Misplaced Sympathies?

I have Liddy and Congress on this afternoon in the background, in between writing spurts.

I have to admit, though I may be tarred and feathered for this, that I’m feeling pity for Liddy, after a particularly scathing examination by a Democrat whose name I didn’t catch, but has repeated about 40 times that he is “a contract attorney.”

The amount of posturing by our “public servants” all for the good of the “American people” is really underwhelming and grating at best.

On one level, these hearings are ludicrous . . . the inbreeding between big business and American government has been so deep for so many years now, it’s obscene.

But you wouldn’t think it to listen to these hearings.

The public servants arise anew, reborn for the good of We The People.

<yawn>

I get the public’s anger.  I am one of those who understands that the money is one tenth of one percent that weighs in at 50 percent, given our current economic hardship.

The money is symbolic, gets to the heart of what most Americans live in everyday, the most invisible layer of culture, because unlike race and gender, its markers are elusive: class division, in a culture devoted to to denial through acquisition’s narcotic effects.

Making Liddy a scapegoat is just wrong; he jumped on the boat late in the game, and many in Congress are more than happy to crucify this man to make themselves look good. He’s no angel. But he’s no Devil, and Congress members ought not feed the hate for their own good.

And Liddy’s having to stand in for the incompetence, greed, and class entitlement of all the AIG executives, though his term there has been relatively short, a fact that many Congress members choose to ignore.

Very little moral high road here, in this viewer’s opinion.

Just more theater, on both sides of the aisle.

With a few exceptions, a self-serving debacle for our elected officials.

Post-script:  During the “hearings,” the Fed announced it was buying an additional TRILLION in securities to aide the economy.

All in all, a very good day for . . .

the Chinese.

Uncle Dick on John King

For those of you lucky enough to miss Uncle Dick on John King’s “State of the Union” Sunday, I’m posting links to the YouTube uploads.

One of the prize moments, though you’ll have to suffer through all the segments, because I don’t remember when exactly the praise started, is when Uncle Dick talks about the great and wonderful Uncle Rush.

Enlightening.

This first segment is particularly rich for anyone with half a wit, but each segment offers its own “insights”:

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Rush The Tragic White Boy

I try to steer clear of the obvious, and I give few of my life minutes to people like Limbaugh and his ilk.

But Timothy Egan’s piece in the Times today warrants this short entry. Mr. Egan makes excellent points that go beyond the usual diatribes against Limbaugh, and his column today is insightful and well written.

Link: Fears Of A Clown.

Two points which struck me, impressively written by Mr. Egan:

As someone who spends a lot of time on the road, I used to find Limbaugh to be an obnoxious but entertaining companion, his eruptions more reliable than Old Faithful. But now that Limbaugh has become something else — the face of the Republican Party, by a White House that has played him brilliantly — he has been transformed into car-wreck-quality spectacle, at once scary and sad.

(bold face added)

We again see why Barack Obama is the man for this job at this time: we need leadership skilled enough to deflate those self-aggrandizing toxic hot air balloons that have floated too long over the land.

And it was this paragraph which I thought brilliantly summarized our current economic state of affairs, and crystallized reality as few have to date:

But therein lies the main tactic of Limbaugh, an old demagogue technique: create a straw man, then tear it down. The latest example was Saturday, when Limbaugh presented himself as the defender of capitalism, liberty and unfettered free markets. Obama, he has said since, is waging a “war on capitalism.”

There is a war, all right. We are witnessing the worst debacle of unfettered capitalism in our lifetime brought on by — you got it, capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself. Government, sad to say, had nothing to do with it — except for criminal neglect of oversight.

Now that government has been forced to the rescue, just who is insisting on taxpayer bailouts? Who is in line for handouts? Who is saying that only government can save capitalism? The very leaders of unregulated markets who injected this poison into the economy, the very plutocrats that Limbaugh celebrates.

(bold face added)

Capitalism cannibalizing itself. Perhaps the most succinct summary of the global economic meltdown yet articulated.

The corrective will be a cannibal like swing to government regulation and nationalization, until the equilibrium is restored.

It’s the world’s way.

Ohhhhh, Goooood Grief

The day America sees real Socialism will be the day the heavens open and Jesus returns in the clouds with the angels, her black breasts bared ready to feed the poor, her scepter prepared to spread the wealth and even the playing field quicker than you can say, “Mike Huckabee ♥ economic equality.”

‘Socialism!’ Boo, Hiss, Repeat: an entertaining New York Times article on the current deluge being spewed by the far right fear mongers, warning of the Republic’s imminent transformation into the U.S.S.A. under Comrade Obama, and Mr. Huckabee serving up wisdom like, “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

You just gotta love the drama queens of the far right–but then, politics is all about theater, isn’t it?

