DemocratDad

The Debt Ceiling Double-Dare

A critical juncture... A high-stakes stand-off...

Insert your own attention-grabbing phrase here.

But this is not hyperbolic, I''m afraid. This is very real.

The obstructionist, anarchic members of the Tea Party are happily staring down President Obama, with nothing less than the Full Faith and Credit of the United States hanging in the balance.

The media talks about how the Republicans need a "fig leaf" so that they can end this. Some little concession from the President -- elimating the tax on medical devices in the Affordable Care Act? chained CPI for Medicare? approval of the XL Keystone pipeline? -- and the House Republicans, including the Tea Party, will spring into action, open the government, raise the debt ceiling. All will be good.

Without context, it sounds as if negotiation would be the natural move for both sides. When engaged in a stand-off, both parties should reach out, talk, compromise -- right? So it plays to the bias in our brain for symmetry (see Brain Bugs by Dean Buonomano for a brilliant description of some of the cognitive flaws that lurk in all of our brains).

That is exactly wrong. This goes to a fundamental principle in our constitutional democracy.

There are a few of these. Should we compromise, for example, on whether each citizen is entitled to a full vote? Of course not. Here the principle is less well known, but I would argue, at least as significant:

No elected officials should use the threat of doing economic harm to the United States as leverage to achieve policy goals. Ever.

This kind of threat (some have compared it to "terrorism," though I think that muddies the water) cannot be accomodated without seriously weakening the legislative process and rendering moot the opportunity for accountability that elections provide. It would bring our regular, zigzagging, incremental political process to a halt, and replace it with an endless struggle of... predator vs. prey.

All of the factions in the country would soon strive to overpower each other, the more radical their tactics the better. And for those of us who just so happen to live here? I'm afraid we would have to get used to hopping madly, like frightened animals, from crisis to crisis.

(See all of recorded history, for examples of this. It is important to remember that the limited success of representative democracy in the modern era is the exception not the rule.)

Republicans argue that they don't want to give up the leverage they have (i.e. threatening not to raise the debt ceiling) before negotiating with the President. That would be crazy, they insist.

But what they fail to see is that this is not valid leverage. The leverage that the Republicans (and the Democrats, and the President) should look for is what they have traditionally used in the legislative process: votes, favors, tit for tat, horse-trading, persuasion, public relations, obfuscation, sound bites that appeal to voters.

Those are the levers that an elected official is understood to have at his or her command. Lots of little switches. Not shutting off the power source altogether and smashing the instrument panel.

*

If any Republican reader still objects, let me propose this thought experiment...

President Obama has policy goals of his own, correct? One of them is to require purchasers of guns to undergo a background check, to prevent the mentally ill, or those with violent criminal records, from buying firearms. Most Republicans oppose this.

What, according to Republican logic on the debt ceiling, would prevent President Obama from refusing to sign ALL legislation, including raising the debt ceiling, or anything else, for the remainder of his Presidency, unless background checks are passed?

*

In other words, Republicans insist that their refusal to raise the nation's debt ceiling is their leverage to make changes. But they forget that this is not exclusively their leverage. The Democrats and President Obama have it at their disposal too! But they refuse to go there. Why? Because they understand that it is simply an invalid move in a constitutional democracy.

The media -- and our brains -- may get confused. But there is no "fig-leaf" concession that can be made on this. If the Republicans do not raise the debt ceiling, and the U.S. defaults on its debts, and we inflict an economic downturn or even a recession on ourselves, then we will enter a very dangerous and painful period in our national history. But if it happens, then the blame will fall squarely on the Republican members of the House of Representatives.

Making concessions now, in order to placate the Tea Party Caucus or anybody else, will only mean that this default will come later rather than now. At some point, preferably earlier, the validity of the attempt itself must end.

*

I hope President Obama concedes nothing.

Let them know that politics, in a republic such as ours, must be waged in the language of compromise and trade-off and cost-benefit analysis.

Ours is not an absolutist system; the absolutists and anarchists in the Republican Party and the Tea Party will have to be taught that. Paradoxically, the President will have to teach them that by the strength of his defense of one of representative democracy's few absolute principles.

(By the way, I'm glad President Obama knows his Lincoln; this was the paradox of that presidency too.)

My Open Letter to Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish

Dear Andrew,

I have been reading The Dish for a long time -- at least a decade.

An aspect of your character that I have long admired is your urge always to seek MORE information, rather than less. Over and over, you demonstrate a willingness to consider -- and share with your readers -- a wide range of commentary on any given topic. I believe that I have been influenced, for the better, by your unfailing generosity and fair-mindedness to those who hold positions different than yours.

So. Encouraged by this sense I have of your strong character (namely, that you won't get offended by what I'm going to say, but on the contrary will understand it correctly as meant with respect) well, I'm going to come right out with it:

The religious aspects of your blog are, I am sorry to say, beginning to discredit the rest of it for me.

In the past, as you might expect, I was able to cordon off your religiosity from your political commentaries and philosophical musings.

To each his own, right?

I just skipped over the stuff about God and faith altogether. (Unless, of course, you were denouncing "Christianists" or exposing Muslim fanaticism, or something else we could agree on...) 

But now I am finding that I can't cordon your religious beliefs off. And I have a feeling that this development may be bigger than you or me.

This is why I am sharing it with you, Andrew. You follow the zeitgeist better than anyone I know. And as I say, I am convinced there's... something happening here...

Atheism is growing up, I think.

As many people like me are moving away from any need to grapple with religious thinking, I suspect that our frame of reference is changing accordingly. It reminds me of the gay marriage debate, how fast it turned.

All that religious stuff, even the formerly interesting dialogues you hosted or provoked, between people of "faith" and those skeptical of it... it seems more and more, well, silly. A waste of time.

Just for moment, put yourself in the position of readers like me.

There's this blog that you really, really enjoy... But the writer happens to be a devotee of... Zeus.

Zeus? Yep. Takes it quite seriously too.

It would embarrass you, would it not?

In 2013, if someone you respect greatly did this? 

You might begin to read that blog with a kind of squint, hoping that there would be none of that high-minded writing about Zeus and Apollo and Athena in it. Right?

Come on, Andrew. Join us.

Let go of the old Bronze age myths and fables, in the generous and thoughtful way that you generally do things. Prove to me that you can recognize bullshit when you see it.

With respect,

Tom

FOLLOW-UP TO THIS POST:

Andrew Sullivan has been writing often in recent weeks about Pope Francis. I wrote Sullivan an email on this "extraordinary Pope" -- seen from an atheist perspective, and he quoted it in full!

Once again, evidence of Sullivan's willingness to consider and publish opposing viewpoints.

I talk about elves, not Zeus, this time, but my words are just as blunt as in this earlier "open letter." Here's the link. I'm the "atheist" reader who starts: "It is strange, being a non-believer..."

I will confess. I still worry about the bullshit quotient, but I can't quit reading Sullvan's blog because of its wide-ranging intellectual and cultural curiosity... and because he writes so damn well and with such heart.

The Convention Speech Obama Would Give (If He Could Be Honest Without Losing the Election)

Ladies and gentlemen. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Americans of all political persuasions.

Perhaps this speech will help me in my campaign to serve as your President for another four years, or perhaps not.

Either way, I believe it is important for me to tell it to you straight, from one citizen to another.

Tonight I want to speak to you, very frankly, about the central challenge facing our country in the coming years.

I am going to speak about a fear that every politician confronts every day but never gives voice to...

I am going to talk to you tonight about the fear that America, our great country, may be in decline.

*

My dear fellow Americans, it will come as no surprise for you to hear that we face immense obstacles in the way of our economic recovery.

What has come to be called the Great Recession, which began in 2008, took a terrible toll... In the winter of 2009 when I took office, as you will remember, over 750,000 people were losing their jobs each month.

Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the "Stimulus") we managed to stop the free fall, to give it a floor. We did this by a combination of tax cuts and also investments that led to some minimal job growth.

