Think of Olympus or Sinai. As a professor I taught for in graduate school would say, think of all the mountains on or near which western civilizations have built. And think of all the buildings designed as mountains, beginning with the Pyramids and continuing through Gothic Cathedrals and the skyscrapers of Manhattan and Dubai.

We worship height. It challenges our puniness, so why should we not? And why should we not both envy and help those who live in permanent proximity to its greatest natural manifestation? Why should we think we can drop in and out every now and then at our whim, and leave the people living there, who understand the place better than we ever will, to their own materially impoverished but culturally rich devices?

Language as Culture as Power

2009-10-07T16:52:00.000-07:00

I have discovered facebook. This does not make me feel like Columbus or, more legendarily, St. Brendan the Navigator; alas, more like Johnny-come-lately. Every now and then one of my correspondents will make clear that my approach to the language of the medium suggests my failure to understand how it's done these days. Split infinitives, for instance. Yes, the Oxford English Dictionary now accepts them as proper English, but I don't have to split them myself. And if I prefer to use grammatically correct if somewhat old-fashioned word order, nothing prevents me from doing so, not even the squawking of a friend who worries himself about such things.

This sort of rhetorical dissonance pales, however, compared to some of the more serious aspects of language that arise on facebook. An episode that occurred this afternoon on a thread that includes a multi-national group of participants interested in Iran, the treatment of women, Obama's health care proposal--whatever pops off youtube or CNN that generates a discussion--offers a case in point. The Onion ran a piece today that hilariously satirized the "death panels" attack of the right wing on President Obama's health care proposal--hilariously if, and only if, one understood it as satire, in the first place, and recognized the references to the recent remarks of Sarah Palin and others. If not, "I don't get it," very understandably (but not understandingly) wrote an Iranian expatriate who for security purposes prefers to reveal where she lives only to her facebook friends, not to people who pop up randomly in threads.

This may not seem serious. I wrote a post to explain the piece, and all seems well. I find another phenomenon more disturbing. facebook has proved a tremendous source of both information--sometimes--and useful opinion on events in Iran. Mousavi's organization, and his wife's, have gotten fairly good about translating their posts. Others have not always had the resources to do so. And once a thread develops off a given post, anyone who doesn't read Farsi, transliterated or no, runs into a brick wall. Automated translation exists, of course, and has more or less success navigating the quicksands of idiomatic usage, depending on whose account one reads. Not everyone has access to it, and certainly not for the real-time fluency of a facebook thread.

The very fact that facebook--twitter appeals far less to me-- has shrunk the world to the degree it has, of course, counts for a great deal in itself. One could accuse those of us who want to understand everyone they encounter in cyberspace of pickiness in the extreme. And yet, when a thread consists of bilingual Iranians and those who speak English but not Farsi, the possibility exists of a learning experience. As soon as the Iranians turn inward among themselves to Farsi, even if for good reasons, they've separated themselves from us and us from them. At times it feels like a power move. Of course, one could argue from their perspective that we assert our power in our ability to expect that as many people speak English as a second or third language as do, allowing us to get away with not speaking other languages. I am not monolinguistic, but the conversations that interest me on the web right now are in Persian, not Italian; at some point soon I'll start trying to find threads on Afghanistan, where the problem will show up all over again in Dari (the Afghan dialect of Farsi), Pashto and Urdu.

Some problems have reasonably easy solutions. This one doesn't, for the time being. But I hope discussing it as something more than a commonplace annoyance highlights the importance of breaking through the ways in which we rely on culture, language among them, to assert power, whether of the present or of a distant but psychologically present past. I have learned so much from my Iranian and Persophile friends on facebook--that the memory of the Mongol invasion informs Ahmadinejad's approach to Obama, for starters--that I want to eliminate anything that prevents me from learning and communicating more--for instance, that their paranoia about Obama misses the fact that we tend to see Ahmadinejad as a Hitler figure. I'm getting a Koran and a Persian textbook, but don't want to miss anything while I master them.

Kindness: no more dead than God; but who'd think so?

2009-09-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

Given the demonization that regularly passes for news reporting lately, coupled with a sort of amnesia for anything that happened more than two weeks ago--though somehow we get our memory back at about six months--one would think Iran has become a nation of nuclear engineers trying to game the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), the UN, and the rest of us. If one focuses solely on the coterie around Pres. Ahmadinejad, as the press has done, that might almost seem a reasonable deduction.

June, anyone? Remember Mir Hossain Mousavi and the Green Movement? I bring him up for two reasons. The first in a sense challenges the question of whether the press has over-focused on Ahmadinejad, because during his campaign Mousavi specifically claimed the right of Iran to have a nuclear program. One wants very much to know how much, if any, daylight separates the two, or indeed the country as a whole, on the matter of the nuclear program, especially the secret site at Qom. My Iranian Facebook friends seem to think that we spend too much time thinking about it, and that national pride entitles them to it. Weaponization? One wants to see bombs first before believing our charges, or considering them a reasonable subject for discussion.

That kind of attitude--waiting for the horses to leave the barn before worrying about whether it might catch fire--should disturb us all, and help us understand the limits of understanding between Iranians and the world at large. And yet, they do have one point we need to answer better than we currently do, as Pres. Obama knows and has sought to change--we have an awful lot of bombs. In fact, the Iranians in Geneva tomorrow will face diplomats representing collectively the majority of the world's nuclear arsenal. Obama and Russia's Medvedev have spoken about eliminating nuclear weapons, but Iran's team in Geneva might fairly wonder when that will happen and why they should take such talk seriously.

The second reason has to do with something he said in a meeting with reformist parliamentarians, posted today on his Facebook page. In paraphrase--the English of the translation has a few rough edges--he applauds the development of kindness in recent social relations in Iran. He seems to mean kindness among the members of the Green Movement. Without good Farsi, one finds it hard to know for certain.

And here we have a telling parallel between Iranian and American politics, at least internally. The rhetoric of hate abounds everywhere. Not too long ago the same Facebook friend declared Mousavi irrelevant, and presumably still feels that way. Mousavi may have invented this outpouring of kindness for political purposes. Tom Friedman wrote a piece this morning warning that our culture of political hatred reminds him frighteningly of Israel before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. And yet we have a president who ran his campaign and runs his administration with the firm conviction that hope matters.

Mousavi seems to mean that the Greens have redirected at least some of their energy from attacking Ahmadinejad to the degree his police state permits, and focusing on the more immediate demands of living humanely. It's a message Obama has repeated constantly, most poignantly in his Philadelphia speech on race. One has good reason to doubt how differently a Mousavi regime would handle nuclear negotiations--perhaps they would have started months ago. The fact that two politicians in two such different societies--but two men for whom their religious faith matters centrally--place such emphasis on our dealing with each other humanely suggests that we may have more to say, one culture to another, than we think.

This argument, of course, has one major problem. Ahmadinejad sent the diplomats to Geneva for tomorrow's meeting,

The Wisdoms of the Deserts

2009-09-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

We think we know what we mean by the word "desert." We have grown up with images of the Sahara and the Arabian peninsula--dunes, camels, oases, Bedouins, mirages--as our ur-desert, the original, the essence of what we mean by the term. While, like most cliches, this one has some basis in fact, it also has the dangerous effect of trying to hide our fear of the vast and wild and barren under a veneer of banality. We have to get over it--the fear and the too-frequent recourse to banality--or we will doom ourselves to a series of politico-military misadventures in which our inability to understand a desert mentality will cripple from the outset any chance we have of success, whatever we mean by that most malleable of military markers.

If this sounds like McChrystal-redux, as in Gen. Stanley McChrystal's not-quite classified status of mission report to the White House and Pentagon that someone leaked to Bob Woodward ofThe Washington Post over the weekend, don't stop here. McChrystal clearly understands that the longer Afghans perceive his forces as isolated in bases, disengaged from the population, the more they look like centuries of occupiers have looked, dug into encampments or fortresses. Afghanistan and Afghans have a very good record in dealing with occupiers, and I don't mean showing them hospitality. I mean showing them the door.

I find this interesting. Sure, they fight well, know the terrain, can tap resources too meagre for those from non-desert civilizations to find survivable, and don't have to manage supply lines halfway around the planet, in our case. Still, I don't think that quite explains the issue. We didn't go there to fight the Afghan people; we went to fight al-Qaeda and their allies the Taliban, both roundly disliked by a majority of the population. That should have made us welcome, one would think.

We forgot something, though. They have no model for foreign troops coming in force as anything but imperial occupiers. We had a lot of work to do to overcome that hard-wired expectation, and we didn't do it. We expected them to accept us as friends after we'd helped them twenty years ago and then left them to the untender unmercies of the Taliban. Suddenly al Qaeda bombs us with commercial aircraft and we expect cooperation? And then we blame them as unreliable when they double-deal with us at Tora-Bora? Come again?

Hospitality and welcome: two notions central to desert life, whether the Christian desert fathers of Egypt or the denizens of the barren expanses of the Afghan countryside, mountains or plains. Think about it. You live in a very remote place where you see very few people. Suddenly someone emerges at your door. Out of religious--Christian or Muslim--or merely pragmatic motivations--who ever heard of pulling a trigger or committing rape on a full stomach?--one invites the stranger in and produces a meal as generous as one's means permit, and often moreso. I fear our troops haven't poked their heads in at enough doors in Afghanistan, whether in remote stretches or in cities. Military culture tells them to go kill bad guys; it needs to start concentrating their energies on making friends with the good guys. And don't immediately ask for help finding the Taliban before the pilau has cooled.

Some would object by alluding to another desert trope: mirages. They argue that one simply cannot find any good guys in Afghanistan. I haven't lived there, but many who have would beg to differ. Those who can't find the good guys haven't paid enough attention to the culture to know how to look. Back to the desert fathers. The emptiness of the desert, the tendency of the desert to absorb our voices without bouncing anything back, leads us to fall prey to the steady chatter in our minds, which leads us quickly to what both monastic Christianity and Buddhism refer to as illusion. The Sufis, who appealed so strongly to the Afghan heart, would certainly agree.

I have found the notion of war in Afghanistan troubling from the very beginning, from about 12:15 on 9/11, 2001, sitting in a college chapel, of all places, listening to the vengeful blood-lust of colleagues and students, even my friend the chaplain. I felt then I could never ratify another war. If we fail in Afghanistan, we leave the Afghans to a desert stripped of illusion. Right now the three insurgent groups vying for control are all Islamist extremists with both conflicting and overlapping interests and territories; the government, stripped by the incompetence and corruption of the Karzai brothers and threatened by the none-too delicate surgeon's hands of Dr. Abdullah-Abdullah, might as well not exist. One cannot imagine their surviving our exit in their current state.

I know President Obama has little stomach for propping up a Karzai government, nor should he. Don't mistake Afghanistan for Iran, let alone Iraq. Mousavi would have had real credibility in Iran; al-Maliki, a Shi'a, represents the largest ethnic group in Iraq. Abdullah, a Tajik, presents a real stretch as president of a nation dominated by Pashtuns, Karzai's ethnic group.

I have one thought for the president to consider before he starts buttoning this back down into a Predator-launched missile campaign against bin Laden, whom Obama will no doubt argue gave us a reason to go the Hindu Kush in the first place. True enough, Mr. President, but have no illusions about the wrecked lives you will leave behind, the unspeakable distortion of Shari'a law that will ensue--that has already begun to function as a shadow justice system in the south, according to Woodward and others--if we scale back our war to a laughably circumscribed CIA remote-control effort. Surely we owe the Afghans more than that after bombing their houses to hell and back getting rid of the Taliban. Cut and run now, and we merely double-down on the immoral mistake of the Bush administration when their minds wandered to Iraq.

War, Myth, and Imagination

2009-09-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

You may know the name Saira Shah from her documentary Beneath the Veil, her record of the daily lives of Afghan women under the Taliban. In her book The Storyteller's Daughter (Knopf, 2003), she makes the point that she had first felt driven to cover Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation from the vantage points of Peshawar and the so-called "tribal areas" for a personal reason. She grew up in England in a formerly landed, aristocratic Afghan family that lost their Afghan estate overlooking Kabul during WW II. Her grandfather and father, both gifted Sufi storytellers, had woven a mythic Afghanistan for her in words, so powerfully that she need to climb to Paghman to confirm its reality as an actual place with evidence of the mosaics and orchards they had described to her. The myth, and the family connection, gave her the motivation to slog through the mountains of the Hindu Kush and endure the surreal world of spies in Peshawar, somewhat protected by the presence of her extended family.

She needed to see that Afghanistan existed, as corroboration of the myths, even if only in hindsight, as with her family's ruined estates. At least her elders hadn't made it all up out of whole Afghan cloth. At the same time, she admits that her pursuit and questioning of the myth blinded her to the meaning of the extremist factionalism emerging literally under nose. Her view of Afghanistan had about it the myopia of a personal quest.

Most myths can overpower reality, often with devastating consequences. The British, driven by a misguided notion of cultural archaeology, a kind of nineteenth-century Aryanism, and the seductive ideology of orientalism, all grafted to imperial pretensions on a vast scale, made as much a mess of the Middle East and Central and South Asia as one can possibly imagine, and did little if at all better in Africa. We continue to pay the price for their arbitrarily drawn borders in Israel, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, just to name the most currently explosive.

Despite the wreckage, the British imperial myth, until it gave out under its own weight after WW II, sustained their Asian and African adventurism. Myths can produce a maddening perseverance.