As the Times reports, “the socialist bogey-mantra has made a full-scale return after a long stretch of relative dormancy.”

Praise the Lord.

We’re doing something right . . . uhhhh, I mean left, after way too long.

Two of the Bogey Meisters, from the New York Times article:

Representatives Mike Pence and John Boehner

Midday Mini Rant

A draft or some such thing of the Federal Budget was released today, and I happened to have the boob tube on (allusion to its mind numbing effects, not the female anatomy, but the way the two are linked is striking, isn’t it?) this afternoon while rushing to get out the door.

(Budget of the United States Government main page with a PDF of the 146 page proposal: A New Era of Responsibility, Renewing America’s Promise.)

CNN showed Ms. Pelosi holding the budget proposal in her hands and saying, “This budget reflects our national priorities and the President’s agenda . . .,” etc., etc., etc., the statement a swipe at what has been going on for the past eight years, and the past administration’s abandonment of American fundamentals.

Just a guess, but literacy and skill might serve We The People well.

Ya think?

Following Ms. Pelosi, John Boehner gets on flapping his lips about the deficit and the woeful and glib way the Democrats and the President are reacting to the budget deficit.

Excuse me?

The Republicans gave Bush a rubber stamp for eight years and basically racked up this mess, for the most part, in Iraq. Mission. Still. Not. Accomplished. Afghanistan is collapsing by the day. Meanwhile Halliburton went skipping off with billions and billions of dollars from its war profits (we love you Uncle Dick), and then moved to Dubai to avoid paying taxes. Not to mention the other contractors who made off with uncounted cartloads of American taxpayer money.

Now we have the housing bubble which came to full fruition under these good ol’ boys and their financial buddies, the credit card companies, the investment banks, Wall Street, Rupert Murdoch, et al, but hey, let’s just blame the new Democratic agenda and its task of trying to clean up the country while getting us back on track for the almost diminished notion of “the greater good.”

I am certain we all know the real solution to this problem:

“Tax cuts. Tax cuts. Tax cuts.”

Education won’t help.
Health care reform won’t help.
Infrastructure repair and creating jobs is a waste of time and money.

No, none of the above. Tax cuts.  The cure to our ills.

If it weren’t so pitiful to watch, it would make for great comedy.

I am thinking to send Mr. Boehner my prayer beads from India, so he can count off how many times he chants the mantra during the day.

An ancient and revered custom, mantras and prayer beads.

NYT: Obama Plans Major Shifts in Spending

Kathleen Parker Calls It Again

Kathleen Parker, the conservative writer who recently broke ranks in denouncing McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, has done it again.

Kudos to her for articulating the obvious.  For sometime, among friends, I’ve been referring to Ms. Palin as “Trophy Veep”; some of my male friends have flat out said, “she’s hot.”

Testosterone is lethal.

Many thanks to my friend Zacca for sending this one on to me: Kathleen Parker: Maverick’s Tragic Flaw.

The Great Divide (Once Again)

My previous posts on “Sarah Palin and the Great Divide” met with more than polite hostility by many of my friends on the liberal left. One friend summarized my attempt at parsing as “that religious garbage.”

I refrained from saying flat out, “point proved, the intolerance cuts both ways.”

I found the following today by Stanley Fish:

Politics and the Pulpit (Once Again).

Fish grapples with many of the Constitutional nuances of the debate, and although his specific concern is the tax exempt status of churches, he explicates concerns similar to mine with more insight, experience, and skill. His analysis is worth reading. He writes in his conclusion that “[t]he bottom line is that there is no rational or principled or constitutional resolution to this conflict. The resolution, if there is one, will have to be political. Either the Johnson amendment will be repealed or it won’t be. And when one or the other happens, the boundaries between church and state, at least with respect to this issue, will have been settled — for a while.”

The reader’s comments are lively and diverse, and worth scanning.

Most social activism and change comes from the belief that all humans are “created equal,” and that this truth, often framed in the language of religion, must be politically realized. The morality of equality and the immorality of social oppression has fundamentally shaped human development. Unfortunately, the assorted maps to broader and more inclusive equality are diverse and subject to interpretation. For that reason, I’m sympathetic to Fish’s analysis: the roads to heaven and hell are paved with the best of intentions, and politics reflects the best and worst of our ideas, writ large.

Professor Fish’s bio and his intellectual predispositions can be read here.

