Keep Your Eye on Mississippi

Six-term Senator Thad Cochran edged Tea Party-backed Chris McDaniel in Mississippi's Republican primary run-off, but only with the help of black Democratic voters, a tactic that has McDaniel seething and threatening to challenge. It will be interesting to watch African-American voting patterns in November, when they choose between Travis Childers, a former Congressman who opposed Obamacare and describes himself as “pro-life and pro-gun,” and Cochran, who ran on his formidable ability to bring big-government bacon home to Mississippi. And it will be equally interesting to watch how Childers and Cochran treat black voters, who make up  36% of the electorate in the most racially polarized state in America. It should be quite a tap dance, particularly since Cochran is the worst kind of pork barreler: Mississippi gets $2.47 in federal funding for each dollar it pays in federal taxes, yet it remains at the bottom of the barrel in health care, poverty, education, and general well-being. Correction. Readers picked up two big errors in my last post:

1. Adams and Jefferson died in 1826, not 1825.
2. More importantly, they became bitterly estranged after the election of 1800, then reconciled in 1812 and remained friends until the end of their lives. While this reinforces the idea that vitriolic partisanship is nothing new, it does temper the notion that their politics was not personal. “Acid does do damage,” one of you wrote. But Adams and Jefferson give hope that such damage can be overcome and they reaffirm civil discourse as the political ideal, which today seems sadly in doubt.

Civil Discourse

Kenyon is a small liberal arts college, founded in 1824, from which my son Daniel graduated and where I am attending a seminar on the “Essays” of Montaigne, which he described as his “attempts” to put his thoughts into words. Kenyon is physically and culturally an idyllic place, where civil discourse is still prized as the foundation of both learning and community. The college’s politics are predominantly liberal, and yet a longtime political science professor with neo-conservative views praised it for its openness. “No speaker has ever been disinvited here,” he said.

That is my hope for this blog: a forum where I can "attempt" to write what I think – or what I think I think – and invite you to do the same. I want to open the discussion to other views. I welcome your thoughts on how to do so.

I do not believe that vitriolic partisanship started only in the last few years. The Jeffersonians brutally attacked John Adams and the Federalists returned the broadsides in spades. They were ugly and sometimes violent. But Jefferson and Adams renewed their friendship before they both died on July 4, 1826, America’s 50^th Independence Day. What is different now, I worry, is that even the ideal of civic discourse is under attack, the notion that political rivals can be personal friends seems a fading memory, and forums for the true exchange of ideas grow fewer. Yet that ideal is the foundation of our political system. We cannot have a republic without it.

Irony in Black and White

When I suggest that race plays a more-than-incidental role in the opposition’s implacable opposition to Barack Obama, some accuse me of playing the race card; others just roll their eyes at my lame excuse for Obama’s presidential failings. But it’s neither lame nor an excuse. It’s a reality. How could it not be? Consider:

• Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” explicitly used race to appeal to southern white voters, pulling the old Confederacy almost overnight into the GOP (and driving blacks overwhelmingly to the Democrats).

• Ronald Reagan expanded that strategy to white working-class voters everywhere, and “Reagan Democrats” provided his margins of victory.

• In 2005 Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized to the NAACP for his party’s efforts “to benefit politically from racial polarization.”

• But perhaps the most bizarre sign of Republican race polarization is Senator Thad Cochran’s last-ditch effort to woo black voters in Tuesday’s primary run-off against Chris McDaniel. Cochran believes African Americans will find the Tea Party-backed McDaniel even more offensive than him, and he appears to be correct. The cynicism is breathtaking, but the irony is that Cochran’s desperate pursuit of black votes may do more to build an interracial coalition based on  self-interest than did the election of a biracial president who appealed to our better natures across the grim line of race.

A discouraging thought, but as I look around the world I see idealism everywhere in retreat from the sectarian forces that would keep us apart.

But I’m not giving up.

