Oh, No

With elections just days away, the Party of No is licking its chops in anticipation of controlling both houses of Congress, as GOP candidates vow to dismantle a bloated federal government that provides its members the best health care our taxes can buy, lavish perks, and personal access to America’s richest people and most powerful organizations. For that we should be grateful. Unfortunately, that’s not where Republicans are looking to cut, as Speaker Boehner made plain when he touted the 46 bills he has ready for Senate approval – most of which are aimed at deregulating energy production, defanging environmental protection, and destroying Obamacare. And so we will have to learn again – as we do every 30 years or so – that we need clean air and clean water, workplace safety and consumer protection, public education and public health, and that corporate America is not in business to provide them.

As for the bloated part, the federal government now employs a staggering 2.7 million people – which turns out to be a 50% decrease from its all-time high of 5.3 million in the seventh year of (dare I write it?) Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Do we need a government that is cumbersome, inefficient and inert? We do not, any more than we need a government that taps our phones and reads our mail. What we need is a government – as the often-maligned but more-often-prescient Paul Krugman wrote this week – that will reinvest once again in the public infrastructure on which our private enterprise depends.

Partying in Pyongyang

When it comes to quarantines, maybe Chris Christie should take lessons from Kim Jong-un. Citing the Ebola crisis, North Korea’s supreme leader banned all tourists and closed his country’s borders. This came as something of a surprise to North Korea’s 25 million inhabitants, who had no idea the borders were ever open. “If I’d known this,” said an anonymous man in a non-descript gray leisure suit, “I’d be so outta here [그래서 여기에 중].” Since North Korea is not on my bucket list – there never seemed much to do there except hard labor – I checked it out.

Until this week, the country attracted about 6,000 tourists annually, slightly fewer than New York’s 54.3 million. It allowed most of them to leave. According to The Lonely Planet, many stay at the Hyangsan Hotel, “a 15-storey pyramidal building with a fake waterfall attended by plastic deer in the lobby.” Sightseeing highlights include visits to the DMZ and the Tomb of Tan'gun, long thought the country’s mythical founder – until archeologists unearthed his bones and “North Korean historians made the incredible discovery that Tan'gun was in fact a member of the Kim clan.” After hours, “karaoke and pool will remain your guide's preferred evening activities for you.” And if your room has a television, be careful. Several party officials were recently shot for watching South Korean soap operas.

Perhaps closing the country is a wily plan to make visiting more desirable – like Bernie Madoff making people beg to invest in his Ponzi scheme.

Why We Need Poets

The most poignant and searing reporting I have read on the Islamic State’s treatment of hostages was written by a poet. Rukmini Callimachi is a Romanian-American poet and journalist who has covered the aftermath of Katrina, hunger in West Africa and al-Qaeda. Yesterday The New York Times published her article on the two-year ordeal and last days of James Foley – and the other 22 hostages held by ISIS in Syria. In it, Callimachi transcends the video pornography of much current Middle East reporting to focus on the human tragedy of the hostages. In doing so, she confronts the absolute evil of ISIS. This is why we need poets. It is remarkable to see the hostages, who often have only their suffering in common, build a community and tell stories to survive under the most awful conditions – as humans have done over and over again in the face of evil. For there is no other word to describe ISIS. This is not about cultural differences or historical grievances. It is an assault on our definition of humanity – infinitely more so when we realize that films of good people being beheaded have become tools for enlisting fighters from across the globe. Almost all those kidnapped have been aid workers and journalists, people who came to help the afflicted and inform the world. Some say they shouldn’t be there, that they are pawns in a deadly game. I think they embody the human kindness and courage that ISIS seeks to destroy.