As a post-script to my first entry on the V. P. debate, in Sojourners this week, Elizabeth Palmberg writes in her entry “V. P. Debate’s Blind Spots on Darfur” that Biden, Palin, and Ifill all got it in part wrong on Darfur last week. She states that “talk of boots on the ground misses the point: what we need on the ground is the wingtips and sensible pumps of real diplomats, backed up by real economic consequences for Khartoum, including an array of new, substantive economic sanctions on Sudan (which has learned to circumvent the ones we imposed years ago). This would enable the various groups in Darfur –- armed and, most importantly, unarmed –- to come together and negotiate with Kharoum from a position of strength, as their neighbors in southern Sudan did in 2005.”

Her entry is short and worth the minute or two it takes to read.

And the Winner Is . . . Part 2!

The crew at Saturday Night Live:

(If the YouTube video doesn’t work, click the link below.)

Saturday Night Live V.P. Debate Skit.

Please note: the NBC site has gotten so many hits on the skit, that they’ve added an advert to the beginning, for which I apologize.

And the Winner Is!

Well, that depends on who you ask, of course.

Palin redeemed herself enough from the Couric interviews for the base to breathe a sigh of relief. On PBS’s after debate commentary, David Brooks was so excited that he actually thought she did well, and wrote as much in his Op-Ed today. Mark Shields said that we’d seen a first in American debate history, the most liberal use of “colloquial language” in any debate to date.

That, Mark, would be an understatement.

Of the many precedents Ms. Palin set during her performance, perhaps none was more onerous as her “folksy” vernacular and massacre of the English language. A friend e-mailed me during the debate and wrote, “She says nu-cu-lar just like Bush.” But it was her inability to completely articulate the present participle of an active verb which wore thin in less than thirty minutes. A gentle use of the informal can be inviting. A disregard for language’s conventions is another animal entirely. But that is the point. As the Times’ editors aptly noted, it was the language of class warfare. While some may see this informality as charming, think that it shows that the rules don’t matter, and that America really is a land of equal opportunity, I found it annoying to the point of numbing. Yes, only in America. There is a time and a place for folksy charm: skillfully moving through language’s registers, formal, informal, vulgar, street, demonstrates curiosity and language acumen, and I am anarchist enough to appreciate a well timed, iconoclastic use of “ain’t.” But the slaughter of English was at moments almost unbearable. Coupled to the cute winking and excessive confidence when being out of one’s depth, for this viewer, it belied a lack of restraint required for the office. It intimated the same excess characterizing the past eight years of Bush and Co. Palin’s informality is presumably a form of empathy, allows her to connect with everyday working folks, makes her accessible. But as Doris Kearns Goodwin commented on Charlie Rose after the debate, “FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy didn’t touch people because they lived the same as the people they served, but because they were able to connect empathetically with them” (loose translation). We don’t need leaders who live like we do, we need them to understand the challenges of our lives and then skillfully lead and implement policies which benefit “We the People.”

I suppose charm must succeed when substance fails, and though Ms. Palin spoke in full paragraphs, a requirement Mr. Brooks stated that she would have to meet before the debate, those paragraphs were too often long and winding roads punctuated with Bridges to Nowhere. It pained me to return to some of my first and most difficult college courses, when I was expected to say something of substance, had nothing to say because I was scared to the point of loosing bladder control, and I talked in circles to fill up empty space. Yes, Sarah, I connected with you. Been there, done that.

But I wasn’t running for a position which would put me a heartbeat away from the U. S. presidency. I was a young undergraduate and trying to avoid looking foolish and busting my backside for a good grade. That is not an option for the Vice President, Ms. Palin.

I wrote elsewhere awhile ago that McCain’s choice of Palin was beyond cynical, it was flat out reckless and dangerous. She said or did nothing last night to convince me otherwise. Today’s Times editorial expresses the same sentiment and echoes my own observation that she did little other than repeat the Republican tax cut mantra, folded in a rhetorical nod to Reagan, and even used a George Bush tactic, identifying the other as “evil.”

I thought they had thoroughly coached her to “look ahead.”

Full paragraphs and mantras notwithstanding, she offered little more than she has previously. She may be charming, likable, and truly has a rare, foolhardy courage, which is admirable in many ways. But not for this job at this moment in history. We’re not a fledgling frontier needing bold courage to pave new roads: we’re a very ill Republic with overwhelming problems needing wisdom and steadiness. I try to imagine the moment when McCain called her and asked her to join him: “Why sure, John! I’d be happy to help ya out on that one! Just thinkin’ about it gets me real excited that we can do, I guess ya might say, some things that, well, could probably be real, real positive, like them tax cuts we Republicans are so cravin’.”