As you know we also passed a significant health care insurance reform bill in 2010, the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), aimed at helping the long-term health but also the financial stability of the citizens of this country as well.

Yet these measures weren't enough.

Joblessness continues at over 8% to this day. Housing prices have refused to bounce back -- and it has been six years from their peak in 2006. Gas prices are stubbornly rising, and, more recently, food prices have begun to climb too. Medical insurance rates still strain our finances, for businesses and individuals alike.

These are tough times...but I don't have to tell you that.

You know it far more viscerally than I do.

*

I believe that things may improve over the next four years. I believe in the policies put in place by my administration.

But despite my hopes for improvements, I am aware of the obstacles that remain. The pressures are too real for me to tell you, breezily, that conditions will improve dramatically. Other difficulties surely await us in the coming years and decades...

The truth is, my fellow Americans, we have to face it: we are looking at a long and, likely, unavoidable contraction of the personal wealth and expectations of citizens of the United States over the next century, any way you look at it.

*

Why is this happening?

Is this a Democratic failure?

A Republican conspiracy?

No.

Let us go back and look at the big picture together. To do that we have to step outside of our familiar, short-term, partisan thinking and look all the way back to the last century.

After World War II, our big, beautiful, brazen country benefited from a massive industrial base, built up in the beginning of the century; an explosion in technology, much of it invented here; and most of all, cheap, available fossil fuels. Our obvious competitors in Europe and Asia, crushed and broken from both world wars, lagged behind us in their capacity to find new markets and develop new technologies. We stepped up, quite naturally, and the United States soon became a colossus, standing astride the world nearly unchallenged.

Only the statism of the Soviet Empire, at great cost to the lives of individuals, could compete with us on a global scale in economic, political and cultural power. And that monolith eventually collapsed -- in a series of events beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ending with the Putsch in Russia in 1992. It became a victim of its own weight, its repression, the stagnation of its ideas, its inefficient centralized planning.

What happened in the 20 years since the collapse of the U.S.S.R.? Where are the blessings of our victory in the Cold War? 

Why aren't we standing astride the world as before?

Well, in some sense we still are. No other country comes close to having our power and influence. But the world is catching up, as is evident to every one of us.

Workers and governments all around the world are building up middle classes in their own countries, in which their own management practices are meeting their own natural resources, in ways similar to ours.

Meanwhile our dependence on foreign oil left us more vulnerable to events in the Mideast and led us to overextend our military in multiple wars (with various justifications).

And perhaps most significantly, over the past 30-some years, U.S. companies (driven by the requirement, imposed by their shareholders, of ever-increasing annual growth) have exported jobs overseas.

The loyalty of the capitalist elite in this country to their own fellow-citizens has grown ever more... imaginary.

And the security of American workers -- both blue-collar and white-collar -- has become likewise more... imaginary.

All of this is to say that the quality of life we came to expect here in the United States in the late 20th century: solid public schools, solid infrastructure, cheap electricity, inexpensive in-state tuition at state colleges, retirement at 65 with Social Security and Medicare paying our bills while we play golf and visit grandkids and leaf through photo-albums during our "golden" years... it's no longer sustainable.

The dream-life of Americans in the last century, as accustomed as it became to us, was in fact just that, a dream.

*

It lasted a good 70 years or so. It was a wonderful boon for our country. It allowed for new social movements, civil rights, women's rights, massive change for the better in our ideas of ourselves and the world in which we live. But it was, nevertheless, an illusion to think that it would just go on like that forever.

The rest of the world, outside the First World, never knew this kind of comfort and self-satisfaction that we did. Most human beings around the world understand that our basic condition is one of want and insecurity. Each of us, however dignified and beautiful and kind and full of integrity and intelligent we are, adds, if truth be told, only a limited amount of value to others. Enough to be paid a small wage for a service or a product, that's all. (Even you George Clooney, even you Martha Stewart, even you, Larry Ellison, even you Meg Whitman -- though you have leveraged your value added, by way of modern technology, into something disproportionately lucrative.)

Certainly each of us does not contribute enough to maintain manicured lawns even in drought conditions, eat rare foods and drink fine wine, purchase second homes, enjoy unquestioned central heating in the winter and air-conditioning in the summer and endless entertainment... have two or three family cars in our garage... It was an astonishing era, my fellow citizens, for those of us in the middle and upper classes in the Western industrialized countries -- above all, for those of us living in America. It is ending.

For many Americans, it has already ended.

*

I do not say all this to depress you or discourage you. I say it because I want to have a candid conversation with you.

The fact is: we are not going back. We are going to be forced to reduce our expectations and our government expenditures, no matter what.

Defense spending must be cut.

Waste and redundancies must be eliminated.

Discretionary programs, things like PBS, Head Start, I would argue need not be cut -- should not be cut -- they are too small to make a difference anyway.

But there will still be the problem of the entitlement programs: namely, Social Security and Medicare.

Social Security is solvent for some 50 years -- so let's leave that one alone for now. We may have to address it later.

Medicare, though, is teetering on the edge. Everyone agrees: it isn't going to make it in the long term. The costs of care are too high. The elderly are living longer, and, moreover, the medical system has bizarre incentives in place, leading to unnecessary tests and expensive procedures instead of more common-sense preventive care and simple, family-centered, end-of-life care. 

What can we do?

*

Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan have suggested that we could create a system of private vouchers -- instead of a single-payer system like the one we have today. That approach would probably lead to reduced benefits (one estimate is a reduction of about $6000 per recipient).

Some say: well, at least each individual could make his or her own choices about what medical care to pay for out of pocket when the vouchers run out... That's something isn't it?

I would answer: That may be something, but it is not an acceptable something. Making your own decision not to buy a chemotherapy drug, one that you know will help you live a year longer, because you don't want to face foreclosure before that year is out...? Because your child has Downs Syndrome and needs special resources so that your spouse can leave home to work? No, that future is clearly not acceptable.

Or we could spread the risk and insure the whole population. This would mean, in effect, that younger, healthier Americans would fund the health care of sicker Americans, particularly the elderly.

Such a change to Medicare -- altering it from an "earned benefit" to a tax -- would no doubt cause resentment, particularly in difficult economic times such as we face into the foreseeable future. Over time, would such a change delegitimize government in people's eyes? Would it foster even deeper cynicism than we have today?

GIven these difficult choices, I'll be honest with you, I am not sure what we should do. All I know is that hese are the difficult choices we face, together.

But I can tell you: I do know that we should not -- we cannot -- simply privatize Medicare and throw people back on the mercy of their own incomes or net worth.

I believe that equal access to health care should be something we ensure for one another -- as fellow Americans, as neighbors, as human beings.

In my role as President I find that the theme that confronts me on almost an hourly basis is fairness. I believe that we should be as fair as possible in deciding how to ensure that every American, rich or poor, has access to basic health care.

*

Here's the good news. We have entered an era in human history -- some 10,000 years after the advent of agriculture -- where we are finally learning to overlook the trivial ethnic or religious differences which have long driven us apart and made enemies of us. 

Whether black or white or Latino or Asian or Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or nontheist (the fastest-growing part of the population, by the way), gay or straight, young or old, Northern or Southern... we are all capable of abiding by the laws of a pluralistic, democratic state.

Let's do that. Let's agree to have our enemies be: disease, hunger, climate change, cruelty, war, cancer, accidents, bullying, betrayals, losses, depression, things like that. Not the old prejudices and fears and stereotypes and hatreds.

Our only chance of getting through this is that we get through this together.

*

Okay. That gives you an accurate picture of where I am coming from. I will work every day for the next four years, if you give me the honor of serving as your President again, to make this country as great as it possibly can be.

Who knows, perhaps with the aid of unforeseen technological break-throughs -- never underestimate the ingenuity of human beings, especially in this new age of cloud computing -- we will reverse the tide of America's decline.

Inexpensive, unlimited energy would be a start.

Certainly, as your President, I will do everything I can possibly do to lead us to a brighter future.

But at the very least we can be together in it, keep things fair, speak openly with one another along the way.

*

That may be all we have. It has to be enough. And I believe it is enough.