Affirming Life

I am tired of bad news, about the way it has come to define our world and our relationships with each other, about the numbing relentlessness of headlines depicting war and disease and disaster that make us feel helpless in a hostile world. I don’t even know how to react anymore. When a French oil executive’s private jet clips a snowplow driven by a drunk Russian worker and crashes on a Moscow runway, absurdity trumps tragedy. When ISIS films its beheadings of innocent people, our horror deadens our humanity. When we dress Ebola health workers head-to-toe in Hazmat, and then learn that one flew round-trip from Dallas to Cleveland, while another turns up on a cruise ship off Belize, misfortune turns into farce. Our tendency, or mine anyway, is to stick my head in the sand, to withdraw to a safe place where I can keep the bad news at bay.

In the 1970s, New York’s Central Park was considered too dangerous to enter after dark, and so when the sun set we ceded it to gangs and criminals. A friend of mine, a man of unimpressive physique and noncombative ways, refused to comply, saying simply, “That’s our park.”

To retreat from the world is to give in to the forces that seem so threatening to us. Those forces are real and dangerous, but they are not the whole story. We need to publish other stories, the ones that affirm the only world – and the only lives – we have.

Autumn Evening

“I only know two things,” Vladimir Nabokov is reputed to have said (although I have never been able to find where), “that life is beautiful and that life is sad.” Walking yesterday evening in Acadia National Park, amid firs and spruce and pines, and hardwood trees whose multi-colored leaves sparkled in the muted light, it dawned on me that Nabokov was describing, not a contradiction but a connection. Fall is northern New England’s special season, and people travel great distances to experience it. It’s more than the foliage. The light is different now, the way it plays across the land and water, not overwhelming them with its summer intensity but drawing out the intrinsic beauty of the natural world. I walk on a path filled with fallen needles and dead leaves, as the earth prepares for its winter and I prepare for mine.

As I walk, I think that original sin is the evolution of a consciousness that set one species – ours – not just above all the others but separated from the rest of creation. It takes the passing beauty of an autumn evening to remind me that, despite all I have lost by this, I wouldn’t have it any other way. And I think of Thoreau at Walden, writing: “I went to the woods . . . to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Lost and Found

We found them, those elusive weapons of mass destruction that sent us to war in Iraq. In what some are calling a belated vindication of the Bush-Cheney administration, C.J. Chivers reported in The New York Times this week that during the last decade American troops unearthed several caches of chemical weapons, including thousands of nerve-agent rockets. It took Chivers a lot of digging, though, because the Pentagon had suppressed the information for years, going so far as to deny adequate care to affected soldiers and refusing to give them Purple Hearts. Why all the secrecy instead of a jubilant “we found ‘em” from Vice President Cheney? Well, it turns out these weren’t exactly the weapons everybody had been looking for in 2002, the ones we assured the United Nations that Saddam Hussein was secretly developing. All the weapons our soldiers dug up had been manufactured before 1991, when Saddam was an American ally engaged in a brutal war with Iran and Dick Cheney was the U.S. Secretary of Defense. But there is another reason we knew they were there. We helped make them. In fact, Chivers reported, “in five of six incidents in which [U.S.] troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.”

No such weapons manufactured after 1991 have ever been found.

The compound where most of the weapons were stored is now controlled by ISIS.

Smoke-Filled Rooms

With Election Day less than three weeks away, one constant theme has been the vicious conduct of the two parties and the growing polarization of the country. Yet the popular image of partisans ripping each other to shreds obscures the reality that more Americans identify as Independents (42%) than either Republicans (25%) or Democrats (31%). This raises a question: Is it the country that’s polarized or just the two parties that run it? Whatever its shortcomings, the two-party system has provided remarkable political stability – usually by emphasizing political horse-trading over ideological purity – for a long time. The last president elected from a new party was Abraham Lincoln in 1860 when the country was on the eve of Civil War.

The major criticism of the old system was that the parties made compromises in order to build broad-based coalitions, and so they didn’t “stand for anything.” Yet the broadest coalition in our history was Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party, which somehow managed to include labor unions, southern segregationists, northern blacks, populists, "urban ethnics", rural farmers and women. While it made some ugly compromises on racial segregation, it simultaneously prepared the way for the Civil Rights movement. What’s amazing is not that the party ultimately couldn’t survive its contradictions, but that it held them together for 40 years. And whether you like the New Deal’s legacy or not, it certainly got stuff done.

