So It Goes

"Emblematic" of Evangelical Christians? I Hope Not

AMID THE VOLUMINOUS coverage of yesterday's caucuses, the Washington Post ran a feature photo today of a family from Rock Rapids, Iowa, next to a headline "Witness Politics: Their Faith is in Santorum." It's the sort of 'glimpse of the inner world of voters' that attempts to offer a little authenticity to the volumes of blather that pundits produce to fill so much air time.

Both the husband and wife who were featured told the photographer they would vote for Rick Santorum, and the caption describes them as "emblematic of evangelical conservatives."

The extended caption (I'm going with the text in the printed edition, which is slightly different from the online copy) goes on to say that the husband and wife said :

[T]hey couldn't vote for Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) because she is a woman, for Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) because of his anti-war views, for Mitt Romney because he is a Mormon, for former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) because of his infidelity and for Texas Gov. Rick Perry because he didn't get past the surface of the issues.

Assuming this couple is truly "emblematic of evangelical conservatives" (and let me point out that the Post owes readers and their subject a bit more to prove this is empirically true -- a snapshot of two people does not a demographic profile make), I'm a bit startled to see that they would make this sort of admission publicly, let alone think it in the first place.

Now, there are a truckload of reasons not to vote for Michele Bachmann. But to say categorically that she is unfit to be President because she is a woman, well, wow. Forgive my precious naivete, but are there still a lot of people in America who think this? And do they really think it's no big deal to say it out loud without any apparent embarrassment ? Haven't we gotten past that one out?

And then what about their view on Romney? Believe me, I'm aware of the theogical (and maybe it's even social and cultural) discomfort many evangelical Christians have when it comes to Mormons. But are we still living in a country where religion is a make-or-break factor in some people's judgment of their fitness for higher officer, or, presumably, anything else? (Well, when it comes to Muslims in particular, as I have discussed frequently in this blog, yeah.) Would I be justified in dismissing a candidate of a certain faith (say, an evangelical Christian), even if that person is clearly qualified and completely in synch with my own political views?

The comment about Paul is slightly more complicated, I think, though it raises questions. It's tempting to conclude that the couple here is "pro-war" because they rule out Paul for his "anti-war" views. But they could mean that, while war is undesireable and should be avoided at all cost, it is sometimes an option we have to choose. (Paul is, apparently, categorically against any sort of military action, or so I understand.) That's not such an unreasonable position, but I personally would not have been comfortable characterizing my vote so simplistically, knowing how much misunderstanding might be lurking in the vagueness. Maybe the journalist owed them a little more clarity than this. Or maybe she got them just right.

As for their objection to Gingrich: no surprise. Same for Perry, though I would argue (as The New Republic has in this excellent essay) that none of the Republican candiates got "past the surface of the issues." (Democrats are not immune from this at times, either, by the way.)

I'm hesitant to make any broad-sweeping generalizations about evangelical Christians based on this isolated example. Indeed, much as I may disagree with many on certain issues, I sincerely believe most evangelical Christians are representative of the whole of society, which is to say they have good and decent intentions. And this could be a case of bad translatiby the newspaper.

But, not that any will listen to me, but if I were an evangelical Christian, I would step up and say that these two are not at all "emblematic" of their community. And, if I were Rick Santorum, I would do the same. Otherwise, we're left with the feeling that they embrace pretty unfortunate views. And Santorum would need to prove to me that as President of the United States, he will represent all the American people.

Jeff

No Lone Perpetrator Behind the "All-American Muslim" Controversy

WHAT SURPRISES me most about much of the discussion that has swirled around The Learning Channel's "All-American Muslim" program is how surprised many seem to be about it.

The shameful anti-Muslim fervor that tripped the wire of wall-to-wall coverage this time is part of a troubling and growing pattern, and it was not, as some of the discussion seems to imply, the work of a lone perpetrator. Lone perpetrators don't get this much traction unless the conditions are right in the first place. And they were.

The program (which I have never watched) reportedly portrayed Muslims in Michigan as, well, all-American -- which is to say, not especially unusual Americans. They carried on their lives -- as most Muslims in America do -- rather prosaically.

Indeed, as one Muslim American wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay, "The plotlines featured in the previews -- a young couple preparing to wed, another planning the arrival of a baby, a high school football coach putting his athletes through grueling practice -- seemed high on sweetness and low on drama. Since the ordinariness of a Muslim life is something I experience everyday, I felt no need to have it demonstrated for me on television."

That banality may have been bad TV (a criterion that hasn't kept other such reality shows from getting good ratings), but it was a red flag for the Florida Family Association, which has a reputation for dangerous intolerance.  The all-American Muslims on the show just didn't square with FFA's central assumption "that Islam and those who practice some of it’s [sic] deviant rules have been doing so for thousands of years and are a threat world wide including in America."

Enough has been said, I think, about how businesses by Lowe's and Kayak faltered morally by caving in (only "in part", they say) to FFA's campaign to gin up a false threat about Islam and the Muslims among us. These businesses and the many other people who bought into this bigotry should really be ashamed, and I'm pleased to see there's been a big groundswell of condemnation for their views. Their behavior is about as un-American as it gets.

Before someone tries to take this discussion in direction that is beside my point, let me stipulate, as I have in previous posts  that, yes, there are Muslims who are truly a violent threat to Americans and other "infidels". They scare the shit out of me, and the world must stop them. End of disclaimer.

(But I'm also convinced (based on empirical research and lots of anecdotal evidence of my own) that the vast majority of Muslims do not buy this extremist notion of Islam. In fact, for good reason, many despise these miltants more than even the FFA.)

One of the nutrients that enriches soil for the sort of bigotry FFA cultivates is the noise we hear from advocates against sharia law. These folks have convinced themselves that Muslims have an agenda to replace secular U.S. law with Islamic (sharia) law. They have conjured this completely out of thin air by pointing to (real) Islamically based theocracies such as Iran as the model of what most Muslims want to do in America. They leave aside that, unlike the Irans of the world, the U.S. has a strong and resilient legal tradition that prohibits this very possibility.  (I don't think it's a stretch to assume, by the way, that most of these same people would be untroubled if Christian theology replaced much of American civil law. These details get in the way.)

As far as I can tell, the anti-sharia-ists still represent a minority view in the U.S. According to a recent opinion study, a substantial majority of Americans reject the notion that American Muslims ultimately want to establish sharia as the law of the land in the U.S (61 percent disagree, 30 percent agree).

But, wait: why don't a much higher number of Americans see the anti-sharia crusade as snake oil? I'd like to see more than 90 percent, but I guess that's dreaming.

And if anti-sharia-ists are in the minority, how is that, as the New York Times reported, "Since last year, more than two dozen states have considered measures to restrict judges from consulting Shariah, or foreign and religious laws more generally. The statutes have been enacted in three states so far." All of these are likely to be struck down, even by sensible conservative jurists, as unconstitutional.

One of the most visible (but far from only) evangelists for the dangerous lie about sharia in the U.S. is none other than Newt Gingrich. Because he is such a profilic dispenser of so many whacky views (even the danger of electromagnetic pulses!), I probably shouldn't be surprised that his espousal of anti-sharia nonsense over the last 18 months or so got a lot less attention than it deserved. Until recently, that is, when his candidacy.for the Republican presidential nomination began to surge and heightened scrutiny followed. 

Back in July 2010, Gingrich delivered a speech in which he defiantly declared that no court anywhere in the United States should be "allowed to consider sharia as a replacement for American law. Period." He claimed that:

"radical Islamists want to impose sharia on all of us - for legitimate reasons. Let me be clear: you can respect your adversary without agreeing or giving in. They have profound and deeply held beliefs, and one of the great challenges for securalists is they can't understand the level of passion that a belief, which is derived from an underlying religious form, leads one to have, which is why, frankly, deeply believing Christian and Jewish Americans have a much better understanding of what's going on than do secular intellectuals from deracinated unversities looking out of their ivory tower trying to wonder what it is that would lead people to kill themselves and having no comprehension of the emotions and the depth of passion.

...[S]tealth jihadists use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools and violent jihadists use violence. But in fact they're both engaged in jihad, and they are both seeking to oppose the same end state, which is to replace Western Civilization with a radical imposition of sharia.... Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrant to the Western world and the underlying basic belief, which is that law comes directly from God and is therefore imposed upon humans and no human can change the law without it being an act of apostasy is a fundamental violation of a tradition in the Western traditiion, which goes back to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem and which has evolved and given us freedom across the planet on a scale we can hardly imagine and which is now directly threatened by those who oppose it.... The principle of sharia is painful execution, not just death.... [It] is a direct, mortal threat to virtually every value that the Left has.

Whew. Sorry to bog down the discussion here, but I think it's instructive to see how much Gingrich mixes up a bunch of ideas that sound really smart but have no relation to one another when you look closely. It's what gives him the appearance of being an intellectual. In this short space he includes:  irrelevant attacks on "secularists" in their "deracinated" "ivory towers (but wait, by opposing the threat of sharia, isn't he playing a "secularist" himself?); chastisements of those who belive that "law comes directly from God" (but won't that offend many folks, like those at FFA, who think the same thing about their own bibles?);  and "respect" for the very adversaries who are such a threat to Western civlization.

Imagine the justified hue and cry that would follow a speech from a similar prominent figure who made the same sort of statements about Christian theology or Jewish law. But it's striking that Gingrich can say things like this and get only a shrug from most, if that.

But the worst problem is his use of truly trivial examples that offer no proof whatsoever of a concerted effort to impose sharia law on America. Later in the speech, Gingrich talked about a legal case in New Jersey in which (according to Gingrich) a judge excused the violent acts by a man against his wife because they were an extension of the religious law (Islam) the man follows.

No, Professor Gingrich, as terrible as that ruling may have been (a higher court rightly overturned it), that's not an example of how Muslims are trying to impose sharia on American law. It's a misapplication of important U.S. laws that allow reasonable accommodation of a person's religious beliefs. (For example, in some states Jews can be exempted from laws that require autopsies, which are prohibited under Jewish law.)

It's telling, too, that Gingrich appeared to have jumped on this bandwagon last year (and, at the same time, contributed to it) when he was openly entertaining the idea of running for President. Similarly, 2010 was the time when his views appeared to moving toward the extremist outlook of many Tea Partiers, and he was effusive in his praise of them. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, but, if I'm right, it's sickening to think that he's fanning flames of bigotry just to win votes. His only other defense is that he doesn't realize he's doing it. Either way, that's not what I call presidential material.

What's scary is that these are the sorts of examples Gingrich and like-minded zealots have relied on to generate the rage against Muslims. In other words, like the FFA's critique of "All-American Muslims", the fury is based on a made-up threat, a straw man. Indeed, research and anecdotal evidence suggest that most Muslims support America's tradition of separation of religion. This means the controversry is really about pure ethnic hostility, not about a clash over the "big ideas" and "values" guys like Gingrich pretend to stand for.

I'm not pinning all the anti-Muslim fervor in the U.S. on Gingrich or even on the others who peddle the anti-sharia gospel. There are plenty of other sources of the misinformation and hostility about Muslims in America, to name a few: the guy in Florida last year who threatened to burn Korans; the people who turned the Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan into a sinister symbol; Herman Cain's ominous declaration earlier this year that he would never have a Muslim in his cabinet, and so on.

So while there is no excuse for how Lowe's and Kayak panicked when they heard that there was something subversive happening at TLC, one can almost understand why they reacted the way they did. They can probably feel the way the wind seems to be blowing. It's reminiscent of how the entertainment industry responded to Joseph McCarthy's bluster in the 1950s.

It is dangerous and, if I may borrow a sentiment, a sin, to traffick in lies that one religious minority is a mortal threat to the rest of society. As a Jew, I find that chillingly familiar and scary. As an American, I'm ashamed and worried about the future of this country and the ideals that have made it great. 

Jeff

Havel and Kim: Living Within the Truth and the Lie

IT'S MORE than a little ironic that the death of Vaclav Havel, who played a major role in disintegrating a totalitarian regime, coincided roughly with the announcement of the death of Kim Jong Il, who committed himself to sustaining such a regime. They were two sides of a similar coin. Without men like Kim, Havel would have had no reason to risk his life to bring about generational change; without men like Havel, Kim would have no concrete excuse (though he probably had many imagined ones) to so ruthlesslessly enforce the kind of perverse system injustice and inhumanity that defines his nation.

Even now that Kim has died, it is clear that North Korea will likely continue "living within the lie", as Havel would describe such a society, that he and his father Kim Il Sun sustained for so long.

This extraordinary video footage offers a spectacular example of just how bizarre the North Korean lie was and apparently remains. It shows masses of North Koreans weeping hysterically in public over the last few days in the wake of the "Dear Leader's" passing. At times, the din of the crying seems almost deafening and the histrionics extreme.

There could be many social and psychological reasons for this outpouring, some have suggested. But there's quite possibly something else going on there, according to at least one former party ideology boss (quoted here) who defected to South Korea in 1997 and said that after Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 “anything other than mourning was not allowed.”

“The party conducted surveys to see who displayed the most grief, and made this an important criterion in assessing party members’ loyalty. Patients who remained in hospitals and people who drank and made merry even after hearing news of their leader’s death were all singled out for punishment.” Even those who remained merely dry-eyed, he said, were harshly reprimanded and penalized. In other words, for many the grief is just a government-engineered show from which the people are not free to desist.

The scene of the North Korean mourners instantly reminds me of an unforgettable vignette Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes in "The Gulag Archipelago". In the late-1930s in Moscow Province, Solzhenitsyn documented, a district Pary conference took place:

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up.... The small hall echoed with "stormy applause, rising to an ovation." For three, minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the "stormy applause rising to an ovation" continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting with exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would be the first to stop?

The applause continued for nine, ten minutes, but no one could figure out just how they could possibly end the agony, even though they were all surely conscious of the insanity of it all. It's hypothetically possible they would have gone on clapping for much longer had it not been for a certain director of a paper factory, who, after a full 11 minutes of the nonsense, "assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat."

And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.

That was, however, how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different.

This is what Havel called "living within the lie," enabling a great charade to govern all of life. As he wrote in 1978, the totalitarian system is:

...thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial intluence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."

Havel added that "when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game, everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably."

This breaking of the rules (or jumping off the revolving wheel, as Solzhenitsyn might put it) is what Havel called "living within the truth" -- difficult and dangerous business, as the examples from North Korea and the Soviet Union illustrate. It can take generations, if ever, before "living within the truth" cracks the granite infrastructure of a totalitarian regime. People like Havel, Solzhenitsyn and the many other dissidents across the globe and history have put up with unthinkable physical pain, psychological and economic depredation and, worst of all, the demoralization at times that their sacrifices may be all for naught.