Yes, America is cravin’ alot these days. Most importantly and decidedly, economic recovery.

Joe Biden gets a special award from me, for having the courage to bring up Darfur during the debate. He is the only player so far to do so, to the best of my knowledge. His brief statements against genocide, during the only Vice Presidential debate, spoke loudly for a people who have no voice, and demonstrated what our national values should encompass in both word and deed.

His concern for those 2.5 million displaced in Darfur, and the brutal massacre of at least 300,000 humans, which had nothing to do with the voter’s self interest, showed a true depth of courage, transcending political posturing.

Thank you, Senator Biden.

Sarah Palin and The Great Divide, Pt. 2

I found the following Monday morning when I turned to The Economist: The Born Again Block: The Democrats are Having A Lot of Trouble Wooing Evangelical Voters. It nicely coincided with Sunday’s entry, and it gives me the opportunity to unpack a little of what I wrote in my letter to Frank Rich.

I first offer an anecdote, to illustrate the concerns I previously expressed and which were echoed in The Economist article.

I spoke with my mother on the phone last week. Not surprisingly, she is the only in her circle of evangelical friends voting for Obama, and the following is typical of what she encounters. “Jill and I were talking yesterday, and she couldn’t believe I was voting for Obama. Jill said, ‘But he is for abortion.’ I told her abortion is just one issue, and I think we need to vote on more than one issue, but she doesn’t understand how I can be a Christian and vote for someone who upholds abortion. She seemed to think I was being un-Christian by voting for Obama.”

Jill is indicative of my mother’s friends, and compared to most, quite tolerant. For this group, Christianity is an iron clad doctrine, reinforced by Sunday sermons, home Bible studies, radio and television programs. Diverting from the doctrine is to wander off the “straight and narrow,” the assurance of salvation not quite as iron clad since “once saved always saved” is a hotly disputed issue. More compelling, though, is the buttressing of doctrine through the spiritual relationship formed through prayer, worship, and the Christian community. In these communities “values” are formed and become yoked to the believer’s subjective experiences. Such experiences might be dismissed as mass hallucination by skeptics, but the import and transformation in their personal lives is quite extraordinary. (Skeptics would be well served to read The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.)

Most of these individuals will never have access to the elite or even semi-elite educational institutions that mark the background of those publishing and writing for The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, etc.; their lives are circumscribed by their faith communities, their work, their families, and their neighborhoods. College is not a given, and many of my mother’s friend’s children have attended Bible colleges, or have an educational background like Sarah Palin’s: fragmented and unfocused.

First and foremost in the minds of this group is a “relationship” with God, understood exclusively through Jesus Christ, and the purification of their lives in this goal. Their primary role models are Biblical characters, and the Bible is not viewed as a compilation of historical documents, or a redaction of oral traditions, but the absolute and unquestioned Word of God. Such certainty sanctifies this world view, but more important offers rote assurance that the believer rides the tides circumstance victoriously.

To dismiss religious belief and its expressions is to ignore compelling evidence of the brain’s hard wiring for spirituality, and the increasing evidence for the mysterious complexity of the unconscious mind. It is also to ignore the profound connection between spirituality, creativity, the intricacies of human development, and most important, the unavoidable reality of the symbolic imagination characterizing our species.

Among Evangelicals, personal experience, faith, belief, doctrine, and “values” form an intricate psychological web: these are not bad people, but very often decent people holding suspect ideologies born from good intentions, reinforced in the community, and solidified through spiritual experience. More germane to this discussion, “faith” is not an abstract concept that is merely talked about, it is a daily surrender of one’s self to a personal spiritual quest and set of beliefs which must be narrowly defined, for the path is ’straight and narrow.’ This life and the afterlife depends on their responsibility to this experience and walking “the straight and narrow,” even though the pitfalls of that walk are numerous. Discussing faith abstractly or to treat it as a private matter entirely misses the point; in the political realm, a candidate so speaking simply demonstrates that they aren’t a “true believer.”

