The Pope of Hope

The United States restored diplomatic relations with Cuba on Pope Francis’ 78^th birthday, a day of celebration in Rome that featured a mass tango and the gift of eight sunflowers from the homeless whose cause he champions. A full day for the first Latin American pope, who played a critical and patient role in the secret U.S.-Cuban negotiations. Although the Catholic Church has been one of communism's most implacable foes – even as communist regimes have tried to crush the church – it has stayed engaged, in Cuba, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, keeping alive for Catholics not only their faith but their hope.

Francis named himself for Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), whom historian Lynn White called “the greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, [who] tried to substitute the idea of equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation.”

“He failed,” White concluded in The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis. His “prime miracle [was] that he did not end at the stake.”

White argues that Saint Francis offered the church a radically different path, which it rejected and rooted out. Even as it canonized Francis, the church was already instituting the terrors of the Inquisition, and no pope subsequently dared to take his name.

I like to think that Francis I seeks to reclaim that alternative vision of the church, one grounded in humility, dedicated to humanity, and committed to inclusiveness – a spiritual voice we desperately need to hear in this world.

Christmas Shopping

I was hoping to give my kids a Congressperson for Christmas this year, but when I finally went online there were hardly any left. Just a couple of lame duck representatives and Mary Landrieu, still peddling her Keystone Pipeline. But I’m looking for someone who will last beyond the end of the year. Damn those pre-Christmas sales, especially the $1.1-trillion pre-Christmas budget sale that has a little something for everyone: sleep-impaired, Red Bull-guzzling truckers can again legally drive 82 hours a week – putting even Santa’s sleigh at risk; medical marijuana dispensaries, in states where they’re lawful, are safe from raids by the Justice Department, which can now only bust illegal joints; and in a major surprise, the sage grouse, never a large donor, lost out to the oil-and-gas industry, which claims the endangered bird interferes with drilling.

But the really big gifts went to the really big givers.

Those risky derivatives that brought the world’s economy to its knees in 2008 will again be insured by the American taxpayer for the sole benefit of the five banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan – that do 95% of the trading.

And big donors can now give $1.6 million to their favorite parties – over eight times the old limit.

The New York Times reports that Estefanía Isaías can spend Christmas in Miami with her maids, thanks to her fugitive family’s enormous generosity to the Democratic Party.

And Mitch McConnell hopes we all get coal in our stockings.

Immoral, Illegal and Ineffective

Excerpts from two responses to Friday’s post:

• I never encountered any U.S.-trained military interrogator who claimed torture was moral, effective or constitutional.
• If torture had revealed information that might have thwarted 9/11, would you support it?

If the first is true, the second becomes moot. But let’s accept its possibility because it is the fundamental issue in the debate.

My answer is no, and here’s why:

The question seems to ask, would we torture one evil person to save 3,000 innocent lives? That seems a no-brainer – except that the chances the first guy you torture gives you what you need are about zero. But once you have tortured him, you can’t just say, ‘gee, that didn’t work.’ You have to keep torturing to justify what you have done. So, how many people, some of them innocent, are you willing to torture to get information? 10? 100? 2,000? 3,001? The question seems absurd, but it's where the numbers game inevitably leads.

There are only three questions to consider with regard to “enhanced interrogation:" Is it moral? Is it legal? Is it effective?

The Geneva Conventions sought to legally codify morality in war (which may not be a good idea in this Hobbesian world). They say nothing about effectiveness. But after 9/11, our government perverted our legal system to justify immoral acts, claiming they were effective. Effectiveness  became the only question that mattered. Legal had become legalistic. We were in the numbers game.

Yet that same government had enough information before 9/11 to prevent the attacks without torturing anybody.

Duck, Cheney

Unsurprisingly, Dick Cheney is unrepentant. In an interview on Fox News, the former vice-president called the Senate report on the CIA's interrogation practices “full of crap,” although he confessed he had read neither the report nor its summary. (Full disclosure: Neither have I.) But he trashed the document nonetheless, praising the CIA and defending the legality, morality and effectiveness of its techniques. Four times he invoked the 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11, and he took responsibility for measures he asserted had prevented a second such attack on American soil. What he has never taken responsibility for is this: On whose watch did the first attack take place? Thankfully, we have had only one. It happened while Dick Cheney was overseeing our national security.

I’m not suggesting that Cheney is responsible for 9/11 in the same way the current Congress keeps trying to pin Benghazi – another horrific terrorist attack, which left four Americans dead – on Barack Obama. So far, five (!) House committees, all with Republican majorities bent on sticking it to the president, have investigated Benghazi. They have found no evidence of a conspiracy or cover-up. But don't worry, they’re still looking.

I don’t believe there was any conspiracy or cover-up with regard to 9/11. But if the head of the secret service is fired because a guy jumped over the White House fence and the VA administrator is disgraced over hospital conditions, why is nobody deemed accountable for 9/11?

Dick Cheney poses as a stand-up guy. But on this issue, he lies low.

“You Can’t Handle the Truth”

It’s one of Jack Nicholson’s great scenes. In A Few Good Men (which was released in 1992 and set, eerily, at Guantanamo) Col. Nathan Jessup (Nicholson) responds to the Navy prosecutor’s (Tom Cruise) demand for “the truth” about the torture and murder of a Marine private. “You can’t handle the truth,” Jessup sneers, raging against those who “sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then question the manner in which I provide it.” Like we do with the CIA. We do not want to see what some do to protect us from others who would do far worse. We look the other way because we are afraid. But also, I think, because we are ashamed.