Havel's legacy takes us back to a time that seems so distant now it's hard to believe a society so absurd, dehumanizing and utlimately self-destructive could ever have existed. Kim's present-day North Korea is, of course, the smelling salt that wakes us from such disbelief. It reminds me also of how extraordinary those people are who "live within the truth" and how mere mortals like me are not fit for such a noble and difficult existence.

Jeff

Why I'm Not Piling on Obama Right Now

YOU DON'T have to look very far these days to find a lot of disappointment, and sometimes digust and depression, about the job Barack Obama is doing as President. And I'm just talking about how Democrats and other of his natural supporters feel.

To a point, you can count me in. I've still not forgiven him for his inexplicable acquiesence to Congressional Republicans over allowing the tax cuts for wealthy Americans to expire at the end of last year. Those tax cuts never made sense when the Bush Administration and Republican Congress enacted them in 2001; they have not, as promised, led to anything close to widespread economic prosperity, and they contributed to the soaring debt that Republicans themselves are now saying is the most important problem in America. And, of course, Republicans are blaming that problem on the Democrats and Obama in particular, which seems chilingly Orwellian.

Mostly, I was furious that the President indulged the bullying tactics of the Republicans, and I can't fathom why he apparently (what do I really know?) did the same in the debt-ceiling negotiations.

I understand his problem and sympathize. He enters these negotiations trying to exercise good faith, to be a statesmen for all the people and a pragmatist. But it's like he and most of the Democrats who've been battling the extreme postions of the Republican Party are bringing a racquet to a tennis match, as one does when playing tennis. The problem is their opponents are bringing heavy artillery to the game and using it without hesitation. Somehow, the Republicans are getting away with that and have for many years now.

But, as I said above, I'm disappointed only to a point. I absolutely refuse to pile on or abandon President Obama right now, not because I'm one of those staunchly loyal partisans who won't dare to acknolwedge that the Emperor just might not have clothes. Nor am I so in love with him (I voted for Hillary in the primary), though I like him. I'm keeping my patience for two reasons:

First, beating up on Obama right now is yet another way to give a victory to the truly bad actors in our political system and to the way they've twisted reality. I'm so weary of Republicans who accuse the President and the Democrats of the very partisan recalcitrance and intellectual dishonesty that Republicans practice themselves. It's just not true. But they get away with it most of the time.

Indeed, we're constantly hearing public commentators say that both political parties share equal blame for the chaos and pessimism that now encumbers the nation. Paul Krugman was absolutely right when he wrote last week that:

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands....

Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.... when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

If it's any consolation, a New York Times poll released today found that more Americans (72 percent) disapproved of the way Republicans handled the debt-ceiling negotiations than of the way Democrats (62 percent) and Obama (47 percent) did. That said, a record proportion of Americans (82 percent) told that same poll that they disapprove of how Congress is doing its job. That's all of Congress, which (for now) still includes a lot of Democrats.

The second reason I'm not piling on Obama right now is because I remain completely convinced that his more pragmatic, post-ideological impluses are exactly what the United States needs in a President right now. Prior to his taking office, we had eight years of an administration that was driven -- most of the time -- by ideology and not by pragmatism. It did so openly and without apology, and the result of the 2008 election was, as far as I'm concerned, more a rejection of that style of governing than of any great affection for Obama and the Democrats. I think people were just sick and tired of the inflexibility, especially when it led to disastrous outcomes.

I'm just sorry that Obama hasn't been able to act more on his pragmatic, post-ideological impulses. What came out of the debt ceiling bill is not pragmatic policy, let alone a good framework for governing. What emerged is an agreement to put the ball at the Democrats' 20 yard line; deep in their own territory with their heels near their own end zone. The ultra-extreme Republicans voted against the agreement because the ball isn't on the Democrats' 1 yard line. (Sorry for all the sports allusions, but they're working for me right now.)

How did Obama and the Democrats let that happen? Why is it that he and the Congressional Democrats essentially conceded the highly dubious assertion that what this country needs right now is to slash government spending and taxes? Why did they allow Republicans to determine the frame of the discussion?

Why didn't they take the offensive and simply say, 'Look, everyone, up is not down, black is not white, and we simply can't keep the economy moving the right direction if we suddenly take huge sums of money out of it. Indeed, we need to do just the opposite and pump more cash into the economy via government programs.'

I mean, if the Republicans can prattle on and on about what they think is good policy (and, to be fair to them, I believe most really do think that starving the government beast is good policy), why can't the Dems and the President mount the same sort of offensive to the contrary?

I know: things aren't as simple as all that, and it's not easy being President, especially when outrage from an extremist element of our electorate has gained momentum just as we're facing some of the most serious problems we've seen in generations. The timing is terrible. And he can disagree with the extemists, but it's hard to ignore them completely.

Notwithstanding the sound of all the hand-wringing on the left and knife-sharping on the right, I think -- hope -- Obama has the sense and sensibility to break the inertia of the course we're on right now. Let's give him the room to work, and let's see how I feel in about six months.

Jeff

Who Will Tell the People the Truth About the Debt Ceiling?

THE WASHINGTON POST published an article today about Republican Members of Congress who refuse to believe warnings that a failure to raise the federal debt ceiling will result in economic catastrophe for the United States. It doesn't faze them that credentialed economists, rating agencies, business leaders, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, top budget analysts, their own Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader and pretty much everyone who knows anything about this stuff say that the consequencs will be dire. As Representative Mo Brooks, a Republican from Alabama, told the Post, “There should be no default on August 2. In fact, our credit rating should be improved by not raising the debt ceiling.”

In the article, Representative Rick Crawford, a Republican from Arkansas, said he feels pressure from constituents not to vote for an increase in the debt limit. Asked if he has tried to explain to them the consequences of this course of action, Crawford said, “I think that’s probably an arrogant attitude to take, that I know more than they do. I’m trying to represent my district in Washington, and not Washington in my district.”

It's tough to be a leader. In a democracy that means representing your constituents' desires in the policy making arena. People like Mo Brooks and Rick Crawford (and several of the Republican Presidential candidates) are responding, it seems, to about a quarter of Americans, who, according to the Pew Research Center, believe there will be no consequence of failing to raise the debt ceiling. 

Now, I'm all for ensuring that the ideas of even a minority should count for something in the marketplace of policy making. But don't our leaders at some point also have a responsibility to, well, lead and to tell The People what's up and what's down, especially on highly technical issues like this one? I mean, if 25 percent of our fellow Americans believe that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, should we just take their word for it -- if that untruth were to have any bearing on the broader public interest?

Wait a minute, one may say, the rising of the sun is a scientifically proven phenomenon. The impact of the default of federal debt is really speculation. Yes, but, first of all, it's a fact that many who mind the global bond markets say those markets will almost certainly respond adversely if the U.S. defaults. And the rating agencies are threatening to downgrade U.S. credit, which will at the very least make it more costly for us as a nation to borrow.

Second, there are other scientific facts that many, particularly from the same segment of the U.S. ideological spectrum, have chosen to ignore to the detriment of the public interest. As I've written before, this willful ignorance extends to climate change and the theory of evolution, which are settled questions among a preponderance of people who really know what they're talking about. And it wasn't too long ago that John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, offered a tortured explanation as to why he won't try to disabuse many Americans of their belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim, even if he, John Boehner, doesn't share their view. I'm not surprised that some out there don't agree with the consensus; that's the way of the world. But it's discouraging, to say the least, to see our political leadership indulging such ignorance.

Some day, someone will be able to discern the extent to which this willful ignorance -- not just about the debt ceiling, but some of these other contentious issues -- began not with The People but with the leaders themselves. Really, before the debt ceiling debate began to dominate the news a few months ago, how many rank-and-file Americans knew much at all about the issue, let alone had an opinion about it? (Not me.) How is it that roughly so many Americans, according to Pew, got it in their heads that raising the debt ceiling would be bad and failure to do so would have no consequence? I'm not trying to insult anyone's intelligence, but this is something about which specialists have a bit more expertise than average Americans.

It's not "arrogant," Congressman Crawford, to tell your constituents sometime that you -- or the real experts -- know more than they do. That's part of your job as a leader.

Doesn't it seem plausible that, as they have so many times over the years, Republicans framed this particular issue in a way that would alarm and catalyze their base? They've done it on taxes and spending, crime, affirmative action, and other matters. The cap-and-trade legislation, for example, which passed the House and failed in the Senate two years ago, was re-branded by Republicans as a big "tax" and a potential drag on the economy (which was debatable, but far fetched), not as something we need to do to get a handle on the ill effects of massive carbon emissions into our atmosphere. The health reform legislation that President Obama championed was framed by Republicans as a scheme to make our expensive and fractured health care system more expensive and fractured. Up suddenly became down. East suddenly transformed itself into west. White became black, and the spectre of widespread economic disaster has become something not to worry about.

I have some admiration for Republicans' ability to pull off this cynical sleight of hand, except that talent of theirs has so distorted our public policy debates -- as is the case now -- led us to the brink of catastrophe. It's almost as if they wouldn't mind the catastrophe to visit the nation so long as it meant strenghening their own party's political fortunes.

One more anecdote, also from today's Washington Post, that reinforces how detached certain leaders seem to be from reality. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified yesterday before the Senate Banking Committee, where two of the Committee members, Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) and Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), "pitched the idea that the government could avoid default simply by prioritizing debt payments over less important things, such as 'a reimbursement to a vendor or failing to cut the grass at the monuments,' Toomey said.

“'That would require us to stop paying almost half of our other bills,' Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. 'Isn’t that just default by another name?' he asked Bernanke, and then asked whether it would still result in a downgrade of the country’s credit.

“'Yes,' the Fed chief answered. 'I do not think this is a direction we want to go.'

But what does he know?

Jeff

Celebrating Re-creation on July 4

I'M IN THE MIDDLE of a terrific new Civil War history: 1861 by Adam Goodheart. As the title suggests, it's about the events and states of mind that led up to outbreak of the war between the states. The book shines a light on a much different episode in American history than the one we celebrate today, July 4. But, like the July 4 holiday, it reminds us that one of the constant features of our nation's history is re-creation (not recreation, which is what we usually we do to observe these important historical mileposts).

In the months leading up to the Civil War, the people of the United States found that they could no longer live with the great compromises they had negotiated among themselves for decades. Though no one knew in late 1860 and early 1861 precisely how President-elect Abraham Lincoln would address the twin problem of slavery and potential disunion (according to the custom of the time, he made hardly any public appearances or utterances during his election campaign and before he took office), his earlier pronouncements and his party's platform strongly suggested an abandonment of the long-held status quo.

To the chagrin of the hardcore abolitionists, it was not quite full emancipation of slaves. But, on the other hand, Southerners feared Lincoln would end the institution of slavery, on which they (and really the entire country, North and South) relied. One by one, even before Lincoln took office and before the first shots at Fort Sumter, Southern members of Congress resigned their seats and headed back home to create a new and separate nation. In spite of last-ditch efforts by some to stave off this split by offering Southern states even more appeasements, the slide to secession -- and war -- seemed (at least in retrospect) inexorable. How frightening that must of have been for everyone, even those who were believed firmly in the righteousness of their cause.

If ever there were ripe moments for the U.S. to re-create itself, this was one of them -- though perhaps more abruptly and cataclysmically than any other since the Revolution. To draw on one of the overused images of our current age, neither Southerners nor Northerners wanted to kick the can of indecision further down the road as they had for decades. This was the end of the line, a calling of the question of whether this country could continue to look away from the stark inconsistency between the values it set on July 4, 1776 (and later in 1787 with the Constitution) and the practice of slavery. And it was apparently time to settle whether or not this was indeed one cohesive nation or a collection of many states, each with its own right to accept or ignore the fundamental principles of the federal government.

In 1776, the founders of the nation also engaged in a far-reaching act of re-creation. As in 1861, the status quo of colonization by Great Britain became untenable, and acknowledgment of that fact (The Declaration of Independence) was just the first act of bravery. The next -- defending that acknowlegment and even dying for it -- took even more courage. That's ostensibly what we celebrate today July 4.

But July 4 is also about the act of re-creation. America seems always to be in a constant state of re-creation, not necessarily on the scale we saw in the 1860s or during any of the other major historical turning points, but in small, simple, imperceptible ways. Perhaps like few places anywhere, America's social and political systems were built not only to withstand re-creation but to encourage it -- civilly and constructively. One of the core assumptions of our system is that the enterprise of nation building is never perfect or complete and that we must be able to improve it constantly.

That, to me, is one of the aspects of American Exceptionalism (not, as some voices today have implied, that we are always better and stronger than every other nation and that anyone who says otherwise is a traitor). It is, to me, one of the other reasons to celebrate on July 4. 

To be sure, there have been other acts of social and political re-creation in American history that resulted in powerful upheavals -- the civil rights movement, the Great Depression and the rise of organized labor are notable among them. And there's no question that many of our major military engagements, particularly the great World Wars, transformed us socially and politically, not only here in the U.S. but on the global stage. But I think one can argue that none were nearly as traumatic and sweeping as the Revolution and the Civil War and that, before and after each, the U.S. was a completely different nation.

Thankfully, the simple, less noticeable acts of re-creation in America come and go without the crashes of lightning Americans endured when they spawned the new republic in the late 18th century and then fought fiercely to keep it intact in the mid-19th. As vituperative, grotesque and seemingly insoluable as our present-day political and social disputes can be, I truly can't imagine them reaching the sort of breaking point they did in 1861 when the only real option was all-out war. Maybe because we as a nation understand, even today, how truly painful that conflict was, I have strong faith in our ability as a nation, which revers the rule of law, to work out our differences civilly and peacefully (even if that means adopting some screwy options, which are not in short supply these days).

Happy Independence and Re-Creation Day.

Jeff

Logic for Unity Accord Escapes Me

PLEASE HELP me out with something. Someone explain to me why there is so much puzzlement that the Israeli government would object to the unity arrangement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.  Why is this so hard to understand?

In today's Washington Post, for example, former President Jimmy Carter hails the unity accord as something that will somehow solve all the problems of the terrible and protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflice. Through a system of checks and balances, he seems to imply, the combined PA and Hamas regime will "lead to a durable cease-fire" with Israel, captured Israeli prisoners of war such as Galid Shalit will be returned home, Hamas will recognize Israel's right to exist. And so on.

"Suspicions of Hamas," Carter writes, "stem from its charter, which calls for Israel's destruction. I find the charter repugnant. Yet it is worth remembering that Israel negotiated the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian Liberation Organization while its charter had similar provisions. It took five more years before the PLO Charter was altered."

No, suspicions of Hamas stem from more than just the charter; there is also Hamas's bad habit of killing innocent people -- not just Israelis but any Palestinians who disagree with it. The charter, which so many critics of Israel often dismiss as nothing to be worried about, is only a statement in words of what Hamas is all about in deeds (which is why the charter really does matter). And Hamas has made it clear over and over - via actions and words - that it would like to kill Israelis and eliminate the State of Israel.