That said, we don't have much of a track-record when it comes to perseverance in wars overseas. We have gotten into some we had no business joining--Vietnam and the Second Gulf War for starters, certainly the Spanish-American War--but we have arguably avoided some that the cause of justice required us to enter, or enter earlier than we did--Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur. We show signs of nervousness in Afghanistan, as soon as our withdrawal from Iraq puts it back on the front page and Gen. McChrystal and Admiral Mullen suggest they probably need more troops.

One could argue this caution about foreign involvements shows us admirably free of the imperial pretensions of other great powers historically--the British, the Russians, Alexamder the GReat, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane the Great, the Romans, even the Japanese, Nazi Germany and the Soviets under Stalin and his successors until Gorbachev. Fair enough. We have had a series of myths, though, principal among them the moral imperative of democracy. It has a serious flaw, however, in that, allied with the anti-myth of Communism or just on its own, it can get us into wars where we don't belong.

More dangerously, right now we have another myth, the war on terror. Our military has not always had a brilliant track record on understanding how to fight the war in front of them rather than the last one. They have made some egregious mistakes in Afghanistan, and shown some signs of correcting at least some of those mistakes. Sarah Chayes' The Punishment of Virtue (Penguin, 2006) makes that case clearly for the early phases of the war. Chayes' book tells a cautionary tale we must all consider, even if it comes from one of the few journalists who has covered the war in Afghanistan and found herself transformed into, as one of the American troops based outside Kandahar puts it with some astonishment, "a hawk."

In a sense she tells a variation on the story Saira Shah tells. By now we know what Shah discovered, that we had a war between factions of fundamentalists running parallel to the anti-Soviet conflict, than which it turned out by far the more important. We think we've gone to fight bin Laden, but even if we win that battle, possibly by forcing the Pakistanis to come clean and start helping us, we risk losing the war if we don't leave behind an Afghanistan where people can make a living, trust their government, and have no reason to trust the Taliban and grow poppies.

The myth of democracy fails us at crucial times, not because of our over-reliance on mythology. Human societies need myths as part of their fabric, their way of understanding the world. It fails us because another myth has penetrated our consciousness too shallowly. It motivates a journalist-turned NGO founder such as Sarah Chayes: the ability and need to imagine another culture than one's own without judging it. In our obsession with accomplishing missions, we so often botch or nearly botch them precisely because the culture in which the the military objectives exists has other priorities. We don't find them interesting, because they don't mirror ours. As Saira Shah realized at the ruins of her family's Paghman estate, we have to accept reality, however crumbling, and take some relief from the fact that we have someting more at hand than a mere myth. In Afghanistan, or anywhere, we have lives to protect, cultures to protect. At times we screw that up with the best of them, but we've done it right, too. We have to learn to find Afghanistan as interesting as we finally found Europe in WW II.

"Stop Making Sense:" The (De)meaning of Partisanship

2009-09-09T19:09:00.000-07:00

Partisan: a word which comes to English from the Lombard dialects and Tuscan in two slightly different forms, "partezan" and "partigiano" via the Latin pars, partem, or part. It first means the member of a faction, which takes on a different sense than it has for us when one considers that the same word, in 16th-17th c French, referred to a pike-like weapon on a shaft. By the late 17th c it means something like our guerilla fighter, then (re-?)acquires a political sense in the 19th c (Source: Dictionary.com). The word morphs back into warfare in World War II as the name for the Italian fighters of the Resistance, and to politics again, as all of us know who have paid any attention this summer. Faction, in Renaissance texts, always implies deceit, and a grave risk to social order. In other words, partisanship amounts to warfare, with or without lethal weapons.

One could hardly miss the presence of partisanship in the House Chamber when President Obama delivered his address on health care tonight. I could hardly deny it in myself. The partial government option he offered will disappoint many on the left, but since it addresses me I feel quite happy with it. The Republican congressmen (yes, men) waving copies of a bill they'd written that apparently either didn't clear committee or gain consideration gave particularly childish evidence of partisanship in the hall.

The grim demeanors of Lindsey Graham as he rubbed his hands in tension and John Boehner as he wore his perpetual scowl--except when Obama endorsed the Republican idea of malpractice reform, at which the Republican senators looked like fans (from the word fanatic...) at a football game when their team has finally scored deep into the fourth quarter, finally giving them something to cheer--suggested an odd combination of anxiety, pugnacity, and, yes, partisanship.

Let's not leave out the Democrats. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton may have forgotten her pompoms, but she hardly need them, seeming to beat everyone except perhaps her former colleague from New York Chuck Schumer to their feet when the president made a particularly powerful point. Interestingly, at one point he just kept going through the cheers with a stinging series of assertions.

As for Obama, for all his genuine overtures to the other side, including adopting an idea of John McCain's, the stakes of this speech came through most clearly at two junctures. One can imagine Mitch McConnell taking umbrage when the president announced that the time for playing games is over, but it struck just the right note of a president who has tolerated about as much as he intends to tolerate. I found it telling that well into the speech, at a pitched moment, he used a phrase familiar to all of his who voted for him last year: "not this time, not now." I watched for its reappearance, but it didn't come.

The signature moment for partisanship--why can't we just talk about the tribute to Ted Kennedy?--came when a lone Republican Congressman tried to call Obama a liar until Democrats drowned him out with boos. It provided the lowest point of the evening, the clearest evidence that the extremism of the summer is disturbingly alive and well.

It also reminds us of the true threat of partisanship. We all have the right to urge our cases, but what exactly do we mean when we say we will fight for our beliefs? Partisanship is now, as it always has been, an expression of group loyalties. It also represents the opposite of civility and, to a degree, citizenship, when it places the views of the few over and against those of the many. Exactly what I did when I applauded the truncated version of the public option, not to mention when I wanted to scream at the set as the Republican response began.

Obama used the phrase "disagree without being disagreeable" in his stump speech last year. It speaks to the importance of civility, to listening. Not to screaming, or waving unconsidered bills in the air, or lying to older people about death panels and Medicare. Civility--as I get older, I respect it more and more. It stands in tension with partisanship, but ought not be fundamentally incompatible with it. We'll see how many Republicans want to let Obama make sense and give us what we all--not just what I, or you--need from health care reform.

What Art History May Say about Political Perspective

2009-08-30T11:59:00.000-07:00

My second year in the Williams College/Clark Art Institute Graduate Program in the History of Art we had as a visiting occupant of the Clark Chair a feisty, diminutive, brilliant, skirt-chasing polio survivor, the Englishman and retired Chair of the Art History Department at Bryn Mawr College, Charles Mitchell. Prof. Mitchell stood about 5'4," maybe 5'6" with his one good hand raised in the air to make a rhetorical point, as he often did. He tended to accompany those points, especially emphatic negatives, with a shrill glissando through the entire tessitura of his rather sharp tenor voice. Those brief but piercing performances had an unmistakably breathtaking--literally--effect on his audiences, as he well knew.

He first put on such a performance for us in his seminar on Raphael in the second or third class of the semester. I recall my colleagues beginning to champ at the bit for us to get on with Raphael after Mitchell's rather extended preliminaries to begin the term, including his insistence that we pick the topic of our seminar papers before doing anything else. So this particular class meeting began with a combined sigh of relief and ratcheting up of our powers of concentration. Mitchell had finally put up a slide of a painting, fancy that.

It quickly became clear that he had an agenda that both included and went well beyond the particular painting he had on the screen. He asked us to describe it. In a seminar of about six or seven students, three of us had a strong background in the Italian Renaissance, and two of us continued our studies in the Renaissance after Williams. We took the bait first, using the picture as a scrim on which to project all our knowledge of Renaissance studio practice, iconography, and perspective--for the angels Raphael had reversed his cartoon, a drawing enlarged by a craftsman to the scale of the painting itself, to get two angels from one drawing, even though scripture makes no mention of angels at the Crucifixion, the subject of this painting. That sort of thing; I don't remember whether we got to the scriptural question or not.

And suddenly he'd had enough. "NNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooo," in Oxonian inflection (he had his Ph. D in philosophy from Oxford and had picked up art history teaching in London at the Warburg). None of us in that room will ever forget it; one of my classmates does a brilliant imitation of it, despite his baritone voice and Texas twang. Mitchell wanted us not to forget it. He wanted to shock us into remembering something crucial.

What, after all, had we done the last ten minutes or however long he gave us to hang ourselves?We had named the subject and produced some details of how Raphael made the picture and whether his making corresponded to the primary literary sources; we may even have gotten into later medieval tradition. All well and good, but none necessary and certainly not sufficient (Occam's razor), the sort of thing one does with a picture after doing the one necessary--and to some, though not to Mitchell, sufficient--thing: looking at, taking in, and describing the whole picture. He wanted us to strip away the title and the names, not even allowing us the shorthand of "cross," insisting instead on "two beams of wood set at ninety degrees to each other, the horizontal about ninety percent of the way up the vertical," and so on, until we'd sufficiently reminded ourselves of the building-blocks of the image that we could never take any of them for granted as we moved into questions of iconography, patronage, or whatever we subjected images to in our seminar papers.

That moment had a profound influence on me. I admired the tenacity not just of the rhetorical intervention but of the intellectual persistence that lay behind it. Mitchell always had a flair for the theatrical and even manipulative. It annoyed most of my classmates, who saw the skirt-chasing long before I did. He angled two of us into working on slices of a project he'd had in mind for a long time; I'd started out with a very different topic which he quickly whisked away like a gnat. He made me feel he had a much more important idea, and me feel flattered that he wanted me to work on it. It became the greatest learning experience of my academic life, except perhaps for Ph. D. orals some years later.

While researching my seminar paper for Mitchell I had a series of conversations with him, one over scotch at his rented home, one in seminar as I presented my paper. He began to pick it apart, and I responded aggressively and with evidence in perhaps the best argument I've ever had with a professor, both on the level of intensity and in the matter of my having done my homework well enough to have answers to his objections. That moment, too, had a great influence, though an unfortunate afterglow. I never worked with anyone thereafter willing to challenge me and to suffer challenge to that degree. He didn't suffer it, he thrived on it, sought it out, cherished it, grabbed it the way one grabs the air to applaud a brilliant performance in an opera, a courageous put-out at home plate, a speech that makes a kind of sense you haven't heard in a generation. I think a British education explains part of the exuberant aggressiveness, and the combativeness required to survive polio and World War II at once, but that does not explain all of it.

I have digressed longer than I meant to do, but we've neared the point. Mitchell's big project concerned his suspicion, confirmed by no documentary sources per se, that a series of papal commissions from the rooms on which my Texan friend and I worked--he had one room, I had all four--which Raphael and his assistants painted under the direction of three successive popes, culminating decades later in the placement of an ancient monolith in St. Peter's Square, constituted essentially one collective and unitary commission. Their subject: the achievement, elaboration, and sacred condoning of papal power.

Get past the different painters and their various styles, even within Raphael's own shop, ignore the difference between stone and fresco. Consider what they all had to say, what they all represented, that they could have said and represented other things in the century of the Reformation, though their emphasis of papal power has an almost obvious--too obvious, some would say, debunking the unitary commission theory--relevance in light of the threat to Rome of Luther, Calvin, and their Protestant brethren. Go beyond the small-bore objections, the sort of material I used against him and still find it tempting to marshal. See the small, but move through it to the larger perspective. Only then will you see the issue--any issue--well enough to understand it.

Now we're there. Thinking nostalgically this morning while walking my dog Abby about how much I've given up in leaving academia and perhaps given up on--this the influence of the Kennedy eulogies this weekend--it suddenly occurred to me that Mitchell's method offers a metaphor for what has happened and needs to happen in the health care reform debate in Washington. All involved need to cast aside their ideological screens that prevent them from seeing the issues in all their stark clarity--the nearly naked young man with brown hair attached to two beams of wood, apparently by nails at the hands and feet, etc.--work through the detail-slogging their staffs have done for them, as generations of us did for Mitchell, and arrive at the large picture. Health care reform, as many have noted, encompasses the term of a number of presidents. Obama can lay claim only to a resolve to address a larger piece of the problem than anyone else had the historic opportunity, some degree of consensus, to battle in the halls of Congress and the forum of public opinion.

We have small minds on both sides of this issue. Those crying "socialized medicine" need to shut up and see what socialized medicine has accomplished, and to admit that Obama and the Congress have set their sights on more modest change. Those screaming about the president's willingness to negotiate on such things as the "public option," i.e. socialized medicine, need to take a strong-tasting medicine called "the possible." Left and right, we've lost civility, as so many noted by implication in the Kennedy eulogies, and we've lost perspective.

Go ahead, have vigorous debate. Get your facts in order. Know the problem. See it in the small and then stand on those building-blocks to see it large. Then hammer it out. Yell at each other, if necessary, but with civility, for the salutary effect of forcing each other closer to the solution. I only wish that at some point, if and as this debate veers off course, we had Charlie Mitchell to walk into the committee rooms and the House chamber and the well of the Senate, to grab a microphone from a stunned senator, and give them all one last, piercing, grating, salutary "NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooo."

Grief

2009-08-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

I had planned a very different post today, but it can wait. The wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the responses to them of governments and NGOs alike will remain. The question of martyrdom will linger. The freshness of Senator Edward Moore (Teddy) Kennedy's death will not.

In the last couple of hours I have read and heard a great deal about the man known as the "Lion of the Senate." His colleagues on both sides of the aisle in the Senate miss the role he could have played in pushing through the necessary compromises to accomplish meaningful health care reform. Some, like Orrin Hatch, remember respectful battles royal in committee debate. Journalists, of course, feel compelled to mention the scandals of Chappaquiddick and Palm Beach. None can overlook his eulogies for his brother Robert F. Kennedy, "a good and decent man," and his nephew, John F. Kennedy, Jr., who all had hoped "would live to comb grey hair."

