They Endure

The last words of The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s tale of aristocratic family disintegration and underclass survival, kept running through my mind as I flew home last week. “They endured,” he wrote of Dilsey, the matriarch of the black family that had served the Comptons for generations and witnessed the white family’s self-destruction. I was trying to make sense of my short visit to Burma (officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar), and those two words seemed to offer a clue. The Burmese have endured half a century of one of the world’s most repressive military governments, one that brutally crushed any dissent and created an Orwellian surveillance network that kept its aptly named Insein Prison overflowing. Actually, life hadn’t been that great before: Burma was ravaged by Japanese and Allied fighting in World War II, which followed a century of British rule, when the “white man’s burden” was carried on the brown man’s shoulders.

Last year, “the generals” shifted gears. Without explanation, they loosened their harsh rein and opened up the country to the outside world. The speculation is they need both hard currency and a counterweight to China. People in Burma talked more freely than I had expected, but their answer to any question about the future was a fatalistic, “We don’t know.” As a tourist I went where I was told and saw what I was meant to see, but still I carried away a deep respect for the resilience of a people who endure.

Traveling Man

When I travel to new places, I become increasingly impressed with my own ignorance, a trait I normally like to keep under wraps. It isn’t just that, to get where I’m going, I stand in long lines like a sheep, pass through machines that penetrate my body, and sleep sitting up. Far more unsettling is that, in the comfort of my armchair back home, I had a clear understanding of the world, which was delivered to me in books, newspapers, my computer. Then I ventured “out there” and discovered that I didn’t have a clue. For every single thing I knew turns out to have been a projection I imposed on a world that is too vast, diverse and messy for me to grasp. I think we all do this. If we didn’t create a subjective framework to order the world around us, we would be bombarded by the chaos, much as the autistic children I once taught felt besieged by the stimuli that came unfiltered to their minds. Likewise, when I landed in Burma on a journey I hope to write about this week, I encountered a world of colors, smells, sights and ideas that overwhelmed me. I had left everything I “knew” back in my armchair. I had to take the country on its terms, not mine, and I didn't begin to understand it. Travel forces us out of our smug isolation and challenges our preconceptions. That’s why Hilary Clinton’s 900,000 miles traveled and 112 countries visited is not a statistic; it’s a secretary of state’s job description.

Coming Home

Having just returned from two weeks in a country that is tentatively emerging from 50 years of secret government, it was unsettling to arrive home to a nation that sometimes seems headed in the other direction. Two cases in point: (1) by the predictably partisan 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court’s majority dismissed a challenge to a Bush-era law that gives the federal government broad powers of secret surveillance over its own citizens; and (2) it took Rand Paul, of all people, to get the administration to address the limits of targeting Americans for assassination on U.S. soil. No, the situations in Burma and the United States are not comparable, and people everywhere hunger for this country’s tradition of open dissent. But that tradition depends on transparency in government, and Paul, for all his grandstanding, underscored the fact that political leaders must constantly to be reminded of that. I was startled in Burma to hear the word “transparency” on many lips. It speaks of people’s new faith that one of the world’s most “Orwellian” governments is changing. In a country – once home to the author of Animal Farm and 1984 – where dissent was ruthlessly crushed and surveillance an ubiquitous fact of life, there remains the fear that the generals will renege on their promises. But it is tempered by the hope that each day of openness will make that more difficult to do. The Burmese take nothing for granted. Their history says they are wise not to.

Burma Road

I told someone not long ago that my two favorite decades were the 60s – the 1960s and my sixties. That was probably more distilled memories and wishful thinking than the truth (and, in fact, my actual favorite times were when my children were young and still willing to play with me). But I do think of the 1960s as a time when hope and altruism drove young people to try to change the world. As for my current decade, sixty, whatever it may seem, is actuarially no longer old. But as the years pile on, I have become oddly aware of a sense of anticipation for the future, even of the optimism I was supposed to feel when I was young. For there seems little use in worrying about all my separate failings when my entire body is sending me a message of, well, inadequacy. Like it or not, this is who I am. Recently, a friend urged me to see “Quartet.” It is a wonderful film about people who learn – because it doesn’t come naturally – to grow old with joy. They are musicians, and they may no longer be able to hit the high notes, but they can still sing. And they do.

