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

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

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

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

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

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

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..."

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.