Also, while I was a hopeful supporter of the Oslo Accords, it's hard even for me and others like me to say that it led to an idyllic future (though we probably have a lot more to work with today than we did before the Accords). Even under Yasser Arafat's watch as the head of the PA, there were repeated murderous attacks by Palestinians against Israelis in Israel proper. Either Arafat was unwilling or unable (or both) to stop them. That ultimately undermined the Oslo Accords. Again, as important as words are, deeds count more.

Carter has, to his credit, made a lot of effort to go to the region, meet with people and study what it's all about. All the more reason why his blind spot for Hamas's criminality is shocking and puzzling. He's basically saying it's okay for a legitimate political party -- say, the Democrats or the Republicans -- to ally with Tony Soprano's organization because... well, he doesn't really say why. But he relies on some magical faith that such an alliance would clean up Tony's act, hold him in check.

My guess is that if the Sopranos had the chance to rule a government (from the inside), they'd jump at it  and take advantage of the power it gives them to carry out their misdeeds. There would be no checks on their power. On the contrary, they would seize the power and it would be hard to hold them back. 

One need only look to the immediate north of Israel, in Lebanon, where a similar murderous Hezbollah has strived hard -- and succeeded -- in taking control of the government there. That hasn't put a brake on Hezbollah's ambitions to go to war again some day with Israel. Indeed, the conventional wisdom is that Hezbollah has continued to arm itself for that very scenario.

"This accord should be viewed as the Palestinian contribution to the 'Arab awakening,'" Carter writes. Again, what is he thinking? The "Arab awakening" is about putting an end to the corrupt, tyrannical and immoral regimes that have oppressed their people for generations. Inviting another corrupt, tyrannical and immoral group to rule over Palestinians is exactly the opposite of what the Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans, Syrians, Bahrainians and other Arab populations have been trying to accomplish over the last few months.

Look, I want Palestinians to live peaceful and prosperous lives. I hate what they have to live through now. Ditto the Israelis. A two-state solution is probably the only solution to this. But I don't get the logic that Hamas, even when it's supposed held in check by Fatah, will lead to this scenario. Just the opposite.

Jeff

 

 

Reflecting "Real Life" on "The Office" and "Friday Night Lights"

I FINALLY got around to watching the series finale of "Friday Night Lights, Steve Carrell's farewell on "The Office", both of which are on my short list of best-ever TV comedy and drama shows. [Note: Earlier, I thought this was the season finale of "The Office," but an alert reader corrected me.]

For those of you only now seeing "Friday Night Lights" on broadcast TV and wondering how I've seen the whole season, I get Direct TV, where the program aired first and finished in February. (So, why, you wonder, have I only just gotten around to it? Just busy.) I won't spoil it for you, but I'll say that it doesn't end with a 30-mile wide asteroid crashing into the the city of Dillon, Texas.

In a way, one almost hopes for that sort of an ending. As I've written here in the past, "Friday Night Lights" is a show that got too little attention from the American viewing public, which, the ratings will show, seems more interested in schlockey so-called "reality shows" and cliche detective and doctor dramas. Part of me thinks that destroying the entire town and all its compelling characters in a single stroke, while a tad heavy handed, would symbolically tell all those who missed this great show that they can't have it, don't deserve it. Also, as with the ending of "The Sopranos" (yes, they did kill Tony), the producers could pretty much say, 'we're proud of what we did, and we're not going to mess it up with a disappointing movie version' (I'm thinking of you, "Sex and the City").

We've known for a few months that Steve Carrell was leaving "The Office." So the only suprise this season was how the producers were going to ease him out without destroying the show. Not an easy trick considering he is probably one of the funniest people in America and because so much of the show revolves around everyone reacting to his loveable icky self. It's a bit like taking a nucleus out of a cell and replacing it (if that's what they're trying to do with Will Farrell) with a new and different one.

My guess is that "The Office" will survive this transformation, if only because it is one of the best ensemble shows of all time. Those of us who have watched it loyally (if not obsessively, as I think my family and I may), know all the subtle back stories of every character and still care a great deal about where they end up. And the writing has always been extraordinarily creative, always surprising and experimenting without distorting the characters and the story arc so that they become parodies of themselves. "The Office" hasn't jumped the shark. Not yet at least.

Both "Friday Night Lights" and "The Office" are great because they're as close to "real" as we get not only on TV but in most of our entertainment in the United States.They are much more real than the most popular shows where, say, a dozen people are put through a punishing obstacle course on a remote tropical island and put in the position to be nasty with one another; or where B-list celebrities fight with another for the attention and respect of a famous egomaniac or stumble over themselves to become America's favorite ballroom dancers, or any of the other "reality" shows that, when you think about it, not all about what happens in real life.

To be sure, I can't imagine there are any offices in America that operate quite like the Scranton, Penn., branch of Dunder Mifflin Sabre, at least not any that could remain profitable.

But those of us who have spent a lot of our lives in offices know that the personalities that make up "The Office" are only slightly exaggerated versions of the sorts of people we have worked with. Maybe not all of them at once in one place, but we recognize all of them, don't we? They are filled with the same insecurities, tedium, jealousies, annoying habits, neuroses, nastiness, secret crushes, sweetness and loyalties we encounter every day when we walk into our own offices. The show is really a fictional experiment that tries to show what happens when we subject this very typical collection of personalities to strange, unexpected and sometimes dangerous circumstances. That -- along with great writing and acting -- is what makes it so funny and what makes it such an accurate mirror on our own real worlds.

Like "The Office," some of the situations in "Friday Night Lights" are a bit more exaggerated or accelerated than we know from real life. We have to allow for some dramatic effect and, after all, they can't show everything they should about a couple of dozen characters in less than an hour each week.

But "Friday Night Lights" has dealt directly and candidly with the most difficult realities we find in many American lives: the struggle to succeed and do right, in spite of the pull of negative forces and flagging economic opportunities; fractured families; catastrophic illness; petty but sometimes profoundly damaging political battles; racial conflict; the sometimes strained dynamics of parent-child and husband-wife relationships; how our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq reverberate in the lives of ordinary Americans; the exhilaration of glory and how hard it is to hold onto over the long run; the power of love and, ultimately, how each of us needs a father or mother figure in our lives, no matter our age. It's hard to understand why that hasn't attracted a larger and more loyal audience, but we can argue all day about the relative attraction of escapism versus realism.

As the parent of three teenage girls, I have to say, for example, that Tami and Eric Taylor's interactions with their teenage daughter Julie were as real as it gets. Not that my kids are doing any of the crazy stuff she did (or quite as whiney). But my wife and I could truly relate with the give and take that comes with that relationship. Both the writing and the acting that went into some of those scenes (and all the rest) was stripped right out of real life.

So I'll miss "Friday Night Lights" and Michael Scott. But the people in both of those shows will continue on, not only on the TV screen, as will be the case with "The Office," but also in the real world.

Jeff

P.S. For my money, episode of "The Office" this year when Michael proposed to Holly was one of the two best episodes ever, next to Jim and Pam's wedding. See it if you haven't already.

NPR "Liberal Bias", Continued

LAST NIGHT I engaged in what NPR calls a "driveway moment," whereby I literally sat in my parked car in my driveway with my daughter, both of us unwilling to walk away from a riveting piece about an Iraq War veteran's scary struggle with the effects of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

This was one in a series of in-depth investigative reports by NPR and Pro-Publica, a non-profit investigative journalism organization, about how the U.S. military has not grappled sufficiently with the aftereffects of TBI (traumatic brain injury) and PTSD among those who have suffered them in action, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan. The result of these reports has been some very public responses by our miltary and veterans affairs officials that treatment of service members with these maladies needs reform and improvement. This is a case of where journalism is truly making a difference.

Moreover, the stories you hear -- from the service members themselves and the families who through hell to care for them -- are chilling and heartbreaking. In addition to spurring better handling of these wounded warriors, the stories on this NPR series remind us, as Marine Lt. Gen. John Kelly did in this recent Washington Post article, of the continued sacrifice a relative few Americans are making on behalf of the country. "We are in a life-and-death struggle, but not our whole country," said Kelly, whose own son, a Marine, was killed in Afghanistan last November. "One percent of Americans are touched by this war. Then there is a much smaller club of families who have given all." At the very least (and this is not much), the rest of us owe it to them to pay attention, to keep their plight from being out of sight and out of mind.

I could -- maybe should -- go on about that, but I'm still thinking about my post the other day on NPR and the reaction to it. As I expected, not everyone agrees with me that notions that NPR is guilty of "liberal bias" are misplaced. Fair enough, I suppose. As I said, I think it's all about what appears in the eye of the beholder.

Still, when I encounter work like the NPR series on brain injury and PTSD among the military, I can't understand what these other eyes are beholding. Tell me, please, where is the "liberal bias" in this journalism? Is it "liberal" to raise a mirror up to our government about something it might want to improve? And since when is it "liberal" to be standing up for the needs of people in the military service? If anything, hasn't the right claimed that for itself?

And please detail for me how this particular bit of journalism differs from all the rest that NPR generates daily -- indeed, around the clock. Is this an anomoly?

I guess I still don't get it. .

Jeff

Meanwhile, at the Gaza-Israel Border...

THERE'S A LOT OF BIG NEWS around the world right now, more than global media outlets and even their audiences might have a chance to digest. Amidst it all, two tweets today, posted within a half hour of one another on the Israel Defense Forces Spokesman's Twitter feed:

Today, 312 truckloads of food, goods + gas entered the Gaza Strip via the Kerem Shalom Crossing

130+ mortars, Qassams & Grad missiles fired from Gaza & landed in Israel since beginning of yr-56 of which fired this wk

So, even as missile attacks from Gaza continue to rain down on it, Israel allows essential aid to go through -- according to this report. That explodes -- sorry -- challenges what many might know or assume about Israel's stance on Gaza: that Israel's trying to choke off Gaza residents and that Gaza is no longer a threat to Israel.

Let's put a bookmark on these and keep them in mind when the focus shifts back, as it inevitably will, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jeff

 

Some Welcome Civility About a Tough Problem

STEPHEN GOLDSMITH, the former mayor of Indianapolis, current Deputy Mayor of New York City and widely recognized big thinker about how to make cities run better, offers a thoughtful reflection about the state of city government in a recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed.

Aside from his views, which I'll summarize in a moment, what I like most about this piece is that he offers a much more civil, authorative and informed analysis about the problems of governent (city government mostly) than what we've gotten recently from the many shrill voices emerging around the standoff in Madison, Wisconsin. The implication is that all the heat generated there around the Governor's efforts to ban collective bargaining rights of public employee unions misses a big point and keeps us from dealing with the real issue.

According to Goldsmith, "It is not government unions per se but progressive government itself—long celebrated in Wisconsin, New York and elsewhere—that no longer produces progressive results."

"In the early 20th century," Goldsmith continues, "the progressives championed a rule-based approach to public-sector management that was a big step forward from the cronyism and corruption of Tammany Hall. Today, however, the very rules that once enhanced accountability, transparency and efficiency now stifle the creativity of public-sector workers and reduce the ability of public investments to create opportunities for citizens—outcomes precisely the opposite of those intended by Progressive Era reformers.

"...No one wants a return to the bad old days when public employees feared arbitrary dismissals. Today, however, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. Rather than too few rules governing public employees, there are far too many, and they hurt the very people progressive reformers cared most about: the least fortunate members of society who depend the most on effective support services."

Though I have a graduate degree in urban planning, I don't claim to have the kind of understanding, let alone insight, Goldsmith does on this subject. But, like so many people who have come in contact with public-sector bureaucracies (I'm sure we all have stories), I can only agree with Goldsmith that something has gotten out of hand. Something needs to change, I'm not sure what. It's not abandoning government altogether, as some of the more extreme voices in America suggest today, but making it work better. Many devoted public servants have tried to cut through and rationalize the complex problem of government bureaucracy, including Goldsmith. It's a difficult riddle to solve.

But, again, my point in highlighting this Op-Ed is more about the state of our public discourse. What I conclude after reading Goldsmith's analysis (I suspect he would agree, but this isn't his point) is that grand gestures like banning collective bargaining of public employee unions are misleading and clearly meant more to rally angry voters than to actually solve a very real challenge.

We need to discuss tough problems like this with the sort of civility and authority Goldsmith offers. Unfortunately, that kind of cool and courteous talk doesn't make as compelling TV as people screaming at each other at the Wisconson State Capitol.

Jeff

Women Can Be Warriors After All

I DON'T REMEMBER precisely who said it, but I know I heard on a number of occasions commentators say that if women led many nations they'd be less likely to promote wars than men -- or something like that. 

So it's kind of interesting to read in today's New York Times that Barack Obama, a man who was, until a few days ago, strongly opposed to U.S. military action against the Libyan regime, was persuaded otherwise by three of his top officials -- who happen to be women: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council; and Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

So what does this mean? That the stereotype of women being softer, less confrontation is just that, a stereotype? That this is a more righteous use of force than, say, the invasion of Iraq, and only a woman could have championed that? Or that one's sex is irrelevant when there faced with harsh reality?

Will the people who made those statements, about women being the anti-warriors, please acknowledge that was a silly thing to say at the time?

Jeff

NPR Debate Exposes the Gulf Dividing America

THE RECENT CONTROVERSIES over NPR, have really upset me. Though to understand exactly why, I have to get past my reflexive response .

As I have noted here before, public radio has been a constant companion and major source of knowledge for me since I was in high school. This sounds so precious to say, I know, but I have almost "grown up" on public radio and am constantly amazed by the vast and innovative work it produces. (Coincidentally, though important to disclose here, I consulted professionally to NPR for several years in the mid-2000s, but, believe me, my attachment to it had formed long before.)

So, reflexively, I'm easily annoyed by attacks on public radio. What really gets my goat are the charges of NPR's (and public radio's) alleged "liberal bias." I hear this even from self-described liberals from time to time, but most definitely from self-described conservatives.

All I can say to them is, what!? Seriously? Because if you actually listen to it (and now I'm speaking primarily of NPR, but I think the same can be said for most local public radio stations), you will hear facts and information -- with the occasional commentary, some of which consciously gives air time to people from all points on the ideological spectrum, including, believe it or not, conservatives. It makes me wonder if these critics are truly listening to public radio or just responding to a cartoonish stereotype.

At a time when thoughtful, thorough and reliable news gathering operations are actually shrinking, NPR has expanded its reach, dispensing information that would otherwise be difficult to find about many different issues from many different spots around the world. Around major news events, Americans will be hard pressed to find the kind of reporting on the radio dial (or in many other places) they get from NPR. So why wouldn't don't Americans view it as the national treasure that it is, a great investment of public dollars?