Familiar if moving stuff, all that. One hesitates to wade into it, not knowing what one can add. Some of the subtleties fade to the background at a time like this, such as the point a journalist made recently that Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama for the presidency in the run-up to Super Tuesday because of his outrage over the Clintons' race-infected campaigning in the South Carolina primary. I admire him for that, for the preservation of his family's association with decency and respect in race relations going back to the Voting Rights Act of 1964, which concluded an effort his deceased brother Jack had begun.

All moving. I found myself crying most openly, though, at a small detail in a piece on NPR's "All Things Considered" this morning posted on their website. Kennedy had reached out to the victims of 9/11, as had many politicians. He had shown considerable kindness to a woman who had lost her husband, as I recall. Two years later, she got a phone call from Kennedy's office. Did she have any plans that weekend? Would she like to go sailing with the senator? By 2003 he knew that such a gesture would do her more good than it could ever do him.

Any of us who have admired the Kennedys feel some grief at this loss. We know the failings, at least the public ones, and the fact that so many cannot overlook them. My supervisor at work last fall expressed his utter unwillingness to forgive Kennedy for Chappaquiddick and perhaps even more for "getting away with it." The precise meaning of "it"we will leave open. My pointing out that Jesse Helms, a particular hero of my boss, worked closely with Kennedy, as did Orrin Hatch of Utah, a conservative's conservative, had no impact on him.

We overlook his faults perhaps because we know our own, and know we could not have accomplished what Ted Kennedy did, family money or no. His privilege helped and he freely acknowledged it. He worked harder for the poor precisely because of the perspective afforded him from his hospital bed recovering from a broken back in 1964, wondering how fellow patients paid their enormous bills. That experience made him a champion of health care reform, which he remained until last night in Hyannis Port.

We grieve him for another reason, a more important one, at least those born before 1960 or so do. The Kennedys have always stood in liberal Democratic circles for a brand of reforming idealism that asserted the ability to transform the world. Ever major figure in Democratic politics since then--even Carter, who would probably profusely deny it out of personal animus--has benefitted, directly or indirectly, from the prestige the Kennedys have lent reformist liberal politics. Certainly the Clintons, disappointed as they were by Ted's turning on them last spring, and above all Obama, would not deny it.

Grief comes from loss. Losing Ted Kennedy for some of us means losing the last link not just to the glamor and cliche of Camelot, but to a time in our lives when we believed in the heroic as not merely the survival of war's horrors, but the courage to rethink how we face opponents. In this, we risk idealizing. Jack and Bobby Kennedy woke up late to the horrors of racism, and Bobby came late to seeing Vietnam as a disaster. In both cases, however, once they saw, they acted. Ted Kennedy's broken back from a plane crash probably had a more profound effect on the history of health care in this country than any other single event.

We will rely on others now. Indeed, as a senator, Ted Kennedy has not held the center of our attention as much as have the Clintons and Obama for some time. That, too, causes us to grieve. As we watched his gradual acceptance of a quieter role, and then his precipitous decline and now decease, we see a mirror and anticipation of our own. We grieve for Ted Kennedy as a surrogate for our own griefs--in my case, a father gone whose mother did political ward-heeling for Kennedy's grandfather in Boston--but also as a lightning-rod for our own fears and dreads.

Requiescat (requiescamurque) in pace--may he rest in peace, and we with him.

"We Have Nothing to Fear but..."

2009-08-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

F. D. R. spoke to a time rich in parallels to ours. People committed suicide in the Crash (admittedly on Hoover's watch), died in the Dustbowl and starved in the cities in the 1930s, literally fearing for both their welfare and their lives. Then came first the prospect and then the reality of war in both Europe and the Pacific. The Nazis had their sights on Lebensraum and that meant the Czechs, Poles, Russians, and other Eastern and then Western Europeans, as well. But they focused particularly on the Jews, as do, quite literally, Hezbollah and Hamas.

When we speak of racial profiling these days, we generally mean the singling out of African-Americans, but we could mean Arabs and Persians, as well. Honestly, can you distinguish an Iranian from a Syrian on sight? (Hint: Arabs tend to have straighter noses, but cosmetic surgery in Iran has eliminated that difference for many Persian women, much to the displeasure of Ayatollah Khamenei, who fears such Western perversions.) Does that inability to tell a difference worry you? Would it make you likelier, as a law enforcement officer, to just go ahead and arrest, or at least question, both of them? And what emotion would impel you to take that action: fear, perhaps?

Some years ago in a class on how massage therapy makes use of psychological information, the teacher drew a very clear distinction between fear and anger, insisting that they have very different somatic sources and therefore no relation to each other. We debated that assertion for a few minutes, a process that teacher always tended to oversee with a sort of brittle condescension. Objections smitten by the force of superior knowledge--this is not quite the caricature it may seem, though it probably is as mean-spirited, for which I ask forgiveness but cannot quite resist including the scene, anyway--he started to move on to the next set of unsubstantiated assertions.

I leaned to the classmate immediately to my right, an African-American I.C.U. nurse, someone who grew up in a different sub-culture than I did and might not necessarily agree on questions of how to handle emotions. I would have the same doubts of people from almost any ethnic group other than my own, and even other subsets of Irish-Americans, as frequent readers of this blog will have suspected. Admittedly, the foregoing debate had led me to suspect firm ground. I looked at C. and said quietly, "When I'm angry, the first thing I try to do is ask what's frightened me." She nodded in agreement, as much as to say, "Why is this news?"

These thoughts come to me because of the vortex of fear and anger into which the debate over health care reform has thrust us. If "[t]ruth is the first casualty of war," it has begun to rot amid the piles of mangled lies produced in this "debate," if we dare dignify the current national screaming-match with such a label. I have to watch my own fear and anger in this process. I have no health insurance and a pre-existing condition. When Sarah Palin--who we all know has plenty to fear--launched her "death panels" ICBM (maybe she borrowed one from her neighbors, the Russians), I had a very visceral response. She has gone for me from breath of fresh air--June, '07--to "Oh, no, she's a demagogue, and a pretty good one"--the Republican Convention--to "what was McCain thinking (if anything)?"--the Gibson and especially the Couric interviews--to just plain rabble-rouser of late, not quite as good as Goebbels, but nearly as hateful. If there is a politician I would like to see caught in an ethical net and hoisted on her own pitard, I can't think of a better candidate (and don't believe this stuff about retirement, she is a candidate).

I don't know how many of us can engage in the health-care debate dispassionately. Members of Congress have good health insurance, but no job security past the end of their present term. Others with good health insurance have a hard time hearing--for lack of effort?--when the President assures them they will not lose it. Some have seen this debate as an apt time to raise the issue of the right to bear arms, and if the role of fear has emerged, I can think of no more frightening way. But the logic-buster for the ages: the frightened elderly who don't want government in health care because they depend on their Medicare. Even Republicans have felt compelled to point out to such misinformed constituents the illogic of such a canard.

I don't remember ever seeing us so frightened as a country since the race riots of 1967 and the aftermath of 9/11 eight years ago. The inability of people to reason clearly concerns one enough, but this issue matters more than any legislation since the ill-conceived Patriot Act and the equally idiotic No Child Left Behind. Health care reform now can affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people and give us the means to address the serious failings in our health care delivery system. The "patriots" who insist we have the best health care should be forced to bring a near-term pregnant relative to a hospital with a significantly higher-than average infant mortality rate. I used to live in Lynchburg, Virginia, which at the time had an alarmingly high infant mortality rate. Friends gave birth there successfully, and one saw lots of children, but obviously somebody had reason not to feel good about their pre- and post-natal care.

What bothers me most is how lunatic some of the rhetoric and behavior has become. It reminds me of an episode from the 2004 presidential campaign. I worked the phones for a couple of days for the Collier County Democratic Party in East Naples, Florida. The point was to identify Kerry voters--yes, they existed, poor outnumbered dears--and see if they planned to vote, whether they needed a ride, and whether they had any questions. I prefer pre-election data entry and election-day canvassing to pre-election phone canvassing. By election day people know what they intend to do, rationally or no, but campaigns spawn wacky ideas faster than Apple can build i-pods. I called a woman who seemed to want to vote for Kerry, but felt afraid to do so. Asked why, she said someone had told her Bush would have him assassinated if he won. A whopper? Sure, but Bush and Cheney worked on such fears; Palin, McConnell, Cantor and Co. see no reason not to follow suit.

If ever we have needed Obama's message of hope, now is that time.

Making Sense of the Other

2009-08-12T18:16:00.000-07:00

On a Sunday afternoon in June, 1984 in Rome, I went for a walk. My girlfriend at the time and I lived in the first of two places where we stayed that summer. Somehow, though both of us sympathized with the left politically and she had leftist friends there, her contacts had found us apartments in neighborhoods she considered neo-fascist, one a legal sublet in a working-class area, one illegal and on a famous and tony boulevard, the Viale Parioli, behind the embassy district. The first apartment occupied part of a floor of a modernist apartment building in the so-called "quartiere Africa," so-named because all the streets and squares memorialized the "conquests" of Mussolini's troops in the years before World War II: Viale Libia, Viale Eritrea, Largo Somalia (where we lived).

On weekdays I made a point of buying the Communist Party's newspaper, "L'Unita," probably more to make a point--the vendor had it on sale, after all--than to make a serious attempt to decode the notoriously byzantine politics of Italy, irrespective of the lens through which one views them. I learned that the center-left "La Repubblica" did the decoding better. This Sunday afternoon, though, I headed up the hill, across the viale, and continued on absent-mindedly for a few blocks in the relative cool of a late Roman afternoon. I knew there had been some obscure neo-fascist terrorist activity, a kind of pushback to the operations of the Brigate Rosse and smaller terrorist organizations of the left. A young man had been killed, a neo-fascist hero-martyr, and the neo-fascists seethed at the way the Carabinieri (think hybrid of State Police and FBI, but operating with the run of cities) had handled the matter. This about covers my understanding of the background.

Suddenly, a block downhill from me to my right, I saw a group of thuggish-looking, working-class young men standing in front of a building, just feet from the curb. They maintained perfect silence: no signs, no gestures, no proclaimed manifestoes, though I may have missed that part. Their anger felt palpable, but also magnetic. One had no idea exactly what it meant, though a vague idea of at least one of the references involved, their dead comrade-in-arms. I stood watching them for several minutes, then, intrigued, began walking downhill toward them.

All around me the silent chorus had drawn in an audience. On Sundays afternoons, after all, every couple in Italy goes for a "passeggiata," a leisurely, sociable, often rather voluble, generally well-mannered walk. Some of the strollers kept right on strolling, but some stopped. This evidently worried the Carabinieri, because suddenly they started buzzing around in their Lancias at speeds a great deal higher than indicated either by circumstances or the tightness of corners on those side streets, even in the modern Africa quarter. One, filled with three or four young carabinieri, with whom my girlfriend had warned me not to risk contact owing to their reputation as a reckless law unto themselves, suddenly slowed down fifteen feet from me. A young carabiniere looked at me, asked me what I thought I was doing there, I said I was an American, and merely watching, and with a gesture at once dismissive and threatening indicated that I should move away from there, back up the hill. Shaken, I did just that, looking back, Lot-like, just once. Nobody had turned into pillars of salt just yet.

Political theater, especially somebody else's, can easily contain that combination of vaguely understood motivations, obscure if riveting actions, and glowering authorities reminding outsiders to stick to fights in which they have, if not a dog as in the old phrase, then at least an interest, which says the same thing less colorfully. Make no mistake, the streets and courtrooms with show trials and backrooms of mullahs and stadiums filled with faithful for Friday prayers in Tehran and throughout Iran, even the courageous speeches of some opposition parliamentarians in the majlis represents political theater at a high level. The intensity, the bloodletting, the thuggery of the Basiji and the brutality of the Revolutionary Guards, contrasted with the humane restraint of some police, has captured the imagination and sympathy of many of us in the West. At least one of my friends chided me on Facebook for the degree to which I'd fallen prey to the drama of it all, the inhumanity of it all. The zenith, of course, came with the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, videos of whose death went viral on YouTube almost two months ago and within hours of the event. That day I had either my computer or CNN on almost non-stop from mid-afternoon past midnight.

I must admit I've begun walking back up the hill a bit, though no Basij has gotten close enough to bully me into such a posture. We've known from interviews Mir Hossain Mousavi gave before the election that he insits on Iran's right to its nuclear program. Clearly, one can negotiate far more easily with him than with Ahmadinejad, but to what conclusion? Some reading in "Foreign Affairs," "The Guardian," some academic conference papers, and other sources suggests both a situation more complex than even some of my Iranian expatriate Facebook friends seem to understand, and a quagmire of no rapid solution. For all that our hearts go out to people chanting "Allahu Aqbar" (God is Great) in sinister imitation of the Islamic Revolution against the Shah, some of those people remain faithful to that revolution, but feel betrayed by its current flame-bearers. Some, possibly not even among the chanters, seek by means none of them have succeeded in making clear to me the overthrow of the entire system itself, replaced by some sort of vague--and disappointingly provincial-- projection of Iran into full membership in the Muslim world, as though the rest poses merely an incovenience, gnats like Sarkozy, horseflies like the International Atomic Energy Agency, mosquitoes like Obama. A writer in another thread took Iran's right to possess nuclear arms as a right.