I leave later today for Burma, daunted by the hours of flying but excited to see a completely new place. I am told that, for reasons of time management, Internet access and personal well-being, I must take a break from my blog. So I will take notes and give you a vacation. See you in March. Rejuvenated.

Party Lines

Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC), who grows increasingly shrill in the face of a possible Tea Party primary challenge in 2014, called Chuck Hagel “one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of defense in a very long time." Senator, get a grip . . .

More radical than Donald Rumsfeld (2001-6), who oversaw the disastrous war in Iraq,who became the first leader of America’s military to justify torture, and who rationalized the condition of U.S. battlefield equipment by telling his own troops that “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want ” – even though it was America that had decided to go to war?

Or than Jefferson Davis (1853-7), the only secretary of war to be subsequently charged with treason – for leading a war against the U.S. government that resulted in 700,000 American dead?

More unqualified than Dick Cheney (1989-93), who responded to a question about his five Vietnam-era deferments by saying, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service?”

Or than Simon Cameron (1861-2), who resigned from the war department after less than a year because his corruption was so astounding?

Republican objections to Hagel seem fourfold: He challenged the Israeli lobby; he opposed the Iraq war; he seeks alternatives to bombing Iran; and he crossed party lines to support Obama in 2008. Good for him.

In 1997 Bill Clinton nominated Republican Senator William Cohen to be secretary of defense. The senate confirmed him unanimously. And he went on to do an excellent job. How times have changed.

Pretty Yende

The tragic death of Reeva Steenkamp, the model and law school graduate, has brought into focus a host of clichés about big time sports, the rise and fall of heroes, the link between domestic violence and the proliferation of guns, and the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa as one of the world’s most violent countries. Steenkamp was shot by her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, the sprinter who was born with no fibula and became the first double amputee in Olympic history. His inspiring story of rising above adversity to become a hero to millions has become the all-too-familiar sports story of those we lionize turning into clay. But this story has an extra dimension: the level of violent crime in South Africa and the image of white people barricaded in their houses at night, armed to the teeth. It is an image that sits uncomfortably with that of a country that overcame the most oppressive colonialism and racial apartheid to itself become an inspiration for a continent. Is this too in question?

No. Last month 27-year-old Pretty Yende made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera. That a young black woman could come from a South African township to one of the world’s largest stages would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Her triumph, though, is not only personal because her voice really is a gift to the world. Perhaps we look in the wrong places for hope and inspiration. It is in art that we find the beauty that expresses our common humanity.

Old Money

It’s ironic to me that Ponce de Leon stumbled onto Florida while searching for the fountain of youth. My experience of the state has been a place where old people get fleeced by a workforce that exists solely for that purpose. Case in point: when my stepgrandmother died years ago, she left a strip of her property to the nice man next door who had looked after her place. Unfortunately, that strip was the driveway, which made it hard to sell the property to anyone but the nice man next door. Meanwhile, her stock certificates had disappeared from her safe deposit box. That history probably predisposed me against Marco Rubio’s speech, and to be evenhanded I now turn to the unseemly relationship between Robert Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, and Salomon Melgen, a Palm Beach eye-surgeon-cum-venture capitalist, who seems to have done very well by the elderly. Maybe too well, as the government wants to recover $8.9 million it calls fraudulent Medicare billings. Melgen is also the largest contributor to Menendez, the next chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and coincidentally the doctor is trying to secure a contract to supply drug-screening equipment to the Dominican Republic that could pay him $500 million over 20 years. Such investments require flying your important friends to see them on your private jet, and I am happy to report that the senator recently reimbursed the doctor $58,500 for two trips he made in 2010 but had inadvertently forgotten.