I used to disdain the old politics – the backroom deals, the compromises, the quid pro quo. They're looking a lot better from here.

Fifty Years Later

In the last couple of months, ISIS has beheaded two Americans, Ebola has claimed one life in Texas and infected a second person, and police officers in and around St. Louis have killed two black teenagers. Every one is a tragedy. But only two of the three have become headliners on the national political debate circuit. Guess which one hasn’t? We have effectively declared war on ISIS, getting ready to deploy troops to Turkish bases, and we are scrambling to set up a defensive perimeter against Ebola amid rising demands that we secure our borders against both. But 52 years after Michael Harrington described the “invisible land” of the poor in The Other America, 50 years after Lyndon Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America,” and 46 years after the Kerner Commission described a nation “moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal,” we turn our backs on St. Louis.

It’s not fashionable on any part of the political spectrum these days to return to the rhetoric of the 1960s, and much has changed radically since then. But on the persistent pockets of poverty and despair in our cities, where unemployment rates are unconscionably high and educational opportunities are almost non-existent, we continue to turn our backs.

I have little doubt we will contain ISIS and quarantine Ebola, but containment and quarantine are not strategies for revitalizing our cities, and this country's future really depends on whether we have the will to address the injustices at home. 

Weekly Wrap™

One More War! One More War! "If you thought that two disastrous wars in the Middle East spread over 13 miserable years might cure Washington of its delusion that the next war will solve all our problems, you were wrong," wrote Paul Waldman in The Washington Post, in response to Lindsey Graham and John McCain's suggestion for bringing peace to the Middle East: Attack Syria. As the senators point out, we now know the key to success – "embedding U.S. military advisors" – a tactic that worked so well in Vietnam the Pentagon is celebrating its 50th anniversary. As for arming moderate Syrians, why not? They already supply ISIS with much of its U.S. and Saudi weaponry. Where’s Tiny? I’m not saying they get their tips from me, but after my post on Kim Jong-Un, reporters noticed the diminutive dictator had vanished from public view, which has led to wild speculation. My theory is that the “monolithic leader” is at a Fat Farm (지방 농장) in suburban Pyongyang, recovering from the “excessive eating and drinking” that accompanies his annual expenditures of $650 million on “luxury goods” (about half what he spends on missiles). He’s likely the only guest, as those places aren’t cheap and 84% of his people are already much too thin.

President Ebola. Finally, San Francisco-based radio host Michael Savage announced that the president sent U.S. troops to West Africa because he “wants to infect the nation with Ebola” as part of the administration’s war on white people.

The Pursuit of Happiness

In the wake of Monday’s Supreme Court “non-decision” that paved the way for gay marriage in 30 states and the District of Columbia, the “originalists” – who believe the courts should seek only to discover the original intent of the Constitution – were in high dudgeon. “This is judicial activism at its worst,” railed Senator Ted Cruz. “The Court is making the preposterous assumption that the People of the United States somehow silently redefined marriage in 1868 when they ratified the 14th Amendment.” Cruz echoed Justice Scalia’s dissent when the Court declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional in what he called a “jaw-dropping . . . assertion of judicial supremacy.”

And after a stunningly superficial survey of the founding fathers’ writings, I admit I could not find a single one who supported gay marriage. Nor could I find any who opposed it.

And yet, as the country turns rightward, gay marriage moves inexorably from unthinkable to inevitable, and the Supreme Court, despite its conservative instincts, is tagging along.

Maybe that’s because the Court’s duty is not only to analyze sacred texts but to protect those rights (“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”) which the founders believed were "unalienable" and therefore not subject to a plebiscite.

When the Court has gotten that wrong – as in Dred Scott, which declared slaves property, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation, and Korematsu, which allowed the internment of Japanese-Americans – it has disgraced itself.

When it has expanded human rights, it has redeemed both itself and America.