I will remind you: The greatness of the United States of America has never been measured by its wealth, but by its people.

We the people. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Nothing about golf memberships in there. Nothing about luxury cars. We can do this.

*

Thank you and goodnight. I love you all.

[Waves goodbye to stunned crowd.]

I Heart Iowa

Iowa, what a run that state is having.  

First there was Senator Barack Obama's victory in the Caucus last January, which transformed the Democratic primary race and enabled Obama's ultimate election to the Presidency.  

Now this from the Iowa Supreme Court, striking down a ban on same-sex marriage:

"Therefore, with respect to the subject and purposes of Iowa's marriage laws, we find that the plaintiffs are similarly situated compared to heterosexual persons... Moreover, official recognition of their status provides an institutional basis for defining their fundamental relational rights and responsibilities... Society benefits [italics mine, I just like the directness of this phrase]... In short, for purposes of Iowa's marriage laws, which are designed to bring a sense of order to the legal relationships of committed couples and their families in myriad ways, plaintiffs are similarly situated in every important respect..."

We all benefit from acknowledging and honoring the love between others.  The full ruling can be found at

http://www.iowacourts.gov/Supreme_Court/Recent_Opinions/20090403/07-1499.pdf

 

The Gordian Knot of the Current Crisis

Brilliant article in the Nation magazine today by Jonathan Schell. An excerpt:

All the crises are characterized by double standards, which everywhere block the way to solutions. One group of nations, led by the United States, lays claim to the lion's share of the world's wealth, to an exclusive right to possess nuclear weapons, to a disproportionate right to pollute the environment and even to a dominant position in world councils, while everyone else is expected to accept second-class status. But since solutions to all the crises must be global to succeed, and global agreement can only be based on equity, the path to success is cut off. Finally, all the crises display one more common feature: all have been based on the wholesale manufacture of delusions. The operative word here is "bubble." A bubble, in the stock market or anywhere, is a real-world construct based on fantasies. When the fantasy collapses, the construct collapses, and people are hurt. Disillusion and tangible harm go together: as imaginary wealth and power evaporate, so does real wealth and power. The equity exposed as worthless was always phony, but real people really lose their jobs. The weapons of mass destruction in the invaded country were fictitious, but the war and the dying are actual. The "safety" provided by nuclear arms is waning, if it ever existed, but the holocaust, when it comes, though fantastical, will be no fantasy. The "limits on growth" were denied, but the oil reserves didn't get the message. The "uncertainty" about global warming--cooked up by political hacks and backed by self-interested energy companies--is fake, but the Arctic ice is melting anyway.

Read the whole thing.

Political Labels and Political Philosophies: Take the Test

See where you come down on the electoral compass. It's a great way to test your political self-image against the actual policy positions of the candidates in this election year.

I fall squarely in the upper left quadrant, and my answers are closest to John Edwards and, after him, Barack Obama. So I guess I am an unabashed lefty after all...

What's curious about my electoral compass-point, though, is that in terms of my political philosophy I am actually a conservative -- in the sense that I believe in anti-Utopian, gradualist change, and lower-case meaning derived from contingent cultural traditions.

But I happened to be raised in Berkeley, so the values that I want to conserve are lefty values, emphasizing freedom of expression and equal opportunity for all, instead of religious authoritarianism or private property absolutism. Other people come to liberalism through a different path -- they break away from their upbringing and embrace a transformative, radical position in support of abstract human rights or the rejection of the Powers That Be. I come to my liberalism the way that 18th century "liberals" like Jefferson did: because it seems to me that it allows the maximum of human flourishing, while responding to our deep down sense of fairness. I do not need to believe that it will ever create a Perfect Union, only that we are always striving together, as the Constitution has it, towards "a more perfect Union."

Where do you fall on the electoral compass? What is the political philosophy that lurks behind your specific policy preferences?

Parents Getting Their Way, the Angry Child and the Results in New Hampshire

My two boys, 3 and 2, are just getting to the age where they will directly test their wills against mine.

The boys will want something -- say, to soak "just one more minute!" in the bubble bath -- and my wife or I will insist that, no, they can't have it.

You know what comes next: a loud and unruly protest rally. Chants and raised fists. Outrage from all sides. The inevitable divisions and recriminations within the movement. And finally, a plastic frog thrown hard at someone's brother.

Grabbing the culprit and lifting him out of the bath, I feel like "the Man." Part of me wants to join them. A vision flashes before my eyes of myself suddenly plunging into the bath next to them, throwing bubbles in the air, calling for more plastic bath toys. "No justice, no peace!" we'd all scream at their mother as she came running in to see what was going on.

But I resist. I mean, I really want them to get in their pajamas.

Sometimes, as I lift them out of the bath, or deny the refill of apple juice, or separate them without asking for a report of who started it, I see a look in their eyes that seems familiar. I remember being a child myself, and having no say as to the final outcome of a confrontation.

When Mom or Dad laid down the law, when it was time for me and my sister to go to our rooms or get in the car to go to school, there was no arguing. Or rather, there was arguing, but it was a foregone conclusion who would win the argument.

Even in the best of worlds, even if it were possible for the parents to be right and reasonable, under all circumstances, it hurts to be the kid. It makes you feel helpless. You recognize the limitations of your own power to change outcomes. It makes you mad, righteously mad. Door-slammingly mad.

That is exactly what many of us felt on Tuesday night, watching the Hillary Clinton victory speech in New Hampshire. And I'm not alone. It felt as if our parents were winning once again.

And it makes us particularly angry because we've had a lot of that over the past eight years. There was the decision by the Supreme Court (parental figures if there ever were such, in strange "grown up" black gowns, talking to each other in sophisticated language about unfamiliar issues) to hand over the Presidency to George W. Bush, despite clear indications that Gore had... I don't know, just possibly received more votes from the good citizens of Florida than anyone else on the ballot.

Then there were the "adults" who, back in 2003, told us that questioning the drumbeat for war and the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was childish. In fact, Dick Cheney's main persona, from the beginning of the administration to the present, is that of the wiser, more responsible parental figure who tells it like it is to the rest of us squirts. And one of the most notorious "grown ups" in the lead up to the Iraq disaster, Bill Kristol, now has a column in the New York Times, along with that other cheerfully enabling grown up, Tom Friedman.

We're still listening to their lectures, suffering from their hand-slappings, sitting for their pep talks.

In New Hampshire, there was a moment when the younger generation seemed to announce itself. Reporters on the ground talked of Obama rallys which were confident, positive, forward-looking -- celebrations of our new unity as an extended family of Americans. It seemed as if, maybe this time, we would speak for ourselves.

But the grown-ups, the over 40 voters, leaned to Hillary. The over-60 voters stampeded to her. And it was enough to send us to our rooms all over again.

I still feel angry. It reminds me of how my boys must feel sometimes.

So what can we learn from our experiences as children and parents to ease the pain?

No, I will not acknowledge that the grown ups are usually right, and that Hillary Clinton, despite my resistence, is best for the family. No, I will not come out of my room and say "I'm sorry." Is there any other lesson to draw from parenting?

There is one: This too will pass. Kids grow up. As you enter your teenage years the conversation with your parents starts to involve more give and take. You may even convince them on occasion to take your side. And then suddenly, shockingly, you find yourself responsible for your own destiny.

I hope that this is the year for Obama. I resent the results in New Hampshire. I am nervous about the prospect of the so-called "Greatest" generation and their children, the Boomer generation, rolling the rest of us kids once again on February 5, "Super Duper Tuesday."

But at least I know that if not now, then soon. We're growing up, Mom and Dad -- Hillary and Dick -- and we're going to finally get the franchise.

I pledge right now to listen to the political views of my adult kids when I'm 60 and holding on to the status quo.

Hillary Clinton and the Curse of the "Double Self"

Dear Senator Clinton,

I am writing this letter with a feeling of genuine sympathy for you, concerning the difficulties you are facing in the campaign. Let me be clear: I am a supporter of Barack Obama. But this letter is not written to score political points or with tongue in cheek; I truly wish to convey my respect and sympathies.