We are Citizens

Three issues rarely heard on last fall’s campaign trail made their way forcefully into the president’s State of the Union speech Tuesday evening: the poor, climate change and gun control. I was happy to see them; we have ducked an open discussion of them for too long. Obama was most oblique about the poor. But his reference to “inescapable pockets of poverty” was a rare acknowledgement in a country where everything is meant to be escapable, where a new life lies just beyond the frontier. I hope the president’s “ladders of opportunity” will enable us to rebuild American communities that are as ravaged as any in the developing world, rather than be simply the means to get out of them.

The president’s most encouraging message was his full engagement with climate change, which is becoming a signature issue for him. He may well be our most environmental president, although with Richard Nixon often offered as the reigning champion, the competition is pretty thin. But the president must show us how we can simultaneously have all the growth we seem to need and protect the increasingly ravaged earth on which our lives depend.

It was not a passionate speech until the end: first, on guns, when Obama adopted the “call-and-response” cadence of a Baptist preacher, “They deserve a vote;” and then the finale: “We are citizens . . . this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations . . . our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others.” Amen.

The Other Speech

One measure of how much Barack Obama has grown over his four years in office was Marco Rubio’s speech last night. I don’t just mean the cotton-mouthed diction, the furtive search for that tiny bottle of Poland Springs, or the high school debating team delivery, for he has the skills to surmount his oratorical infelicities over time. No, it wasn’t so much his style. It was his substance. What a hypocrite. The opposition’s response to the State of the Union, first given by Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford in 1966, is a delicate matter, for on this night the president reports to the country in his role as leader of the nation, not simply of his party. Not to sound too naïve, but some sense of protocol would demand that the response rise above the slash-and-burn partisan invective we saw last night, filled as it was with straw men and taking aim at things the president did not say but that his opponents have long insisted he stands for. On this night, at least, the president need not be presented as a cartoon character.

But Rubio has a deeper problem. His overriding message of damning the government that has been his only career and praising the private sector, which he has experienced primarily through campaign donors, was kind of irritating. And as he listed the government programs that have benefited him and his family – from student aid to Medicare – I waited in vain for a single word that might have tempered the shrillness. Gratitude.

La Mama

Veteran Vatican watchers were befuddled yesterday when out of St. Peter’s dome came neither black smoke nor white smoke . . . but lightning. Traditionally, black smoke has meant the assembled cardinals have not yet agreed on the next pope; white smoke means the church has a new leader.

Lightning, it turns out, means the next pope is Theresa Speyer, a no-nonsense, 12^th-generation Catholic from Olive Branch, Illinois. The new pontiffa (or “La Mama”) traces her ancestry to the Diet of Worms, which, she told reporters, family archives describe as “delicious” and “loaded with protein,” as well as "putting Martin Luther in his place."

At her first press conference, Speyer said she “totally” accepts church doctrine on marriage and the priesthood. “Are you kidding," the twice-divorced leader-elect asked? "I wish I had listened to Him years ago.”

As a woman, Speyer hopes to be more inclusive than some of her predecessors, men like Innocent III whose Inquisition, she noted, rubbed certain people the wrong way. “I plan to sit down with the world’s major religious leaders and see if we can’t be nicer to each other.

“We have the most trouble with Muslims,” she continued, “so first up will be Barack Obama. I’d like to get him with Rick Santorum, who converted Governor Brownback of Kansas when they were in the Senate together.”

Asked about the Dalai Lama, who has made world peace the center of his religious teaching, Speyer demurred. “Let’s start with people who actually believe in God.”

War Crimes

Did U. S. Forces commit war crimes in Vietnam? And 50 years later, does it matter? In his relentless new book, Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse argues that the infamous slaughter of 500 unarmed women, children and the elderly at My Lai in March 1968 was not a rogue action that went out of control, but the inevitable result of a policy that came from the top and was intended to “produce a veritable system of suffering.” Turse methodically traces that suffering, and its cover-up, in long-secret files that document atrocities committed in pursuit of the “body count,” a policy that equated military progress with dead bodies. The grossly misleading numbers, which appeared nightly on American television screens in the 1960s, were themselves a result of the “mere gook rule” or MGR, which encouraged killing Vietnamese people with impunity.