Samaritan

You know the story: A man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho is attacked by robbers, stripped, beaten and left for dead. Later, a rabbi traveling on the road crosses to the other side.  So does a Levite. But a much-despised Samaritan takes pity on the man, bandages his wounds and carriers him to an inn. The next day he tells the innkeeper, “Look after him, and when I return, I will reimburse you.” The moral, said Jesus: “Go and do likewise.”

Let’s change a few details: From the Jerusalem-Jericho road to 72^nd SKD Boulevard in Monrovia; from an unidentified man by the roadside to Marthalene Williams, a 19-year-old pregnant woman so sick she can’t walk; from a Samaritan to Thomas Eric Duncan, who helps Williams to the hospital and then carries her back home because the hospital is full; from recovery at an inn to a painful death in an overcrowded room. Like the Samaritan, Duncan leaves, but he doesn’t disappear from history. He goes to Texas where he now lies near death from Ebola.

If Duncan survives – and his condition is now “critical” – he faces criminal charges in Liberia and the United States for lying on travel documents. And if he came, knowing that he was himself a deadly weapon, perhaps he should.

Luke’s parable seeks to answer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” The Ebola story is more complicated, but its victims are not just “carriers” to be quarantined. They are our neighbors.

Kim Phones Rodman, Changes Country’s Name

In his first press conference ever, North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un denounced the coverage of “those raggedy little nouveaux” in Africa and the Middle East as “totally not fair. “When I set off a nuclear bomb or have my favorite uncle executed for half-heartedly clapping, I make the front page of The New York Times for like two days,” said a visibly irked Kim. “These guys are page-one for months.”

The reclusive publicity hound then announced changes to get more media “face time.”

First, he has invited Dennis Rodman, the NBA Hall-of-Famer who calls Kim “my friend for life,” back to Pyongyang to coach the national basketball team, because “Americans only pay attention when Dennis shows up and makes an ass of himself." He added, with obvious frustration, "I have called Dennis three times, but so far I’ve only gotten his voicemail.”

Kim has also changed the name of his country to the Democratic Republic from Mars (화성 에서 민주 공화국), “the god, not the planet,” he said, because “using an ancient deity’s name has really worked for ISIS.”

Finally, Kim said he had invited President Obama for a summit on internal security. “When I read about the White House break-in, I knew we could help,” said the leader of the world’s most repressive nation. “My family has run North Korea for 65 years, and nobody has ever even tried to break in.”

After Kim's remarks, a reporter raised his hand to ask a question and was immediately arrested.

“First they came . . .”

For those who wonder what World War III might look like, I think we’re in it. To us who grew up in the early Cold War years, when air-raid drills involved ducking under wooden desks, World War III meant nuclear Armageddon, depicted in books like On the Beach, Nevil Shute’s bestseller about the world’s last survivors awaiting the radioactive cloud in south Australia, and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, which describes the “second death” – that of the future of mankind. Now, as the veneer of civilization erodes in many parts of the world, world war looks less like a game of nuclear chicken between superpowers armed to the teeth, and more like the state of terror Thomas Hobbes described long ago, with “no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

It’s a world in which violence seems arbitrary and unpitying – calculated to break any sense of common humanity. It comes in the personalized form of a videoed beheading, the random slaughter of a suicide bomb, the sudden swoop of a drone. Its aim is to scare us to the sidelines of relative safety, to watch in horror as the unlucky suffer, and then go about our business, having forgotten the words of Martin Niemöller, “Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”

The Hubris of Humans

We are living, I keep reading, on the edge of the Anthropocene, the sixth massive extinction in the earth's long history, and the first since the age of the dinosaurs. As the name implies, the cause is us. So naturally we have taken it upon ourselves to fix the problem, and in “Building an Ark for the Anthropocene,” Jim Robbins discusses several projects to save endangered species and protect habitat – an effort, however exciting and encouraging, that inevitably involves choices about which species get saved. Even Noah didn’t try to play god at that level. He loaded the ark with his family and two of every other species, figuring, I guess, that he could repeople the earth but needed all the others to survive.

