Nora Webster

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When I finished Colm Toibin’s celebrated novel, Nora Webster, I had the humbling epiphany that I didn’t understand it. I sensed this coming when I felt the novel running out of pages before the author had made his point. Yet the book mesmerized me, and the realization I didn’t get it made me feel kind of dumb. So I read some reviews, figuring they would at least give me a coherent explanation of the plot. But I discovered that the reviewers didn’t understand Nora Webster any better than I did. They, however, were not about to admit it – and instead unapologetically explained for me a novel I had not read.

Nora Webster is a book in which nothing happens – nothing, that is, except life. Set in Ireland during the early years of “the troubles,” it is a story about ordinary people trying to cope with their lives. They are unheroic and inconsistent, often impenetrable. And Toibin doesn’t try to explain them for us – indeed, we end up knowing little about them, about their motivations or their inner feelings or even whether we like them or not.

This, perhaps, is the point I had missed. Toibin is not a sociologist. He is a storyteller. He doesn’t want to make his characters comprehensible. He wants to make them human. And as we are absorbed into the story of Nora’s life, we come to know her as we know everyone else, which is to say, hardly at all.

The Steel of Freedom Does Not Stain*

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Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is remembered above all for its soaring rhetoric, delivered in the flowing cadences that black Baptist preachers had transformed into an oratorical art. I heard King speak in February 1963 when he was working out his August speech. I had never heard anything like it. But I was long troubled by two paragraphs, near the beginning of the speech, whose language seems not melodious but mundane. “[W]e’ve come to our nation's capital to cash a check,” King said, “a promissory note [that] guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ [But] America has defaulted on this promissory note.” For people of color, the check bounced.

King labored over his speeches, leaving little to chance, and his language in this, his greatest speech, was no accident. His intent was to locate the civil rights movement firmly in America’s political tradition. Despite all we have endured, he said, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”

He evokes directly the language of America's two seminal documents, the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address; but he grounds their philosophical rhetoric in the no-nonsense pragmatism of Poor Richard’s Almanack.

We have folded King safely into American history because we want to forget how revolutionary he was. His message was simple: Words are important, but let’s get real.

He came to redeem more than a check, and he was threatening enough to get himself killed.

* From Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again

Charlie Redux

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Today Charlie Hebdo published its first issue since the massacre. As I look at my own and others’ struggles to make sense of what happened, our reactions seem surprisingly varied for an act so easy to condemn. Opinions diverge as we debate the inviolability of free speech and the demise of civil discourse; the “delicate balance” between legal tolerance and social restraint; the difference between skewering the powerful and bullying the downtrodden; the dangerous delusion of pitting civilization against barbarism; the political role of art. I find myself agreeing with people who disagree with each other. I have argued for more civil discourse in our own politics, and yet nobody ever accused Charlie Hebdo – whose tagline is “journal irresponsible” – of civil discourse. I believe that ridiculing each other ultimately debases us all, and yet I know no more effective way than satire to prick the (al)mighty. The problem is not simply external: we can’t reconcile our own beliefs.

Today’s cover features a cartoon of Muhammad, a tear falling from his eye. He holds a sign that says “Je Suis Charlie.” Above his head are the words, “All is Forgiven.” It’s not clear, at least to me, who is the forgiver and who the forgiven. So I infer that the journey toward reconciliation must begin with forgiveness, not of murder, but of each other. It is Charlie Hebdo’s most courageous cover, standing firm and reaching out. It will inevitably, even intentionally, be misunderstood. In fact, it is already under attack.

The Great Hoax

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I believe that almost everyone who runs a large organization is taking steps to cope with the threats posed to that organization by climate change. I believe that the leaders of countries from China to the U.S. to Europe, the governors of most states and the mayors of large cities, and the CEOs of major corporations are drawing up contingency plans – just in case the beliefs of 97 percent of the scientific community and the ever-more-sophisticated climatology models turn out to be true. I believe this includes ExxonMobil and other energy conglomerates, despite what their lobbyists are peddling. They would be fools not to. The exceptions are governors of energy-dependent states, Millennialists of all persuasions who can’t wait to get to paradise – and the Republicans who control both houses of Congress and who have made denial a litmus test of political orthodoxy, like the tax pledge, intelligent design and abortion. But members of Congress don’t run anything, and they are responsible for the future of no organization other than their reelection campaigns.