(There are also the charges, from some of my good friends and others within the pro-Israel community -- of which consider myself a part -- that NPR specifically has anti-Israel bias. I remain mystified by these charges, but this is something for another time.)

To some ears, public radio's on-air personalities can be a bit ponderous and earnest at times -- some call it "snooty". Maybe that tone grates on the critics' nerves from time to time. Even so, I'll take it any day over the sensationlistic presentation of the news on our cable and broadcast news outlets anyday or the steady flow of crap about celebrities.

I defy anyone to explain to me where the bias is in NPR's straight news (not opinion) programs.Give me real, substantial examples of bias that anyone can agree on -- and not just one or two anomolies (like, say, the remarks of NPR's development director, which, by the way, some are now saying were distorted in the final edit). Give me real proof that the entire operation is shot through with bias (like, say, a certain cable news outlet whose begins with F and ends with x). If you can't or won't, please, don't waste your time trying to convince me otherwise.

All of what I've just discussed, though, remains within the province of perception or, perhaps, under the Latin maxim, de gustibus non est disputandum -- “there is no disputing about tastes.” Yes, that adage is reserved mostly for discussion of aesthetics and art, but I'd argue that political outlook is really another variant of taste -- formed both by experience, context and, I suppose to some extent, physiology (e.g. most of us recoil physically from foul smells and violent images).

My point is that debates like the one we saw the other day on the floor of the House of Representatives, which passed a measure to cut public funding for NPR  -- ridiculous as they may be, are yet another in a growing number of examples of how disparate groups of Americans are perceiving the world in starkly different ways.

No, that's not an original insight. Plenty of other commentators and much of our public opinion research has made this point for a long time. I talked about it last year around issues such as acceptance of the science on climate change and the theory of evolution.

So, what's really troubling to me about the NPR debate and the rest of public radio is not that other Americans don't share my taste. Again, de gustibus non est disputandum, baby. Rather, it seems to have gone well beyond that. We're not even using the same vocabulary to talk about it or the same yardsticks to measure what we're arguing about.

My bias -- yes, maybe I'm living in my own unreality -- is that this growing gulf of perception is being driven by people with another agenda: to win elections or higher viewer ratings. Most of that -- again, my perspective -- appears to be coming from the political right, which has been masterful over the last generation in its ability to frame issues in ways that distort what the public debates should really be about.

For example, they argued during the '80s and '90s especially that if you're not for tough anti-crime measures, such as the death penalty or mandatory minimum sentences, you're a lover of criminals; they now have framed a false choice  between efforts to limit sources of "so-called" green-house gases into the atmosphere and economic progress -- as if we can't have both; and they have so effectively branded "taxes" and "big government" as evil twins, that any politician who even thinks of raising a tax -- indeed, of not lowering one -- should be considered suicidal and public employees are likely feeling like enemies of the people. Then there's the argument that easy access to guns is good for us and that immigrants -- not just the illegal ones, but also the ones in our midst who have made it necessary for proud Americans to have to dial 1 for English and put up with bilingual operating instructions -- are somehow bad for America. And don't get me started on the lie that Obama is a Muslim, which one of our our highest-ranking public officials, the Speaker of the House, wouldn't even dispute recently saying, "It's not my job to tell the American people what to think."  How ironic is this?

The smears about NPR bias are yet another part of this series of framed talking points. And they exaggerate the unpopularity of the radio network. Indeed, as the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism noted in its just-released "State of the News Media: 2011",  NPR has a huge and growing audience: "National Public Radio continues to be a growing source of news for many Americans, its audience expanding each year as news disappears from commercial radio outside of the country’s largest markets.  Overall NPR’s audience grew 3% in 2010, to 27.2 million weekly listeners."

What usually happens after I post a commentary like this is that those on the "liberal" side of things say, "Yo, right on," and those on the other side tell me how misguided I am. We all play our roles, as if the script is set and inviolable. Not that, if we are true to our own selves, we should do any differently. But I'm puzzled as to how we're ever going to be able to bridge that gap.

Jeff

At Midlife, What's Your Zion?

FOR MANY OF US, turning 50 is an occasion for panic, dread, soul searching or some odd and unsettling shift of perspective. Before I reached that threshhold a few months ago, I was determined not to fall into this state and to let it pass as if it were any other birthday.

But I guess I'm no different than most. I surprised myself and spent a bit more time and energy than I expected thinking about turning 50. To be honest, I wasn't sure whether to consider it a time for a fresh start or for holding fast to the grooves I'd worn for myself, either by design or by the simple act of living (as John Lennon once said, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.").

It turns out that someone who lived nearly a thousand years ago offered some profound perspective on this passage, which just goes to show that we moderns didn't invent introspection or the midlife crisis.

I'm speaking of Yehuda Halevi,a Jewish poet, philosopher and physician who lived in Spain from about 1070 or 1075 to 1141. Overlapping, and in some cases interacting with some of the other masters of Spain's Jewish literary tradition, Halevi was one of the leading lights in what many consider to be a Golden Age of Hebrew poetry. "Never again did it mean as much for an entire society as it had meant in Andalusia," writes Hillel Halkin, who has just produced a wonderful biography of Halevi published this year  by Nextbook. "And never again until the twentieth century did it shine as it had shone there." Indeed, some of Halevi's work and that of contemporaries such as Shmuel ha-Nagid, Shlomo ibn Gabirol, Moshe ibn Ezra and Avraham ibn Ezra have long been part of the Jewish liturgical canon. Jews still recite some of their poetry as part of formal prayer.

The poetry speaks for itself, feeling as fresh and as immediate to a reader in 2010 as it may have in the 11th or 12th century (though people like me have the disadvantage of reading Halevi in translation, which, even at its best, loses the word play and rythms that gives verse its glimmer). Reading it, I have the same sensation I get looking at, say, a Vermeer painting, whose colors still leap off the canvas, even some four and a half centuries since the artist put them there, and whose subjects still draw you in.

During Halevi's lifetime, Muslims and Christians continously fought for and periodically swapped control of various regions of Spain. This prompted the poet and many other Jews of his time to migrate from one city where they suddenly faced persecution to another where they could live in relative, albeit temporary, peace.

But, even though he lived comfortably (such was the station of a physician, particularly one who treated rulers) and was revered inside and outside his Jewish community as a literary force, Halevi apparently never felt fully at home there. Nor, the record suggests, did he have any particular yearning for practicing medicine (unlike another major Jewish philosopher, Moshe ben Maimon, or Maimonides, who was born in Spain near the end of Halevi's life and who was as prolific a medical thinker as he was a religious one). He was, at heart, a poet.

He was also a Jew, whose writings spoke restively about life at the whim of Christian or Muslim leaders and romantically of Zion, the Holy Land, notably in a series of poems that later became known as shirey tsiyon or Songs of Zion. As he wrote in one of the most famous of these poems,

    My heart is in the East -- and I am at the edge of the West.
    How can I possibly taste what I eat? How could it please me?
    How can I keep my promise or ever fulfill my vow,
    When Zion is held by Edom and I am bound by Arabia's chains?
    I'd gladly leave behind me all the pleasures of Spain --
    If only I might see the dust and ruins of your Shrine.

    [This translation by Peter Cole from "The Dream Of the Poem" (2007)]

Edom, in this case, referred to the First Crusaders, who in 1099 had conquered Jerusalem, slaughtering masses of Muslims and Jews and barring their remnant communities from resettling there. The small community of Jews that remained in Palestine was weak and scattered, and Jewish pilgrimmage to Jerusalem, which was now difficult and dangerous, came nearly to a halt. “Besides having to put up with the hostility or mockery of its Christian inhabitants,” Halkin writes, “a Jewish pilgrim to the city would have found no Jewish home to stay in, no synaogue, and no kosher food.”

Still Halevi clung to his passion for Zion; indeed, today we consider him a proto-Zionist from whom others, centuries later, would draw inspiration to form the modern Zionist movement.

Halevi’s passion seemed only to intensify as he grew older and closer to death, as in this love poem for Jerusalem suggests, speaking of a queen banished from her home:

    O fair of view! World's joy! Great monarch's home!
    For you, from earth's far end, my spirit yearns.
    Compassion stirs in me when my mind turns
    To your lost cloister and its spendors' doom.
    Would that on an eagle's wings I flew to mix the water of my tears with your parched clay!
    Always I think of you -- and though your king's away,
    And snakes and scorpions scuttle where once grew
    Your balm of Gilead, your stones and earth
    Would taste, when kissed, like honey in my mouth.

At a certain point later in his life, Halevi made it known to his family and friends that he wanted to make that difficult pilgrimmage to Jerusalem. But for many years he put off the journey, yielding to the many responsibilities and security of his life in Spain, and perhaps the appeals of his friends and family who tried strongly to dissuade him from going.

But his impatience grew, and “sometime in his fifties... he wrote a poem about this,” Halkin writes. Even though, in his fifties, Halevi was far beyond midlife, he was going through what we could call a midlife crisis, and, Halkin writes, “he takes himself to task for clinging to material pleasures and social enjoyments in disregard of the duty to set out.” The poem describes his internal struggle -- do I stay or do I go? -- in the form of a tempestuous ocean journey, not unlike the actual one he would have to take to get to the Eastern Mediterranean.

    A man in your fifties -- and you still would be young?
    Soon your life will have flown like a bird from a branch!
    Yet you shirk the service of God, and crave the service of men,
    And run after the many, and shun the One
    From whom the multitudes of all things come,
    And laze about instead of setting out
    On your true way, and for a mess of pottage
    Sell your immortal part. Has not your soul had enough?

    ...Be as bold as a panther, swift as a deer!
    Fear not the open sea, though mountains of waves crest and crash,
    And hands shake like rags in a gale,
    And speechless ships’ carpenters quail,
    and crews leap to the task and in dismay stagger back,
    Trapped in an ocean with nowhere to flee
    While the sails flap and crack, and the deck creaks and groans,
    And the wind whips the water into haystack-high bales.

    ...[After a tumultuous trek] the waves subside; like flocks of sheep they graze upon the sea.
    The sun has set, departing by the stairs
    Up which ascends the night watch let by its silver-sworded captian.
    The heavens are an African spangled with gold, blue-black
    Within a frame of milky crystal. Stars roam the water,
    Flare and flicker there, outcasts far from home.
    The seaward-dipping sky, the night-clasped se, both polished bright,
    Are indistinguishable, two oceans cupled alike,
    Between which, surging with thanksgiving, lies a third, my heart.

As the poem suggests -- and as he spells out in even greater detail in his monumental philosophical work, The Kuzari -- Halevi overcame the fear and inertia keeping him from his true passion, though he had no illusion that the path ahead would be easy.

And, eventually, in 1140, somewhere between his early and mid-sixties, Halevi left Spain and set out for Palestine. Upon leaving, he wrote:

    Driven by longing
    for the living God
    to hasten to where his annointed ones dwelt,
    I had no time to kiss my firends or family
    a last farewell;
    no time to weep for the garden I grew,
    the trees watered and watched as they branched and did well;
    no time to think of the blossoms they bore.
    ...Forgotten are my synagogue
    the peace that was its study hall,
    my Sabbaths and their sweet delights,
    the splendor of my festivals
    I’ve left them all.
    Let others have the idol’s honors and be hailed.
    I’ve swapped my bedroom for dry brush,
    its safety for rough chaparral,
    the scents and subtle fragrances that cloyed my soul
    for thistles’ smells,
    and put away the mincing gait of landlubbers
    to hoist my sail and cross the sea
    until I reach the land that is
    the Lord’s foostool.

The postcript is that Judah Halevi stopped for eight or nine months in Egypt, where he was treated by the Jewish community there as a literary celebrity. They, too, tried to talk him out of going to Palestine, and the comforts with which they showered him could easily have dissuaded Halevi from continuing.

But in the spring of 1141, he set sail for the Holy Land. The record of what happened to him then went blank, though there is virtual certainty that Halevi died within only a few months. No one knows whether he made it to Jerusalem and fulfilled his ultimate dream of gazing upon its glory.

For most of us at midlife, Halevi’s example is a bit extreme -- giving it all up to chase a passion, knowing full well that hardship of that journey, especially for someone in the late hours of life. Most of us can’t, won’t or don’t need to make that sort of sacrifice. And, to some extent, for our own peace of mind, we need to put away dreams that are simply unattainable at a certain advanced age, if they ever were realistic. (In my case, for instance, I think it’s time to accept that I’ll never play in the NBA, as I once thought possible -- at least until I stopped growing at age 13 or so and never learned to go to my left.)

Yet it is Halevi’s passion itself that is instructive and inspiring, even for those of us who are not ready to alter our lives so radically. It is easy at midlife for one to think the tank is half empty. Halevi’s message is that it’s never too late to find your Zion -- your passion -- and to set out on a tough and scary passage to find it.

The question for us, then, at this point -- and I suppose any point -- of life is, what's your Zion? And what will it take for you to taste even a morsel of it?

Jeff

Except where noted, all translations above are by Hillel Halkin from his 2010 biography of Halevi.

Secure With An Asterisk: What American Jewish Architecture Tells Us

BECAUSE WE'RE AMIDST the eight-day celebration of Hanukkah, Sid Schwarz, the founding rabbi of my synagogue, naturally used the festival as the focus of his d'var torah (or explication of the Torah) during Shabbat services yesterday.

He pointed to a directive from the Talmud in which the rabbis instruct Jews to place their lit menorahs either in a window or doorway where their light can be seen by passersby outside. But the rabbis’ prescriptions around the ritual of lighting the menorah qualified that Jews could keep their menorahs hidden indoors in times – and places – of danger. Just as all rules of Jewish law can be abrogated to save a person's life, the rabbis weren't going to require an act that could draw the hostility of others.

With this as background, Schwarz set out to conduct an informal survey, asking this congregation of 21st century, Washington, D.C.-area Jews to say whether or not they feel they are living in a time and a place of danger to them because of their religious identity. Figuratively speaking, how comfortable do we feel putting our menorahs in our windows?

On a scale of 1 (being most secure) and 10 (being highly insecure), a show of hands suggested that they range somewhere between 1 and 3 -- though the vast majority said 1. Some commented that their assessment is situational. That is, when in other countries -- not just the ones you'd think of mostly around the Middle East where anti-Semitism is overt and intense, but even in Europe, where there have been widely reported instances of anti-Jewish hostility in recent years – some said they would register a much higher number, above 5 to be sure. And one visitor from West Virginia pointed out that Jewish institutions there have been vandalized with swastikas and the like, so he’s feeling a bit less "welcome" than many.

If anything, I felt in the room as sense that, as has long been the case, the United States remains one of the most hospitable places for Jews in history, and certainly in our time. (Notwithstanding the tiny minority of extremists who have always had it out for us – and probably always will.) But I also felt a twinge of worry in the air, a sinking feeling that, while we are as welcome as ever in nearly every part of American life, there could be a growing misunderstanding of Jews that could grow into something more troubling.