That’s worth remembering. So many of our efforts to save the polar bear or the rainforest or the earth itself pretend that we are doing so for their sake, instead of for our own. But the earth doesn’t care whether we survive or not. As Alan Weisman noted in “Earth Without People,” it would do just fine without us – and if you are open to the Gaia principle that the earth is a single organism, it’s pretty obvious who the cancer cells are.

My daughter, Gayley, got married on Saturday, and it is their future and their children’s that I truly care about, and that’s why it is critical to protect the wondrous diversity on which their lives will depend.

A Necessary Tension

“We had a wonderful discussion about what makes everyone in the world unique, interesting and exciting. Everyone agreed that it is our differences that make the world so fun!” This message came in an email from my granddaughter’s teacher. Callie is in pre-kindergarten at a Quaker school, and I hope this message, so innocent and hopeful, stays with her as she grows into a world that seems intent on obliterating it.

There is an inevitable tension between individualism and community, between the urge to assert our uniqueness and our need to fit in with the group. It’s a healthy tension mostly – until the forces of orthodoxy overwhelm our differences. We see that most terribly now in the murderous brutality of ISIS, but it exists in the enforced conformity of totalitarian societies and the subliminal messages of consumer advertising, in reflexive patriotism and political correctness, in ethnic intolerance and the willful destruction of art.

The health of human communities depends on diversity as much as the natural world does. It is as destructive to crush differences among peoples as it is to eradicate species in nature. Whenever we stifle a voice of dissent, we extinguish a piece of life.

In Excellent Sheep, his new book on the state of higher education in America, William Deresiewicz quotes novelist/philosopher Rebecca Goldstein: “I place my faith in fiction, in its power to make vividly present how different the world feels to each of us.”

That, I think, is what politics must learn from art.

Defining a Nation

It turns out there really is an independence movement in the Shetland Islands. In response to Friday’s post, a reader sent me a Wall Street Journal article on the efforts of the Shetlands, Orkneys and Outer Hebrides, those beautifully wild islands in the North Sea, to hold their own referendum on secession from Scotland. The parliamentarians in Edinburgh, perhaps with an eye to the islanders’ claims to waters rich in fish and oil, denied the request. Which raises a question: Is there an ideal size and composition of a country and what’s the best way to achieve it?

These days, some very bad guys are expanding their borders by naked force. Vladimir Putin feigns innocence as he moves baldly into eastern Europe; ISIS uses terror to extend its caliphate in Mesopotamia. The Scots, by contrast, voted peacefully on independence, lost and went back to work. But secession movements have rarely been so civilized and have almost never been decided by vote. The United States fought the deadliest war in its history to keep the union intact (and force an end to slavery); the bloody “troubles” in Northern Island has been “the longest major campaign in the history of the British Army.”

Nationalism arose to combat the sectarian violence of warring tribes, but it rarely honored the unique cultures of its people, demanding instead capitulation to a centralized state. Whatever your position on last week’s referendum, it was an extraordinary effort to accommodate peacefully the conflicting demands of nationalism and diversity.

Rick Perry “Inspired by Shetlands Vote”

Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and once and future presidential candidate, told reporters this morning that the secession campaign in what he called "the Shetlands" should inspire all Texans, despite the crushing defeat it suffered at the hands of Scottish voters. Perry, who has been suggesting the possibility of Texas secession for years at Tea Party rallies, said he would study yesterday’s referendum in Britain to learn “how we could do it better.

“We tried leaving once before, about 100 years ago if I’m not mistaken,” he said, apparently referring to the Civil War (1861-1865). “But that didn’t work out so well. I didn’t realize until this week that you could just have a vote on it. Boy, that would have made things a lot easier.”

Perry said Scots and Texans have a lot in common, including accents that people are always trying to imitate, lots of oil, and a tradition of resisting British royalty. "The reason that we fought the [American] Revolution in the 16th century,” he said, “was to get away from that kind of onerous crown, if you will."