Enough

Dick Cheney, who "had other priorities in the 60's than military service," has become America’s most vocal warrior in his old age. He is much in the news this week because of the op-ed piece he and his daughter Liz wrote for The Wall Street Journal. I disagree with the Cheneys’ message; with their reading of recent history (“we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory”); with their amnesia about the 500,000 Iraqi dead as a result of the American invasion; and perhaps above all with their style of personal attacks and innuendo, depicting a president who “doesn’t seem to care,” is “blithely indifferent,” is determined to take “America down a notch.” The Cheneys’ Journal article was part of a larger campaign to announce the launching of their Alliance for a Strong America (there was a time when newspapers didn’t offer their editorial pages to public relations campaigns), a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization. My reaction to the package of article, video and website was visceral repugnance, and the post I began writing this morning was littered with vituperative references to WMDick Cheney and Liz’s over-the-top Senate campaign.

No, I don’t like these people, but I am tired of fighting the battles in the past – the invasion, the surge, the withdrawal, who lost Iraq? – which have led us all down a path of ad hominem blaming, name calling and paralyzing national divisiveness. In my revulsion to the Cheneys I saw a part of me I didn’t much like.

Levels of Intolerance

I was driving in rural Maine, channel surfing on my car radio, when the dial paused on an evangelical preacher (of which Maine radio has many). “I know some non-Christians who are nicer than some Christians,” he was saying, some who are kinder and friendlier. But they aren’t going to heaven, he continued. You don’t get there by being a nice person. There is only one way to heaven, and they aren’t on it. My takeaway: Enjoy these charming people while you can because you will never see them again. From my perspective this seems progress, if not exactly toleration, for at least the preacher is giving me a chance to get out of this world unrepentant. Of the next world he has no doubt, and I think of his heaven as a place where he can say “I told you so” for eternity.

For now, though, there exists the possibility of friendship between the saved and the damned, although marriage still seems off-limits.

For Zakia and Mohammad Ali, the young Afghan couple – Zakia a Sunni, he a Shiite – who fell in love and eloped, marriage isn’t just off-limits. In their families’ eyes, it's a capital offense. They have been in hiding, in jail and live in fear for their lives.

“After I get released,” Zakia told a Times reporter, “I hope we can have a happy life again and go and live in a place that is safe for us. If my family catches us, they won’t leave us alive.”

Four Ways to Create a Community

How do you create a community in a world where Sunnis and Shiites slaughter each other, Ukraine, Myanmar, Kenya seethe with ethnic hatred, and our own country grows dishearteningly divided?

• The Melting Pot is the foundation of America’s faith in assimilation. It seeks to erase cultural and ethnic differences and bring forth a new American. Marxism seeks to eradicate class distinctions in pursuit of the same goal. Such differences have proved stubbornly resistant, and policies to deal with those deemed unassimilable, whether kulaks or Native Americans, too often turned into genocide.
• The Quilt recognizes the importance of diversity by replacing the melting pot with a single fabric woven from different pieces, each maintaining its own identity while contributing to the beauty of the whole.
• Walls, topped with glass shards and razor wire, defended by heavily armed troops taught to hate what’s on the other side, seem where we’re headed now. “Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
that wants it down,” wrote Robert Frost, and it’s hard to see how our world can survive as bristling fiefdoms behind bricks and wire.
• The Retreat offers the chance to create small purposeful communities, often close to the natural world. While such a life seems increasingly attractive, I believe a retreat must be a place to recharge, and not retire.

Globalization seems bent on eradicating our differences by homogenizing the world. It has unleashed, in reaction, unimaginably brutal responses. Our survival depends on understanding that our differences are what make us human.

Fresh Blood: A Youth Congress?

Many of you have responded positively to proposals for universal service – and my friend Jock Hooper sent me his article, “Ten Reasons for a National Youth Service” (which notes that only 0.5% of America’s young people are engaged in any public service). The idea is getting national traction: it was the focus of Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Sebastian Junger, for example. But one place where nobody talks about it is Congress, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Libertarians hate the idea, and the Republican Party is so jumpy after Virginia’s primary that people predict no significant legislation of any kind before November – which  shows that Eric Cantor’s unexpected defeat changed little in Washington. Which gives me an idea. Our discussions of national-youth-service jobs include the military, Peace Corps, rebuilding infrastructure, fighting forest fires, restoring public lands, teaching in poor schools. What about Congress itself, where the average age is 55? Why not throw those 435 jobs into the lottery? This isn’t a new idea. Andrew Jackson believed that government is “so plain and simple” anyone can do it (or not do it, as we see today); and in New Hampshire men once served in the legislature, not to stoke their egos or line their pockets, but because it was their turn. A Congressional term is only two years, and if we make the pay and perks commensurate with those of army recruits, think how much money we will save the country and the Koch brothers.