I also want to try to explain to you what is happening in New Hampshire at the voting booths and all around the country in the polls.

I know that you have dedicated much of your life to the advancement of your political goals -- including health care reform, education and preschool programs, and a more progressive tax structure. You worked closely with your husband during your years as First Lady both in Arkansas and Washington D.C.. You led many initiatives and commissions into many important policy areas in those years. And then in your subsequent career you delved deeply into the minutia of legislation addressing all manner of economic, military and social needs and endured the endless wrangling in the Senate. Many of your colleages -- Republican as well as Democratic -- have attested to your civility, your thoughtfulness, your obvious intelligence, your fortitude. You won them over, just as you have won over the voters in New York.

But Democratic voters all around the country are now going in a different direction. You and your campaign, by all reports, are reeling.

Why are voters -- particurly young voters -- turning to Obama in droves? Why does experience seem a liability these days? Why do people constantly reference the "likability" factor when contrasting your candidacy to Obama's?

There are many explanations of course. For one, there is Obama himself. We could also speak of "Clinton fatigue," gender stereotypes, the Republican noise machine and its villification of you over the 15 years, demographic shifts, celebrity culture, your fateful vote to authorize the war in Iraq, your personal style of self-restraint, the infinite power of Oprah, and on and on. But I want to focus on just one of these many explanations, the one which I think is (other than Obama himself) the fundamental one:

Hillary, the nature of public discourse is changing.

People are getting savvy. They recognize what people in public life are doing, behind the masks. They know how to read motives. We are, each one of us, saturated with images of other people in the media. And we have become, each one of us, highly advanced critics, expert detectors of duplicity, pretense, hypocrisy, inauthenticity, ambivalence. Microexpressions have macro-consequences.

I believe that you are truly dedicated to your political goals. The charges -- the Sean Hannity/Rush Limbaugh line of talk -- that you are driven by avarice, revenge, or ambition are silly and hurtful. But in your long time in the public eye you have developed a habit of speaking which hides more than it reveals.

You purse your lips into a half smile. You focus-group your hair style (I am assuming that it has at least been discussed, for its political import, in your inner circle). You speak in measured cadences with a subtext which consistently advances your agenda, be it tactical or strategic.

This is no longer suitable in the media-driven culture. People see too much.

This change first began to have consequences in the 2000 election. Voters judged Gore and Bush on the basis of their personal style, regardless of the content of their speeches. While Gore -- dear, brilliant, sincere Gore -- spoke in his slightly condescending, calculated way to the voters, George W. Bush spoke from his heart. He has, over a lifetime, developed a consistent, down-home Texas-style delivery, which relies on the talismanic power of short, simple words (You're a "good man"; people want "freedom" -- see my earlier post on Bush's... unique way of speaking). Voters responded to this. Whatever his policies, whatever his values even, they recognized a person speaking to them without artiface.

When I say that George W. speaks without artiface, I know that you and many others may reflexively disagree. Of course he is a blue-blooded New Englander who is pretending to be a Texan. There is a certain artiface in his whole persona. But the important point is that he has genuinely adopted it as his own. So he may recite the cues given to him by Karl Rove, and he may have invented his down-home style back in his childhood, but he believes it now. Gore, on the other hand, is famously different with his friends in private -- cutting, sharp-witted, even irreverent -- than he is in public, where he is serious, self-deprecating, and yawn-inducing. (Though I have to admit I still love the guy, even when he drives me crazy.)

My point about you, Hillary, is that you have a double self. So do I for that matter, when I present myself to the world. I hide my goofy side and get very serious (not unlike Gore, I'm proud to say!). There is nothing wrong with this traditional style of self-presentation, this double self, on the face of it. But it is a serious liability in today's politics.

Voters today -- especially the young -- want someone who is a fully portable package, and someone who allows any voter, anyone watching on TV, to inspect the contents held within. The age of secrecy is over. Love him or hate him, George W. makes no bones about who he is and where he stands. Love him, Barack Obama does the same.

Again, my sympathies are with you. You are a gifted person, and you have done and will no doubt continue to do much good. But the culture has shifted, Hillary.

In your emotionally revealing moment yesterday, your voice broke when you spoke of how hard it is sometimes to continue on with the campaign, and why you do it. Let's forget the supposed risk of crying, considering our country's hang-ups about "showing weakness." I was with you as I watched it. For a moment, you seemed to drop your mask and let us see the contents within. But then, before our very eyes, you put the mask back on. You transitioned, almost effortlessly (I only saw your eyes drop for a moment as you made the switch), into a political speech about how "some of us are right and some of us are wrong... some of us are ready, and some of us are not."

It broke my heart to see you do that. For I knew then, that this dual awareness, this calculation of the words you speak for their effect instead of their capacity to represent your inner reality, is your default position. You cannot help it. You cannot break the habit. And for this, voters cannot forgive you.

I will vote for Barack Obama on February 5 in California. But I will think of you too, Hillary, and I will wish you well in your continuing career as a Senator from New York. There are many of us who struggle with this new era, which demands exposure to all of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, all the time.

Best wishes and be proud of all you have done,
DemocratDad

Update: Clinton won New Hampshire! Congratulations, Senator Clinton. This will certainly be an interesting month ahead.

What Lies Behind the Youth Vote -- Obama, Huckabee and the "Secondary Orality"

The world is changing. Faster than any of us can track. And one of the ways it is changing is to make us far more accurate at assessing the multiple sources of information demanding our attention every day.

We have to be more accurate. We have to be more selective. If not, we would be swamped with a time-wasting, distracting, confusing barrage of information, and we would go to sleep at night wondering what the hell that was all about.

(Well, okay, sometimes I go to sleep at night wondering what the hell that was all about anyway, but usually there is a specific cause -- say, I happened to land on Fox News for too long before clicking the TV off. It's not a general state of mind...)

We've learned to be choosy about what we let into our heads.

One reason we've had to do this is that our culture is becoming an audiovisual one -- instead of one based on the written word.

This is somewhat threatening to those of us who value the old culture -- those of us who still read for pleasure. An article in the New Yorker last week terrified me on this topic of our changing culture.

The article, Twilight of the Books, discusses the rise of a post-literate culture -- a so-called "secondary orality." The author, Caleb Crain, lists some of the findings of research into the ways in which an oral culture -- one without reliance on the written word -- functions. These findings happen to match up almost exactly with our emerging 21st century culture in the U.S.

Here's the most hair-raising passage from the article:

"[T]he best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to 'think memorable thoughts,' whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliche and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There's no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in 'enthusiastic description of physical violence.' Since there's no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted...[I]t is only in a literate culture that the past's inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth."

Doesn't that describe our current political and popular cultures with eerie accuracy?

I brooded about this for a week, until I realized that this culture of "secondary orality" will generate new skills, new adaptive behaviors, new talents, in the coming years. My children will have abilities far beyond mine to selectively choose what goes into their heads, and what new synthesis they make of it all.

And that brings me to the youth vote.

As is becoming increasingly apparent from the floundering of Clinton and Romney, young people don't buy the old schtick of politicians. When they start with the rhetoric, or dwell too long on their resumes, young people turn their attention away. This is the secret behind the popularity of the satire on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or the Colbert Report, or the Onion. The old written-word style of communication, mimicked by habit even in the speech of older politicians, has become a joke.

Elevated language, and the unreflective role playing that goes along with it (message: "I speak in this self-important manner because I am an important leader of men!"), simply don't translate well into an audiovisual culture.

This is why Obama and Huckabee have a special magic for young people. They may be readers themselves, but they belong -- in every syllable they utter, in every casual, natural smile they flash -- to the new culture. They are authentic, finite, recognizable. And most importantly, they are hearable and watchable.

An Aesthetic Critique of the Candidates' Christmas Videos

So the candidates on both sides have released their "Christmas" videos (I say "Christmas," because it is more accurate, although some campaigns hedge and call them "Seasonal" or "Holiday" videos).

