Sunday, November 02, 2008
The Land of Reinvention vs. Resistance to Change - Vol. 4 Issue 7
The great French social critic and political thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that the American brand of Democracy balanced liberty and equality, embodied by concern for the community as well as the individual. Tocqueville was both a critic of unbridled individualism and a fan of “association.” He believed that “association,” the coming together of people for common purpose, would bind Americans to the idea of a nation larger than their own selfish desires. In many ways, an Obama administration will attempt to embody those basic American ideals and tendencies so acutely observed by Tocqueville during the time of President Andrew Jackson.
Yet, Tocqueville observed, that more than just eliminating any vestiges of old-world aristocracy, ordinary Americans also refused to defer to those possessing, as Tocqueville put it, superior talent and intelligence. These natural elites, who Tocqueville asserted were the lone virtuous members of American society, could not enjoy much share in the political sphere as a result. Ordinary Americans enjoyed too much power, claimed too great a voice in the public sphere, to defer to intellectual superiors. This culture promoted a relatively pronounced equality, Tocqueville argued, but the same mores and opinions that ensured such equality also promoted, as he put it, “a middling mediocrity.” Make no mistake about this: Obama will be challenged by “a middling mediocrity” from both the Left and the Right.
Never the less, America is about to go through an important rite of passage. It is impossible to over-estimate the invigorating and positive effect of an Obama presidency, both here in the States and around the world. But before anyone puts their dancing shoes on and pops the champagne, allow me to bring you back to earth: We are still a deeply divided country. The McCain-Palin rhetoric in the last days of their disgraceful campaign - spewing veiled and not-so-veiled venom to eager crowds of self-described xenophobic “Joe-the-plumbers” - has even amazed Republican commentators like George Will and Peggy Noonan. This negative “tone” is not likely to dissipate quickly and no one is counting on patriotic cooperation from the right wing. All one has to do is go back to the Clinton wars to see how the Right behaves when it loses.
Yet it is not just “the Right” that worries me. So, what’s the problem? It is simply this; American society, while always in the process of reinvention, is also resistant to fundamental change. Mediocrity is even-handed. Despite the large Democratic majorities in Congress, Obama will try to govern from the middle. THAT may be problematic to a substantial number of left-leaning Congressional Democrats. As so many Presidents have discovered in the past, it is often members of one’s own party who present the largest obstacles to change. If any person can overcome the “old politics” of mediocrity, it is Barack Obama. Let us pray he finds the strength and continuing inspiration to overcome resistance from whatever source, whether left, right or center. Oh, and one more thing, GOD BLESS THE U.S.A.!
Never prouder to be American, I remain
Savant
Click
here to continue...
Sunday, August 24, 2008
The Long Road Home - Vol. 4 Issue 6
Now the battle is joined. The John McCain of yesteryear is gone: the “maverick” has been replaced by the xenophobic tool of the military industrial complex and the oil cartel. McCain has abandoned his formerly principled positions on offshore drilling and environmental protection. Of course, he never supported the constitutional right of privacy embodied in Roe v. Wade and the long tradition of Habeas Corpus embedded deep in Anglo-American law. Worse, the not-so-subtle racism adopted by the McCain campaign (run by the progeny of Karl Rove) is nauseatingly clear to all but the denizens of the extreme right.
To understand the depths to which ambition has driven McCain, let us go back just a few months. Remember when Bush went before the Israeli Knesset and attacked the patriotism of Obama and his other critics? As an American and as a Jew, I have never been more horrified by a President’s actions than I was by President Bush’s hideously inappropriate accusation of “appeasement “ Did McCain object to this unseemly behavior? No. Yet the target of the attack, Barack Obama, showed incredible restraint. He should have said something like this, ideally in a tone of restrained anger: “The president of the United States has gone to a foreign country and stood before foreign leaders to make outrageous
slanders of his domestic political opposition. I am appalled that
he would soil the Office of the President this way on a mission of
diplomacy, spoken in front of a government body while representing
the United States of America. I will have no further comment on
this until Air Force One leaves foreign airspace on its way home.”