Praying for Charity

“Charity Hicks needs our prayers” was the email’s title. “I am writing with some sad news . . . Charity Hicks was in a hit-and-run car accident a week ago in New York City.” She is in a coma, on life support. Many of you know Charity from these pages. She is the Virgil who guided me through the hell that has become so much of Detroit – and she is the Beatrice who showed me often-hidden signs of hope. The granddaughter of Alabama sharecroppers recruited to come north to Detroit’s once-booming auto plants, she is a firebrand who has given her soul to the neighborhoods she loves and despairs for in equal measure. She has no illusions about the city in which she lost, first her job, and then her house, sold at auction to a bottom feeder who offered it back to her for a tidy profit – a city that, she says, “has given up on government” and spawned a generation of young men so marginalized they “would kill you without thinking about it.”

But despair always gives way to determination, to her belief that out of the rubble will grow a garden. She has dedicated her life to food security, and in a city where 150,000 people live outside the cash economy, she finds hope in Detroit’s 27 urban farms and 1,800 community gardens. More than hope: “There is power in these gardens,” she says. “They show our resilience and our resistance.”

May those qualities see her through now.

“He was lost and is found”

I have had a good life. Whether it has been a useful one is for others to decide. But of the value of four gifts – five, really – bestowed both on me and from me I have no doubt. My life changed completely from the moment my children – Gayley, Jake, Annie and Daniel (and little Joanie, Jan. 3-5, 1979, who struggled mightily for her whole short life) – appeared. They are the legacy I will leave. So, I bristle when I see a father pilloried by mean and ignorant people because he loves his child. Bob Bergdahl grew a beard and learned to speak Pashto during the five years his son was held captive by the Taliban. It’s OK, apparently, not to shave before the big game or until you have achieved some personal milestone, but not in solidarity with your son, who, by the way, speaks only Pashto now.

“He has learned to speak the language of the Taliban and looks like a Muslim,” said Bill O’Reilly, “actually thanking Allah right in front of the president.”

"If he wasn't so light-skinned, he actually looks like the terrorists,” echoed grammatically challenged radio host Laura Ingraham. (Actually, if he were any lighter-skinned he’d look like Timothy McVeigh.)

“Your son's out now,” said Fox and Friends’ Brian Kilmeade. “Are you out of razors?"

What began as a celebration of a son’s return turned quickly into a nightmare. It’s an old story, first told by a bearded man in the Gospel of Luke.

Three Institutions (Part III)

There was no happier man than the one who walked out of Fort Lee on Sept. 1, 1970, honorable discharge in hand. In truth, my three-year army tour had been pretty undemanding, spent mostly at NATO’s military headquarters trying to catch spies. And we almost caught one, in a top-secret operation reminiscent of the Keystone Kops, that featured my friend Red (6 feet 5 inches and 240 pounds, including the shrapnel he had acquired in Korea) and me posing as Belgian road workers – although Red spoke not a word of French and we arrived at “the job” in a black Peugeot with a radio antenna on its roof. In the midst of our stakeout, the German suspect was transferred home to avoid an international incident, and we went back to our desk jobs. The army didn’t like me much more than I liked the army, preferring a more gung-ho specimen. Yet stories like mine, I believe, help make the case for universal service – not military service, solely, but a country in which everybody contributes a couple of years to the greater community. Career officers, here as elsewhere, can lose sight of the military’s role in a republic, and millions of inept civilians remind them not to take themselves too seriously. Thrown together from all over, those recruits also help democratize an increasingly divided country.