Twinkling lights, bright sweaters, warm smiles, knitted stockings and, whenever possible, adorable children, are all featured, as you might expect.

There's been a lot of chatter in the blogs about Huckabee's assertion that "what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ," or Barack and Michelle Obama's inclusion of their girls in the fireside scene, or Hillary Clinton's assortment of policy proposals for the American people...

But let's get away from the politics for a moment. I think it's high time for a critique of these videos, not for their content, but for their use of the medium.

As a filmmaker myself, I consider myself obligated to bear down and watch these babies.

What are the aesthetics of these videos?

In other words, what message do they convey, behind the words. It's a visual medium; we have to remember that what these videos are actually doing is showing something.

Let's start with my favorite candidate, so we can get my own agenda out of the way:

Barack Obama

The first thing I noticed is the tense body language, despite the warm atmosphere.

I believe that this family is genuinely close, so I'm assuming that this is the 5th or 6th -- or 22nd! -- take, and they have grown increasingly tense as the minutes turned to an hour. I've seen it happen.

Perhaps technical issues (sound, lighting, framing) dragged the taping out. Perhaps the girls got restless, or had an argument about who got to sit on their dad's lap.

Whatever the facts, the result is that Michelle and Barack talk in a friendly, but curiously exacting way. Listen to the way Michelle's voice bounces rhythmically with the words of the opening: "We'd-like-to-take-a-moment to thank YOU and your FAMILY for the WARMTH and friendship that you've shown ouuurs." That sounds like someone who has grown weary of saying the same thing.

One visual element also immediately stands out to me: those spooky shadows of stockings on the wall above the fireplace. They are definitely intentional -- I would guess to convey the warmth of candlelight, and to add some texture to the background. But they hang behind this family in such a way as to evoke the aesthetics of film noir. Touch of Evil and Double Indemnity are usually not the best sources of inspiration for campaign videos

The books on the table in front of them suggest upper middle-class coffee table art books -- signaling a home of broad intellectual curiosity. The Christmas tree is discreet -- and notably designed instead of ad hoc (the red and amber theme stands out).

This is a house well under control. No holiday madness here.

As for Obama, he speaks in the same overly exacting way that Michelle does. Worse, it looks as if he gestures too closely to his daughter Malia's face a few times. I know it is an optical illusion (when zoomed in -- which creates a nice tight focus on the subjects with a blurry background -- the distance between objects can seem shorter than it really is), and I know that Obama often gestures this way to make a point, but it made me nervous the first time I watched it.

Then there's the telling moment. The parents have finished speaking and it's time for the girls to add their "Merry Christmas" and "Happy holidays." Watch how Barack and Michelle anticipate the girls' lines -- after all, it is hard not to after multiple takes. They both turn sharply just before their daughters speak. By doing this, they confirm for us -- it hits our subconscious, the eyes miss nothing -- that these are canned lines. It does, however avoid what would be worse: if the parents feigned surprise when their daughters spoke.

The overall effect of the video is actually a grudging one, which is -- and here, perhaps, my agenda is showing -- what I think makes it work. I get the sense, watching this video, that the Obamas are not at all comfortable with the megalomaniacal charm required to pull of a warm Christmas message to the entire nation. A tension fills the air, and it is the tension of a real family being asked -- for political purposes -- to do something patently ridiculous: wish 300 million Americans Merry Christmas.

Okay, let's turn to a Republican:

Rudy Giuliani

Like the Obamas, he sits in front of a Christmas tree. But -- it leaps out at you -- where is his family? Of course we know the answer to that question (reminding voters of Judith -- his divorce, their affair, the puppies -- is not helpful, and his kids are, well, a little distant, shall we say).

Instead of surrounding himself with progeny, Rudy dons a red sweater vest and a red tie. With his glasses and this combo he comes off looking like your friendly neighborhood pharmacist, all decked out for the holidays. It's actually quite winsome. And he can refill your Lipitor prescription if you need that too!

When he says he may get a fruitcake for America, someone off-camera questions him: "A fruitcake?" And Giuliani leans forward with his peculiar, aggressive charisma to someone whom we never see. This is a very post-modern move -- breaking the frame of the film. He can thank Goddard and the French New Wave (although I don't think that would be to his advantage in South Carolina). The effect is funny -- and surprising.

Interestingly, Giuliani is often called "insane," or some other nutty confection, by his critics. And the video of him in drag, kissing Donald Trump, is, one would guess, a political liability. So this mention of wanting to get America a "fruitcake" is a good double-fake move. If he were really a fruitcake he wouldn't be so comfortable talking about them.

The only false note is the Hillaryesque laugh, apropo of nothing, at the end when he says "Happy Holidays."

Giuliani has another ad too, with Santa laughing at his wish that the candidates all just get along. Rudy's wearing the same red and white sweater vest. This video suggests visually that he may be working for Santa Clause -- or at least on the same team. You can watch it here.

Okay, let's go to Hillary Clinton:

Immediately you notice the much-ballyhooed "professionalism" of the Clinton campaign. The video is edited snappily to the music soundtrack. The images -- close-ups of wrapping, cutting with scissors, etc. -- are framed tightly, which is the current standard for Hollywood shot selection. The lighting has that big budget studio gloss to it -- warm and muted all at once, as if this video is an outtake from, oh I don't know, Seabiscuit. The sound design is detailed (listen for that crinkling sound as the cards are placed under the bows -- all added in post). We see a tilt on "Universal Health Care," a pan on "Alternative Energy," a rack focus on "Bring the Troops Home."

And then the music pauses on the reveal of Hillary herself. The room is light...

INT. LIVING ROOM -- DAY

A woman sits comfortably on a couch, wrapping presents.

This scene, complete with throw pillows, captures those private, unnoteworthy moments that women share, taking care of the wrapping of presents, completing a project, preparing something wonderful for the family. The point is that Hillary seems to be enjoying it. Message: she is one of us.

Only there is a slight scratch in the record, so to speak. It comes just at the end. As Hillary exclaims, "Oh!" we are to understand that she has just located the present which matches the card "Universal Pre-K" -- good so far. But then she commits a beginner's acting mistake. She repeats the exclamation as she grabs the present: "Ah!" It rings false. We know that she already had her discovery moment. So what is this second "ah"?

Just like the entire Hillary Clinton for President campaign, this second "ah" suggests that Hillary knew where she was going all along. The double discovery shows that there never was a discovery. Everything has been orchestrated to reveal "discoveries" to us -- the voters -- when they are useful. Hillary is even prepared to experience those discoveries a second or third time (e.g. President Bush cannot be trusted!) when this may score additional political points.

And please, someone in the Clinton video production unit tell me why they froze that awkward frame at the end, with her smile half open, and zoomed in slowly, as she says, "I approve this message." It looks as if she has been caught red-handed, and we have a photograph to show it.

Onward to the Repubicans!

Mike Huckabee:

A red sweater, a white collar. Like Giuliani, Huckabee apparently works with Santa.

Otherwise, it couldn't be more different. There is no French New Wave or cinema of alienation here. The borders are not porous. There is just a straightforward point made: what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Jesus -- oh, and that you can count on Mike Huckabee to say that without apologies or unease of any kind.

Huckabee does everything that the Obamas resisted. He turns on the charm, the eyebrow-lifting, shoulder-shrugging charm of the best kind of salesman, the kind that means it, as he wishes an entire nation to have a "magnificent" Christmas.

Yes, yes, and there is a giant white cross over his right shoulder. Your point?

This video has all the simplicity and folksy charm of the best propaganda. It knows what it is selling (just as its subject does) and it goes about selling it. Its best analog is an Ipod ad on TV -- you always see the iPod up front and center, and there's always music playing on it. Well for Huckabee, Christianity is his music, and bass-player that he is, he knows how to keep a tune.

What about John Edwards:

We see the same Christmas tree hovering over the right shoulder. But this time the candidate is in a black suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie. Sober, unflashy, dedicated to the cause.