The provincialism and narrowness of that vision, as expressed on a Facebook thread the other day, turned me at least partway back up the hill, though from this distance I have the leisure to turn around at will. Marxism gets invoked in various ways, some almost pathetically--one wants to say hilariously, were the stakes not so high--call for the Americans to intervene, though some more sensibly recognize the absurdity of Obama riding into Tehran and Qom on a white charger to do--what, exactly?--as patently absurd. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, who recognized that America has no role to play here, pointed out that the younger generation does not know the horrors of what he saw in 1983. Otherwise one repeatedly comes up against expressions of Persian pride in ancient empire, the fissuring of a theocracy which will not unravel easily, if at all, and the aspirations of youth to live in the modern world, not the medieval one of strict adherence to the Q'uran and Shariah, or Islamic Law, without any clear glue to hold it all together. One of my Facebook friends all but calls Moussavi a stooge, a placeholder, as teh next generation surges by him to a wildly abstract declaration of their aims.

If any of us have expected anything permanently relieving to come out of all this, the time has come, for me, anyway, to plead guilty to naivete. I will continue to look at YouTube links on my Iranian Facebook friends' pages--including Moussavi's and his wife's. I saw a remarkable argument put forward on a video of a televised round-table the other day, urging the necessity of engaging the west, though I could not tell where the forum took place; I hope the speaker has stayed out of prison. I will even check in on the occasional thread. But part of my fascination that Sunday in Rome amounted to a recognition that here I saw something I didn't know and could only partly identify, which held my attention not because of anything attractive about it--like the insistent faith and anger of those who chant "Allahu Aqbar"--but precisely because it frightened me. It just happened that on that Sunday they chose a form of protest that contained in immobility and silence the violence one feared, in marked contrast to the then-recent bombing of the Bologna train station.

Iran has reversed the equation. The violence, even the non-violent and at times silent marching shows a courage to take on a system we fear, and we have taken heart from that fearlessness. The technical advances of YouTube and Facebook fool us into forgetting that all the empathy we may feel in this time of struggle will mean little to at least some of the strugglers in the unlikely event they achieve their aims. The genie has gotten out of the bottle, and those aims seem a lot harder to characterize now than two months ago. We can do nothing for the defendants in what a tv commentator a couple of evenings ago referred to as essentially a re-run of Stalin's show-trials of the 1930s. We need to prepare ourselves for the moment when we walk up the hill, turn the corner, and support a process of diplomacy that will of necessity get very aggressive, and inflict hardship on those we have watched on YouTube. Let us only hope this remains a diplomatic struggle.

The Middle of Nowhere Does Not Exist

2009-08-04T11:34:00.000-07:00

Early in the summer of 1990 I took a needed break from the intense months-long "zone" I'd lived in writing my dissertation. As I weighed the relative advantages of the Catskills and northeastern Vermont, a little African -American girl sitting on the floor with her older sister in the New Haven Public Library made my decision for me. Her ejaculative "Mr. Moose!" decided me on the spot, and led me to find a Vermont guide book to hiking trails--an old Vermont guide book, as it turned out.

Hiking a trail from its pages, and ignoring the overgrown grass at the trailhead, after several hours of complete human solitude I discovered bear scat on the way down. The probable source of said scat emerged charging loudly through seriously tangled underbrush a few minutes later, on a course that in 40 yards or so would have landed it squarely on me. This adult black bear, 400'ish lbs., possessed a beauty I did not comprehend until it stopped, smelled the air, saw me with nostrils widened in shock, and turned to run from me in a tight circle, muscles rippling under black-brown fur, approximately as afraid of me as I of it.

When I asked back at my lodgings how commonly one saw bears in the area, the owner asked where I'd seen the bear. To my answer, he incredulously responded: "What the hell were you were doing there? Nobody's maintained that trail for years." Only then did I check the date on my fourteen year-old guide book, the first thing one does with a scholarly resource. I'd made a mistake unthinkable on my dissertation, but in circumstances that, had things gone badly enough, could have cost me my life, something my dissertation would unlikely ever do. Fortunately my instincts--to stand stock still and silent, though a dragged heel may have caught the bear's attention in the first place, and possibly just as well--corresponded precisely to the appropriate response.

That afternoon I went biking, at the advice of locals, at a remote lake known for its population of moose, but the bear had spooked me. I had visions of a bull moose charging me, and turned back a couple of miles down the access road, itself absent of human contact. My long-cherished hope of seeing a moose would have to wait.

Later that same trip, and far less frighteningly, I drove up to the southern tip of Lake Memphremagog (Magog, for short), and decided to ride my bike into Canada, Quebec for the sake of precision. There I experienced a phenomenon I had noticed before, that borders sometimes make a difference. Kathleen Norris writes about the absolute trasnparency of the border between South and North Dakota, which she can see looking north from her yard in Lemmon, SD. Many of the borders out west result from surveyors, both American and British, simply extending a line along a parallel of latitude.

In the eastern U.S. and Canada, though, those lines seem far less arbitrary. When I crossed the international border at Beebe Plain, having dealt with an incredibly nice customs agent who agreed I had the perfect day for a bike ride, the landscape changed immediately. Within a mile the heavily forested Vermont landscape--I hadn't seen a farm in miles, though I'd ridden past a couple the day before--opened up into a rolling farmland cleared for miles in either direction. The distant White Mountains and disappeared. I had crossed not just just a border but a boundary.

The French Riviera to the Italian; far northeastern Italy (past Udine) into Austria; Poland into Slovakia; the Romanian provinces of Maru Mures into Moldova/Bukovina through the Carpathians. All these offer recognizable, if sometimes subtle, transitions. For all these, though, one can think of transitions without any clear marker: Tuscany to Umbria, Tuscany to Lombardy (until one has penetrated well inside either region), Connecticut to Massachusetts. Often borders yield their secrets, as in a couple of the examples given, only after one has passed them for some time.

Now, traveling near the borders of countries with which we have no diplomatic relations lends one a different responsibility than that of a casual tourist or business traveler in a car or on a train. Either of those will more than likely take you to a customs station, unless the car traveler specifically wants to dodge customs on obscure roads, at which point they bear clear responsibility for whatever happens.

Al Gore's journalists, and the free-lancers now presumably in Iranian detention, appear to have made a mistake more like mine when I used a badly out-of-date map. I don't know that a good up-to-date map exists for northeastern Iraqi Kurdistan. A careful journalist probably would have wanted to leave a margin for error, or a bigger one. Journalism, however, at its roots stems from curiosity. Foreign correspondents in war zones take risks before they've brushed their teeth in the morning that most of us will never take in our lives, forget about what they've done by dinnertime. Free-lancers have less backup than those working full-time for major news organizations, but even the latter take risks that would make most of our hair stand on end.

We won't know the full story until and unless the journalists and their companion in the Kurdistan case gain release, if they do. Bill Clinton received a welcome in N. Korea--in fact gain entrance at all--because he has dealt with them before, and has their respect. He and the Obama administration probably made the release of Al Gore's employees from detention a precondition of his trip. To whom can we turn with such credentials to deal with the Iranians?

But these questions beg the more important one. If borders can offer such blurred distinctions, or none at all, as in the cases of the Kurdish-Iranian and Chinese-North Korean borders, why do countries invest such charged stakes in them? Central Americans in southern Texas clearly do not want to stay there. Kurdistan, however, seems to offer a rather remote, difficult, long, and ultimately very vulnerable route into Iran. Two journalists operating openly with camera crews on the Chinese-N. Korean border hardly seem to have acted with the subtlety one associates with espionage. These two countries, Iran and North Korea, have one thing in common beyond their nuclear ambitions: fear. Our power frightens them, dwarfing theirs. Our culture frightens them, threatening their discipline. More than anything, though, contact frightens them, even in the case of a young Arabic speaker who does not know Farsi.

Borders matter to both countries; they have in many places a semi-sacred quality. Since the Iranians consider the Kurds apostate, perhaps one can say sacred without exaggerating. An unmarried couple traveling together offends and frightens the Iranians; westernized Chinese-Americans signal a way of life banned in North Korea, despite Kim Jong Il's fascination with it. Both countries fear any sign of American espionage at a very fragile moment. What look to us like attractive young professional women and some slightly disoriented if not foolish young free-lancers and their traveling companion, look to the North Koreans and the Iranians as frightening as the bear and I looked to each other that noontime in the woods overlooking Lake Willoughby.

"I Can Forget but I never Forgive"

2009-07-29T19:23:00.000-07:00

"I can forget but I never forgive." Alice B. Toklas' trenchant honesty, as attributed to her by Gertrude Stein, her life partner and "auto-"biographer, reminds us of the difficulty of forgiveness. While we may (not?) cringe at the cynical flippancy of the Toklas/Stein phrase, we all know the dilemma. We can harbor resentments against siblings, parents, friends, long after we still remember clearly the incident we have yet to forgive. How much harder, then, when we remember it all too clearly, or when we can see the offense still playing out before our eyes. How much worse when the transgression happens at the hands of those we need most to trust, because of their power over us.

One obvious case comes to mind. Everyone following the American media the last week has heard about to something approaching the saturation point: Prof. Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates' arrest in his home for disorderly conduct by Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge, MA Police Department.

So much of how we approach this story depends on whom or what we find to forgive or leave unforgiven. Some will have difficulty believing that an Irish-American cop in the metropolitan Boston area can have as lily-white a record on racial profiling and other race-related miscarriages of justice as the Cambridge Police claim applies to Crowley in particular and the department in general. If they have such a terrific record of race relations, why did they need Crowley trained in deprogramming the racist instincts of his fellow officers? And yet, racism pervades the Boston area, Cambridge did something about it, and apparently Crowley did the best of any. Perhaps we really don't have racial profiling here, after all?

Some will find it all too easy to imagine Skip Gates jumping to conclusions, paranoid or not, based on experience or not, about the intentions of the Cambridge police squad descending on his home as he tried to get settled after finding his front door stuck and having to go around to the back door. Some of those will feel empathetic. The President tells a story in his second memoir, The Audacity of Hope, of waiting to meet someone for dinner at an expensive restaurant in Chicago only to have one of the patrons toss his car keys to Obama, then either a law professor at the University of Chicago, a state senator in the Illinois Legislature, or both, assuming that he had the responsibility for valet parking as the only African-American in sight.

Others will feel less kind. Only a very aggressive personality, that case might go, could become senior faculty in African-American Studies at Harvard, and one can all too easily imagine that personality erupting when beset upon by cops of dubious sympathies in the matter of race relations. The fact that such an eruption does not justify arrest accounts for the fact that the police have dropped the charges, without exonerating Gates from the unofficial and all-too-human charge of behaving badly.

Even in a news story, none of whose dramatis personae we have met, we have much to forgive and to attempt to forget. I can claim all of the above sentiments except empathy for a racially-profiled African American based on shared experience. Skip Gates' writing has had an effect on me--I remember for some reason reading Colored People on a bus pulling into Waterbury, CT en route to Virginia--but his reputation within academia resembles that of many who have achieved much and struggled with balancing whence they came and where they have arrived. The same applied to a mentor of mine who grew up white in working-class Philadelphia and bled Yale blue, as the expression goes, by the time I knew and greatly admired him. One needs to forgive them their eccentricities as one forgives and asks forgiveness for one's own. One can all too easily imagine why Sgt. Crowley, as he wrote in his report, found Gates' actions "peculiar," though one has a much harder time getting from eccentricity to disorderly conduct.

The press has made much of the President's invitation of Gates and Crowley to the White House for a beer (not Gates' beverage of choice, apparently) tomorrow. Some have begun to sound a bit cynical about Obama's notion of the "teachable moment." Think about it, though: an African-American president who used to teach at the University of Chicago, an Irish-American cop, and an African-American literary and cultural critic who teaches at Harvard. Think of what that says of the reversals we've seen; and yet the conversation depends on an incident that suggests we haven't gotten so very far, after all, unless one could imagine, say, Larry Summers similarly arrested after having to get in the back door of the President's House during his tenure at Harvard. As a friend noted in a comment on my entry last week, the reversals here have as much to do with class as with race.

One hopes that some true forgiveness and forgetfulness will lie at the bottom of the glass of Blue Moon (pretty good stuff, pace Paul Begala's ignorance) Crowley has, whatever brew Obama prefers, and whatever drink Gates requests. One worries that Gates may not see this as a matter for either forgiveness or forgetfulness just yet. His lawyer, asked earlier this week if his client had given up the notion of a lawsuit, said that that he and Gates had yet to make a decision. One would hope Gates has the Our Father--"and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us"--on his bedside table, but one fears that he has The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, instead.

The Fallacy of the Irish-American Experience

2009-07-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

A Southern, Episcopalian, on-again, off-again girlfriend of mine gave me Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes once as a kind of peace-offering. She assumed that it would speak to my ethnic experience as an Irish-American Roman Catholic. I took it on vacation with me to Ocracoke Island as beach reading, dutifully opened it and made my way through more or less the first fifty pages. I don't remember any distractions--an alliance of dolphins on a fishing run, even a flight of pelicans--drawing me away from the book. I simply remember feeling disgusted by McCourt's shameless exploitation of ethnic stereotypes of his neighborhood and tenement in the South Bronx, particularly his comments on a Jewish neighbor clearly intended to express sympathy and fondness but which to me had the opposite effect. His descriptions of Irish-Americans, including his family and especially his alcoholic father, struck me as no less reliant on stereotype.

This reaction has troubled me over the years, and comes back to me with the news of McCourt's death. McCourt wrote from searing and often bitter personal experience, though leavened with humor, the classic Irish survival mechanism, as for may peoples. One cannot gainsay the veracity of his tale, or its horridness. I read no further than his family's return to Limerick, so I have no right to speak to the tragedy they lived there. I can, however, speak to the effect of my sometime-lover's operating assumption, one shared by the literary community in general and presumably by the enormous readership: that McCourt's book spoke accurately to the Irish-American experience.