A more empirical barometer of American Jewish confidence in our surroundings, at least based on somewhat narrow measures, suggests just the opposite. According to a 2010 survey of American Jews by the American Jewish Committee, 25 percent said they think anti-Semitism in the U.S. is currently “a very serious problem,” while 66 percent said it “somewhat of a problem.” Only nine percent said it is “not a problem at all.” In 2000, when AJC asked those same questions, the responses arguably sounded less confident: 32 percent said anti-Semitism is a “serious problem,” 63 percent said “somewhat of a problem,” and just five percent said “not a problem at all.”

That apparent easing of anxiety among American Jews over the last decade could be a function of the aging and dying off of an older generation who grew up in a time of overt, institutionalized anti-Semitism in American life. Either that, or the 2000 or 2010 figures (or both) were anomalous, reactions to passing episodes. In that case, I should probably look a bit more closely – but I will leave that for another day.

I’d like to point out yet another indicator of how secure American Jews feel today: our architecture.

At Beit Hatfusot in Tel Aviv, the Museum of the Diaspora, there is a large room filled with tabletop models of historic synagogues from many places and times where Jews lived. When I visited there years ago, woman from the museum pointed out that the structures most overtly identified as Jewish and seemingly open to the public were those built when and where Jews were feeling secure – even if, ironically, many of these building were burnt to the ground centuries later in pogroms or other convulsions of anti-Semitism. Still other structures appeared relatively anonymous and more fortress-like, suggesting an environment in which the Jews of the day felt more vulnerable.

Where, then, along that scale should we rate the architecture of today’s American Jewish religious and communal buildings? In many ways, I’d argue, it shows we're feeling secure, but with an asterisk.

This could be considered something of a golden age of Jewish architecture. Buildings constructed or redesigned in the last decade or so display some pretty good aesthetic sensibilities (a departure from many of the truly hideous structures the Jewish community put up in the decade or two after World War II).

More importantly, they also reflect that Jews are finally feeling at home in America: unafraid to express their identity publicly. Many of the buildings – synagogues, community centers, Federation buildings – stand out proudly and conspicuously among the rest.

But here’s the asterisk. Today’s sparkling Jewish buildings are now surrounded by large boulders or reinforced fences, designed to ward off attackers in vehicles; increasing numbers have full-time security officers, elaborate door-entry and alarm systems and other measures to detect a threat – or combat it should it materialize.

Many of these measures, which cost the Jewish community dearly, came about in the wake of 9/11, when we learned to worry about even the most remote and even unimaginable threat. Also, there have been periodic violent attacks on a number of Jewish buildings in recent years, which only underlines our resolve to protect ourselves. And rising attacks against Jews around the world understandably ring loudly in the ears of our communal leaders here.

What we see, then, is a collective indicator of how Jews are feeling in America and the ambivalence we have felt in many places and times throughout history. Whether it reflects the true state of our existence at this time and in this place is something we can debate - at another time. 

Jeff

How Will the Current Political Climate Affect U.S. Innovation Policy? An Interview

IN 2005, a blue-ribbon panel convened by the National Academies, called for dramatic efforts to improve science and math education in elementary and secondary schools and increased public investment into basic scientific research. The title of their report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” summed up the panel’s sense that America is headed for trouble, but the challenges were surmountable.

Two months ago, the panel reconvened to issue a follow-up report assessing the progress since 2005. Its conclusion was grim; the nation “has shown little sign of improvement,” the follow-up report declared, adding that “The Gathering Storm increasingly appears to be a Category 5.”

Bad news, especially at a moment when the U.S. is struggling to energize a faltering economy, when the political climate favors cutting back public spending and when many of our global competitors are investing heavily into innovation.

The day after the midterm elections, President Obama suggested where he stands on the issue when he said, “I don’t think we should be cutting back on research and development, because if we can develop new technologies in areas like clean energy, that could make all the difference in terms of job creation here at home.”

But partial Republican control of the legislative process could frustrate his ambitions. As the American Association for the Advancement of Science noted in a policy brief, “The 2010 Republican Agenda, A Pledge to America… [calls for], cutting government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels for the FY 2011 budget, [which] would cut the federal R&D investment by $8.1 billion (5.5%) from FY 2010.” And it would place “a hard cap on future growth of the discretionary budget, [which] would make it more difficult for Congress to implement R&D growth initiatives.”

Also, just a few weeks ago, after the midterm elections, Representative Eric Cantor, in line to become majority leader of the House in the next Congress, called for cutting the National Institutes of Health budget by 4.3 percent, or about $1.3 billion. And it’s still not clear whether the America COMPETES Act – a centerpiece authorization measure that would double the budgets over the next decade of the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy science research programs, and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology along with programs to foster science education and innovation – will clear the Senate during the forthcoming the lame-duck session. If not, advocates will have to start from scratch in January when the new Congress convenes.

Robert Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank that studies innovation policy, is closely watching these and host of other factors that will affect how the U.S. promotes innovation and strengthens our economic competitive posture in the global market. As he explains, positions on both sides of the partisan divide in Washington could inhibit or help innovation promotion. Here are excerpts of my discussion with him a few weeks ago:

Do you agree, first of all, that the U.S. is not keeping its edge as an innovative power throughout the world?

Absolutely. We issued a report last year called “The Atlantic Century: Benchmarking EU and US Innovation and Competitiveness,” where we showed the U.S. ranks 40th out of 40 countries in terms of improvement in international competitiveness and innovation capacity over the last decade. This was based on a set of innovation-based competitiveness metrics within several broad categories: human capital; innovation capacity; entrepreneurship; infrastructure; economic policy; and economic performance. The U.S. is simply falling behind. Other countries have made innovation promotion a high priority, so they’ve restructured their tax code, their regulatory systems, their innovation policy systems.

 

Midterm Voter Turnout: Rising But Still Not Befitting a Great Democracy

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY is getting there, but — forgive the cynicism — I don’t feel it gathering steam, at least not when I read the dismal voter turnout numbers.

According to statistics compiled by Dr. Michael P. McDonald, Associate Professor of Government and Politics in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, at least 41.5 percent of America’s voting-eligible population* voted in the November 2 midterm elections across the U.S. just a few days ago. (“At least” because he may update the figures as recounts come in, which will probably only drive up the turnout rate, but only a tiny bit.)

That’s a slight improvement over the 40.4 percent turnout during the 2006 midterm elections, which was itself better than 2002 midterms, when 39.5 percent cast votes. So we’re headed in the right direction.

What’s more, 36 out of the 51 states or jurisdictions (that’s D.C.) saw increases in the percentage of voting eligible who voted this year. I’m not sure that’s better than previous years, but it bodes well that we’re seeing some measure of improved voting participation in most places.

By the way, if you’re from Oregon, you can be proud that your state led all others with a whopping 56.9 turnout. Minnesota was a tick behind with 56.8 percent (which was down from Minnesota’s rate of 60.1 percent in 2006). The District of Columbia, at 29.7 percent, brought up the rear, as it did in 2006, but actual states like New York (34.1 percent) and Utah (34.3 percent) can’t claim to have done much better.

Sure, it’s encouraging to see the numbers edging up, if only in such small increments. And a much more in-depth review of the numbers  and the circumstances in each jurisdiction will help us understand why they went up. (Was it the momentum the Tea Party? Jon Stewart? Fox News? A nation restive during an economic downturn? Better voter education? More money for campaigns?  “Walking around money,” as campaign strategist Ed Rollins once called it? We can argue this forever.)

Still, for me it’s hard to get excited when fewer than half of those eligible to vote actually exercise the precious privilege of the franchise – or even 61.6 percent, which is how many voted in the 2008 Presidential election, a high, but not record, year. I've written about this belore (see this and this). Once again, my feeling is that the U.S. fancies itself as the world’s leading democracy, but way too many of us can’t seem to muster the enthusiasm to live out the true meaning of that status.

Jeff

*McDonald defines voting eligible as “the population that is eligible to vote,” as opposed to the “voting-age population” which includes “persons who are ineligible to vote, such as non-citizens, felons (depending on state law), and mentally incapacitated persons.”

The Mess Juan Williams Hath Wrought

The messy flap over Juan Williams' firing from NPR is disappointing all around.For its part, NPR may have overreacted a bit. Yes, Williams' remarks about his feelings about Muslims make me uneasy (as my wife pointed out, what if you replaced from his remarks the word "Muslim" with "Jew" or "African American" or whatever?). But what he said seems a lot more ambiguous to me than others I've criticized for anti-Muslim sentiment (see this, this and this). He certainly could have been understood the wrong way, and obviously was by many. But having followed and admired Williams for a long time, I find it hard to believe he has a deep antipahy for Muslims. Given the murkiness of this one, at the most NPR should have handed down a suspension, not an all-out dismissal, don't you think? Reasonable and unreasonable minds will long disagree about this one.

That said, if you think I'm going to go easy on Williams, then hear this: his remarks about the incident on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday, October 22, were unforgiveable. He said: “I’ve always thought the right wing were ones that were inflexible and intolerant and now I’m coming to realize that the orthodoxy at NPR, its representing the left.”

What really bothers and surprises me about this remark is that Williams, of all people, blithely tossed out the age-old canard that NPR is ideological in its outlook and character -- and left-wing at that.

(I don't mind adding that, in spite of my disagreements with what many conservatives say, they are not, by definition, "inflexible and intolerant" any more than liberals. Williams, whom I've long respected for his usually thoughtful, nuanced and clear-eyed analysis and his aversion of simplistic labels should know, too. But that's not my focus today.)

I have listened to NPR religiously and continuously since I was in high school in the late-1970s. Like most mere mortals, I cannot claim perfect objectivity about these things, but I believe with complete conviction that NPR is neither right nor left. It is about as close to being "objective" and "balanced" as any of our media in the United States. (We can argue all day whether there is such a thing as true objectivity and balance in media, no matter how hard they try; thus the quote marks above.)

If anything, the Williams firing was an example of a news organization that was trying to bend over backwards (maybe to a fault this time) to preserve its reputation as unbiased. Indeed, Williams' appearances over the years on Fox News, which quite clearly encourages journalists to express a point of view, apparently induced a lot of heartburn at NPR, which operates under strict journalistic guidelines meant to head off bias.

I should reveal that for several years NPR was a client of mine. So, go ahead, accuse me of bias. But having gotten a pretty good glimpse (though by no means complete) of this organization from the inside, I feel even more qualified than the average listener to make the claims I do about NPR.

The real problem I have with so many of those who accuse NPR of ideological  bias is that they either don't listen to NPR, they choose selectively from its offerings or they only know the network from what Limbaugh and Beck say about it. 

I've tried hard to understand the objections many conservatives have about NPR -- folks like Newt Gingrich, who has long called for cutting federal funding for public broadcasting and who are now seizing that cudgel again since the Williams firing. It appears their gripe is only ostensibly about ideological bias. Rather, they're really trying to tap into sentiment out there that disdains what many believe is a smarty-pants, elitist tone. Conservatives have long played off this hostility (Nixon, for example, made much of the effette East Coast intellectual elites), and Sarah Palin, Fox News and the Tea Partiers have picked up this baton more recently. This theme is what this is really about, not NPR's bias, and it's what really annoys me about this debate and about what Williams said on "Good Morning America". 

Those who say that NPR is the opposite of Fox News are right in one respect, but not the one they mean: it's not the liberal answer to Fox's conservativism (MSNBC has taken on that role). No, NPR represents fair and balanced journalism while Fox, with a knowing wink, only pretends to.

Jeff

P.S. Now, for all of you readers who are ready to write a 2,000-word rebbutal below, lecturing me on how anti-American NPR is, please do this first: go to the NPR website and pull up all the stories that ran on its programs over the last week. Or just pick "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered." If you conduct an honest content analysis of which points of view are represented in NPR's reporting, I can almost guarantee you'll see extraordinary balance between left and right, and a large number of NPR shows (think "Car Talk") contain no political points of view at all. Do the same over a month or a year, and I'll bet the proportions come out even closer to 50-50. If you do, and you still feel NPR stands for National Pinko Radio, I'll read what you say. If you don't, well, then you're wasting your time and mine.

P.P.S. A fun fact: at a PBS conference in February 2003, Gingrich declared, “It’s one of the great mysteries of how life evolves that I now find myself driving to work listening routinely every morning to NPR.” Give him credit for his candor.

(Yet Another) Blessing to a Bat Mitzvah

Last week, my youngest daughter became a bat mitzvah, a sort of coming-of-age ritual Jewish kids go through when they turn 13. As I have with my other two (see this and this), I'm posting here the blessing I gave her during the ceremony.

This day is not just about learning to read lines of sacred text or writing your thoughts on what the Torah tells us. You’ve worked hard at that for many months. But that’s really the easy part.

What’s tougher – but far more interesting – is figuring out where you fit into the rich tradition that begins with the story in this scroll and continues to the present. You now have complete license to sort out for yourself how you’ll embrace this tradition and what “being Jewish” really means for you. Up until this point, you’ve only had your learner’s permit.

I promise not to be a backseat driver to you in that journey. That's not because I don't have the natural impulse to or because I don’t want to be bothered.

It's because, first, I’m one of many who constantly struggle with what the tradition means and how I should relate to it. So who am I to tell you?

Secondly, in order for it to truly work for you, it has to feel authentic to you; you have to come to it yourself, on your own terms, in your own way.

You’ve already begun this odyssey. Preparing for today, you showed tremendous curiosity and passion for the ideas in this text and for what this ancient coming-of-age ritual means. You've shown up here often enough and on your own initiative to obsorb some of what it's all about. And, thanks to your summer camp, Habonim Dror Moshava, which has become the great love of your life, you’ve begun to see and think pretty deeply about the treasures and questions that come with being Jewish.

I have the pleasure and honor of watching this fascinating process of exploration unfold. Let me know if I can help you along your way.

The Planned Burning of Korans is Terrorism; We Must Stop It

OF ALL THE GALLERIES OF HORRORS contained in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., I somehow have the most emotional reaction to the one on Kristallnacht, that spasm of Nazi-provoked violence in 1938 across Germany against Jewish lives and property. The exhibit at the museum includes several Torahs -- scrolls with the Five Books of Moses handwritten onto parchment -- that were damaged on Kristallnacht and remain in a desecrated state, strewn on the floor as they might have been that terrible November night.

I've been through the museum countless times, and the sight of these scrolls and the thought of so many other such scrolls that were completely destroyed in the violence of Kristallnacht still tears me apart. Sure, the frightening images of the human toll of the Holocaust -- such as the lifeless piles of death camp victims and emaciated survivors -- cut me to the core. But there's something about the desecration of a Torah that leaves me literally weak kneed and overcome with despair.