The implication of this dress code is that Edwards will be working for you, even during the holidays. He's that dedicated.

The music is unremarkable: a gathering-moment piano piece. But it does raise the stakes emotionally. It seems to be building to something. And Edwards talks directly to us, as Huckabee did. He means it.

There's the problem of his stuffed-up nose, adding a nasally quality to his voice. But otherwise we focus on him and him alone for the duration of the video.

The background does not suggest anything fancy at all. The tree is nondescript, the wood-framed picture on the wall, the wood paneling -- everything suggests a middle-class living room, or even a modest hotel room.

I think this is a strong video. It highlights Edwards' most endearing trait -- his commitment to making things better. Edwards' appeal is emotional (unlike Obama's, which like JFK's is more cerebral). And this ad does all the right things to create a sense of stirring emotion, held back only by the sobriety required to get the job done.

Back to the Republican side:

Mitt Romney

Okay, this is not technically a Christmas video like the others. This is a video of Mitt Romney and his family sledding together. It was posted by the campaign on December 17 -- so it must have been last weekend?

It's a relief to see a video that looks as if it documents a real-life event. Of course it is partly staged for the camera operator, but you do get the sense that there did take place an actual afternoon of sledding at some undisclosed location, with actual members of the Romney family (and their dogs) in attendance.

The video has a documentary feel, but like all good documentaries it tells a story. The story is that Mitt is a man who is different from his sons. They may be more self-aware and willing to open up to strangers (two of them admit to being "lazy"; another says he is "in awe" of his dad). They may be more socially at ease (we see them lounging on the couch without a clear mandate; Mitt is conspicuously absent).

But they never forget that he is their hero.

He is a tireless worker (we see him shoveling snow). He is caring (he reassures a youngster -- his son? -- that he will "do his best" not to let him "hit the pole"). He is frugal (he prefers the gloves from last year with duct tape holding them together). He hates waste of any kind ("Go leave the water running and see how quickly that will last," comments one of his boys).

The story it tells is that of Mitt overcoming whatever obstacles his family meets (snow, poles, failing gear, running faucets). He may not be the most accessible guy, but it is only because he is so busy doing stuff. If you knew him like we know him, he would be your hero too.

It's effective. I wish more political ads took this raw-footage, shooting from the hip documentary form. The distortion is still there, but it's in the editing not the performance of the candidate -- you get glimpses of the real person behind the mask.

Finally, the only other viable candidate in the race:

John McCain

A prisoner of war story. A black and white photo of McCain as a young man. The older McCain's calm voice recounting it. He tells a heartwarming story of a guard easing his misery. And then the image:

A cross drawn in the ground with a stick.

This video has the starkness of a documentary, but the iconographic power of a religious story. It matches Huckabee's white, glowing, "coincidental" cross (formed by the sections of a bookcase) with a genuine, intentional cross, infused with meaning and history.

For my part, I think it is a powerful rejoinder to Huckabee. But the lasting impression of the video is not its image of the cross. The lasting impression is the one left by the black and white images and the unaffected tone in McCain's voice: suffering, hard-earned wisdom, sadness, quiet resolve. Those may be important and moving aspects of his experience, but I don't think they draw votes.

The McCain ad is a Christmas video done in the Ken Burns' style -- elegiac and cold.

*

Well, that completes my round-up critique of the candidates' videos. In then end I would rank them in two ways. Once for my personal preference:

1. Romney's "cinema verité documentary" style.
2. McCain's "Ken Burns' elegiac" style
3. Edwards' "I'm out here working for you" direct appeal
4. Obama's "I-will-sit-for-this-but-this-kind-of-self-aggrandizement-is-forced" style
5. Giuliani's "French New Wave Santa sidekick comedy" style
6. Hillary's Hollywood big-studio style
7. Huckabee's "direct propagandistic" style

My second list is in order of effectiveness:

1. Edwards'
2. Huckabee's
3. Obama's
4. Giuliani's
5. Hillary's
6. Romney's
7. McCain's

After all that, while we're on the subject of Christmas videos, check out this inexplicably hilarious video (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan):

I'll be writing occasionally next week, but back to daily entries again in January. Happy holidays to everyone!
Tom

Paris Hilton: A Threshold Question for Civilization

Something that Sam Harris said in his "Four Horsemen" conversation with Hitchens, Dennett and Dawkins (see Monday's post) struck me.

Near the end of their two hour talk about the future of religion, Harris urged nonbelievers to admit that there is something not quite right with our free-wheeling contemporary culture: it's all about money-making, tawdriness, celebrity-worshiping -- you know the litany of complaints.

Everyone nodded in agreement.

Harris' larger point was that those of us who stand outside of religious traditions should work to develop a "spiritual" language of our own (except with "no bullshit," as the soft-spoken Harris surprisingly said). Harris hopes that such a language could express our longings for experiences which are distinct from the daily effluvia of our lives.

With that point I agree. We need to talk about the profound experiences we have which give us new perspectives and sometimes overwhelm us with emotion, our visions and inspirations, what is sometimes called the "oceanic feeling." These are important experiences to us, and they will continue to be -- with or without religion. They reach beyond the everyday.

But Harris' casual dismissal of contemporary culture (and the ready assent of the other three to this dismissal) struck me.

The more I thought about it, I realized that many of us have a conflicted view of contemporary culture. In any given moment we may consider it to be: a) the most dazzling display of symbol-generating, meme-producing, endlessly morphing, gloriously nobrow, creative flourishing that the world has ever known; or b) an ever-shifting representation of the broken lives and misplaced hopes of countless lonely, lost human beings, cynically repackaged by some of those same in order to make a buck.

Well, which is it?

This, it occurs to me, is a threshold question for those of us who would urge our fellow-citizens to free themselves from the grip of the ancient texts of religions and the creaky belief-systems of centuries past. It is also a threhold question for parents as they introduce their children to the larger culture around them.

Do we like contemporary culture? If not, then what are we doing immersed in it?

Or to put it more directly: Can we all come together now and celebrate Paris Hilton?

Whatever you think of her personally (in my case, I pretty much draw a blank), I say we can and should.

That doesn't mean you need to read about her in the supermarket tabloids or watch her on TV. It doesn't even mean you need ever to mention her name to your spouse or your children. The great thing about being alive today is: You can pick and choose which parts of the culture you want to enage.

But make no mistake. I am saying it without apologies. I am saying it with pride: The effluvia is the culture. There is no sacred truth buried underneath. There are experiences which stand apart from the effluvia, but they are profoundly personal and do not point to some metaphysical realm which we could reach if only we were more pure of mind.

Yes, you have to do some navigating through the morass of other people's interests and hang-ups and diversions, but what is the alternative? Do you want someone else to screen out the Paris Hiltons of the world for you?

In that case, you might never be able to enjoy the gifts of another "it girl" of her day, who was discovered on the streets of New York for her looks alone but turned out to be immensely talented: Chloe Sevigny. It takes work this way, but you get the rewards of diversity and feedback loops and rare discoveries.

And the world would be a more barren place without the Chloe Sevignys and the Paris Hiltons.

The Big Lie that Religious People Tell One Another

The big lie that religious people tell one another is not that God exists.

That is the small lie.

Any claim which goes unsupported by evidence -- and moreover, does not even consider evidence (except reports of "miracles") to be necessary -- can only be described as small, since it is insubstantial, no more than a hunch really.

Sure, this little lie about God can get elaborated into something solemn and serious enough to command the adherence of wonderful, well-meaning people all over the world... But it's really just -- what shall we call it? -- a goof, a conjecture, a stab in the dark.

We all know people who believe that it is "Our Father Who Art in Heaven" who exists (some may be reading this post -- hello!). Others say it is Allah; others Vishnu. Others the Flying Spaghetti Monster (a site I recommend, if for nothing else than for its impressive control of tone).

For the nonbeliever, these lies are perhaps amusing, sometimes engaging, sometimes even deadly, but little lies. No more.

The big lie that religious people tell is that a world without God is a world without hope or meaning.