I remember as a child that my parents occasionally hired, largely out of pity, a colorful man-of-all-work named Jim Kelly we always called simply "Kelly." Like McCourt's father, he had a drinking problem. He also had a colorful way with words, and I found him and his wild tales of leprechauns and faeries captivating. I have never really understood why Kelly stopped coming around, but have a vague sense that my mother had lost her patience with his drinking and the example he set. On a fairly profound level, I think our experience with Kelly--my feeling charmed by him, my parents' charitable tolerance giving way to disapproval--acts as a precursor to my response to McCourt's writing.

In a course on the Progressive Era I took as an undergraduate, one set of statistics Prof. Harbaugh cited stood out to me above all others. Of all the ethnic groups participating in the massive wave of immigration in the late nineteenth century, three emerged thereafter as the most successful economically: Jews, Irish, and Italians. One might want to argue that my inability to identify with McCourt's experience derives from my growing up in the era in which the Irish-Americans had joined the middle-class, even the upper-middle-class. I saw John Fitzgerald Kennedy elected the first Irish-American and first Roman Catholic President of the United States as a first-grader. McCourt's experience had little relevance to us as we spent Christmas Day at lavish parties over the years at the house of my uncle. He ran a company bought during the depression by his Irish-Catholic father-in-law. The poverty of the McCourt's rarely crossed our radar screens as Irish-Catholic poverty, even at my maternal grandfather's far more modest house. My working-class Irish-Catholic friend's family, far closer in experience to that of the McCourt's, my parents simply dismissed as not "our sort" of people.

Unattractive snobbery aside--or not--here lay the point in a nutshell. My mother's cousin had visited poor cousins in Galway living in cottages through which their chickens regularly ran. My father's family, however, had worked as middle-class professionals at least as early as the period when McCourt's father drank them out of the Bronx and back across the Atlantic. My paternal grandfather worked as a civil engineer in Boston, and a photograph of my great-grandfather I remember from childhood shows a well-dressed man in a suit with a large moustache. The Lynches and my grandmother's family, the O'Briens, struggled early after their arrival, but I do not have the sense that they struggled for terribly long. A photograph taken in my father's house in the 1930's shows the classic "lace-curtain" scene--striped wallpaper, lathe-turned woodwork, lace curtains, a plaster cast of the Venus de Milo, a baby-grand piano with a songbook open on it (my grandfather sang beautifully, though I do not know whether he or anyone else played), and my grandmother presiding over all in an empire-waisted lace-adorned dress, the picture of middle-class self-satisfaction. And that says nothing of the modest beach house in the Irish-American enclave of Hull at Nantasket Beach, near Quincy.

A well-to-do Irish-Catholic resident of a retirement community in Maine where my mother lived for a year joined us for dinner one evening about a year after the release of Angela's Ashes. The book came up, and she and I voiced agreement that the book did not speak to the Irish-American experience as we knew it. It makes me uncomfortable to say this, but I have been protected from the ghastly struggle McCourt and his brothers describe. I do not mean that simply in the sense that I grew up in the era when the Irish-American middle class had established itself. A working-class Irish-American experience remains, perhaps best personified by the Matt Damon-Ben Affleck film Good Will Hunting, set between the worlds of South Boston and Cambridge. My father grew up in more affluent--then, anyway--Dorchester, and my uncle graduated from Harvard. Southie to me stands for recalcitrant racism and willful provincial ignorance. I have never identified with it, never even set foot there.

I mean something more elemental. The centuries-long British misrule of Ireland left in its wake horrific poverty in the Irish countryside, and horrible social injustice throughout. One cannot overlook the fact, however, that under the British an urban middle-class had arisen by the nineteenth century. I do not know why my father's side of the family same, or exactly where from. Lynch (Liaosingh in Irish) has a ubiquity in Ireland not quite on the level of Smith. I feel rage at the facts of the McCourt's life, but at the same time I feel deeply patronized by those who assume McCourt speaks for the Irish-American experience in general, the experience of the second-most affluent of the late-nineteenth century immigrant groups. It is not that more affluent Irish-Americans have not long felt left out at the table of American mainstream acceptance. But in the particularity of the story he tells, McCourt speaks for himself, and those who lived a poverty like his. He does not speak for a more general Irish-American experience in which his family sadly did not participate until he reaped the profits of the success of Angela's Ashes and lived, until his death in the last few days, a life very different from the one on which he originally embarked.

"Hu's on First!?" Semantics and the Sotomayor Hearings

2009-07-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

To help us identify all the players, at least one internet service has provided a seating chart for the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings to consider the president's nomination of 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States, where she would replace retiring Justice David Souter. The seating chart reminds one of the defensive lineup graphics the networks regularly use in the top and bottom halves of the first inning of a baseball game, showing who plays where in the field. Since it generally precedes the throwing of the first pitch, such a graphic does not show Hu's on first, since nobody has reached the bases yet.

The comparison--and the reference to a silly comic routine--seem apt for a number of reasons, not least the wheedling over the demise of white male prerogatives unleashed by the Republicans this week, particularly by their two most visible participants, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina. Graham as much as admitted his role in a losing cause, and seemed not to rule out switching uniforms to join the winning side, citing shrewdly the consequences of elections. Translation: he knows that he's not Hu, and certainly is not on first.

The "Hu's on first!?" gag, of course, pivots on both the unfamiliarity of a Chinese name seventy-five years ago or so, and its homonymity with the English word "who." Hence the exclamation point followed by a question mark. The statement becomes a question if one mistakes a foreign name for an English pronoun.

"Hu's on first!?" comes to mind because Graham and Sessions both fail to see the upside-down, Alice-in-Wonderland quality of their complaints against Judge Sotomayor. Jeff Sessions lost a nomination to a federal judgeship because of comments he made suggesting bias in favor of the Ku Klux Klan and hostile to the NAACP. He can't see that Sotomayor's remarks about her Latina wisdom do not amount to the same egregious, racist error he made, but rather speak to the benefits of diversity. Hu's about to make it to first, and he's steamed.

Likewise the ostensibly more likeable Graham. He tried to turn the tables on Sotomayor's "wise Latina" observation by suggesting that had he made a remark about the superior wisdom of white men, it would have destroyed his political career. He enjoined her with barely concealed frustration to exercise greater care in her public speaking. He misses two points (at least). First, as a Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor would--will--become immune to the discipline of the electoral process. That does not mean she can shoot her mouth, as these hearings will have indelibly reminded her. It simply means that Graham as a politician plays a different role than Sotomayor as a putative Supreme Court Justice.

More important, Sotomayor felt the need to say what she did precisely because white males such as Graham have said precisely what Graham admits--grudgingly?--he cannot any longer say, and said it for too long, in public, anyway. Enough hatred of the ethnic "other" remains in states like Sessions' Alabama and Graham's South Carolina (we could include, of course, Kyl's Arizona, Hatch's Utah, and so on) that we need not imagine too hard what gets said in private. As for Graham, he got picked off first, it's Hu's chance to run the bases, and he wants to do everything he can to hobble her. As though her broken ankle doesn't hobble her sufficiently.

I hope using one of the sillier gags from the history of American comedy as a key for unlocking the inanity of the attack on Sotomayor from the Republicans has served a purpose. As Sen. Klobuchar, Sen. Feingold, and Sen. Franken spoke in detail to her record as a judge on a range of issues, the Republicans directed the vast majority of their attention to a reverse discrimination suit filed by a firefighter who had already won a discrimination case on disability grounds, and one statement made in a speech to law students. "Hu's on first!?" Damned right she is, and the sooner the Republicans accept the changing demographics of our society, the sooner we'll have Supreme Court nomination hearings that don't send one party, at least, back to the dugout with mud on their faces and their uniforms in tatters.

The Unwonderful Land of Or...

2009-07-08T17:29:00.000-07:00

Imagine a scene in a private hospital in a medium-sized city, part of a sprawling string of metropolitan, suburban, and beach communities in the Middle Atlantic region of the United States. Visualize a windowless room perhaps 15' x 8' (5 x 2.7 m), with nine people sitting in a ring, one of those people a candidate for a residency in hospital chaplaincy training. Listen as the first seven to ask questions do so by reading, rote, from a list of questions supplied to the candidate twenty minutes in advance of the interview.

Only the last two interviewers made the assigned questions assigned come alive as interesting, worthy of serious thought, though deadpanned with a lack of affect that left just the barest opening for connection, until the interview had ended. True, one of the others had smiled; she had then fallen behind the mask of impersonality as she read her question with virtually no expression. The candidate, a former academic used to intellectual exchange, found all this affectlessness baffling, and never performed up to ability until the last two, interesting questions. Most baffling of all: the committee seemed to find the candidate's performance baffling, and sub-par, except for the responses to the final two questions.

Now consider the same room about an hour later. The director of chaplaincy services remains, but three new colleagues have joined him. Whereas the first group included, along with the medical professionals involved in training the residents, only two chaplains--the director and the one who asked the interesting question interestingly--the second consisted of nothing but chaplains, two in their thirties, the others in their sixties. Here the script consisted only of the candidate's application, a series of essays-cum-resume that in this case came to about eleven pages. The conversation could not have gone more differently, even though the candidate had a moment of fear at first, wondering if he would find a way to connect with these people. The doubts dissipated in the first five-to-ten minutes, amid a blitz of challenging questions, careful consideration of the responses, and even the occasional bit of laughter. An interesting conversation which ended with the candidate judged to have done well.

The candidate learned the opinions of the two committees after about a forty-five minute wait in the parking garage, the hallway, even the adjacent sidewalk briefly. It felt a bit like the wait after a Ph.D. oral examination. The answer: maybe.

For the candidate, an afternoon in the unwonderful land of or...

The difference between the two experiences--mine, two days ago--makes one wonder a number of things, beginning with whether a residency at that particular hospital would work. A degree of ambivalence still characterizes my thoughts about hospital chaplaincy, even as the opportunity to walk around with a chaplaincy intern fifteen or so years my senior helped me, at least in retrospect, see myself in such a setting, and even imagine a specialty in mental health. Or...

One also has to consider the conservative culture of the region itself. This again speaks to fit, and reminds me of struggles, one considerably more successful than the other, waged in two earlier periods of my life in the same state, though in areas distinctly different from each other and from this one, and neither near my great protectress, the sea. Or...

Then comes the issue that seems most striking and important. The culture of medicine places professionalism ahead of personality, partly as a protective shield against burnout, but also as an extension of the notion of medicine as science. It strikes me as more honest to call it an art practiced with the benefit of scientific knowledge, something a bit different, if not another thing altogether. One strongly suspects people who buy into the scientific model of left-brain dominance.

The culture of ministry, on the other hand, when not given over to the academic practice of theology, tends to encourage contact with the real person seeking consolation or guidance. Ministry requires some of the same persona-as-self-preservation that one sees in medicine, especially in a hospital environment--hence my initial moment in the second interview of wondering how to make contact with the group--but with an enormous and even existential difference. Chaplains, doctors, and nurses all manage a series of critical and uncritical moments aimed at the hope of a successful outcome.

One suspects, though, that a chaplain would find a successful outcome harder to specify, let alone judge. For all the improvisational character of the practice of medicine that leads one to call it an art, chaplaincy draws personalities much more likely to demonstrate right-brain dominance. Chaplains work from training, but also from instinct and faith, from an ability to empathize without losing sight of the patient's--and the patient's family's, or both at once and sometimes against each other's--best interest. Different job description, different skill set, likely to appeal to very differently personalities from those to whom practicing medicine appeals. Or..

When Impatience May not Be

2009-07-01T17:42:00.000-07:00

Patience has never ranked high among my list of virtues. Nor does one think of it as an American trait. So, the switch from media coverage saturated by the Iran election protests, to the coverage of Michael Jackson's death and its aftermath, with a sidebar for those interested in the story of Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC), should have come as no surprise. My inability to let the Iranian story fade from the screen may speak less to patience than stubbornness, but its muted coverage on television simply sent me all the more to the Internet, and particularly the social networks.

One can measure patience in various ways, from one's ability--or not--to watch an entire YouTube video that appears headed nowhere in particular, to one's need to look at as many YouTube videos as appear on one's Facebook page, even if only momentarily. Impatience, you say? No, the patient persistence to learn from the plethora of images awash on the social networking sites, where one must carefully sift through to avoid repetition, unless of course one wants to see a particular event from several angles, as for example, in the death of Neda Agha-Soltan.

What, exactly, do we seek to learn, that the intrusion of pop and political bathos has such power to annoy at least some of us, largely thirty-five and older in my highly unscientific gauge of the responses of my Facebook friends? An idea occurred to me several days ago emailing a former student annoyed with me for my open criticism on my Facebook page of the obsession with a pedophile pop star's death. I watched the Islamic Revolution unfold in 1978-79, and vividly remember Robert MacNeil interviewing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from a suburb of Paris shortly before his tumultuous return to Tehran. PBS had to carry the burden of my interest; but then, as now, one sensed the unfolding of a great historical moment. I felt a great sense of standing for the right of self-determination, though one greatly feared where it would take Iran.

However much one might wish for the success of the current protests, that seems unlikely. For some, quite probably some television producers among them, that justifies taking Iran off the front burner. For those of us who have become fixated on the historic moment of the protests, the unlikeliness of success simply stirs fears of what happens next. If one digs hard enough, the images of beaten students--including one that came to my attention today, a face so grotesquely swollen and worked over that one imagines death came from cerebral hemorrhage long before the beating stopped--and calls for protests and commemorations from Mousavi's website exist.