But the Scots' big mistake was their politics, he said, citing a column by Neil Irwin, who wrote that "Scotland’s grievances are almost the diametrical opposite of those of, say, the Tea Party. . . . They want more social welfare spending rather than less, and have a strongly pro-green, antinuclear environmental streak.”

“That would be a big loser in Texas, for sure,” Perry said, adding that "those fellas should wear pants."

Innocent Blood

In addition to the horrific manner of their murders, the three men beheaded by ISIS shared the status of non-combatants, a status protected by Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits “violence to life and person,” hostage taking, “outrages upon personal dignity” and arbitrary execution. So much for the Geneva Conventions.

Steven Sotloff and James Foley were freelance journalists covering events in Syria. David Haines was bringing humanitarian aid to a Syrian refugee camp. These are dangerous – and critical – roles in war zones, and those who perform them knowingly put themselves at great risk. But to be singled out for torture and public execution is a sign that the rules of war do not apply. It also raises the question of why we have rules for wars which have always brought disproportionate destruction and death to innocents.

ISIS has made a mockery of those rules, and we have hastened their demise with our justification of torture and failure to close Guantanamo.

And now Foley, Sotloff and Haines are being blamed for their own deaths. They had no business being there, we are told, as if they were seeking only their self-aggrandizement. But the world needs, more than ever, men and women who will risk their lives to bring aid to the suffering and report what is happening to the rest of the world. We cannot build walls and turn our backs.

I do not know what motivated the three men, but I admire their courage and their commitment.

A Sobering Thought

Here’s a sobering thought: three reasonably intelligent old men of diverse political views are sailing off the coast of Maine. When the conversation veers from reminiscing about the old days to current foreign policy, not one of them can articulate a coherent plan about what the United States should do in the Middle East. They can’t even quarrel, which is unusual. They agree on two things: the situation, including the cultures and players involved, is too complicated to completely comprehend; and regardless of what we do or don’t do, the U.S. can neither control nor even predict the outcome. I think we are hardly alone in this, not just among ordinary people but among those who represent us in Washington. With so much uncertainty and so little power to affect the outcome, the time seems unripe to rush into frenzied action. And yet the pressure to do something builds unrelentingly, whipped up by pundits at home and the despicable behavior of ISIS – which seems bent on goading us to act – abroad.

President Obama’s announcement that he will send 475 military advisors to the Middle East seems modest and humane, but I came of age with a war that began with military advisors, ended with 55,000 American – and countless more Vietnamese – dead, and spawned books with titles like The Making of a Quagmire. The U.S. didn’t understand the culture then, and it couldn’t control the outcome.

Wearied by sobering thoughts, we poured a drink and changed the subject to Ukraine.

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It”

Today Congress comes back from summer vacation. Perhaps you hadn’t noticed. Perhaps you weren’t even aware that our congresspeople had been away. Well, they're back. And they have much to do. First, there is the ongoing debate about whether to arm the moderates in Syria. Sure, one or two things have changed on the ground, such as whether President Assad’s decision to bomb ISIS positions in northern Syria makes him an American ally and therefore a moderate by definition . . . which just goes to prove John McCain’s point that if we don’t start bombing someone now, pretty soon we won’t know whom to bomb.

We can also look forward to another panel or two on Benghazi, several more votes to repeal Obamacare and finally unholstering the smoking gun that will settle the mystery of the president’s birth. Our representatives need to act fast because all 435 seats in the House are up for grabs in early November – and those who sit in them are in a hurry to get home so they can cut ribbons, kiss babies and get sent right back to Washington.

Which almost all of them will. For despite the high-profile fall of Eric Cantor in Virginia, 91 percent of incumbents continue to win re-election year after year after year. This is particularly astonishing these days when public approval of Congress stands at a whopping 8 percent and a third of the voters don’t even know their congressperson’s name.

So get ready to go out and vote for what’s his name!