Tom and John

Conceived in the language of John Locke (1632-1704), America has turned increasingly to the principles of Thomas Hobbes (1578-1679). Locke wrote that in the original state of nature, all humans were equal – and guided by reason, they “voluntarily entered into civil society for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and . . . property.”

For Hobbes, however, our natural state was a "war of all against all,” in which humans lived in “continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man [was] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Locke was the Founding Fathers' favorite philosopher: his emphasis on liberty and the social contract was the intellectual foundation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But Hobbes has never been far from the surface – admonishing us that without order, liberty and the social contract cannot exist.

We can deal in the abstract with the messiness of democracy, but once the bombing starts in Baghdad or the protests break out in Ferguson, our first instinct is to restore order before all else. Only when we have imposed external control, can we permit internal liberties to be exercised. We need Hobbes before Locke.

That seems logical – so why isn’t it working? Maybe it’s because those who patrol the skies of Mesopotamia and the streets of Missouri have little understanding of the lives and communities they are charged with controlling. Locke understood, as Hobbes did not, that you cannot long impose order on people who are excluded from the social contract.

The Glories of War

I had just finished Elizabeth Samet's thought-provoking article, “When is War Over?”, when I learned that Chuck Hagel had resigned under pressure. A Vietnam veteran, Hagel is the only former enlisted man ever to serve as Secretary of Defense. He leaves amid questions about his ability to manage America’s endless war – even as President Obama was once again extending the exit date for American forces from Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. Samet is a professor of English at West Point, and she poses her question through the unusual prism of a course on world literature. It’s reassuring, in an age when the humanities have been deemed irrelevant, that our future military leaders continue to study them.

Samet focuses on Alexander the Great’s 13-year military campaign, which ended with his death at the age of 32. He assured those soldiers who balked at spending all their lives at war that “it is sweet to live bravely and die leaving behind an immortal fame.”

The only person who gained immortal fame from those interminable wars, of course, was the young emperor, and while his troops – and their victims – lived short, hard lives, the exploits of Alexander continue to nourish the glories of war two millennia later.

Chuck Hagel, whatever his shortcomings at the Pentagon, understood war from its underside – as did Coenus, a loyal Macedonian who dared tell Alexander, “If there is one thing above all others a successful man should know, it is when to stop.”

There But for History

In the mid-1920s, the Ku Klux Klan reached its apex of influence in Maine, even capturing the governor’s office in 1924. The targets of the Klansmen's ire were not so much African-Americans, of which there were relatively few, but Catholics and immigrants, particularly of the French-Canadian variety, who had come streaming across the northern border to work in the state’s textile, paper and lumber mills. Many did not speak English, which did not stop them from taking American jobs. Earlier this month, Paul LePage defeated Mike Michaud to win re-election as Maine’s governor. During the campaign LePage hammered away at illegal immigration, taking particular umbrage at the placement with host families of eight children who had fled from Central America. Michaud was more silent on the issue, but it’s worth considering that both men descend from French-Canadian families that were the objects of the Klan protests not that many generations ago.

In fact, whatever you may think of LePage as governor, he has a singularly compelling biography. The eldest of 18 children of an abusive French-speaking millworker, he left home at the age of 11, after his father had shattered his nose, and lived for several years on the streets of Lewiston, finding work where he could. He failed his first college admission test because of poor English skills, and only passed after a benefactor persuaded Husson College to give him the test in French – interesting in light of today’s “English-only” movement.

It’s a true story and, somehow, this morning it seemed worth telling.

One More Nail

There is a small organization in southeastern Pennsylvania that has devoted its entire 47-year existence to studying fresh water, becoming perhaps the most respected scientific institution in a field critical to us all. Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency asked the Stroud Water Research Center’s scientists to help clarify the Clean Water Act’s “Definition of the Waters of the United States” to ensure their continued protection. Here is the clarification: “The scientific literature clearly demonstrates that streams, regardless of their size or how frequently they flow, strongly influence how downstream waters function. Streams supply most of the water in rivers, transport sediment and organic matter, provide habitat for many species, and take up or change nutrients that could otherwise impair downstream waters.”