What’s missing in Turse’s chilling history is the context in which U.S. troops lived and fought in a landscape filled with constant misery and omnipresent danger against a hardened and largely invisible enemy who didn’t play by the rules of Nuremburg either – a war brought searingly to life by Philip Caputo in A Rumor of War and Michael Herr in Dispatches.

War crimes were committed in Vietnam, as they are in all wars, by people who were trained to dehumanize others and in the process became dehumanized themselves. We cannot justify those crimes; but we must ask why we believe that something as horrific as war can be played by a set of civilized rules.

Stumble of the Week

Historical Truth. As a 16-year-old during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, I remember the collective fear of a nuclear attack, followed by relief that the calm and steely resolve of President Kennedy had made the Soviets blink. In a review of Sheldon Stern’s new book, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, Benjamin Schwartz writes that almost everything we have been taught about the event is not true. The miscalculations and political considerations of the Kennedy administration brought us to the brink of war, and a legendary counter-story was concocted and fed to a gullible press. One of the villains is Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “whose histories ‘repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts.”’ Schlesinger, who left academia for the halls of power and became the model of the “public intellectual,” was long considered a sycophant by his old academic colleagues. They have been vindicated. His “accounts – ‘profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive,’” writes Schultz, “were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys.” Women’s Rights. The fight for the hearts, minds and other organs of the Republican party continues stage right. The Daily Beast reports that the “transvaginal ultrasound” is back on the legislative dockets in Michigan, Tennessee and Alabama. A year ago, the Virginia legislature passed – and then rescinded after a national outcry – a bill mandating the procedure, which the Michigan GOP insists “further protects the interests of the women seeking an abortion by assessing the viability of the fetus and confirming the approximate gestational age of the fetus.” The party of non-intrusive government has embraced women’s rights.

Sequestration

Of course they have to do it. Congress needs to pass some package of interim spending cuts and tax “reforms” to head off the drastic reductions (known for some reason as “sequestration”) that will automatically go into effect on March 1^st because . . . well, because once again our representatives have backed themselves into a corner on the elementary issue of what kind of country we want and how to pay for its governance. “At some point, Washington has to deal with its spending problem,’” said John Boehner yesterday. “Now I’ve watched them kick this can down the road for 22 years since I’ve been here. I’ve had enough. It’s time to act.” It’s worth noting that Boehner is not exactly a disinterested observer. He is the Speaker of the House, the person who is supposed to lead his colleagues, not just wring his hands. In fairness, though, a budget would help, and the president needs to submit one. It is wrong, I think, to consider the budgeting process as simply a financial exercise in allocating the money we have (or even the money we don’t have). It is a vision for where we want to take the nation and a blueprint for the journey. Last November, Americans had a clear choice, and a majority of us gave Barack Obama a mandate to govern because we believe in his vision. Now we want to see his blueprint. Why should plotting the nation's journey be any less exciting in 2013 than it was in 1789?

Big Lies

"Beware the big lie!” the 1951 American propaganda film of the same name warns us. “Beware the dove that goes BOOM!" We have seen a lot of big lies lately from people in high places who have looked into the collective face of America and told bald-faced lies so often and so insistently that you think they must be telling the truth.

• Calling himself the most “the most tested athlete on the planet,” Lance Armstrong denied for years that he took performance-enhancing drugs. Last month he answered “yes” to every single question Oprah Winfrey asked him about his drug use.

• For decades Cardinal Roger Mahoney repeatedly denied that priests in his Los Angeles archdiocese abused young people. Last week the court-ordered release of 12,000 pages of church records documented repeated abuse, often by serial violators and always denied by the church.