The dominant American myth is that we are different, special and by implication better than other nations. That is the basis of American exceptionalism. America is the city on a hill, the first new nation, conceived in liberty, dedicated to equality.

But our myths contain potent contradictions that we prefer not to confront:

• Slavery in the land of liberty and the legacy of inequality that endures long after emancipation.
• The frontier, which was not a vast and empty open space waiting to be settled by yeoman farmers, but the home of millions of native peoples.
• And now torture.

America, at first alone, insisted on accountability at Nuremburg after World War II. It's hard to imagine that we would not demand accountability now, were the crimes reported yesterday not our own.

Sacred Places

Martin Litton, who died last week at 97, spent much of his life defending wild places – in particular, the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. He and David Brower led the Sierra Club’s quixotic fight against plans in the 1960s to build “bookend” dams on either end of the Grand Canyon, orchestrating a nationwide campaign to defeat the powerful alliance of the federal government and private developers. Perhaps he died too soon. The newest plan to despoil that area is the Grand Canyon Escalade, a $1-billion tourist complex proposed for 420 acres of Navajo lands just above the confluence of the Colorado and little Colorado rivers. The developers talk about the need for “a balance”. They offer instead Hobson’s choice “between having a job and a decent place to live or saving the environment and stopping development.”

The belief in any place as sacred has become a romantic relic for affluent hippies and premodern primitives, where the environment must be sacrificed to the economy and beauty must give way to utility.

But sacred places sustain our bodies as well as our spirits. For years, photographer John Trotter has documented the destruction of the Colorado – the river and the people it sustains. His series is called simply No agua, no vida. No water, no life.

When it comes to sacred places, Martin Litton said, “what you give away will never come back – ever. When it comes to saving wilderness, we can’t be extreme enough. To compromise is to lose.”

Obama’s Burden

In a recent interview with Terry Gross, Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker’s legal writer, said Barack Obama had “transformed” the federal courts. “They are very different in one way,” he noted. “Diversity.” Ideologically, however, “President Obama has been rather cautious” – particularly in contrast to the Republicans’ aggressive nominations of conservative judges – but his appointments of women, gays and minorities have been unprecedented.

This tells much about Obama – about why he was such an inspiring candidate and why he has been, in some ways, a disappointing president. We elected him for who he was, rather than for what he was going to do, which we really didn’t know. He represented the America we hoped to become – black and white at ease in one body, articulate and compassionate. His Philadelphia speech on race in the summer of 2008 was one of the finest I have ever heard. His candidacy appealed, in Lincoln’s phrase, “to the better angels of our nature.”

But while Obama’s persona was unthreatening to many – which is the only way our first black president could be elected – it was, in itself, threatening to others. And when he actually had to govern, he opened himself to partisan attack (and, as Senator Schumer recently demonstrated, to second-guessing).

His policies have been cautious – the idea that Obama is a “socialist” is laughable, his portrayal as a dictator absurd – but his commitment to diversity has been unwavering, which ultimately, I believe, will be his greatest legacy.

B*gg*r Thy Neighbor

Here’s how the free market works in Ohio: Large utility companies get together with Republican lawmakers to write legislation rolling back the state’s environmental standards. The industry lobby then shepherds Senate Bill 310 through both houses, and Governor Kasich, once a strong proponent of renewable energy and fracking regulations, signs it into law. Almost immediately, FirstEnergy, the huge utility company, announces it is ending its efficiency programs – even as it simultaneously lobbies the Public Utility Commission to require distribution companies to buy energy from its two old and uncompetitive power plants.

No, no, folks, this isn’t blatant politics. It’s “the free enterprise system.”

The law’s supporters have the gall to say they are motivated to help the poor and that Ohio no longer needs alternative energy because huge new natural gas discoveries have driven down energy prices.

Gutting clean air standards doesn't just affect Ohio. For years, the prevailing southwest winds have blown the state’s industrial waste over its neighbors to the northeast, causing those states to sue the Environmental Protection Agency in 1984 over acid rain and again in 2003 over air pollution.

I can never remember. Is it “beggar thy neighbor” or “bugger thy neighbor”?

Meanwhile, UN negotiators are currently meeting in Peru to draft a global accord on greenhouse gas pollution; the presidents of China and the United States have agreed to significant cuts in carbon emissions; and the EPA has proposed strong new regulations for coal-fired power plants.

And the next Congress can’t wait to eviscerate all three.

Hands

The first thing I notice about a man are his hands, probably because mine seem so pitiful to me, their cracking blisters rarely turning into callouses. In winter I vainly try to toughen them by going gloveless. Yesterday morning, the wind blew out of the southwest – a clearing sign – but the sea was still a steely gray as I looked across the white caps to Cranberry Island in the early light. I thought of Harold Alley, an islander of legendary strength and endurance, who, it was said, once lifted a car back onto the ramp of a ferry and put a harpoon through the backbone of a great white shark.

Years ago, before plastic traps and motorized winches, he was lobstering well offshore on a winter day when a sudden storm knocked out his engine and left him stranded in the growing darkness. As the night came on, he knew that if he gave into his fatigue he would freeze to death, and so, in an effort to stay awake, he began to lower and raise a lobster pot.

In antiquity, some thought Sisyphus – who was condemned by the gods to push a rock forever up a hill – personified the waves rising and falling on a “treacherous sea.” For Albert Camus, Sisyphus’ “struggle toward the heights” gave his life meaning in an absurd world.

All through the night Harold Alley hauled up the rope and let it drop again, his bare and freezing hands his only sign of life.

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.