Two thoughts come to me as framing devices for all this, apart from a certain obsessive fascination I will not deny. First, we have not had an opening into the workings of Iranian society since Ayatollah Khomeini disappeared into an enormous crowd thirty years ago. We've sighted a whale coming up for breath, and we want to take its measure as much as we can before, as much as we might hope otherwise, it disappears again into the deep. To non-specialists such as myself, the existence of an Iranian (not the Lebanese) Hezbollah, the basij paramilitary that Khomeini instigated, and the byzantine plethora of mullah's councils, not to mention the presence of mujahedin insurgents (some apparently the CIA'S dirty work) have all come as news. We knew Iran had a brutal regime that hated us; we didn't know quite how brutal for quite how long, and that they blame us more for providing Iraq with chemical weapons than for the Moussadegh coup in 1953, which they blame more on the British. Iran has only recently come back on our radar screen with this degree of clarity; we now need to make up for lost time.

Second, and perhaps more controversially--though for some, perhaps not--the frightening sense that we have seen this before, but not in Iran, drives our interest. Think of the similarities. An elderly autocrat backs a militant nationalist two generations younger, a man with a fanatical street following, unafraid of inciting violence, whose foreign policy consists of name-calling when it suits him and alliances of convenience, particularly with Russia, when that suits him, and who maintains a constant class warfare, right down to the blatant patronage of the downtrodden for the sake of political loyalty while paying little attention to the state of the economy itself. One can take this too far. Khamenei has greater power than did von Hindenburg; if he falls, a new Supreme Leader or a new theocratic government will emerge, rather than the vacuum Hitler could exploit. Ahmadinejad did not have to invent the basij as Hitler did his brown shirts, and yet his cultivation of their loyalty amounts to much the same thing. One does not expect a world war as the outcome of all this, and yet with Ahmadinejad in power Obama will have a more difficult time keeping Netanyahu's bombers on the ground, and what happens then only the wonks in the military, intelligence, security, and foreign policy apparatuses will want to hazard a guess.

My father never made it out of boot camp in World War II, except to an Army hospital in Atlanta. Still, those of us in my generation, or at least the children of my father's generation have a sense of connectedness to World War II. We never saw Hitler or Roosevelt, but they shaped our parents' lives. My uncle ran a factory that made razor blades for the Army when he couldn't get a contract for their main product, light rifles. We may not face World War III--Iran apparently lacks the capability to force one, at least for now--but we certainly do have in Iran a secular leader if not a religious leader, as well, with dangerous regional ambitions, presiding over a badly fissured country by brutally imposing their will.

The information revolution permits us to watch the resistance to this theo-fascist state. From my perspective, those of us who would brook no distractions to this phenomenon may open ourselves to charges of cultural fascism. Whatever. It does not interest me that cable news ratings have skyrocketed during the Jackson coverage, as Nicholas Kristof pointed out recently on his Facebook page. People are getting killed in Iran in the name of freedom, for calling out that God is great (as they did in 1979) from the rooftops. We are watching events potentially of the importance of the Kristallnacht in 1938. May Mr. Jackson's soul rest in peace, but let's please keep our perspective here. No moonwalk ever mattered as much as the gauntlet Iranians walk every day, and at this moment of fervor, when the regime's hide has cracked, the media should recall that some of us have the patience to stay with the hard stories. Precious few, perhaps, but some. If that makes us cultural fascists or snobs or whatever, so be it.

Neda; or, the Question Suzanne Malveaux Didn't Ask

2009-06-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

This post requires the sort of warning that has preceded the airing of many amateur video clips from Tehran on CNN over the last few days, even those so edited and censored as to make the most disturbing portions of the clip virtually unintelligible, dulling their ability to disturb. In this case, some will find some of my comments on the clip in question and the response to it disturbing. Since such a response would mirror my own reservations about the selectivity of outrage and the lessons we all need to take from the coverage of the Iran election protests, it seems a risk worth taking.

Anyone who has paid any attention at all to the coverage from Tehran over the last ten days knows about or has seen in some version the footage of the death by sniper's bullet of Neda Agha-Soltan, a largely apolitical woman in her mid-twenties engaged to be married and embarking on a career as a cultural tour guide. She apparently got out of her car near the corner of Salehi St. (hence an early mistaken version of her last name on Twitter) because the a/c had broken down in the heat. She, her music teacher, and a couple of people they knew began to join the edges of a rally, about a block from the main body of protesters. One video shows her leading her music teacher away from the direction they'd started to take. Then a gap of unknown length ensues.

The second and best known of the videos begins after a sniper concealed on the roof of a house has shot her in the chest. It shows the music teacher and one of their friends laying her down on the street, where we can already see a pool of her blood, presumably from her exit-wound, and continues as the men try to comfort her. At some point she apparently says "I'm burning, I'm burning," and the men, beginning to sound like so many mourners we have heard in recent years in Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hindi--one could go on and on--exhort her not to leave them.

Then comes the moment that one suspects has made this video the icon it has become, and with it Neda herself. As the music teacher reaches to cup the left side of her face with his right hand, blood begins to stream out of both corners of her mouth and both nostrils, covering her left eye, her right eye open but glazed and uncomprehending. At the conclusion of this tape and another that captures only these last few moments, her head tips over to the right. The hospital to which the men brought her declared her dead that evening. Her life as the symbol of the election protests had only begun.

It has taken a few days for the details of her circumstances to emerge in various sources on the Web, including Wikipedia. A parallel effort of disinformation has emerged as well. An Ahmadinejad supporter had claimed by early Saturday evening ET that Neda and her teacher and friends had staged the whole thing. When her music teacher put his hand to her face, according to this tweet, he actually poured the blood that then appeared on her face. I have a weakness for the crime investigation show NCIS, and did something their Goth forensic scientist has done hundreds of times in countless episodes. I took the video back, again and again, to the moment in the tape when she begins to bleed. I could have written off the Ahmadinejad supporter as a biased crackpot, but something in me wanted certainty, wanted to know that I can trust what I see, that the web cannot play with my emotions helter-skelter without some recourse to verification. In the video the music teacher has nothing in his hand with which to pour anything; the hand in fact reveals nothing but helpless tenderness. The moment in the tape when the blood begins to issue from her mouth and nostrils says all that needs saying about the veracity of her death.

The Ahmadinejad line has shifted. They now argue, in one version, that an Israeli entered the country illegally and shot her to create mischief, and in another that the basij sniper mistook her for the sister of a monafeghin, an outlawed Iranian Marxist mujahedin, executed by the government last year. One fails to see quite how the latter account would justify Neda's murder, unless the sniper's "mistake" issued from some sort of misplaced heroic hatred of all associated with any opposition to the government. One begins to wonder not only why Ahmadinejad thought he could get away with voter fraud on a massive scale, but why he even bothered with the farce of an election in the first place, other than the obvious failure to understand the depth of mistrust and, if not then, certainly now, hatred with which his people view him. Will the protests lead him and Khamenei to abolish all pretense of democratic process?

The death of Neda has become something of an obsession for many of us. Saturday night one got far more hits on Twitter, refreshed at a remarkable speed, using a hashtag that included her name, appended to the phrase "iran election" or not, than if one neglected to use her name. Josh Levs reported this phenomenon on CNN, and I confirmed it on my own computer. In thirty seconds anything from 423 to 2,436 tweets--for one brief moment at the peak--would appear. The protesters had a martyr, Mousavi knew it, and soon the cycle of mourning would begin that Mousavi and his colleagues used to such effect in the Islamic Revolution, though how aggressivly they will use it one cannot yet tell. Neda had become the international symbol that linked all those anywhere following events in Tehran. Her face has become an avatar on Twitter and Facebook. By last evening a touching film appeared, with soft, sad Persian music and the most flattering of the few photos of Neda alive that have surfaced, scarved and unscarved.

Suzanne Malveaux of CNN asked President Obama at his news conference yesterday if he had seen the images of Neda's death, and if so, how had he responded. He replied that he had, and that he found them "heartbreaking." And here I have to pose the question for which you have received fair warning. Why Neda? We have seen so many corpses these last few days, so much blood, most of it on men. I have begun to find it all numbing, to the point that I don't know how I would have answered Malveaux's question, which struck me as rather sensationalist and cloying. Clearly Neda's image has stuck because it comes with a narrative, albeit a partial one that has needed some filling in to complete. At the center of the narrative, unmistakably, blood flows. Somehow flowing blood, not the stains on a dead man's shirt, but the evidence of lungs still just barely alive pumping out blood with each last labored breath, grips us by the emotional privates and says "Watch. Watch again. And again." Beautiful young women shouldn't die this way.

I just wonder. Does Neda's story say anything at all about the reach of feminism in Iran, or even here? After all, in the video we see a young woman in a short chador and blue jeans, a professional woman in her leisure time. In some Islamic countries she couldn't have aspired to work as a cultural guide, nor gotten away with the blue jeans. On the other hand, though she is hardly beautiful in her struggle, we see her beauty from photographs of her that have appeared. Sadder because beautiful? Have we made that little progress?

Mousavi's wife wears a chador or a kind of double-scarf combination in all her appearances on video, by herself, with friends and associates, and with her husband. She certainly has every right to the chador, as do all Iranian women, indeed all Muslim women anywhere. I used to admire my Muslim students who would come to class with beautiful silk or wool scarves, making many of their classmates look as though they'd just gotten out of bed--as they had--or come from the gym. I just wonder if we accept the notions behind the protection of women by the veil, the dangers of their beauty and the fragility of their sex, in lavishing on the one unmistakably beautiful Iranian victim whose death we have watched on our computers and blackberries and i-phones and televisions the attention of the last few days, and the status of martyr.

I, for one, do not feel entirely comfortable either with the numbing of affective overload from trying to absorb all that has come through the electronic media, or with the focus, my own included, on this one young woman whose car a/c broke down at a particularly inauspicious moment in a brutally dangerous place. I mourn her, but do not want that mourning to distract us from all those others we need to mourn, whose friends did not happen to have an i-phone or whatever to film the last moments of their lives, and whose sex and physical appearance might not have inspired as much pity in us as did Neda's.

Tweet, tweet, wiki, wiki, Facebook Youtubes revolution!

2009-06-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

I swear the world underwent astounding changes in 2007, the year I spent in a monastery. I knew very little about Youtube before I entered Mepkin Abbey as a postulant in February of that year. I don't remember learning of Facebook until after my departure ten months later. My serious introduction to both came at the hands of the Obama campaign. I now access Youtube fairly regularly for clips or speeches I missed or cannot find on television or network websites. Seventy-seven Facebook friends later, that networking site has become a welcome source of contact with former students and far-flung friends and colleagues. Twitter I resisted at first introduction, again thanks to the Obama campaign. Any of you who have read this blog before can imagine the obstacle a 140-word limit poses for me. Gertrude Stein distinguished Hemingway and Fitzgerald very aptly. Hemingway, she thought, wrote in sentences; Fitzgerald wrote in paragraphs. I never put on a blue blazer, striped tie and poplins to watch For Whom the Bell Tolls or to read a Nick Adams story with a glass of scotch in hand.

Which leaves Wiki. In a twist of irony I'd find wonderful in other circumstances, I owe this discovery to Mir Hossain Moussavi, who also gets credit for my decision to embrace Twitter, after all. An article I read on RealClearPolitics.Com the other day convinced me we had gotten a superficial and distorted version of events, the players, and even the stakes in Iran from the majority of media coverage. "Rick," said Claude Rains to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, "I'm shocked! shocked!..." Since then I've joined Moussavi's Wiki blog, Juan Cole's blog as suggested by my Facebook and Twitter correspondent (Him Tarzan, me fan) Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, and watched as much Youtube footage from Teheran as I could find without repeating myself.

This expansion of the sources of information leaves the obvious and oft-tackled question of the quality and reliability of said information. I have gotten the best-researched, most thoughtful and, one wants to say, useful information, from conventional media and academics, though often from the internet. With this caveat: what use can we make of it, exactly? Can you imagine the patience or even purposeful neglect and compartmentalization the fluidity of the situation in Iran must require of Pres. Obama? I have always valued staying informed, but I wonder how many of us--a few dozen, at most, definitely not counting myself--really understand the dynamics of the election in Iran and its aftermath.

Moussavi competently ran Iran's government, the secular apparatus, at least, during the Iran-Iraq war, as widely reported. He came to power as one of the radical faithful of the Islamic Revolution, in the circle of Ayatollah Khomeini. He counts as a close ally, though perhaps one of convenience, one of his successors, Imam Rafsanjani, characterized by our press twenty years ago as the hothead of all hotheads. Rafsanjani, an opponent of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and one who had hoped--and may still--to attain Khamenei's position, has apparently withdrawn from Teheran, the secular capital, to Qom, the religious capital, if you will. There he has apparently taken over the back-room maneuvering aimed at achieving either a recount or a nullification of last week's election. Or, perhaps, his real agenda: the ouster of Khamenei.

That much I've gleaned in a few days. What I haven't gleaned I find more troubling. We have demonized Ahmadinejad in the west, and for good reason, as with any other Holocaust-denier who wants to erase the state of Israel off the map, as he has put it. Here comes Moussavi opposing him, a one-time radical revolutionary, apparently backed by Rafsanjani, whose headlines in the the western press used to read rather like Ahmadinejad's now. Moussavi seems "mellower," and certainly more willing than Ahmadinejad to engage the west in general and Pres. Obama in particular. All good things.