• Yesterday Essie Mae Washington-Williams died. She was 87 and the daughter of Strom Thurmond, who 65 years ago bolted the Democratic convention and ran for president on the “Dixiecrat” ticket, winning four states. Carrie Butler, Washington-Williams’ mother, died that year at 38. She had been a teenaged Black maid in Thurmond’s house when he impregnated her. “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen,” Thurmond said in a campaign stump speech, “that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

Dystopia

Imagine a future with no past. It’s impossible to do so because time doesn’t work that way, and yet this is the great totalitarian dream, manifest most recently in the efforts of fanatical Islamic rebels to destroy the rich manuscripts and artifacts of the Golden Age of Timbuktu. Reminiscent of when the Taliban dynamited the magnificent 6^th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan’s central valley 12 years ago, the rebels sought to eradicate the centuries of history and foundation of an ancient culture that live for their people in the sacred books and statuary. While we naturally and rightly save our most empathic horror for the atrocities committed against living people, there is something almost as appalling about the destruction of a people’s cultural past. It is what makes us who we are. It is why we write books and create art in the first place. And totalitarian regimes – Stalin’s purges, Mao’s cultural revolution, the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero – strive to eradicate all vestiges of it. In fact, it is the goal of most Utopian visions – even the American melting pot: Henry Ford used to have his company’s workers participate in a pageant in which they would march into a huge black pot, dressed in their impossibly backward ethnic costumes, and march out the other side purged of their Old-World idiosyncrasies and looking exactly alike. In Mali, where they have been risking their lives to save their identities for centuries, people know firsthand that the totalitarian’s dream is the human’s nightmare.

The Game

Although the Super Bowl turned into a very good game, it couldn’t steal the show from Beyoncé, whose electric halftime performance apparently knocked the Superdome lights out. Clearly the best athlete on the field, her 12-minute gig exceeded the 11 minutes the football was in play. And she hardly looked winded. But the most telling game last week was not the Super Bowl but a high-school basketball game in Chicago between Simeon Career Academy and Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, two national powerhouses, each featuring one of the country’s best players. Never mind whether The New York Times should have given 27 column inches to a high-school game. Far more remarkable was that the reporter didn’t even get to the score until the fourth-to-last paragraph. The story focused on the massive police presence and security precautions in the wake of an earlier game, which had ended with an on-court brawl of players and coaches, followed by a fatal shooting outside the arena, one more pointless, violent death in a city that endures almost 10 murders a week. Appearing on national television in warm-up jerseys saying “Shoot Hoops, Not Guns,” the young players embodied the gladiator role that now defines spectator sports even at this level.

Big-time sports isn’t a game for the players anymore; it’s mass entertainment to keep the people tranquilized, to sell them stuff and to promote betting. And not only here: European football just uncovered a massive match-fixing ring run by organized criminals from Singapore

Oh, Simeon beat Whitney Young, 44-41.

Stumble of the Week

Bullying is not only for young males, as 76-year-old John McCain demonstrated when he went after Chuck Hagel during nomination hearings for Secretary of Defense. Still infuriated over Hagel’s opposition to the Iraq war (not to mention to McCain’s 2008 presidential candidacy), McCain attacked his former friend for opposing the 2007 “surge,” which has become the last straw of Republican honor in Iraq. But Hagel was right. The costs were enormous and the gains short-lived, as the current situation in Iraq makes clear. It’s time for those who insist on resurrecting in Iraq the American honor that was buried in Vietnam to recognize the parallels: two ill-conceived and badly executed wars, marked by “collateral damage” and fought in the end primarily to extricate our own troops. If the purpose of war is to extricate our troops from the mess we created, umm . . . Hearts and Minds. We have read far too much about the tragic brain damage suffered by professional football players. San Francisco 49er cornerback Chris Culliver is only 24, but his pre-Super Bowl comments show that muddled brains can come young. “I don’t do the gay guys, man,” he said in an interview. “Can’t be with that sweet stuff.” His damage control? “The derogatory comments I made yesterday were a reflection of thoughts in my head, but they are not how I feel.”

Liberal Hollywood’s image was jolted by a recent study that reported that two of the 10 highest-grossing film actors, Tom Cruise and John Travolta, are Scientologists, and a third, Clint Eastwood, talks to empty chairs.