Although most Republicans actually believe climate change is real, the number of their Congressional representatives who publicly say so is shrinking. This is not based on new evidence, of which there is none, but on politics. “I think it's part of the phenomenon of the polarization of the Congress,” said former GOP Congressman Jim Greenwood.

And so while responsible people make plans, just in case, those responsible for our “general welfare” stick their heads in the sands.

Correction: A typo in Friday’s post listed Charlie Hebdo’s normal circulation as 6,000 copies. It is 60,000.

The Pen and the Kalashnikov

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The only thing more destructive of democracy than censorship is self-censorship, more destructive ultimately than two brainwashed jihadists with machine guns. In fact, while the murders of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and their police protectors (one a Muslim) is an attack on free expression, the killers seemed more intent on punishing those who had insulted Muhammad than making a statement about press freedom – although it’s hard to imagine in whose holy book their act would constitute “an eye for an eye.” The result, when the civic squares have emptied and the symbolic pens put down, will be a greater public commitment to free speech and an increase in small acts of self-censorship.

With censorship, at least, you know who your enemy is, even if you feel powerless to fight it. For the press, censorship comes in many guises. The worst is that of governments, and almost the first act of any totalitarian regime is to shut down the independent media. But it is more ubiquitous: threats to pull advertising; political demagoguery; a rock through the window.

But the threat of murder makes us pull our punches. Do I really need to write that?

“[W]e don’t want to publish hate speech or spectacles that offend, provoke or intimidate or anything that desecrates religious symbols or angers people along religious or ethnic lines," an AP executive told The Washington Post.

That’s a broad brush.

Charlie Hebdo is publishing next Wednesday. Not its usual run of 60,000, but one million copies. That’s commitment.

The King

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In memory of Judge John H. Mason (1945-2004), who loved the King

Here’s something to make us feel a little older: Elvis Presley would have turned 80 tomorrow. (Former English students, note the use of the future perfect subjunctive.) I remember, in the fall of 1956, watching his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan had said only three months earlier that he’d never have Elvis on his show, calling him “unfit for family viewing” and suggesting he wore “a Coke bottle” inside his pants. But 60 million viewers changed his mind. Among them were my sister and I. She was 13, I was 11. Elvis had barely warmed up when my sister emitted a little squeal. I think she even startled herself. Then she lost complete control. “I can’t help it,” she said apologetically, as she screamed at our small black-and-white TV. I was just disgusted.

Not for the last time did I find myself on the wrong side of history.

Elvis went on to sell 600 million records before he died, a prescription-drug-addicted zombie His last years were enormously sad. He made terrible movies and shallow songs, becoming a bloated, bespangled caricature of a star. He seemed so old. He was 42. But his early music lives, not just in the songs he recorded, but in all the diverse influences he absorbed into it and then sent out in completely new forms. Some resented him for usurping and profiting from black rhythms; others for mongrelizing white country. But he embodied both in a respectful but revolutionary way, one that empowered his music to transcend his biography.

The Public Employee

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On New Year’s Day, as I arrived with my car packed with evidence of our “family activities,” he emerged from the building, putting on his gloves. A quiet man of medium height, with shoulder-length hair, a stubbly beard, and an earring, he oversees the town’s recycling efforts. Recycling here is a community habit. Only ten states still have “bottle bills”. Half of those are in the far northeast, where you pay a nickel deposit for soda, beer and wine bottles. Because stores long ago stopped accepting returns, local governments established recycling stations with separate dumpsters for cardboard, plastics, glass, paper and metal. The Boy Scouts set up bins for redeemable bottles and cans, which is both a source of revenue for them and, I imagine, a peephole into grown-up life.

I initially resented this recycling czar, as he instructed me what went where – “this is plastic; paper bags go with the cardboard” – thereby dragging out what had seemed to me a pretty uncomplicated operation. So I’d try to go when I thought he wouldn’t be there. Like New Year’s Day.