And don’t underestimate their valor. Most of those who hit the Normandy beaches 70 years ago today were not career soldiers, and far too many of them never came home.

Three Institutions (Part II)

I know of few places as insatiable for money as Harvard University. Its $32-billion endowment and budget the size of many countries seem only to spur its fundraisers to get more. (“How much is enough?” an old roommate once asked. “It’s just a little more than you have.”) I think sometimes that non-profits have become the creatures of their development departments (or whatever they’re called now to disguise the fact they’re development departments): their primary function is to raise money and their ancillary role is to be a university or a hospital or a museum. In fairness, the life of a non-profit is not easy. In the fierce competition for money from individuals and organizations that often have their own agendas, it is all too tempting to blur your mission simply to survive – to bend it a little because that’s where the money is. And it takes an enlightened donor to fund programmatic excellence over personal politics and to consider the institution’s legacy ahead of his own.

I google Harvard’s mission: “The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country….” It turns out it hasn’t changed in 364 years. As I consider the university’s staggering physical plant and corporate mentality, its huge government contracts and investment strategies, I hope it has remained equal to its mission.

Three Institutions (Part I)

In 1967 I graduated from Harvard College (way easier to get into then); was inducted into the US Army (we had something called the draft) and joined the Democratic Party (I was a liberal). Almost half a century later I remain a Harvard alumnus, a veteran and a Democrat. As I consider these three enormous institutions, all much in the news, I sometimes think I have most affection for the one I most detested when I was in it. Perhaps that’s because the army isn’t always hounding me for money. Take the Democrats, from whom I get several emails a day. Such as:

“We’re about to LOSE. James, We’re on the brink of defeat. There’s no way to sugar-coat it. If we let $125 million worth of Koch Brothers-funded attack ads go unanswered, the 2014 Elections are over and the Tea Party wins again. Please chip in $10 before the midnight deadline.”

“James, In the couple of minutes it takes you to read this email, an attack ad funded by the Koch Brothers' network will run 27 times across the country. Please rush $10 by midnight.”

I loathe the Koch brothers’ politics more than most, but simply and constantly bashing them is a pretty pathetic political strategy. Pitting half the country against two old men, however rich and cunning, gives them a mythological power that is actually counterproductive. Money is a great evil in modern politics, primarily because it is crushing creative ideas, thoughtful platforms, and strong and independent candidates. Maybe we should start there.

Stick Your Head in the (Tar) Sand

As it promised to do in exchange for the withdrawal of a shareholder proposal on “stranded assets”, ExxonMobil has issued a report on its plans for managing the risks in the event that market and regulatory responses to climate change reduce the value of its oil and gas reserves. “The report, 'Managing the Risks'” according to Natasha Lamb of Arjuna Capital, which filed the original proposal, “forgot to address one thing: the risks.” Instead of offering a plan for dealing with a lower-carbon future, Exxon blithely dismissed its possibility. It’s too expensive, said the company, overstating the costs; the public won’t tolerate it, disregarding the growing concerns. Unlike members of Congress, Exxon doesn't deny the threat of climate change; it simply ignores it. And so, as T. Boone Pickens asserts, America continues its march into the future without any energy plan at all. Is Exxon simply deceitful, promising an honest report on a matter of importance to its owners (i.e., its shareholders) and delivering a whitewash, marked by bland generalities and forecasting a future consonant with its corporate fairytale? Or is it a dinosaur, unable to adjust its lumbering 20^th-century body to 21^st-century realities? Or is it just arrogant?

When members of the Harvard community demanded the university divest its Exxon stock, President Drew Faust responded that Harvard’s $32-billion endowment “is not an instrument to impel social or political change.” There may be a compelling reason to divest: under its current management, Exxon seems a lousy long-term investment.