Scarfed

Note: If the cartoon doesn't appear in email, you can see it at www.jamesgblaine.com Gerald Scarfe’s cartoon in last Sunday’s Times of London is not especially funny, and its publication on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day was bad timing. But it is hard-hitting and makes a clear and important point about Israeli activities in Palestine, which is what newspaper opinion pages are supposed to do.

Predictably, the backlash from the Israeli government and its supporters was immediate: they accused Scarfe of anti-Semitism, including “blood libel” (the accusation that Jews use the blood of murdered children in religious rites). Equally predictably, it was effective: Scarfe’s newspaper threw him under the bus within hours of publication.

First up was the publisher: “Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times,” tweeted Rupert Murdoch, whose commitment to the principles of journalism is an inch deep. “Nevertheless, we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon.” The paper followed its leader: After a hastily convened meeting with “representatives of the Jewish community,” the Times “apologises unreservedly for the offence we clearly caused."

 Israeli elections: Will cementing peace continue?

While the reaction was less frightening than the fatwa issued in the wake of the 2005 “Mohammad” cartoons, it was no less insidious. It illustrates the proclivity of the press to bow to the powerful and censor itself.  If Scarfe wasn’t speaking for the Times, why did the paper pull his cartoon (whose publication date is set by the editor, not the cartoonist)? Does it only publish opinions that agree with its own? Has the Times of London finally become the British version of Murdoch’s American flagship, Fox News?

Love Story

“Old age ain’t for sissies,” Bette Davis, famously said. And she had a point. Things just don’t work as well as they used to. The body breaks down. The mind goes with it. And the memory? Don’t ask. “It ain’t what it used to be,” pitcher Dizzy Dean said of his right arm, “but what the hell is?” But if old age isn’t for sissies, neither is adolescence or middle age, early childhood or any other of the ages of man. And growing old has its compensations. We were lucky to get here, however broken down we are. And we have seen enough along the way to know the role luck played in the journey, which is the source of whatever wisdom we have. Knowing our days really are numbered can create a sense of gratitude and excitement for each one of them that perhaps the young don’t yet appreciate.

Last Saturday Ada Bryant and Robert Haire were married. He is 86. She is 97. As beautifully described by Margaux Laskey, their courtship was as filled with romance and fraught with angst as any other. “I didn’t think it was the thing to do because I don’t have that many years ahead of me,” said Ada. “But he said, ‘That’s all the more reason.’ I like him very much. I love him. So we’re going to be married.”

“Those who love deeply never grow old,” wrote Dorothy Canfield Fisher. “They may die of old age, but they die young.”

"Trustworthy, loyal, helpful . . .

. . . friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent." Full disclosure: I have never liked the Boy Scouts. Many years ago I joined the Cub Scouts, mostly to get the blue-and-gold uniform so I could reenact western cavalry campaigns in the back yard. I was an indifferent scout, forever behind in the pursuit of my next badge or arrowhead. Born during World War II, I found the image of smiling blond adolescents and their adult leaders espousing the strenuous life, dressed in uniforms that featured short pants and chest medals, frightening even then. Anyway, my mother was hardly the den mother type, so I always had to go to meetings in other boys’ basements.

Later, when I published a newspaper in rural Pennsylvania, the Boy Scouts were a constant thorn, demanding coverage but refusing to recruit minority members – even after the United Way defunded them for discrimination. The Girl Scouts, by contrast, reached out to everyone, eagerly seeking Spanish-speaking members among the growing population of migrant workers.

Yesterday’s reports that the Boy Scouts are considering lifting their longtime ban against gays seem suspect. Under intense corporate pressure (UPS threatens to stop its funding; the Family Research Council counter-threatens to boycott UPS), the Scouts appear ready to punt on a national policy change and kick the issue to the local level. It’s time for an organization that suppressed thousands of internal files documenting decades of sexual abuse to clean up its act and open its doors.