I just have one question. Glutted as we we can become with the information we can get from traditional news sources distributed and complemented by the web and its own original sources, and struck with the sympathetic reaction one would need a hard heart not to have when faced with the images of truncheoning cops and bleeding corpses (but what did they do to merit the truncheons and bullets, and who set whose fires to whose property?), what judgements can we reasonably reach? One cannot help but admire the courage and restraint of the bulk of the protesters, not to mention their stamina. One senses something more genuine than lip-service in Moussavi's call for peaceful demonstrations. One can hardly want Ahmadinejad, or even Khamenei, at this point, to survive all this. But what then?

Flashback: 1979. Robin MacNeil of PBS did a breathtaking series of interviews with Khomeini from Paris as the Islamic Revolution unfolded in Iran, resulting in the deposition and departure of Shah Reza Pahlavi. The Carter administration, against the judgement of the intelligence establishment (up to its armpits in collaboration with Pahlavi, its creation if not its monster), stood back, permitting the Iranian people self-determination. To many of us, this seemed the only moral thing to do. Even if we could have foreseen what would ensue, we could hardly have done much else. 1979 seems perhaps a slightly overdrawn comparison--whatever changes in Iran next week or next month will almost certainly not match 1979 in the scale of transformation introduced. I also realize that in 1979 we had in Khomeini the enemy of a "friend." I wonder, though, if we will have to use quotation marks again, if we declare prematurely that Moussavi, the enemy of our enemy Ahmadinejad, might in some sense become our friend?

Obama, Secretary Clinton, National Security Advisor Gen. Jones, and anyone else who matters knows this. Nicholas Kristof and his colleagues at The New York Times and throughout the mainstream media know this. But do those of us getting Wiki posts and Twitter tweets and Facebook pokes after watching Youtube clips fall into the trap of embracing those for whom we feel sympathy simply for that reason? Which gets us to the heart of the quintessential question about the web--when does so much information become both too much, and not nearly enough? The answer, of course, lies in if and how one uses it. The web wonderfully increases our reach as humans, but does it do anything to deepen our grasp?

Who cares about health care?

2009-06-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

Allow me one assumption that some might consider generous. Nobody engaged in the health care debate wishes anyone else ill, at least not literally. They may, however, wish for a system in which others would have no way to treat their illnesses, or those of their loved ones. They simply don't actively wish anyone ill. As you can see, this does not confer quite the degree of humanity upon them one might have thought at first blush.

Care. The word comes into English via the Latin verb "curo, curare," meaning to care for or about, applied in any number of ways. One can, for instance, care for art objects, as curators do; or souls, the job of priests, to whom we used to refer in the Catholic Church as curates. Doctors care for patients, and when one says that one cares for someone in a romantic relationship, the statement implies a similar level of concern for the other's well-being. So an affection can quickly become a worry, a concern: a care, as in "the cares of the world." And that kind of care usually involves money these days, at least at some point.

The health care debate illustrates the multiplicity of meanings we attach to the word care. We have almost forgotten that we got into this debate to protect people's health, to alleviate their cares and allow them access to proper care. Or so one would hope. Instead, some would make this into an argument solely about finances and profits, taxes and deficits. Apparently the access to affordable health care does not count among the truths some folks hold as self-evident.

Put another way, the cares associated with preserving the incomes of the haves trump the health care of the have-nots, or even the have-not-quite-enoughs, a group which has perhaps reached the critical mass necessary to force a resolution to the health care crisis, at least the insurance side of it. Some of us, nonetheless, continue to lack the imagination, or willingness, to understand the cares of those who can't afford health insurance, or can't get it because of precisely the pre-existing condition for the treatment of which they most desperately need it.

One irony looms large here. Our financial crisis has not only made health care reform more necessary; it has probably made it more possible. The crisis has, after all, made the haves feel more vulnerable than they have felt in years, and made it hard for them to ignore the general need. As soon as they consider how we will pay for a genuinely fair health care system, however, that very vulnerability makes them more concerned about their cares than about others' care.

Let me play the anti-Jonathan Swift here and make a latter day modest proposal: that we either grant the equivalence of access to health care and enfranchisement and follow that equivalence to the logical conclusion of a health care bill by whatever means, or stop pretending that we aspire to any unalienable right but selfishness. We must pay for it somehow, obviously; but if we count nickels and dimes till the cows come home, we will nickel-and-dime people out of something far more important than nickels and dimes: their health, and with it their human dignity. And we may find ourselves with a lot more financial cares than we have even now, to boot.

Time is no healer

2009-06-03T19:31:00.000-07:00

President Obama speaks tomorrow in Cairo. The Muslim world seems to expect a great deal of him. Some commentators worry that he cannot possibly meet their expectations without offending their leaders. He sees a way forward, but can he point it out in enough detail that others can go there with him? Only a man with absolute confidence in the power of negotiation and compromise would consider the constellation of suspicions and misunderstandings at stake here capable of solution.

One wants to look forward, but Ahman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden have issued tapes in the last two days. The competing voices of reason and hate, of charity and fear take me back to two events, one seared in the memories of all of us, the other much less well known. They represent as bookends the problems Obama takes on as he ascends the stage at Cairo University.

Even though all of those reading this blog remember 9/11, all necessarily remember it somewhat differently. I remember a vague awareness of students and staff gathered around a large-screen tv in a student lounge visible through the blinds of my office window as I spoke with a student. When we finished, I joined them, but could not grasp what I heard and saw, that one of the towers had fallen. I simply didn't believe it, using the cloud of debris as the excuse for my recalcitrance, until the second tower fell.

Less than two hours later, in the chapel, we tried to make sense of our fears, our sorrow, our anger, though I remember feeling sad, and resentful of those who expressed anger, though that resentment seems churlish at this remove. Most of all, I remember a student who spoke from the podium, tears on her face, her voice trembling, one of our many Muslim students, a Pakistani. "Please," she pleaded, to an audience that knew and loved her but which suddenly frightened her, "don't blame all Muslims for this."

The second event happened five years earlier. A band of vaguely Islamist Algerian insurgents kidnapped and later killed seven Trappist monks from the monastery at Tibhirine. The monks had fostered dialogue with their Muslim neighbors, gradually allaying the suspicions of many that they intended to proselytize. They performed acts of charity; one of the monks ran a medical clinic of sorts. A much beloved figure in the town, he died in the attack.

Many in the Trappist order and some in the Vatican hierarchy had for years doubted the wisdom of their presence, and some went so far as to consider the abbot a dangerously inflexible zealot. To those, the sad ending at Tibhirine came as no surprise, if an utterly avoidable tragedy. The monks at Tibhirine had tried to do the impossible, in this view, in so doing had touched a nerve they could not help but touch, with results all too easy to predict and too hard to repair. The last I knew the monastery at Tibhirine remains abandoned by the Trappists.

President Obama has taken an enormous gamble: that the world, particularly those who sit on the Christian/Jewish/Muslim divide--not to mention all the fissures within those only apparent monoliths--can learn to see each other without hatred, fear and suspicion. It means learning to know each other in the broken mirrors of social division and religious difference, repression, chauvinism, fundamentalism and realpolitik. It requires an enormous good faith effort on the part of many people who do not feel they can afford it, or feel on the contrary that they can make a mockery of it at will. It requires that the Rush Limbaughs of the world see themselves in the al-Zawahiris and bin Ladens. It requires the vast majority of us at neither extreme to find a way to isolate the extremists and wrest from them the power they have to sustain the current dangerous standstill, while the precipice erodes beneath us.

More than anything, Obama's gamble requires that we learn to remember in order to forget. 9/11 and Tibhirine teach us what mistrust can lead us to do and what fear follows in the wake of hatred. We must learn to unlearn that cycle. If, as T.S. Eliot wrote in The Dry Salvages, "time is no healer," we must learn ultimately to discard the broken mirrors and, as he says a few lines later, paraphrasing the words of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, "[f]are forward." Obama understands this; let us hope he can persuade others of his wisdom.

Identity politics and the culture of narcissism

2009-05-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

President Obama has nominated the first Latina--nobody remembers Benjamin Cardozo anymore--to fill Justice David Souter's Supreme Court seat. Fortunately Sonia Sotomayor has very impressive credentials, and apparently enough Bronx moxey to have a chance at offsetting the influence of her fellow New Yorker, Justice Antonin Scalia, and perhaps at persuading Justice Anthony Kennedy to join 5-4 majorities against rather than with Chief Justice Roberts, Scalia, and Justices Alito and Thomas. And did I--need I--mention the goodwill Obama has secured in the Latino community, not to mention the velvet-lined coffin he's handed conservative Senate Republicans--i.e., everybody but Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins--by giving them a candidate they cannot possibly have wanted but whose community they cannot afford to alienate?

To all of which I want to say "huzzah," but my conscience nags at me. I thank the President in his wisdom for obviously having a very impressive short list comprised entirely of women. In a sense Obama has treated this nomination as finding a replacement as much for Sandra Day O'Connor as for Souter, and laudably so.

Yet one of the cases likely to give the Republicans whatever ammunition they feel they can let fly involves an affirmative action case involving a fire department exam no minorities passed in New Haven, CT, a city I know well, with a history of racial division, suspicion and violence. The whole scenario sickens one, a kind of replay of the absurd charge of "elitism" slung at Obama by the McCain campaign. Substitute Sotomayor's Princeton and Yale for Obama's Columbia and Harvard: the affirmative action generation has come to power. And what case of Sotomayor's most annoys the Republicans but an affirmative action case; how poetically perfect, how cynically rich. Now, at least, we know what really frightened conservatives about affirmative action: that it would work.

And yet that nagging conscience won't quite leave me in peace. Think of the constituencies either considered or mentioned in the leadup to this nomination, and even in its aftermath. Women's groups would not have forgiven him for choosing a male. The LGBT community wanted one of two openly lesbian lawyers from Stanford, one of whom, Kathleen Sullivan, long ago impressed me as a guest commentator on PBS. She had my "vote." The Latino community had a couple of contenders, though White House aides carefully pointed out that published short lists did not necessarily look like the real thing--although in the end they actually did, just longer. Pragmatism weighed in Sotomayor's favor, and the usual dash of Obama bravado, daring the Republicans to go after her, knowing they cannot, except suicidally.

I believe in affirmative action, and salute what it has accomplished for all whom it has benefitted (that would include society most of all), and have great respect for the pioneers and second and third waves of the women's movement and LGBT activists. I simply can't escape a certain feeling of unease at the chorus of "Mine! Pick mine, Mr. President. (... or I may not vote for you again, you bastard...) " that has attended this process like a stage-whisper.

Obviously it matters that he picked Sotomayor, that she had the credentials that he could pick her, just as it would have mattered had he picked Kathleen Sullivan, not so much because of her credentials but because she achieved it all as an openly lesbian woman. To me, it matters most that we put aside the politics of narcissism and recognize Judge Sotomayor for the most important symbolism she represents: the exaltation of the outsider proclaimed on the statue that guards the harbor in her (and Ginsburg and Scalia's) home city. If the other five Catholics and the two Jews in the Supreme Court speak to the nineteenth-century wave of immigration dominated by Eastern European Jews, Irish and Italians, Sotomayor speaks to the battles fought in the twentieth century that carry into the twenty-first. Let those who see their face in hers reflect on the importance that other faces bring to the table; but let the others recognize that all outsiders benefit when one outsider gains entrance to the highest court in the land.

Climate change and aesthetics

2009-05-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

A writer I know through my job came in to see me today. The conversation turned, for reasons having nothing to do with Pres. Obama's announcement of new standards for auto emissions--though the subject did come up eventually--to cars. Chrysler 300s, in the interest of full disclosure. My writer friend has one, as does a dear colleague of mine, and, for that matter, as did then-Senator Obama until, realizing the liability it would become in a national race, he traded it in for a Ford Escape hybrid. Again, in the interest of full disclosure.

Even fuller disclosure: I lack the appropriate taste, apparently, to appreciate such cars. They smack of illicit display, ill-wrought gain, greed, insecurity--what we used to call, though more with Corvettes and Jags in mind, penises-on-wheels but also on steroids. In a word, or two, bad taste. Call me a snob.

Paul gave me some insight into why some people like them, describing it as a redneck thing, meaning a culture that includes him (and my dear colleague, but obviously not the President, whose liking for them would seem to have more to do with the phenomenon of Cadillacs in black culture) and definitely not me. Not that either Paul or I can afford, say, a Prius, which he finds ugly and I find fascinating, or a Volt, which even he finds snazzy.

Paul's comment stuck with me as I read at lunch of how folks in rural parts of the country will have a hard time affording that undiluted icon of redneck culture, the pickup truck, especially large ones, except for their businesses. Obama's reform of the auto industry will change the aesthetics of the American road. We will see more eccentric designs like the Smart car, fewer appeals to our baser instincts of ostentation. Mind you, Chryslers 300s and Ford F-150s will stay on the road till they die, hopefully soon, but Pres. Obama has given new life not only to the careers of automotive engineers, especially those with ideas about batteries and hydrogen and such, but also to car designers.

One wonders where the ripples from all this will go. Will opulence in clothing become passe? Though a largely nostalgic part of me hopes not--along with the Gauthier's and Lagerfelds of the world, not to mention Michelle Obama's American designers, all of whom one suspects will survive financially--the notion of down-sizing cars suggests a new era of rational modesty, or at least a hint in that direction. Imagine the audacity of it, to use one of the President's favorite words.

Think of it in retailing terms as the ultimate add-on, that suggestion a retail clerk makes after you've decided to buy what you really wanted in the first place, except this time the add-on really does you some good rather than merely pad the retailer's cash-register. In this case we have, first, personal austerity in the wake of the meltdown; second, smaller, lighter more fuel-efficient cars the automakers will have to find a way to make inexpensive to appeal to the new austerity, and finally, clothing and all sorts of other "necessities" trimmed down to accommodate newly strapped-in budgets.