This sentence is enormously important and little understood. It says that small, and even intermittent, streams are the source of most clean water and their protection is critical to the entire system. Small streams supply larger rivers with up to 70% of their flow, provide food and habitat for humans and other species, and filter pollutants out of the water itself. The economic benefit of these services is almost incalculable.

So what’s the problem? Well, these are the streams that coal companies blow off mountaintops, that loggers dry up when they clear cut, that frackers contaminate in pursuit of gas, that developers fill in. These are powerful forces, for whom science is just another gun to hire and this careful, comprehensive study just one more nail in EPA’s coffin.

City on a Hill

In a recent column on “America’s bipolar mental condition regarding foreign policy,” George Will quoted from Henry Kissinger’s World Order: “The conviction that American principles are universal has introduced a challenging element into the international system because it implies that governments not practicing them are less than fully legitimate,” which “suggests that a significant portion of the world lives under a kind of unsatisfactory, probationary arrangement, and will one day be redeemed.” This is one of those sweepingly simple insights that make you wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

It is also the flip side of “American exceptionalism,” the idea currently in vogue that America is different from (and indeed better than) other countries, that we have somehow managed to evolve outside of history, chosen by God to be “a city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop preached 384 years ago. “The eyes of all people are on us.”

Both philosophies are predicated on the belief that the rest of world exists in some state of original sin from which only America can save it. Everybody wants what we have; but the forces of evil stand in the way. “They hate our freedoms,” George Bush said, as he launched the invasion of Iraq. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” Woodrow Wilson said, as America entered World War I.

It’s a foreign policy, often based on good intentions, with a fatal, tragic, flaw: it has impeded Americans from approaching the world from any perspective but our own.

Wake Me, I’m Dreaming

Thinking about the upcoming 114^th Congress has given me some strange dreams. • I dreamt that Utah Senator Mike Lee sponsored a retroactive amendment to the Defense of Marriage Act, exempting Mormon founder Joseph Smith from the provision that “the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.” This followed the church’s recent revelation that Smith had 40 wives, some of whom were already married to his close friends.

• Then there was Senate Bill 2 (SB1, of course, repeals Obamacare). Known as the “One-Man’s-Trash-is-Another-Man’s-Treasure” bill, #2 removes all “Leave No Trace” signs from federal lands, whose presence, said a sponsor, “impeded natural views” and were "a tremendous waste” of taxpayers’ money. “The government has no business legislating personal behavior outside of sex and marriage,” he said, adding that the bill will enable private carting companies to “create thousands of good jobs,” getting people off welfare and “out into a healthy environment” – a much more effective environmental policy than the burdensome restrictions imposed by the recently abolished EPA.

• The weirdest dream of all was that, with oil prices at a four-year low, gas production booming, and the U.N. having issued its most comprehensive report yet on the threats from climate change, the centerpiece of the new senate majority’s 21^st-century energy plan is, um, coal.

“Thirty years ago," wrote the Union of Concerned Scientists, "coal was seen as a fuel of the past.” That's when I realized I wasn’t dreaming any more.

One Veteran's Reflection

As a veteran reflecting on Veterans Day 2014, I just want to say: “You’re welcome for my service.” Well, perhaps one thing more: It seems that the further we remove ourselves personally from the wars we fight, the more we heap superficial honors on the men and women we send to fight them. We applaud them as they double-time through airports. We invite them to the head of the line. We are forever thanking them for their service. We owe them that much, but we owe them and our country more.

Today, “only 5% of Americans have a direct tie to our military.” For a country built on the ideal of the citizen-soldier – who like Cincinnatus, after serving Rome, returned to his plough – that’s a disgrace, as are the wars we increasingly send them to fight.

The growing separation of our military from the rest of us, along with the increasing use of private armies like Blackwater to pursue off-the-books wars, is an alarming trend. It allows us to pay lip service to sacrifice without thinking much about what sacrifice means. It creates a military separated from the people it serves, forgetting James Madison’s admonition that “a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” It equates honor and service with military duty only, which undervalues all who serve in different ways and overlooks the obligation we all owe to the greater community.

It is time for universal service for all Americans.

Wilderness. Who Needs It?