Then, when Air Force One left the Middle East and was over the Atlantic, only then should he have said this: “President Bush soiled the Office of the
Presidency by making outrageous attacks, joining a political debate
at home while representing the United States at home. This
Administration, and the people who are following in lockstep its
failed policy into the future, are the ones who abandoned the fight
against Islamic terror, by abandoning the search of Bin Ladin, by
being distracted by a convenient war in Iraq instead of the necessary
war in Afghanistan, by having thought through the war so poorly
that we created chaos in Iraq, not the peace we sought. The failed
Bush policy, now adopted and continued by Senator McCain, attempts to
distract us from the simple truth that our policy did not make us
strong, it made us weak. We turned away from the real source of
terror and we have now created a much bigger breeding ground for
terror. The Bush-Rumsfeld-McCain policies abandoned our need for
energy independence, it falsely argued that this war would pay for
itself with cheap oil, which policy is a total disaster and when President Bush’s trip concluded with him visiting the Saudi government to plead for cheaper oil, THAT was below the dignity of a strong, free nation.”
Yet Obama said none of this. He remained dignified and respectful of the President. Does anyone believe that John McCain would have shown such restraint? Hold on gang, only a couple of months to go before the nightmare is over.
Semper fi,
Savant
Click
here to continue...
Monday, June 30, 2008
See Internet Work – Work Internet Work
I spent last night in a dark room hunched over a glowing computer monitor. While I’m sure that there are many more interesting stories that start this way, I’m not the one to tell them. I wasn’t hacking the CIA computers or sequencing the human genome, but for me last night was, in the words of Dylan, a fatal dose of salvation. It all started when I happened across a wikipedia article entitled “newspaper of record.” One by one, I opened and looked at each of the world’s major print news publications, and my findings were at once disheartening and incredibly uplifting. I started with those close to home – The New York Times, The Washington Post, yada yada. It was the same as always. Next I looked at the news from those parts of the world where I have family members. My sister lives currently in Berlin, so I looked at Der Spiegel, the famous German weekly, which most closely parallels the New Yorker. It was, of course, stylistically and grammatically fluent, and its articles covered everything from the submarines used by South American drug cartels, to the efforts of democratic subversives in China, to the waning influence of the Federal Reserve. Very Informative. Next, I decided to look at Al Ahram, the standard bearing Egyptian weekly, which has been published since 1875. Here I began to notice an interesting trend. As with the online editions of many print media, Al Ahram allows readers to make comments on the news. These comment fields become a sort of public forum in which the subject of the article is the topic of debate. Here I began to find the broken, half-edited English of those to whom knowledge of the language is not merely convenient, but rather a very coveted trade-skill. The trend continued to the east, where India’s The Pioneer and The Times of India regurgitated articles that might have been found in a 1954 issue of My Home. “If you want to make your man spend a little more money, all you need to do is strut about in a bikini or other sexy outfits, as such things make men extremely impulsive when it comes to taking decisions either related to money or diet.” Hmm. On second thought that sounds a whole lot like Cosmo. Anyways, these user comments began to fill in some of the blank parts of my mental world map. On Haaretz comment boards, people lamented their Israeli leadership. On Al Quds comment boards, people lamented their Palestinian leadership. On Al-Ahram people lamented their Egyptian leadership, and on The Times of India, people lamented their Indian leadership. Around the world, people are desperately sending the digital smoke signals of a nation taken hostage. From the largest pluralistic democracy in the world (USA India) to the so called hearth of radical Islamic thought (Egypt) to Europe To China and back again to our seat high above our deluded-dream-vision puppet stage, we, the masses, are beginning to understand that it is governments who fight wars, and people that die. Though this may be old news to some, it was certainly reassuring for me to know that on all sides of the globe, people are cognizant of our shared humanity, of our common will to coexistence, and of the terrible plague of governments that simply don’t listen.
-Isaac Wilder
Click
here to continue...