I suppose there are many reasons I react this way. It is not only because the Torah is the spiritual and intellectual heart of the Jewish historical and theological narrative, which we are duty-bound to read over and over and which has kept the Jewish nation going, even when the odds of our survival were about nil.

The other reason is that the deliberate destruction of something so dear to a people -- there is nothing more precious in a Jewish house of worship -- is really a symbol act of violence against the entire community. In that sense, it is an act of terrorism.

The targets of terrorism are not only those who are immediately harmed by its unthinkable violence. It is also the larger community from which the victims come. The attacks on September 11 were so frightening, for example, not only because thousands of people lost their lives and countless others had their lives upended in the aftermath. Americans -- and I would argue citizens of many others nations -- hundreds or thousands of miles away from the carnage, with no personal connection to the victims were also deeply shaken.

Why? Because the terrorists chose their targets carefully: some of the highest-profile symbols of our nation and they left everyone with the feeling that, but for the grace of God, it could have been them in one of those towers, or in that ring of the Pentagon or on that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. (Remember how that felt?)

That's the way terrorism works and why it wreaked such a tremendous psychological toll on this country. It's also why our society suddenly after September 11, 2001, began transforming itself in a multitude of ways -- most notably with heightened security procedures at airports, public buildings, international borders and critical infrastructure facilities. We were scared -- still are. 

The plans by Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., to burn Korans next Saturday, September 11, is an act of terrorism. They will create a real state of fear, which is what terrorism strives to do. Especially given surging protests around the U.S. against the presence of mosques, demagogic demonstrations of anti-Islamic bigotry from some high-profile public figures, and  rising public opinion against Islam , Muslims in America have cause to be terrified by the sight of a deliberate assault on their sacred book.

There's more than a little irony here that someone would commit terrorism on the very day this nation remembers the most disastrous act of terrorism on our soil. Just to show how bizarre the Dove World Outreach Center is, though, its website features a blog posting that offers "Ten Reasons to Burn a Koran."  None of the 10 reasons states it is in remembrance of the tragegy of September 11, which makes you wonder why this organization chose that day to burn Korans. But the reasoning is strange, vile and delusional, suggesting a willful misunderstanding of Islam and its holiest book. "We are using this act to warn about the teaching and ideology of Islam, which we do hate as it is hateful," the post declares. What the hell kind of a theology is this?

Right now, less than a week before the Dove World Outreach Center plans to carry out this act of terror, there have been some groups and leaders who have spoken out against the planned burning of Korans (see this and this, for example). But everyone of decency -- and even those who have their own misgivings about Islam -- must speak up, early and often. We must stop treating this another of the bizarre freak shows that our circus-like news media fixate on and more as a threat to well being of our civilization.

Every society has and can withstand its crackpots and bad seeds -- or, more politely, its social deviants. But only when most of the rest of us show that they're truly deviant and that we're committed to the sustenance of what is good and civil.

When this core is quiet -- or, worse yet, when they seem to join in with and endorse the deviants, which was what made the Holocaust possible -- we are, all of us, in for big trouble.

Jeff

Cordoba House and American Pluralism

I'M BEGINNING TO WORRY THAT the Cordoba Initiative, which is building a community center a couple of blocks near the site of the destroyed World Trade Centers, took America's claims of being one of the world's most pluralistic cultures a bit too much to heart.

Not that we shouldn't have expected and even understood some opposition to the plan. After all, Ground Zero is practically -- and rightly -- sacred to so many in this country and around the world, and the crimes there were unabashedly carried out in the name of the Islam. Even to someone like me, who has no objection to the building of the the facility -- which will be known as Cordoba House and contain, alongside other secular facilities, a mosque -- I see why it makes some uncomfortable. Symbols are powerful. Our message to them cannot simply be "get over it."

From the little bit I've read about the Cordoba Initiative and its leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the builders of the Cordoba House are trying to create a catalyst of peace and reconciliation. The Cordoba Institute promises to "steer... the world back to the course of mutual recognition and respect and away from heightened tensions" and to "serve the Muslim and non-Muslim community." That may sound a bit earnest, but hardly threatening, and I'll take earnestness over cynicism any day.

But, aside from those who feel the symbolism is awkward, there are still others for whom opposition has more to do with a profound antipathy toward all things Muslim.

As Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times reported in an article this past Sunday, all over the U.S. there are fierce fights against a growing presence of Islamic houses of worship.

"At one time, neighbors who did not want mosques in their backyards said their concerns were over traffic, parking and noise — the same reasons they might object to a church or a synagogue," Goodstein wrote. "But now the gloves are off.

"In all of the recent conflicts, opponents have said their problem is Islam itself. They quote passages from the Koran and argue that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution with Islamic Shariah law."

One photo accompanying the Times story shows a woman with a picket sign that reads: "Mosques are monuments to terrorism."

If there's any question that such highly vocal anti-Islamic acts are anomalous in the U.S., the Pew Research Center last year found that 52 percent of Americans say they are "very concerned about the possible rise of Islamic extremism in the United States," up 46 percent in 2007. Depending upon how you look at this finding, it could be a lot worse, but it could be a whole lot better, too.

There are at least two notably and disconcerting assumptions embedded in Americans' fear of Muslims that deserve some scrutiny.

First, that the people involved in the erection of this mosque -- and, to many, just about all Muslims -- are "radical Islamists," as one other high-profile leader has branded them, or "terrorists," as the woman with the sign claims. According to these folks, Muslims are categorically guilty of being a threat until proven innocent.

Second, that Muslims are bent on the "imposition of sharia," or Islamic law, on American society. Never mind that our First Amendment case law has pretty strong safeguards against such an outcome, which is ironic because many of the conservatives who are warning of Islamic takeover of American society are probably the same ones who have fought vociferously for getting rid of those safeguards. Also, this charge has the ring of 19th and 20th century cries about the "Papists" who would be a Trojan Horse for the Vatican in its attempts to Catholicize the U.S., and of the Jews' alleged subversion of American culture with their alien theology. As Ecclesiastes said, there's nothing new under the sun.

Obviously there are some Muslims -- call them "radical" or "militant" or whatever you wish -- who truly intend to do harm to Americans and other "infidels." Their goal, no doubt, is to impose their religious laws on secularly governed societies -- as they have in a number of countries. No doubt the people who subscribe to this approach are a bad and dangerous lot. Ground Zero is Object Lesson No. 1 of this. These people give the vast majority of good Muslims a bad image and scare the hell out of non-Muslims.

But those increasingly vocal and angry Americans who paint all Muslims with the same brush of such "radicalism" are doing great damage not just to the objects of their rage but to America itself. We Americans fancy our society as "exceptional," particularly in the way we manage our pluralism. Aside from some notable and tragic examples, we've lived up that to that ideal a lot better than most nations.

It feels rather unremarkable to say this, but apparently it needs to be said: if we go out of our way to alienate an entire category of people -- in this case, a large and growing part of our nation -- based on some misguided assumptions, we will as a nation be much less well off and hardly exceptional. 

Jeff

Where Are the Chuck Yeagers of Our Financial System?

IN "THE RIGHT STUFF," his masterpiece of the early history of NASA, Tom Wolfe describes a certain demeanor that all astronauts -- and later airline pilots -- acquired from a model set by the great test pilot Chuck Yeager. They vocalized this attitude, Wolfe wrote, with "a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless! -- it's reassuring)... the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet in a single gulp, to check your seat belts because 'it might get a little choppy.'"

It's the same voice of almost laughable understatement that emerged from astronaut Jim Lovell's mouth when he famously said, "Houston, we have a problem," just as he realized that the Apollo 13 spacecraft he was captaining in 1970 was on the brink of total disaster.

That voice betrays a certain calm in the face of calamity, a presence of mind to stay focused even when the body is telling you to panic, an indication that, at a moment of chaos, I am in control.That character trait, of course, is part of what Wolfe called "The Right Stuff"

In the wake of the volatile last few trading days on Wall Street, I'm beginning to wonder if we have any similar Yeager-like figures in control of the markets. I'm not talking about market leaders who merely have the voice of calm, though it would be nice to hear that, too. I'm talking about people who are really in charge and not freaking out.

As I noted in a post shortly after our financial system when into a tailspin in September 2008, I don't quite understand how those professionals who manage and trade in our securities markets every day seem to have hair-trigger nerves when problems arise.

It's even more striking because stock brokers and personal finance gurus are always telling the rest of us schleps, non-experts with our own life savings on the line, to be patient, to take the long view, to resist the natural temptation to do anything rash or dramatic. This too shall pass, they say, citing how, over time, the market will return a healthy sum and sustain us in our old age.

It's really the only thing we can do; most of us can't overnight transfer everything we've invested into a mutual fund into, say, gold or other investments that are at least stable, if not ascending. We, the mere passengers on this "choppy" flight are the ones trying to stay calm, even as our stomachs are roiling, but it seems that the pilots are the ones panicking.

That's one scenario: an enterprise in which those with their hands on the wheel are engulfed with fear and unable to resist their own natural temptation to to do anything rash or dramatic, like sell, sell, sell! Quickly, before we (the institutional investors, who really make the markets) lose our shirts, God forbid.

The second scenario, the one that seems to be the more likely -- or as likely -- behind the thousand-point drop of the Dow in mere minutes on Thursday, May 6, is that the human beings are not in control. This one is just as troubling as the first scenario.

"Traders parsing the mystery of Thursday's stomach-churning stock-market plunge are focusing on whether rapid-fire computer trading, coupled with the market's complex trading systems, triggered a free fall that appears to have begun with an order to sell a single stock," the Wall Street Journal wrote in a postmortem of that trading day.

"At a minimum, traders said, the selloff shows that regulatory oversight of stock trading has not kept up with the changing nature of trading," the article continues, adding:

"'There's no mechanism in the current system to stop an error from crushing a stock,' said Dan Mathisson, head of electronic trading at Credit Suisse. 'The regulators will need to explore restricting the use of market orders, or adding some type of circuit breakers.'"

It's another example of how computer systems have not yet acquired the judgment -- or, put another way, the heart -- that humans (and even many other organisms, which instinctually know to remove their hands or paws from a flame) uniquely possess. This is, of course, no path-breaking insight; at least since the release of "2001: A Space Odyssey," we've understood the potential havoc computers can wreak when we humans cede our control to them. And, remember, the computer aboard the spaceship in that movie actually did have something of a heart, a human-like intelligence, albeit a rather malevolent one.

But I am not railing against technology, which is like howling at the moon. And I will give the benefit of the doubt to those who programmed the trading systems (people who, like me, have their retirement savings at stake in the health of the markets) did their level best to ensure that the computer could "think" as a human might, or at least alert a human when the storm clouds appear. I'm assuming they thought through a doomsday scenario and tried to head it off in their lines of code.

But what seems to be the case is that those systems favor the big investors, whose fortunes are the first to sell off as rapidly as possible, triggering a cascade of others to do the same. And the same seems to be true even of whatever parts of the markets are under human control. The economics of a market ensure that somebody -- or institutional body -- had to have protected itself from disaster, and, if they held a short position, maybe even profited. We, the common investors, are just not in the privileged position, or so it seems. We are on the debit side of the zero-sum system. Or, until someone with credibility explains otherwise, so it seems.

The rest of us are really at the mercy of the pros. We can only hope that these same automated systems and the unpredictable, inscrutable "mind" of the market will shift and raise -- or at least protect -- our meager fortunes. But hope is all we have.

The rest of us can only keep ourselves calm by closing our ears to what sound like failing engines and ignoring what feels like a precipitous drop in altitude. We are left to silently reciting the time-tested incantation that, in the long run, the market is the best place for us to sock away our money -- even if, in the short run, we are headed for a crash from which no one can say we will recover. Meantime, the pros, the ones at the controls who have news that the plane is about to self-destruct, are frantically strapping on their parachutes and heading for the escape hatches.

I have to believe there are brave, bright and calm-voiced Chuck Yeagers running our nation's financial system, people who understand the interests of their passengers. But why don't I see any evidence of them? 

Jeff

"More Than Patient" in Arizona: The Sad Cynicism of SB 1070

The substance of SB 1070, the new Arizona law that requires state and local law enforcement officials to question anyone who appears to be an illegal immigrant, is bad enough. But one of the arguments Governor Jan Brewer gave when she signed it into law is also infuriating for its hypocrisy and absence of logic.

Upon signing the bill, Governor Brewer said, "We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act. But decades of federal inaction and misguided policy have created a dangerous and unacceptable situation."

What's really stunning about that statement is it's likely that the vast majority of those promoting such extreme solutions as SB 1070 are the very group of people who have stood in the way of meaningful federal immigration reform. It's like doing everything possible to block the construction of an important bridge project and then complaining that there's no way to get from one side of a river's bank to the other.

We saw this in the wake of the last big effort in Congress to pass meaningful immigration reform in 2007. A tide of fierce and often ugly criticism, flowing largely from the far right wing of our political spectrum, effectively shut it down. Even though it was not an election year, many members of Congress ran for cover, worrying that supporting the bill could be career ending. Others, from both parties (most notably Ted Kennedy and John McCain, who took the lead on the Senate version of the bill, and George W. Bush, who drew on his waning influence at the time), waded into the roiling waters because they realized it was the right thing to do, that something had to be done.

They compromised greatly to pass what eventually was a watered-down bill but a bigger first step toward progress than we had seen in perhaps two decades. But, in the end, even watered down was too much for many conservatives, particularly the radio talk show shouters, whose demagoguery helped kill it. Doing nothing was better than trying to fix the problem, they argued. (Does this sound like another more recent scenario?) 

And then they complained that no one was doing anything to fix the problem. As I wrote here in 2007, only months after the failure of the Congressional reform bill, we saw communities such as Prince William County, Virginia, try to enact draconian laws like the one that just passed in Arizona. Then, as now, we heard people in Prince William County rationalize their support for this provision by blaming Congress for not acting, even though one can reasonably assume they represented the same segment of our population (I can't honestly say the exact same people) who attacked their representatives in Congress for even thinking about passing a comprehensive reform bill.

Now, I agree with Governor Brewer that "federal inaction and misguided policy have created a dangerous and unacceptable situation." And I don't doubt that states like Arizona get a disproportionate number of people illegally entering the U.S. from other countries, mostly Mexico. That's not acceptable.

But it's hard to imagine that a law like SB 1070 will do anything to solve the problem. SB 1070 is no substitute for putting strong border practices into place that make it difficult, if not entirely impossible, to keep people from trying to smuggle themselves into the U.S. That's why I think the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, is right to beef up border patrols and deploy other technologies to stem the flow.

Also, measures like SB 1070 are no substitute for a more holistic solution, which looks at the reasons -- economic and social -- that people go to such great, and often dangerous, lengths to come to the U.S. illegally or overstay their visas and what what this country should do to deal with the millions who are living here without proper legal status and contributing constructively to their communities. That's what comprehensive immigration reform of the sort we last considered in 2007 and which Congress is about to consider in earnest soon is supposed to do.