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. Fifty years ago Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, making the United States the world's first country to designate wilderness areas for permanent protection. (The law came only two months after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, two momentous pieces of legislation that would have been impossible without forceful federal leadership.) The world’s population then was 3.2 billion. Today it is 7.2 billion. Humans have spent millennia carving civilization out of the wilderness, and there is unrelenting pressure to open what’s left of our wild places to drilling, lumbering and farming, to be less concerned about protecting animals that would eat us if they had half a chance and more about the needs of people.

As I walk in the national park, where, it is true, my chances of being eaten by a bear are slim, I think of Thoreau’s words, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Most people will never visit the wilderness, perhaps have no interest in doing so. Yet we need those places, even if only in our imaginations, where we set aside our impulse to dominate and reflect on living in harmony, not just with nature, but with each other – which seems a tonic in these post-election days.

Election Reflection

If politics is a game – and that’s how the media mostly reports it – then last Tuesday was a whoopin’ for my team. (But, hey, I’m used to it: my high school football team was 1-6, and before the season we thought we might go undefeated. Then we actually had to play someone.) All the post-election post-mortems, the gloating and whining, the excuses and accusations, can’t obscure a simple fact: we lost. It happens. But what if politics is more than a game? What if you believe that some issues are too important to simply say, “well, we lost that one.”

Only days before the election, the UN published its most dire warning ever on climate change. Don’t tell James Inhofe, the next chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Citing “the nation’s top climate scientists” – not one of whom actually agrees with him – he calls global warming "the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state.” On issue after issue – from infrastructure investment to reproductive choice, from urban revitalization to wilderness protection, from universal health care to universal suffrage – I see a Congressional majority completely out of step with me.

Well, tough luck for me. I don’t get to choose a benevolent despot to give me the government I want. That’s why we have elections. And we'll have more. I may have been 1-6 in high school, but I’m not leaving this field just yet.

The Perils of Post-Apocalyptic Travel

Lately, things haven't been going my way. I was on the first leg of my three-leg journey home when the last leg got cancelled. This caused me to be thrown off the middle leg and rerouted to a different airport on another day. I learned all this on the runway from my cell phone. Inside, the customer service agent seemed disinterested in customers and in service, but I managed to scrounge the last (middle) seat on the last flight out.

The man on my left is reading The Watchtower (“Is Satan Real?”), when he suddenly starts sneezing wildly. My god, I think, he has Ebola! If his temperature hits 103, I’m as good as dead. It's one thing for ISIS to sneak infected people onto cross-country flights, but Jehovah’s Witnesses? I have always listened politely when they come to the door, and my reward is a plague that even Job never got?

I turn toward the man on my right, whose head is buried in Mickey Mouse-sized earphones. He is furiously texting, furtively covering up his iPhone whenever the stewardess approaches. My god, I think, this jihadi is trying to bring down the plane!

This morning I woke up with a sore throat. I thought of quarantining myself for 21 days, but I decided instead not to sit in middle seats any more. That way I won’t have to worry about ISIS and Ebola at the same time. Then I turned to this morning's post-election news. Now I have something to worry about.

Mean Streets

Thomas Menino, Boston’s first Italian-American and longest-serving mayor, died last week. “My No. 1 thing,” he said in an interview two years ago, “is bringing racial harmony to the city.” Boston was in the second year of court-ordered busing to desegregate its schools when we moved there in the fall of 1975. Each morning we watched a caravan of yellow buses, filled with black school kids and escorted by police on motorcycles, wind through streets packed with jeering white people and climb to the top of Bunker Hill, where police sharpshooters waited on the roof of Charlestown High School.

For almost a century, Charlestown had been one of Boston’s poorest, toughest and least diverse neighborhoods, almost 100% white and overwhelmingly Irish-American. Its decrepit public-housing project below the Tobin Bridge exhibited the same pathologies – high crime, single mothers, school dropouts – which Daniel Moynihan had ascribed to the black ghetto.

It was a tense time in Boston, where politics was dominated by an uneasy alliance of Irish- and Italian-Americans who pandered to the city’s long history of ethnic hatreds and fortress neighborhoods. Menino, who lived his entire life just blocks from his birth, knew firsthand that Boston’s neighborhoods are also its strength – and instead of using his own heritage as a wall against outsiders and a barrier to change, he cited it as the basis for reaching out to immigrants and minorities. He had been there too, and he recognized that Boston's diverse peoples could be harnessed for its common good.

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.