On the last day of November, Pope Benedict XVI issued an encyclical which parroted this lie.

The New York Times, true to form on the topic of atheism, then echoed this lie uncritically in an article entitled, "In Pope's Latest Teaching, an Argument for Hope, Not Atheism, in the Face of Struggle." (For the internet edition the title was shortened to "Pope Stresses Hope in Latest Teaching." If I were an editor at the Times, simply as a matter of saving space, I would just go with "Pope Stresses" -- and lose the rest. It works!)

Here's the letter which I wrote to the New York Times after seeing that article (it went unpublished -- no surprise):

Re: "In Pope's Latest Teaching, an Argument for Hope, Not Atheism, in the Face of Struggle," December 1, 2007.

As an atheist, I recognize that, for many religious people, their faith brings them great hope for the future (the "ocean of infinite love" that Pope Benedict XVI describes, as well as other rewards in this life).

I would only ask that religious people stop insisting that my outlook on life is correspondingly hopeless and meaningless. On the contrary, my atheism gives me great hope; it renews my commitment to creating, with others, a world filled with love, fairness, empathy, and other good things, since, in all likelihood, this is it folks!

Yes, we nonbelievers must avoid utopian dreams of forever changing the human condition (e.g. the New Socialist Man or the Fourth Reich). But a belief that this life is all we have has a marvelous way of concentrating the mind on the need to listen to, and work with, other people. It gives you hope in humanity. It gives you hope that together we can make of our lives something worthwhile and beautiful.

This is my plea:

Please, my dear religious fellow-citizens of this country and the world, please stop telling the rest of us that our lives have no meaning. Our lives have meaning, I assure you. And you are part of it.

Even you, Pope Benedict XVI. Even you are part of the meaning of my family and my life.

*

For an enlightening discussion of faith and meaning by four great thinkers of our time -- Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, the "Four Horsemen" together at last -- click here.

How Would I Feel to Have My Son or Daughter Serve?

I received an email from a reader, a Captain in the Air Force currently serving in Iraq, in response to my post "An Atheist Responds to Mitt Romney's Speech on Religion."

I felt honored that a soldier who is risking life and enduring hardship would write in support of the words I wrote. I wrote back to tell him that I hold what he is doing in high, high esteem.

I do.

After I sent my email back to this soldier, a thought struck me: How would I feel to have my son or daughter serve in the U.S. military?

After all, this blog is dedicated to finding the intersections between politics and parenting, and in some sense there is no more fundamental intersection. Carl von Clausewitz described war as "the continuation of politics by other means." I value politics. I value parenting. Where do I come down when their most basic principles -- the preservation of peace and the protection of my children's lives -- are irreconcilable?

As a citizen, I admire this soldier and others like him who volunteer to defend their country's interests. I know that it has become a tired refrain of politicians, but we really do "owe our freedom" to them...

As a parent, however, I want above all for my children to live happy, healthy lives...

Here's where I come down.

I will hope to raise my children to understand that they are obligated to their fellow citizens; that their freedoms, their privileges, even their hopes, would evaporate almost immediately if they lost their connection to others. I agree with Hobbes (in his famous, still raging cage match against Rousseau on how we are to imagine our pre-political state) when he wrote that life in a state of nature, i.e. without government, is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short."

So my children will arrive at their young adulthood with a clear sense of responsibility to their fellow-citizens. If called upon to defend their country, I believe that they would serve. And I would support them.

But I will never want them to serve in the military, however much I admire the service of others. That's the parent in me talking. I simply could not desire that they put themselves at risk.

I guess what I am saying is that when I became a parent I bifurcated into two selves. There is my former self, who still exists, who can examine life and death issues from the vantage point of politics and abstract concerns. Then there is my new self (let's call him Dad), who cannot brook any compromise with his desire to protect his children from harm.

This Dad in me is now a second self, and the former me has to live with him. There is no reconciling these two parts for a parent.

The highest honor (my child dying for a great cause, say as Abraham Lincoln could be said to have done for the Union) is immaterial to the Dad in me. Likewise, the worst shame (say, my child going on a murderous rampage of innocent people) is also immaterial to this Dad in me -- though it would be horrifying and heartbreaking. Nothing would change in my concern for my child's well-being. Being a parent is outside of systems of praise and blame.

When politics and parenting clash, there is -- there can be -- no reconciliation.

The Secular End of Days: How Good People Get Greedy

Al Gore gave a stirring speech in Oslo on Monday, upon his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize.

As you might have expected, he made the case that people all over the world are burying their heads in the sand when it comes to global warming. With his unique tone (mixing, as it always does, self-consciousness and high-mindedness), Gore urged that we all need to pull our heads out of the sand and open our eyes. As he put it:

"'[W]hen large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: 'Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield'."

When reading this part of Gore's speech, I experienced an epiphany. A goddamned epipany. And it wasn't just about global warming.

Here's what hit me: Gore is wrong on one crucial point. People are not ignoring the inconvenient truths of our time, such as the rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, or the extreme disparities in wealth in the world. On the contrary, despite their uncertainty as to specifics, people are very aware of these issues. Innundated by images and data from the internet and the media, people know what is going on.

I am not saying that people know the finepoints of the science or how to analyze the numbers. But we are not "imprisoned by a dangerous illusion," as Gore suggests; we do not need to awaken to a new "truth force"; we are not looking to be "steered by the stars". We get it.

It's how we're dealing with it that's the problem.

I would go so far as to say that, increasingly in the last 20 years or so, the central orienting position in people's minds in the developed world is that the good times are not going to last much longer.

So Gore is speaking to his audience of solutions and readiness, "a bright and hopeful future." He ends: "We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."

But people have already heard the news. And they are not rising to the purpose he's got in mind. They are acting more and more out of a sense of scarcity -- they are digging in, battening down the windows, putting up higher, automated gates and fences, enjoying the holidays within their own small circle, shutting the world out.

Why do I say this?

Take a look at our political landscape. The health care debate, for example. Last night I saw Michael Moore's Sicko. In the film he points to the mystery of why, in a country of so many good, kind, charitable people, we do not consider it important to provide health care for all citizens. Well, guess why, Michael? It's because people have a sense that this ship is sinking anyway, and they better take care of their own family first. They have lost confidence in the idea of making a difference. At least, they reflect, they have their own private insurance plan, however unreliable. The idea of risking that for the larger community is suspect.

Or take our national debt and the growing debt for American households. What explains the conspicuous consumption of the superrich in this country? And the apparent lust felt by the consuming masses when they see the TV shows and the magazine spreads on this conspicuous consumption? What explains the desire of the many to imitate the luxury lifestyle of the few, even when it means falling into debt? The attitude, again, is: You better enjoy it now. It ain't gonna last.

Or take the so-called "hotbutton" issues in today's politics. The heat is the result of people's fear that America is in its end of days -- and the things we hold most dear are going to be snatched away soon. Immigration? What your hear on the Right is that the Mexicans are stealing our opportunities and want the land back (the myth of the "Reconquesta"!). The environment? The market-driven ads suggest that you better drive your yellow Humvee fast, while you can, before the oil supplies run out. Religion and politics? The impulse seems to be: if the end is coming, my values are my last defense -- and so I need to see them enshrined in law.

The global awareness brought on by the arrival of the information age has changed domestic priorities.

This is the secular end of days.

This is how good people get greedy.

*

What can I add from the perspective of a parent?

Well, let's bring it home.

It's like when you shouldn't eat those two remaining Christmas cookies on the plate left over from the party... but then again, if you just take them both then they will be gone and the anxiety you feel will be over. So you reach out and begin the binge that will herald the end. I don't mean to trivialize it, but ours is the left-over Christmas cookie era.

So how do we stop it? How do we reverse course? How do good people get un-greedy?

That is the true challenge ahead. It's not a question of ridding ourselves of ignorance; it's a question of ridding ourselves of our sense of coming loss.

As a parent, I try to emphazise to my children that they can have a cookie later. Or there will be some other treat after their nap. I emphasize that this is not their last great idea.