SB 1070's call to harass people who "look" like those in this country illegally is just nasty. It only gives an appearance of solving a problem that people like Governor Brewer pretend to be so passionate to solve. It is designed to give perverse satisfaction to those who feel good about going after the uninvited strangers among us and make scared and cynical political leaders look tough for their crusades.

Imagine, if you care to, you are a U.S. citizen or legal residence who lives in Arizona and happens to appear, according to an image hovering in the mind of a law enforcement official, like an illegal. If law enforcement officials carry out the law as written (and, by the way, many police have spoken against laws like this because they forces them into potentially unsavory situations, undermines their effectiveness and makes them responsible for cleaning up a problem that is beyond their control), you could be stopped frequently and forced to prove something you're not.

It may mean that you'll effectively need to have documents on you at all times that show you are a U.S. citizen. In a nation that, for good reason, has a visceral contempt for the notion of a national identification card, how many of us would want to do this? How many of us would want the frequent disruption that comes with being suspected as guilty until proven innocent, or the humiliation of being pulled aside as others pass by and wonder what you've done wrong?

All that is sad enough. What's even more pathetic is that pending legislation that will enact smart, comprehensive immigration reform will probably have a tough time getting passed this year. There is a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, but they will still need support from Republicans to get the bill passed. Many, even those representing the wing of the Republican Party that believes in sensible immigration reform and sees immigrants as a benefit to the nation (and there are many), are being threatened even more by the restrictionist far right. It's not even clear that John McCain, who took a strong and principled stand as a leader of the 2007 legislation, will be there for it this year. McCain is fighting off a tough challenge from a far-right wing-nut who made his name in Congress (and now as -- what else? -- a radio talk show host) as an immigrant basher.

If this year's push to enact immigration reform does fail -- I hope it doesn't, but I fear it might -- it's hard to predict when our political leadership will acquire the courage to bring up anything like it again in the near future.

But it's easy to foresee how its failure will give its opponents one more reason to say that they "have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act." And thus, using their own tortured, cynical logical, these great American patriots will, once again, with mock exasperation and frequent references to the "will of the People," enact even more dangerous, muscle-flexing laws like SB 1070.

Maybe I'm being unfair to public officials like Governor Brewer. Maybe they will stand up and fight for a real solution, like the pending comprehensive immigration reform bill. But something tells me they'll do everything they can to stop it.

Jeff

Straight Talk About Fox News -- Part II

PEOPLE ARE once again wondering aloud whether or not Fox News has "crossed the line" between promoting or covering the Tea Party movement.

How absurd does that sound? What is there to wonder about? Of course the network promotes the Tea Party movement, which is made up of a lot of people who constitute its core audience. That's just good business, isn't it? That's just what we in the p.r. business call "branding," isn't it? 

This discussion comes up periodically, and I don't know why everyone is wasting time arguing about it. Still, straight news stories -- not the kind we might see on a network that pretends to be "fair and balanced" -- have to play by the rules of journalism and ascribe conclusions like this to others who offer opinion. I wrote about this about two years ago when the Washington Post referred to Fox as "a television network that many liberals say is biased against them." According to those rules, The Post can't say what everyone knows is true, that Fox is biased in favor of conservatives and against liberals.

I understand that, but it seems kind of silly to pretend, which is what Fox does when confronted with the charge of bias. Today's New York Times writes that "The network has faced regular accusations that it is promoting — not just covering — the Tea Party movement, something that its executives deny.

"Responding to a question from the media watchdog group Media Matters last week, News Corporation’s chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, said, 'I don’t think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party.'” 

And so the charade continues. This time it's in the wake of a controversy about whether or not Fox knew that a Tea Party group in Cincinnati was charging admission for an April 15 event it was holding with Sean Hannity as a speaker. Fox claims it was shocked, shocked! to learn about this, even though Hannity had been promoting the event on his Fox Web page and event organizers admitted they had been working with Hannity's staff on it. See here for more.

Deflection of criticism of Fox is another feature of our overall media landscape, and the Cincinnati Enquirer, did just that in its article about the controversy. Get this: the Enquirer article begins by saying:

First there was the Washington Post and its “salons.”

Now, Fox News and a Cincinnati Tea Party appearance?

What? How did this suddenly become a story about the Washington Post? And how can one seriously make a comparison between that paper and Fox News?

Sure, the Post came up with an ill-conceived plan last year to hold "salons," during which famous public figures, some in politics, would meet with companies that would pay for the privilege. But the plan never got out of the blueprint stage, and the publisher apologized profusely for even thinking about it after a barrage of criticism. Besides, the plan was to bring in people from many different points of view.

And, most important, the paper itself is a stickler for traditional rules of impartiality and balance (see quote about Fox above) -- outside the pages that are clearly designated for opinion. Don't let anyone tell you that's the case for Fox. 

Similarly, over the last year, we've too often seen our media, in trying to be fair, fail to step up and acknowledge the truth about GOP motives when its party leaders grossly mischaracterize Democratic initiatives. This happened when many Republicans branded the health care reform legislation as "socialist" and liable to produce "death panels," and it seemed to happen again this past week when Sen. Mitch McConnell said the pending financial services reform bill "not only allows for taxpayer-funded bailouts of Wall Street banks. It institutionalizes them." The White House, of course, argued that he's wrong. But, other than some columnists (Paul Krugman, for example, wrote yesterday that "Mr. McConnell is pretending to stand up for taxpayers against Wall Street while in fact doing just the opposite."), I didn't hear a lot of people say that this is just a patently ridiculous suggestion aimed, once again, at keeping the Democrats from showing that they're actually doing something. Again, why the pretense?

While I personally think that Fox is an outrage, that it traffics in a form of intellectual dishonesty that has truly distorted public discourse, I also think that it has every right to do that.  as My only beef with it is that it pretends to be something -- "fair and balanced" -- that everyone knows it isn't, and that so many others, who are rightfully playing by rules of civility, can't come right out and just say it.

Jeff 

“There is no news at the moment.”

I WAS SEARCHING this morning for more information and analysis about the plane crash that killed 97 Polish leaders, including the Polish President, and I ended up on the official web site of the President’s office. When I clicked the tab for the site's “news” page, it reported that for today, April 11, "There is no news at the moment."

This is perhaps one of the few instances when a rather expressionless, automated message speaks volumes about what must be a stunning moment for the Polish people. Though many reams of articles have yet to be written and hours of TV and radio news reports to be produced about this tragedy, it renders one speechless and all other "news" in such a stricken nation nearly irrelevant. 

We Americans read about the tragedies of distant lands daily, and so often it is hard for us to fully grasp their impact. And we must reserve our grief for our own tragedies, such as the loss 29 coal miners this past week in West Virginia. 

I don't want to say that this plane crash deserves our attention any more than others; a lost life anywhere is a great blow. But this one has the potential to tear a huge hole of devastation in the spirit of a nation that has, for the last 21 years, reconstructed itself into a proud and prosperous place. 

For good reason, nearly every report about the crash points to the irony that the delegation of officials who perished were headed to one the most infamous symbols of Poland's suffering during the 21st century: Katyn. That is where, in 1940, more than 20,000 top Polish leaders -- military officers, intelligentsia, clergy and any others who might lead the Polish nation in the tumultuous years ahead -- where murdered by Soviets as part of a secret deal between Stalin and Hitler, who had just invaded Poland. It wasn't until the last couple of decades that the Russians admitted their true role in the massacre, which Poles long knew to be true.

Few in the United States ever really tuned this in or the fact that the end of World War II was the beginning of decades more bondage for Poles and others swept into the Soviet orbit. For us, on the other hand, it was a beginning of great prosperity and liberation. Writing for Newsweek today, Andrew Nagorski puts this in terms that an American can understand: "In the United States, all you have to do is say 'Pearl Harbor,' and everyone knows what you are talking about. In Poland—a country that was invaded countless times by Russians from the east and Germans from the west—there are far more names of places that everyone instantly recognizes because of their tragic symbolism. But one stands out above all others: Katyn."

He adds: "When I started visiting Poland as a student and then as a journalist in communist times, people only had to whisper the word 'Katyn' to signal their opposition to the government and its wholesale falsification of history. You could talk openly about the truth of Katyn only in the West, where Polish exiles like my father and grandfather, who served in the Polish government-in-exile in London during World War II, kept insisting that the cover-up was as bad as the original crime."

The death count from the crash yesterday is only a fraction of what it was in those woods in western Russia 40 years ago, but, as then, the current and future leadership of Poland has been devastated. Along with President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, the dead include top leaders of Polish Sejm (parliament), the President of the National Bank of Poland (their Ben Bernanke), the chiefs of the major military services and of the National Security Bureau, and accomplished career diplomats and government servants. Essentially, the people who run the country.

Among those was Mariusz Handzlik (left), who, until yesterday, was Undersecretary of State in the Office of the President of Poland. He was President Kaczynski's foreign policy advisor. I worked closely with Mariusz when he was posted as a counselor at the Polish Embassy in Washington during the 1990s, and I stayed in touch with him sporadically since then. His exceptional energy, intelligence, sensitivity and charm were perfectly suited for the role of a diplomat, and many of us who knew him figured he was destined to play big parts in the unfolding story of post-Communist Poland. He would some day certainly be a top Foreign Ministry official, or an ambassador, many assumed, perhaps to Israel, as he had become sensitive to and well-educated about the complex issues of the relationship between Poles and Jews. Indeed, he was a great example of how this "new" Poland was grappling with, and trying to set straight, the difficult history of Polish-Jewish relations.

He came to much of this on his own, but he absorbed some of it from Jan Karski, the great hero whom Mariusz (and I) idolized. Karski courageously smuggled himself into and out of several Nazi-imposed Jewish ghettos during the war and then again out of Poland to tell the Allies about the great tragedy of the Jews. After the war, Karski became a celebrated professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, where he inspired many other future diplomats and world leaders.

While in Washington, Mariusz became Karski's regular chess-playing partner, and he helped the great hero navigate the last years of his life. (I didn't know until reading this today that "the two men were playing chess on July 13, 2000, when Karski fell ill. Alarmed, Handzlik started to call an ambulance. Karski sternly responded: 'Minister Handzlik, Check! Your move.'”) It was an unofficial grandfather-grandson relationship, as far as I could tell, with all the affection that comes with that. Not long after, when one of Mariusz's three children was born, he named him Jan -- "after Karski," he told me with pride.

Having spent all of his childhood and early adult life under Communism, Mariusz, age 44 when he died, was of a generation old enough to understand the evil ordeal Poland had been through for the decades before and young and smart enough to be part of the difficult project of steering his country toward a democratic, progressive future.It is because of people like Mariusz -- and because, in their hearts, Poles always felt they were part of a Western, enlightened tradition -- that Poland has since 1989 worked hard to become one of the great economic, political and social success stories among the foreign Soviet satellites.

This tragedy takes many like Mariusz away from continuing that work in progress, though the good news is they put in place an infrastructure and a frame of mind that will allow Poland to withstand such a loss, to replenish these ranks with others of similar talent and sensibility, to carry on. In the longer run, that is. For now, that project will lose a step, though not stop completely. For now, there is no news. 

Jeff

**

P.S. On the homepage of the President's Office is a picture of the President and wife, and bold headline saying, "May they rest in peace..." If you click further on that item, the following page includes an excerpt from a poem on Katyn by the late Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, entitled "Buttons."  The excerpt ties the tragedy of April 2010 with that of 1940:

    a bird flew by a cloud is sailing
    a leaf is falling mallow sprouting
    and there’s silence on high
    and the Smolensk forest is steaming fog

Here's the full poem, which is worth a read and gives a sense of what the Katyn massacre symbolizes for Poles. For those like me who don't know, the word "pertinacious" means "stubborn or perversely persistent," which is what the memory of Katyn, now and then, is in Poland.

    Only the pertinacious buttons
    have endured death, witnesses of crime
    surfaced from the depths
    as the only monument on their grave

    they are to witness God will count
    and take pity on them
    yet how can they resurrect body
    being a sticky element of the soil

    a bird flew by a cloud is sailing
    a leaf is falling mallow sprouting
    and there’s silence on high
    and the Smolensk forest is steaming fog

    only the pertinacious buttons
    a powerful voice of silenced choirs
    only the pertinacious buttons
    of coats and uniforms.

    In memory of Captain Edward Herbert

Teaching Willful Ignorance

WHEN I WAS WRITING my post the other day about how so many people dismiss settled climate change science, I wanted to make the case that this sort of self-deception goes on in other areas, too. Evolution is the obvious example. But the post was getting long, and I was afraid of muddling my case. So I left out the comparison to evolution.

Only a couple of days later, though, I was rather startled to read a The New York Times story that began: "Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools."

"The linkage of evolution and global warming," the article explains, "is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general."

In other words, they are using skepticism of the vast body of science that says that climate change is real to create a legal reason to allow teachers to poke holes in other long-settled scientific truths.

In other, other words, they're encouraging students to engage in willful ignorance. I don't want to be controversial or anything, but that strikes me as not what our schools should be doing.  

The Times article listed Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma and South Dakota as states where either the legislature or the state board of education have recently introduced requirements that would, in the words of the Kentucky legislation, encourage teachers to discuss "'the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories," including "evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning."

The South Dakota measure, a resolution that passed its legislature on March 1 by a vote of 37 to 33, calls for the "balanced teaching of global warming in public schools," adding that "the earth has been cooling for the last eight years despite small increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide, ...there is no evidence of atmospheric warming in the troposphere where the majority of warming would be taking place" and that "carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life. Many scientists refer to carbon dioxide as 'the gas of life.'"

For good measure, the South Dakota resolution asserts that "the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global warming phenomena." That's a lot like Fox News' famous claim to being the "fair and balanced" alternative to the rest of American journalism, when, of course, it is, as everyone understands, just the opposite.

The advocates of willful ignorance seize on a widespread misunderstanding of the word "theory." “Our kids are being presented theories as though they are facts,” Kentucky State Representative Tim Moore who introduce the the bill in his legislature, said to the Times. “And with global warming especially, there has become a politically correct viewpoint among educational elites that is very different from sound science.”

That's not too dissimilar from what Joe Barton, a Texas Republican in the U.S. House, said just a few days ago to a reporter at Christian News Service. "This whole theory of global warming is just that: It’s a theory.  It’s based on models. Models are based on variables, and conditions that the modelers that develop the models put into them. And the models don’t replicate what’s happened. So (scientists) need to go back to square one, look at the empirical data, look at alternative theories, and see if they can find a theory that actually fits the facts.”

Both Moore and Barton, are, of course, playing semantic games. Ask any scientist what the word "theory" means in science -- particularly in areas of settled science, such as evolution -- and they will use a definition much like this one: "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity." In other words, unchallengeable truth.