A Pope and a Saint

“Maybe it is because he is from Argentina,” wrote my son Daniel, who spent a semester in Buenos Aires, “but I love Francis. The guy is also a skilled politician.” His note accompanied a news article about the pope’s visit to the Middle East, where Francis presented an image that was at once diplomatic and genuine. I haven’t had much nice to say of late about the Catholic Church, whose record of abuse and concealment is one of the most chilling stories of modern history. And while his public persona is necessarily ahead of substantive changes in the church, Francis offers a hopeful new direction. On his trip to Israel and Palestine he paid homage at two powerful walls – the Western Wall, holiest of Jewish sites, and the West Bank barrier some call the “apartheid wall.” He had travelled a long way not only from Rome but from his predecessor, Pius X (a man also known for his “simple origins”), who in 1903 rebuffed Theodor Herzl’s request for help in establishing a Jewish state, telling the founder of Zionism that all his followers should instead convert to Catholicism. That kind of dogmatic sectarianism remains a discordant force in a world in which people continue to slaughter each other over religious beliefs. Francis intentionally took the name of a saint who offered the church a truly revolutionary path, which it rejected. Eight centuries later a pope’s embrace of openness, tolerance and humility are a measure of his courage and our hope.

Against the Odds

Since well before Thomas Jefferson, Americans have idealized small farmers. Distrustful of cities, they placed inordinate political power in rural districts until the Supreme Court upheld “one person, one vote” 50 years ago. Long before that, however, small farms had been in decline, the victims of public policy, mechanization and the power of corporate agriculture. To learn more about the state of the small farmer in New England, which is a tough place to farm, I visited Fred Dabney, a nurseryman in Westport, Massachusetts, with whom I squandered countless nights playing pool at college. Long active in state and local agriculture, Fred served as chairman of the Massachusetts Agricultural Board, until he was “booted” for publicly objecting to its politicization.

Threats to the sustainability of local farming come from the ever-expanding reach of federal regulations, which inundate small farmers with bureaucratic overload and compliance costs. They come also from Massachusetts’s famed political cronyism – “You’re supposed to do what they tell you to do,” Fred said of his firing, “and not ask any questions.”

But the biggest threats to the small farmer are (1) the corporate farmer, whose thousands of acres planted in a single crop, protected by Monsanto’s wondrous chemicals, massive machinery and Congressional committee rooms, long ago blurred the line between industry and agriculture; and (2) the real-estate developer who continues to devour prime farmland.

Yet against such odds, Massachusetts’ agriculture is growing, building on a steady campaign that locally produced food is tastier, healthier and safer than its corporate competitors.

Personal Resistances

In his column yesterday, “Four Words Going Bye-Bye”, The New York Times’ Tom Friedman wrote, “A lot of what drives today’s news derives from the fact that privacy is over, local is over, average is over and later is over.” We can’t expect privacy in a world of cell phones, cameras and YouTube; local in a “hyperconnected” world; average in an economy of cheap labor and snowballing automation; later in a world that humans are so radically altering. This, he declares, is inevitable. We must adjust. No thanks.

I think I’ll resist living in a world that chips away at my humanity. Technology cannot prevent me from having my own thoughts nor keep me from places of beauty, solitude and contemplation. Globalization can’t stop me from nurturing the friendships of a long life nor engaging in the life of my community. I will keep struggling to excel, but only in Lake Wobegon are all the children above average, and it does me no harm to be reminded that I am, in countless ways, very average indeed. After a lifetime of procrastination, I know well the dangers of “later”, but there is not enough “now” for all I still intend to see and do.

My little resistances are more than private refuges from an overbearing world. They are not a retreat, but an effort, however feeble, to assert my unique self, to make my voice heard among the cacophony. They are what make me – what make all of us – human.

Assumptions

A couple of you mentioned watching the Mountaintop-to-Tap video linked to Friday’s post. Three days before we set off on the trek, a man called me from Delhi, NY. He said he was a dairy farmer, had read about the project in the local paper and wanted to film it. With all the headaches trying to launch this thing, I thought, now a dairy farmer wants to film it. Kent Garrett said arthritis was driving him from farming, and he wanted to return to his career as a filmmaker. He also said he’d do the project for free. We agreed to meet at the Belleayre Ski Center in the Catskills. When I arrived, the only other person there was an African-American man. But, hey, I was in a ski resort looking for a dairy farmer. So I waited. When nobody else showed up, I went over. “I’m Kent Garrett,” he said.