“You’re working today?” I heartsinkingly asked.

“I work almost everyday,” he said. “I took Christmas off.” He added as an aside, “I don’t get paid for the holidays.”

But wait. Where is the stereotype we are endlessly fed – the arrogant, apathetic public employee, mindlessly punching a clock until he can collect his budget-busting pension? He takes his work seriously. He believes it’s important.

"Thank you," I said.

Spring of Hope, Winter of Despair

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On the last day of the year, the cusp between past and future, I turn to Charles Dickens to make sense of a world that seems filled with hope and progress even as it seems to be falling apart. By many indices, the world is a far better place than ever before. Millions have escaped poverty; life expectancy has increased markedly; war, discrimination and violent crime are at historic lows. On the other hand, climate change, resource depletion, widening wealth gaps, exploding populations, insecure nuclear arsenals, seething inner cities, global terror all portend disaster.

So which is it? It is both, as it has always been. The conflicting scenarios aren't just matters of opinion. They are matters of fact: the world and its human inhabitants are all these things at once. It isn’t easy to hold onto such contradictory realities, and in our efforts to make sense of the world and our lives, we reject views that differ from our own. This is how we build communities of people we trust. Yet, as we separate ourselves into groups of like minds and familiar lives, we give up something important: the ability, even the desire, to truly understand those who are different. Our ideas are the best ideas, our facts the real facts, our religion the only path to salvation.

The spring of hope blooms only when we listen to each other. For how can I convince you of the value of my ideas, if I will not listen to yours?

The Pilot

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Perhaps no image from 2014 seared itself into my mind so forcefully as the face of the young Jordanian pilot being taken into captivity by ISIS fighters. He looks traumatized, terrified and very young. He has not been heard from since. First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh is a soldier, a warrior, trained for war. Yet he’s hardly more than a boy, 26, younger than my youngest son. His training had stressed that capture – that torture – was possible. But he could not have been prepared for this. He was married in July, a proud, handsome young pilot, now paraded before the world without his pants. His is the face of war, as much as are those of his hooded captors. And this is what war does. It devours our young.

If ever there were a just war – by which I mean a war waged to stop a greater evil such as genocide, slavery or conquest – the fight against ISIS seems to meet its definition. But too often a just war morphs into a holy war, waged to impose a particular set of beliefs on others. Even now the lieutenant’s family appeals “to the jihadists to welcome him as a fellow Muslim.” I would do anything to save my family, but Kasasbeh’s fate should be a matter of his humanity, not his religion.

The Pilot

 

Sony Hires Dennis Rodman, Cancels ISIS Musical

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Amid growing accusations that it had “caved to terror,” Sony has reportedly named Dennis Rodman vice president of its newly formed North Korea Office for Friendship and Internet Security. The Hall-of-Fame basketball player has made several visits to the isolated country and calls Kim Jong-un his “friend for life.” The media giant also canceled plans for a musical extravaganza, “Holiday on ISIS,” in the wake of rising Internet chatter about John Travolta’s alleged portrayal of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as “the dancing caliph” and rumors of female dancers in Lululemon chadors.

As North Korea escalated its rhetoric, announcing it is now targeting “all the citadels of the US imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans,” Sony insists it did not cancel “The Interview” out of fear.

Others agreed. "It seemed like a simple marketing decision,” said an anonymous reviewer from an undisclosed location. “I mean, honestly, would you attend that movie’s opening, and I don't care where they held it?”

Instead, Sony is reportedly considering a script on the 2016 Olympics. “Intrepid Dribbler” depicts the inspiring journey of the North Korean basketball team, led by Rodman and point guard Kim Jong-Un, from ostracism to Olympic gold. In the title game’s final seconds, Kim dribbles through the heavily favored U.S. team, elevates over an astonished LeBron James and pounds down what the announcer calls “a nuclear dunk.”

“It’s like an Asian ‘Field of Dreams,’” said a spokesperson. “We think Mr. Kim will be pleased.”

The Pope of Hope

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The United States restored diplomatic relations with Cuba on Pope Francis’ 78th 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

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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

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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

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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”

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.