Either out of conscious deceit or unfortunate unawareness, people like Moore and Barton are referring to this definition of the word, as it is often appears in more popular, non-scientific usage: "a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact."

And then there are people such as Republican U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is proud of saying, "The threat of catastrophic global warming is greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

Why would anyone want to go to so much trouble to turn his or her back on the truth? To be fair, it's not necessarily for expressly mendacious reasons, though I suspect many of those who challenge the climate change science are doing it out of dislike of "liberals" and a desire to disable the Democratic Party. And it's something we from people at every point alongthe ideological spectrum.

A recent NPR story explored about the social science behind such self-deception: "'Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values,' says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project [a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy beliefs]. Kahan says people test new information against their preexisting view of how the world should work.

"'If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way,' he says. "And if the information doesn't, you tend to reject it."

That makes sense. But this explanation suggests once again that we are living in a society where significant proportions of the public are operating from profoundly divergent, and often conflicting, core values. The gulf between, or among, these groups feels to me to be getting wider every day, and there appear to be few, if any, ways of changing or bridging that. So much for a unified set of nationally shared values.

Not even a figure like Barack Obama, who held out the promise of being post-partisan and transformational unlike anyone else, has been the antidote to this troubling trend. On the contrary, critics from the right are rejecting his efforts to reach out to them, but using him as an object lesson of the "politically correct viewpoint among educational elites" that they so revile.

As the song goes, "You've got to be carefully taught."

Jeff

Revenge Against the Experts on Climate Change

POLITICAL CARTOONIST TOM TOLES ran a strip recently in which a news reader on a TV set says, "After a comprehensive review of climate science, we have concluded that climate change is 99.5% certain. Not 100%, as we previously stated."

"Aha!" said a man watching the TV in the next panel of the strip. "I knew it!"

That pretty much sums up what a surprisingly substantial number of people are concluding: that negligibly consequential errata from a tiny fraction of the vast corpus of scientific research is enough to convince one that climate change is a myth or that we shouldn't move so fast to assume it's real.

Never mind the overwhelming evidence that the world is growing hotter and that it correlates closely to the rise in greenhouse gases generated largely by human activity. And, in the wake of controversies about the validity of scraps of evidence from research sponsored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, purloined e-mails from British scientists that indicate holes in their research and even the idiotic claims by some that the record snowfalls along the mid-Atlantic region this winter disprove climate change, these voices seem to be getting louder and more visible.

It's leading to some truly startling policy making. As Science Magazine recently reported, "On 9 February, the Utah House of Representatives passed a resolution stating that there is no evidence that the world is warming and urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to revoke its 'endangerment' ruling that carbon dioxide is a threat to public health. Citing the same concerns, the state of Texas on 16 February sued EPA to overturn the endangerment finding. The same day, Virginia's attorney general filed court petitions questioning EPA's ruling."

Pardon if this sounds a bit naive to some, but I'm rather mystified by the opposition. I'm troubled that so many would reject the rigorously derived conclusions of an overwhelming number of experts.

Notably, the proportions of those who believe in climate change (and that human activity is responsible for it) have remained mostly the same over time. A survey by NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll conducted by the polling organizations of Peter Hart and Bill McInturff in December 2009, for example, shows that positions for and against that view have changed little over the last ten years.

As Andrew Revkin, one of the most respected journalists covering environmental science over the last decade and a half, said in a recent interview, about 20 percent of the public "absolutely reject[s] the idea that humans are or could dangerously destabilize the climate.... [and] 15 to 20 percent... are totally bought-in." The vast majority, he says, "are those who are disengaged, confused, totally uninterested in anything except Britney Spears or the stock market."

Indeed, it seems that the more expert the testimony and solid the scientific evidence, the more suspect it is in the eyes of doubters -- and seemingly unmoving for those who in the "clueless" category. As Revkin observes, "There's pretty good evidence that when you have some event, or when the Al Gore movie came out, it essentially appeared to intensify the positions of people who are already in either the 20 percent who are bought in or the 20 percent who reject this concept utterly. It hardened positions, rather than changed positions."

That's exactly what I heard a couple weeks ago from someone who works at a major climate change policy and research group, and it leaves the organization in a quandary. The more they try to roll out credible experts to make the case, the more the opposition fights back. Also, because they had assumed that the question of climate change had been settled, the group moved on to advocating for policy solutions. Now the organization is considering putting some of that on hold to go back to educating some more about the threat and existence of climate change. They're losing what could be precious time going over old ground they thought they'd won long ago. 

Much of this could be happening now, says Revkin, because "push is coming to shove — twenty years ago the treaty that was signed in Rio by so many leaders was purely aspirational — it didn’t have teeth... There was lot of lobbying, a lot of intensity. But the stakes were not concretely laid out. Now you are talking about bills going through at least one side of the Congress, we’re close to having a bill passed that might get to a president’s desk. The EPA has determined that the stuff [greenhouse gas] is dangerous and needs to be regulated. So the stakes are higher, and people are getting more intense, people meaning the lobbying community."

There's a lot to be troubled about here, and one of them is the seemingly willful reluctance to trust anyone who offers credible evidence of an impending problem. I don't want to say that there aren't some smart people who have raised serious, albeit unconvincing, questions. (For more on this, Foreign Policy Magazine has published this guide to climate skeptics, which sorts out the serious contrarians from the cranks and others with bad motives.) But it's almost as if they don't want to hear that the ship is sinking or the house is burning. For whatever reason, they'd all rather sit and wait, hoping that the unlikely happens. I see this on a lot of other issues, too, and it truly vexes me.

And, even in the unlikely event that our worst fears about climate change don't materialize, isn't there a value to finding new sources of energy that don't emit pollutants or require extraction? Shouldn't we prepare for the possibility that, someday, those traditional sources of energy won't be there? And isn't there a value -- in economic and security terms -- to decreasing our dependence on others who have the lion's share of the raw materials that we use to generate energy? Even if you don't believes the polar ice caps are melting, doesn't it appear that the status quo is untenable?

This just doesn't make sense.

Jeff

Lots of Snow Flakes

I HAVE LIVED in the Washington, D.C., area now for almost 18 years, and in that time I played the role of the smug Midwestern transplant, who scoffed at the way people here freak out when there's even a dusting of snow. Barack Obama, who probably dug his way out of more than a few tough Chicago winters, similarly complained about a year ago that D.C. residents need to acquire some "toughness" when winter weather visits us, and for that he took some local criticism.

Well, even I can't be smug today. A real snowstorm, the likes of which I have only rarely seen, even in the Midwest, hit us beginning last night, and the flakes will continue to come down through late today, according to the forecast. I'm attaching a couple of photos I took this morning, but not sure they really tell the full story.

I spent a couple of hours shoveling snow that was above my knees (early this morning, they said it was 24 to 30 inches, and we've had a least another six inches since). From the looks of even the main streets, we're going to be stuck here for a least a couple of days.

It's no tragedy, at least not for me and my family. And maybe it's an opportunity to get some of the solitude that we so desperately dream of during the busier times of our lives. My kids and a neighbor friend are making a "fort" in the basement, which might result in their actually tidying things up down there -- or not. And I'm close to un-procrastinating to get to a book I've been thinking of starting.

For others out there, according my TV (which is not working now, due to snow blockage of our satellite dish), it's not so cozy. Just under 200,000 homes in the immediate area are without electricity, and there are the expected stranded cars up and down the roads. 

There's not much we can do but wait, hopefully not until the thaw (that could take longer than it usually does around here, where a snow like this will start melting almost next day). But we have to slow ourselves down and rein in our daily ambition a bit.

And we can always read poems, like this excellent one by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow entitled "Snow-Flakes", in which the snow itself becomes a poem. I heard this on a podcast the other day, even when there was no snow falling and the temperature was well above freezing, and it gave me a chill of recognition of the real thing. Enjoy:

Out of the bosom of the Air,
  Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
  Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
    Silent, and soft, and slow
    Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
  Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
  In the white countenance confession,
    The troubled sky reveals
    The grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air,
  Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
  Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
    Now whispered and revealed
    To wood and field.

Jeff

A Simple Quest: Part II -- I Feel the Momentum Building

HOW GRATIFYING IT IS that so many people read and responded favorably to my last post about the need to hold restaurants accountable for the condition of their restrooms. According to my blog site metrics, an unusually high volume of people clicked in to read the post (don't worry, I don't know who you are.) This could indicate a silent, vast and heretofore untapped army of partisans who, to borrow the old Burger King slogan, want it their way when they dine out. My faith in the future well-being of humanity endures.

The other good news is that at least one restaurant reviewer -- Mike Berman -- includes the condition and layout of restrooms in nearly all his reviews. A colleague of mine tipped me off to this yesterday.

Berman, a Washington-based lobbyist in real life, is the publisher of his own blog, appropriately titled "Mike Berman's Washington Watch." He divides the blog between astute observations about national public policy and politics and reviews of a long list of restaurants he has visited, mostly in Washington but occasionally elsewhere. His reviews of the food and overall value and ambiance of each restaurant include some remarkably detailed descriptions of their restrooms. I'm very impressed. 

For instance: "The men's room is near the back of the restaurant, up two stairs. The room is not very large, but of ample size. On the wall to the right of the door there is a white ceramic washbasin with a silver framed mirror above it. The towels are cloth. On the wall opposite the door there is a white ceramic commode and a white ceramic, wall-attached, urinal. There is no separator between them. The walls are covered with large square charcoal gray tiles with light accents and swirls. The floor is covered with large black tiles."

And: "In most men's rooms there are one or two urinals that are relatively out in the open, easily visible. In this restroom there was no urinal in the open. There are 3 small 'rooms,' completely enclosed from floor to ceiling with full size doors. The doors and walls are heavy, dark wood. In each of the 2 narrower "rooms" there is a urinal. In the larger 'room' there is a white ceramic commode. There is also a large picture above the commode."

And: "There are men's rooms in the basement and on the 2nd floor. There is nothing special about the 2nd floor men's room. I did not try the basement facility. Surprisingly, it is what is know in the trade as a 'one holer.' It has a single commode and a washbasin and is relatively small. On the other hand it is bright and clean."

And: "The men's room is small, dingy, and slightly musty. As you enter, there is a 5 [sic] small dark stone counter just to the left with a gold colored metal washbasin. Next to the counter is a floor-to-ceiling solid wall that juts out about 2.5-3 feet. On the other side of the wall is a white ceramic commode. Across from the commode, in the relatively small room, is a white ceramic urinal. The floor is covered with large dark tiles, and the walls are painted a tannish yellow wall. Overall this room is not special."

And: "Then, as you stand at the counter to wash your hands, you can not help but notice in the mirror the large frame with dozens of photos old and new female nudes on the wall behind you. Of the many restrooms that WW has reviewed this is a first. We asked our female server whether they were pictures of male nudes in the woman's restroom. She assured us there were not."

And this more general tip: "Especially when an individual restroom is designed to be used by one person at a time, WW [Washington Watch] believes that unisex is the way to go. On those occasions when it seems appropriate, WW has recommended to women waiting outside the women's restroom to use the men's restroom." I'm all for that, too.

As it happens, most of the restaurants Berman reviews are pretty nice, high-end establishments (he definitely got me excited about a few places I have not been). Consequently, most of his restroom reviews are pretty favorable, which suggests that most of the better restaurants take their restrooms serious, as they should.

Berman sets a high and admirable standard for restaurant restroom reviewers. Now, if only all the rest would follow in his path.

Jeff

A Simple Quest

A FEW YEARS AGO, I was out with my family at a restaurant that rates as well above average in terms of quality, creativity, ambiance and service. Near the end of the meal, though, I went to the restroom and found that they were out of toilet paper. I asked the staffers if someone could restock -- and soon! They told me they were completely out and had to send a busboy to a nearby grocery store to get more. I won't get into details, but let's just say it left me in a very uncomfortable state.

It also turned an otherwise great dining experience into a bust, as far as I was concerned. And while I would eat there again, that episode dominates my thinking of the place -- not the food, which is what I should be thinking of.

Now, every establishment is entitled to a glitch now and then, and this was, I hope, an unusual moment for what is a usually a well-run place. But I'm amazed how often I'll go into a restaurant's restroom and find it in a shambles, dirty, out of paper towels, damp and sticky all over or any number of other signs that the management seems unconcerned with the impression it's making on patrons like me: people who value a good restroom experience, wherever we may be. I can't understand why so many restaurants that go out of their way to keep people happy in the dining room seem to have such a blind spot when it comes to their restrooms.

Anyone who has ever spent even a little time with me, let alone a long car trip, knows that I strongly subscribe to a rule that Lord Mountbatten is reputed to have once said (though I've heard it attributed to Churchill, too): "Never pass up a chance to go to the restroom."

So you might call me something of an expert on bathrooms, at least from a user's point of view. And while I'm not as picky as you might think, it matters to me what I find when I open the door to the men's room. Not that I'd decline to use it if it's unkempt and gross (again, never pass up a chance...). But it will definitely color what I think when I walk out.

That's why I'd like to encourage everyone who will listen to join me in insisting that a standard feature of any restaurant review include the state of the eating establishment's restrooms. I mean, it's part of the entire experience, isn't it? Yet, I don't think I've ever seen a restaurant review mention restrooms.

Why not? Why shouldn't it count alongside factors such as the inventiveness, taste and execution of the restaurant's food, the quality of its service, the atmosphere (which many reviewers are increasingly interpreting to include the decibel level of the din, which is a great breakthrough) and overall value?

Along with general upkeep of the restroom (along a spectrum ranging from backyard outhouse to so nice you don't want to leave it), reviews should also assess the layout of the restroom. I've noticed increasingly over the last few years, for example, that many restrooms have both a urinal and a commode, but with no divider in between. Technically, I suppose, that means two people can use the same restroom at a time; I'm seeing so many like this, something tells me they just barely meet local commercial building codes.

But effectively, it means only one person can use it at a time. If you're the one using the restroom, that's no problem. But if you're the one waiting to get it, it's annoying, and in a busy restaurant your chances of being the guy outside the door are pretty high.

Look, I realize there are more important things to worry about in life (such as Jay Leno vs. Conan O'Brien), and this is one I can (and will probably have to) put up with. No, I will not go to the barricades or howl to the heavens about it like Howard Beale. But someone has to say something for all those who won't. We can't just keep this under wraps forever, can we?

I'm not asking here for world peace or the cure for cancer. It's just a simple quest. And, with this post, I will no longer suffer in silence. If restaurants are going to go to so much trouble to keep us happy and wanting to return, why are so many alienating people like me (and, I assume, so many others)? And why are so many reviewers, who can be strangely picky about so many other things that happen in restaurants, give them a pass?

Who's with me on this one?

Jeff