He was not your typical dairy farmer. A 1963 graduate of Harvard, Kent had spent 30 years in television news and documentary films, winning two Emmy’s and a Peabody for his pioneering “Black Journal.” With no planning time, he and d.b. Roderick created an unforgettable record of the three-week trek. Kent’s current project is “The Last Negroes at Harvard”, the story of the 19 people of color, including himself, who entered the college in 1959. Five years after Brown v. Board of Education, that was the largest number in Harvard's history.

It’s amazing the people you meet on the other side of your assumptions.

Seeing Delight

A few years ago I organized a 3-week trek on which six high-school students from the inner city and six from an upstate region of woods and dairy farms hiked and rowed the 125-mile length of New York City’s water-supply system, from Mountaintop to Tap. We gave the students cameras and journals to record their experiences, and after our first night in the open, Sean, a 14-year-old Puerto Rican, wrote: “When I woke up this morning I kept thinking about the stars that I saw last night. I live in Brooklyn and at night you don’t really see stars. I mean you’ll probably see a couple here and there but last night I was like WOW! In Brooklyn we have street lights lighting up our streets while over here you have these beautiful stars lighting up your environment.” I don’t know where Sean is now. I have heard he joined the marines. I thought of him this week as I scanned endlessly depressing news headlines: 300 miners killed in Turkey; murder indictments for the drowned children in one Korea, nukes in the other; melting ice in Antarctica; 275 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria; fires and drought in California. In the relentless roll of heartbreak it's easy to see a frightening, joyless world, without optimism or wonder. For most of Sean's 14 years, the borders of Brooklyn had been the contours of his existence. Then one night, lying in a sleeping bag in a wilderness a hundred miles from home, he looked up and he saw delight.

Five Feet High and Rising

Forty years ago I went to visit an old man on Prince Edward Island who had built an ark in his back yard. He had started it after Jesus had appeared to him one night on top of an apple tree. Crazy stuff, I know, and yet the old man wove a captivating tale of his visions, his beliefs, his carpentry and craftsmanship. He didn’t know when the flood was coming. He just knew it was coming. The day the news of the irreversible melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet made headlines, the Dow Jones average closed up 112 points. So, should we believe the rising markets or the rising oceans? Have stock prices already discounted the effects of climate change? Are only climate skeptics with snorkels left on Wall Street? More likely, though, as Andrew Revkin noted, the shrugging off of climate change has to do with basic differences in our use of language and our understanding of time. The language of science does not translate well into news headlines (and appears to be completely beyond the grasp of Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma); and geologic time isn’t much use for quarterly forecasts. We don't know when the flood is coming. But the science is clear: climate change is real and it is accelerating, and the real lunacy in this story is the refusal of Congress to confront it.

One of these days I might take a ride back to Prince Edward Island and see if that ark is still there.

Just Wondering

The growing chorus about the evils of government can be very confusing: If rich people use their money to support government programs, is that a good thing because it isn’t government money or a bad thing because it reinforces government policies? For example, when John and Leigh Middleton, who made $2.9 billion from cigars, donated $30 million to help Philadelphia’s homeless, were they addressing a vital human need or promoting dependency. They gave their money to Project HOME (Housing. Opportunities. Medical. Education), an organization run by a nun, whose mantra – “None of us are home until all of us are home” – has that old community-organizing ring, and indeed, HOME works aggressively “to impact public policies, educate elected officials, maximize resources for housing and services, and advocate for human and civil rights for persons who are poor, homeless, and/or disabled.” It seeks to improve public welfare not replace it.

Likewise, should people be able to use their private wealth to effect public policy? Take Roxanne Quimby, who made a fortune in lip balm (Burt's Bees) and has spent most of it buying large chunks of land – over 100,000 acres – in Maine’s north woods. She wants to create a national park, an idea that has put property-rights advocates in a quandary. The Quimbys “can do whatever they want with that land,” said the leader of a group opposing the national park. “It’s their land.” Well, everything except give the federal government “a toehold in the northern Maine woods.” That would ruin the neighborhood.