If Pres. Obama seems radical to some, his radicalism smacks loudly of good old fashioned desert monastic values like humility and modesty, what he often references as the Kansan common-sense of his grandparents. And yet as I write this an image comes to me of a well-known and very diminutive Taiwanese Buddhist nun tooling around New Haven, CT in the early '90s with joyful abandon and questionable driving skill in her car--an outsize and even then quite old black Cadillac convertible. Maybe this change won't come as easily as it might seem, after all.

Where have all the soldiers gone?

2009-05-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

The Army has announced an alarming rise in the suicide rate of its soldiers, surpassing the percentage of suicide deaths in the general population. This news comes not long after a numerically much less significant spate of suicides by people affected by or--potentially or in fact--criminally implicated in the collapse of the financial markets, both in the United States and in Europe, as well as other places perhaps, less well reported.

The literally suicidal choices of these two seemingly unrelated groups of people--what social scientists would refer to as "cohorts"--raise disturbing questions, not so much about the eternal enigma of why (often very "successful") people commit suicide, though we cannot avoid that issue altogether, as about what we think of suicide in the abstract and suicides in the particular.

In the spring of 1976, I had lived in a psychiatric hospital in Charlottesville, VA for about three months. My psychiatrist, a month or so before my release, had made me the roommate of a brilliant and profoundly disturbed high school student, on the theory that I could counter-balance the influence on A... of an equally brilliant and just as disturbed patient who believed herself an avatar of St. Theresa of Avila. He thought if I could play chess with A... and befriend him I could pry him away from St. Theresa. I suspect he knew I could not function in their league--either in terms of psychosis or sheer intellectual brilliance--but perhaps felt he had no other cards to play.

And so I became a pawn in a very deadly game that ended one night when A... took advantage of a graduate psychology student intern's laxness in locking down the facility, walked less than a mile, hid himself in the bushes by a railroad siding, and waited for the freight train that came through at about 10:15 every evening. Coming home from the Fine Arts Library--I left the hospital a couple of weeks later to resume my studies and already had some freedom to come and go--I probably crossed the railroad tracks within a few hundred yards of where A... awaited the freight train.

I remember my own numbness and inability to express any coherent response when the news finally came; A...'s always taut and distracted face, and his voice, tired and strained past all imagining for a fifteen year-old; the volume of Sartre on his bedside table, his attempt to find a philosophical handbook for what the pain in his mind and soul led him inexorably to do; the pathetic and humiliating ease with which he would beat me at chess. And of course the death watch of my shrink, his staff, and the disgraced student intern, hoping beyond hope until the news came that despite an all-out police search along those tracks--he'd made an earlier attempt in more or less the same place before entering the hospital under commitment by his parents--a freight engineer had stopped with far too little warning. A...'s body lay, a grisly mess on the tracks. Beyond that we heard no further details.

My point in all this, though, concerns a meeting we had the next morning for all patients and staff. I remember very little, dumb with sleeplessness and the emptiness of it all, as it felt to me at the time, the inarticulable elusiveness of it. This much, however, I recall very clearly, because it finally allowed me to feel outrage, not at A..., but at those who would judge him. A patient from another team--one of the alcoholics, if memory serves, which it may not--a woman in her late thirties, rose and in shrill tones of deeply moral offense declared A... and all suicides cowards. Empathy, pain, the tragedy of losing a brilliant young mind, all took second place for her to the immorality of cowardice. Her argument, laced with a bit of rear-pew theologizing, ignited me, though I do not recall what I said, or even whether I said it in the meeting itself, though I believe I did, and forcefully. I could not say anything intelligible about the death itself, but I had plenty to say about those who would judge it, and that became my comment on the death----my defense of my roommate's courage by the indirect means of impugning anyone else's right to assert otherwise.

This story seems relevant in these days of mounting suicides among those schooled in courage, tested--perhaps too much--by fear. I felt another sort of outrage at a story of a young soldier on suicide watch identified for all to see by an orange police vest, and by his lacking a belt, shoelaces, or a tie, not to mention a soldier's badge of honor, his gun. Aside from the gruesomely counter-productive effect of such treatment, it reminds me that one of the great tragedies of suicide lies in our fear of it, our cowardice in facing the terror of it, our unwillingness to reach down, imagine the desperation, the loss of identity--the reason most often given to explain the suicides of the rich and powerful--that would drive one to overcome all one's strongest instincts of personal protection, family ties, and love of life, and to have the self-possession to plan and carry out the dispossession of self by whatever means.

It takes a certain ruthlessness, after all. Think of that freight engineer who saw A... and knew he had no chance to stop the train in time, distraught while talking to the police; think of Heath Ledger's family and friends, and the pain the release of the Batman film must have brought them. Think, think, as though the suicide deserves blame for heartlessness, when all these horrible details of the aftermath serve merely to distract us from the deeply disturbing reality of the deed itself. Soldiers, of all people, whose bravery we can hardly doubt--unless we blame war for unmanning them of their courage (I have seen no breakdown of the suicides by gender)--must give us pause in our litany of blame.

I suspect we shy away from associating courage with suicide because we have lionized courage as a virtue. The idea of a courageous suicide seems hideously oxymoronic. Soldiers, who have seen so much horror and faced it, know better than others how to face it. And yet for so many of these--the warriors who whether we like it or not fight battles on our behalf, lose limbs in the name of liberty, properly understood or no--reaching down into the most frightening corners of themselves and emerging out the other side with an answer none of us can bear seems their only option. This fact alone might give us profound pause the next time we want to shirk the responsibility of understanding and indeed respecting the desperate composure of one who leaves this world in a manner we cannot intellectually accept or morally compass.

More than all those

so what exactly did joe biden get wrong?

2009-05-05T18:46:00.000-07:00

From the media flurry, one would think the Vice-President really put his foot in it this time. Protect kids and loved ones by keeping them in safe places unexposed to a flu virus that changes names as often as it changes its microbiology? How could the great Senator Amtrak say such a foolish thing as his boss's administration seeks to dampen hysteria about the nascent pandemic?

While the mainstream media grappled with that line of thought, some admitting that the White House found Biden's honest humanity hard to criticize, a friend of mine and I went to the zoo with no thought of the flu on our minds, at least not mine. The relevance to the swine flu pandemic of our afternoon in the not-so-wilds of Asheboro, NC--though they make an admirable effort--occurred to me only in retrospect.

The flu and the zoo intersect over an issue that struck me at about the third exhibit we reached, the mountain lion's. Mountain lions range over a territory of anything from ten to over a hundred square miles, and this somnolent, languorous cat stretched out in front of us had a hillside of perhaps 1,500 square feet, maybe a bit more. Apparently zoo animals live longer on average than their counterparts in the wild. One can see why from that sleeping mountain lion. With nowhere to run and no need to hunt, think of all the time to sleep.

From exhibit to exhibit we saw some version of the same problem. Perhaps as someone who lived in monastic enclosure for a year in a Trappist monastery this issue appears a bit differently to me than to someone who has not had that admittedly unusual experience. The seals and sea lions have a lovely replication of a rocky coast, but it quickly became obvious that the harbor seals swim laps in a very repetitive pattern, with a wrinkle tossed in every few laps or so. The grizzly and polar bears showed hardly more energy than the mountain lion, in even smaller confines for animals, especially in the case of polar bears, capable of thousand-mile traverses in the Arctic. The elk, bison, rhinos and antelope have much more wide open spaces, but then why did the rhino insist on working the very edge of the field in a straight line along the fence?

In case this sounds like a jeremiad against zoos, in which case it would have very little to do with the Vice-President's "gaffe," we felt privileged to exchange what seemed to us reciprocally intelligent stares with the gorilla silverback, the most moving moment of the day for me. As my friend put it, when the lioness looked at us she saw dinner; the gorilla looked at us as we look at each other, with an intelligence very like ours. One never knows at what point one merely romanticizes animals, but one sensed a being behind the furry mask of his face, and a self-possession, indeed a self, we did not see elsewhere.

And yet the issue came to a disturbing climax for me a few minutes later, after we'd left the gorillas and seen the giraffes and zebras. Tucked in between violent outbursts of noise from the baboons up the hill, we stumbled on the chimpanzees. All seemed well enough until the alpha male sat down at one corner of the exhibition's plexiglass window, directly in front of a couple of families with small children. At a ninety-degree angle to the window, he began banging his right shoulder against the plexiglass, again and again, psychotically repetitive and aggressive, making eye contact with no one. Chimps, apparently, fight wars, the only primate to share that unlovely distinction with us. They throw things ranging from feces to rocks to sticks, and the plexiglass has a long crack and a sizable hole where Hondo the alpha wrought his damage. A guard told us of the precautions one must take to enter their living quarters, a privilege he once declined.

Even the chimps' great champion, Jane Goodall, documents their potential for homicidal nastiness, so one cannot attribute it entirely to living in imposed enclosure. And yet Hondo and his band want something we all want, something the Vice-President wants: safety combined with freedom. Joe Biden has feedom, but right now doesn't feel safe. Hondo--and the silverback, the mountain lion, even the alligators for whose beauty my friend's eye has an appreciation that evades mine--has safety, but would, perhaps, give it up in an instant for freedom.

Perhaps: because one wonders, frightened and angry as his behavior Sunday seemed, whether Hondo would know what to do with freedom. Joe Biden knows freedom, and resents having to put it on hold in the interests of safety; Hondo resents enforced safety, too. Perhaps only because he represents an evolutionary rung so close to ours do we see his behavior as more evidently sad and disturbing than the graceful lap-swimming of the seals.

And yet that seems precisely the point. We hate having to worry about whether our kids can go to school or our mates should fly in airplanes. One hopes the pandemic will abate, and perhaps too smugly assumes it will, while recognizing the tragic consequences it has already had for those who have lost family members. For most of us, as hopefully for the Vice-President, it will prove temporary, a frightening inconvenience, but little more than that. Hondo does not have such prospects, and has sufficient intelligence to see something out there--in his case, us, rather than the flu--as a threat and irritant. And, sitting there carrying someone's old blue sweatshirt like a shopping bag, he feels just as annoyed in his sense of--what, helplessness? or just plain chimpish petulance?--as does the second-ranking man in the United States government, for reasons that may have something to do with each other, after all.

A case of misdirection?

2009-04-27T15:42:00.000-07:00

Left and right. We all learn them as directions as children, though some of us need--no names here--"No, the other left," on occasion, middle-age novices in modern dance classes, for instance. We graduate as young adults to a sense of left and right as designating political positions. At this point the directional takes on the moral. Opposition no longer means the pull of one foot against the other, but the elevation of one set of propositions over another to a kind of truth value. We so easily forget the absurdity of such adversarial thinking, as though only those on the right respect "family values." Do leftists not have families that they value? Or the assumption that the left has a monopoly on LGBT issues. What about the Log Cabin Republicans, their current invisibility in Republican debate notwithstanding? And we won't begin to try and unravel, let alone map, any meaningful notion of left and right in the Catholic Church. Stay tuned on that one.

Another way in which we use left and right: the notion that the left brain and the right brain function differently. The participants and audience at a lecture/demonstration at Duke Divinity School yesterday essentially posited left-brain thinking as critical, skeptical thought, and right-brain activity as a willingness to accept felt phenomena uncritically. Certainly these models have some utility--we know what we mean when we say left- or right-brained--but they risk fostering a kind of clannishness, an "if you are not for me you are against me" mentality that, for all its biblical origins, divides us as unnecessarily as expectations about the taste of green eggs and ham.

What about those, myself included, who struggle to balance left- and right-brained thinking in our own perspectives? What you get, for example, when you mix an academically-trained mind with a spiritual longing that has come more and more to the fore in my thinking over the last ten years or so, with visible roots so much further back. The academic, left-brained side sometimes looks more like the interloper than the dominant paradigm, memories of myself poring through the dictinoary at age eight notwithstanding. One can pretty easily and cogently argue that the fault in this division lies with the way the educational system validates left- over right-brainedness as more reliable and therefore somehow less scary.

And then we have President Obama. A left-brained pragmatist who reads letters from real people and very right-brainedly responds to them himself--unless, of course, you see that gesture left-brainedly as reflecting pure calculation, while some right-brainedly take it at face value as an expression of empathy, an extension of his hanging onto his BlackBerry (as right-brained as you can get in the Oval Office--text-message your friends in Chicago?) And yet we can see his ruthlessness in dealing with people such as Rev. Wright, very left-brained, after a high-risk attempt to defend Wright, arguably right-brained with a bit of left-brained pedagogy thrown in for good measure. Notice that we haven't even addressed the thorny issue of whether his policies place him on the left, as some on the right claim, on the right, as some on the left claim, or in the middle, which seems to make so many people uncomfortable, at the same time that he has an approval rating in the 60s. Will someone please explain to me why this kind of jumble doesn't make perfect sense, as an expression of the fact that none of us, to paraphrase the president's role model, Abraham Lincoln, fits any label all the time?

So, do we scrap the categories of left and right? A lot of dancers, not to mention drivers, will get very badly hurt if we do, our moral landscape will seem utterly inscrutable--though how many find it scrutable at the moment remains an open question--our awareness of the range of ways in which we perceive the real and apparently real will become muddled, and our politics will, of all things, lose its center of gravity. Left and right function as balancing principles; imperfectly though they fulfill their function, we need the bearings they give us. If only we could learn to take the process of getting our bearings a bit less seriously, it all might seem a little less important, a little less worth the bickering and the name-calling and the posturing.