As we know, the Evangelicals form a powerful voting block in American politics, the “values driven” vote. Like good Christian Soldiers “with the cross of Jesus going on before,” they have changed this country in the past eight years, fighting for a straightforward, tightly circumscribed morality where right is right and wrong is wrong, to keep their children and their country safe, free from change, and rooted in a particular world view. Sarah Palin has captured their imagination, as I previously wrote, not because she is a woman, but because she is a woman of faith: she is one of them, and people vote for people like themselves. Like them, she prays for guidance, identifies with Bible characters, and if she comes across as “George Bush squared,” it’s because she really is more like Jill than anyone who has ever been on the national stage. Whereas I saw a scripted neophyte in the Charlie Gibson interview, Jill no doubt saw someone like herself: a working mother who had made tough decisions, has floundered and succeeded in life “through God’s grace” by following his Word, and who may not be book smart but has a personal relationship with the Lord, and by God you can’t take that away from her. I believe psychologists call Palin’s “don’t blink” references a variation on “fight or flight.” And like a true daughter of God, Sarah fights. Like Jill fights, and like so many of my mother’s friends fight. It is a world view which sees no utility in parsing, decisions must be made, and staying true to the faith and fighting the good fight win one the victor’s crown, a spiritual promise which must be lived daily. The liberal elite doesn’t “get it” in many ways.

The cultural divide may be overly simplified as a divide between meaning and thinking, the former associated with those on a personal quest, the latter associated with “secular liberal values.” What our thinkers and analysts don’t understand is that the simple sweeping away of the search for meaning by the presumed superiority of rationalism and “liberal secularism” is itself fraught with overwhelming logical inconsistencies, dehumanization and empathic distance being one of the most common. The dismissive, smug disregard of ignorant Bible thumpers being the most relevant case in point. Like it or not, the Evangelicals have a right to vote. Perhaps the most ironic inconsistency which I observe is that the bubble of Enlightened elitism can’t see beyond its own fragile sphere to penetrate the human imagination of about 23 percent of the voting population. Education and intellectual development seemingly foster self-importance and complacency, a.k.a. stubborn ignorance, instead of humanitarian concern and understanding.

At the end of the day, it seems to me a class issue, and those “dumb” Evangelicals know it consciously or unconsciously. I am not talking economics, but the subtleties of class and social mobility in America. When religious conservatives believe in the existence of a “liberal elite media,” the subtext is “those who aren’t like us, those who don’t live like we do.” They understand themselves as not having the same resources, as different from those who are allowed mobility and gravitas.  When this world closes you off to opportunity, choose the next world and a compassionate God who blesses the social have nots. Their superiority to America’s ever present and invisible class system is anti-classicism by way of heaven and its founder; the privilege of their renegade (“maverick”) status is reinforced by God and his Word. Throw in bits of patriotism, Americana, and the fear of terrorism, and you have a world view easily penetrated by the likes of Rove. And while the liberal elite glibly talks about the ignorance of those who vote for individuals like George Bush and Sarah Palin, the fact is that these are the individuals who too frequently throw themselves under our collective political bus while they simultaneously rely on the assurance of God’s favor and protection in their personal lives.

For all the accolades laid at Obama’s feet, what is conspicuously missing from his discourse is real religious rhetoric: a rhetoric of hope is simply secular liberalism ignoring the obvious. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” freely used scripture and the religious imagination in framing its message; Jimmy Carter’s appeal in ‘76 was a real lived “born again” faith which even wrestled with issues of lust. To speak about hope without the certain imaginative fire imported by religion, given the precarious nature of the world and its circumstances, and our own shortcomings, is to speak in a vacuum for Evangelicals. For all of us, somehow the universe must be made hospitable: belief in God is the quickest route to make it so, a fast track speedily bypassing any philosophical bumps in the road. Thus, when you invoke tradition, authority, and the lived experience of “an ever present help in a time of need,” you move into the realm of the religious imagination, one of the most potent regions in the human mind, and notably the same source accessed by some of our greatest artists, poets, and rhetoricians, arguably the region from which our better angels are born.

McCain trumped many of his shortcomings (including his flip flopping on Roe vs. Wade) and shook things up through one simple move: igniting the fire of Republican party’s base through the religious imagination by choosing Sarah Palin. Someone like themselves, a real Christian soldier. Until the Democrats and the left get their sanctimonious rational hands dirty and muck around in the religious imagination, until they quit demonizing the adaptive and meaningful as mere ignorance, and recognize its inevitable function in human life, until they can identify with the Evangelicals in a way which doesn’t smack of patronizing them, they have little to offer this particular block of voters, and the Republic remains in very uncertain territory.

For further reading:

• David Brooks wrote an interesting Op-Ed today, which intersects with my thoughts above. Although he frames his observations in terms of “populism” and “elitism,” it should be obvious why I agree with his analysis: Why Experience Matters.

• E. J. Dionne also writes on the populist – elitist divide today, and concludes much more optimistically than myself: Whose Elitism Problem Now?

• God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission. Griffith deals specifically with feminist issues, but her book offers an extraordinary and even handed view into the Evangelical woman’s world.  Nicely summarized and described here.