It strikes me that the environmental movement to end carbon emissions and reverse global warming will only work effectively when people have a vision of a treat on the other side of it. We have to develop a vision of a society which functions without carbon emissions, and with a more equal distribution of resources between and within nations.

But Communism is discredited. "Socialism" is vague. Green has become another political slogan. A widescale return to small, aboriginal communities is impractical. So what's the vision? What is the secular and nonreligious vision of the Second Coming? We need it more than we would like to admit.

And as Gore says, we may not have long. We have to learn to dream again.

Romney the Weatherman, Huckabee the Weather

It's a pattern, isn't it?

Mitt Romney, whose succesful career with Bain Capital essentially thrived on his talent as a salesman, aims above all to please.

When asked about interrogating terror suspects in a Fox debate in May he answered, outside of any considerations of practical need, that he would "double Guantanamo." When asked about immigration in the more recent CNN/YouTube debate he insisted that, unlike Giuliani, he would not condone any exceptions for illegals to report crimes or go to school -- lest we create sanctuary cities, sanctuary states, a sanctuary nation. He also claimed on that evening that he believes every word of the Bible -- "Yes!" he said to Anderson Cooper's direct question -- despite the position of his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which holds that it contains a multitude of errors, corrected in the Book of Mormon.

When Romney goes there, he goes there. Until he goes somewhere else. What we have here is a candidate whose strength is in his cheerful accomodation to almost anyone -- any potential customers, in the broad sense of the word -- who will advance his interests.

He is the "weatherman" that Bob Dylan sings about in Subterranean Homesick Blues (the one that "you don't need...to know which way the wind blows").

That's what is perhaps most troubling about Romney's speech yesterday. He is merely the weatherman, but the actual weather is coming our way.

I first noticed the barometer dropping when the Democratic candidates sat for a "Forum on Faith" in June and answered questions from Soledad O'Brien about their private religious views. Hillary spoke of "prayer warriors." Hmm. I didn't know about prayer warriors. Edwards insisted that "we are all sinners."

Oh, I thought. Thank you. Glad to be informed of that.

Then I thought I might have felt a first raindrop fall when, in a September debate on MSNBC, the Democratic candidates were asked their favorite Bible verse. No one flinched at the inappropriateness of this question, even though, to my ears at least, it verged on religious test for office. Think about it: Could you, if so inclined, actually decline to answer this? Would Tim Russert simply nod and go to the next candidate? Of course not. The next question would have been: Why? Are you not a believer? And that's getting pretty close to a religious test.

Obama helpfully mentioned Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. ("Love your enemy," I guess -- he's still rubbing it in that he will meet directly with the heads of state of North Korea and Iran where Hillary would dither).

Now I know it is not news that the candidates for President, on both sides, have religious convictions. But what is news is that their convictions are being foregrounded in their campaigns. Would it be such a stretch, even in this campaign, to imagine a candidate sporting a "cross pin" or a "crucifix pin" on the opposite side of his coat from the obligatory post 9-11 American flag pin? (You can imagine the... shall we say, disapprobrium, that would follow on Fox News if Obama, or any other candidate, suggested that he need not wear a cross on his lapel to prove his faith. Go at 'em Sean Hannity.)

The climate is indeed a-changing, and in more ways that one. Essentially what we saw yesterday was Romney announcing the weather -- a gathering storm of faith -- on TV.

And Huckabee? Huckabee is the weather.

Yesterday he claimed that his rise in the polls is the direct result of "thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much." (Watch the video here.) Their prayers -- and God's resulting attentiveness to caucus-goers in Iowa -- are lifting Huckabee up, in what can only be described as a sacred updraft, to the highest seat of finite power in this world.

An Atheist Reponds to Mitt Romney's Speech on Religion

You can read Romney's full speech here or watch it on his website here.

As an atheist and a father of three young children, the speech Mitt Romney delivered at the George H. W. Bush presidential library today shocked me to my core.

If this is the drift of this country, towards a politics that explicitly excludes my standing as a worthy citizen because I do not believe in one of the major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism or Islam, then I seriously do not know what I will do to sustain for myself, and instill in my children, the strong sense of belonging that I currently feel as a citizen.

I cherish my country; I cherish our history, our laws and our principles, including the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing freedom of speech and the separation of church and state. As a non-believer who believes that it is this life which matters, my sense of morality is inextricably tied to my sense of belonging as a citizen.

Indeed, this sense of belonging runs deep. I consider myself to be unavoidably emeshed in the concerns of my fellow-citizens (as well as, more broadly, the concerns of all of the people on this planet). That is my challenge and my inspiration as I try to live my life well, and guide my children to do the same.

In the speech he gave today, Romney threatened to take part of my core identity away from me.

This is a direct quotation from his speech:

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

Although he addressed the speech to all Americans, he was not talking to me when he gave this speech. Romney made it perfectly clear that as President he would represent non-believers like me with reluctance at best. We do not fit into his idea of Americans; we are an after-thought.

If the two political parties in this country are headed towards the conclusion that, as an atheist, I am not a true American, then my family and I will, in effect, be sent into political exile. For me (as for the ancient Athenians, who also valued political partipation as a part of the core of a person's identity), exile robs life of its meaning.

Romney, unwittingly or not, for reasons of political expediency or not, threatened me with political -- and therefore, for a non-believer, spiritual -- exile in his speech today.

My first reaction, upon reading the words of the speech, was to feel my heart beating faster, as if I was facing a threat to the safety of my family. It's strange how our bodys' survival instincts, buried deep in our brains, warn us before we even have time to reflect on why.

My second reaction is to redouble my commitment to working for a future where, some day, Romney's view on the central place of religion in American life is considered a relic of a time when a great country, founded on the basis of equal consideration for all people, was held in thrall to a destructive, exclusionary myth called "faith."

Being a "Grown-Up" But Also an Equal: the Challenge for Parents and Politicians

My father didn't care who started it.

He didn't care about the build-up, the back story. He didn't care to hear our justifications or even our apologies. He just wanted it to end.

My sister and I were fighting. It was noisy. It was interfering with his peace.

"Hands!" he would say sharply, cutting through whatever high-stakes argument one of us was making, by way of words or actions, at the moment.

We both knew what "Hands!" meant. It meant we had to drop what we were doing, and I mean immediately -- mid-punch, mid-kick, even mid-obscenity. We had to walk over to wherever he stood and stand side by side. We had to raise our hands, palms down, next to each other. At which point he would slap the tops of our hands, hard.

If you pulled your hand away, you had to do it again, and again, until you kept it there.

On its own terms, Dad's approach to discipline worked: that single word "Hands!" generally ended our fights. And the message was unmistakable: He was the grown-up and we were the kids.

Mom was different. She would pull us apart, and even as she did so, she would get involved. She would take turns listening to our grievances. She would patiently wait out our tears, our tantrums, and our tales of unmatched woe, cruelty and terrible misunderstanding. She would even sympathize with both sides.

Sometimes she did manage to pin the blame on one or the other of us. Usually, though, she found a way of reframing our fight to partially exonerate and partially blame each of us. Among her many gifts, she has an amazing ability to reframe almost anything and make it positive.

On the rare occasions when she hit her tolerance threshold, Mom would call for "Hands!" like Dad. When this happened, my sister and I would begin giggling even before extending our hands. We eagerly awaited the Kabuki dance of my mom trying to act severe but then slapping our hands in the most painless and half-hearted manner you could ever imagine. Not only did she tend to favor whoever she considered the victim of that particular altercation, but even if she had determined that you had started it, the slap you got to your hand was something you might have paid a professional to do to you at a luxury spa.

The bottom line was that we were treated as equals. She was a referee, and we were the players, but we were all playing the same game.

What do I think of these two very different understandings of discipline in retrospect? How will I respond as my children enter the fighting years?

I think both are useful.

So far, I find myself favoring my mom's approach. I want to know what happened. I try to see it from both boys' perspective (Adeline, at 7 months, gets more furious with her rattle than her brothers, so I can't include her in this).

I hope never to resort to hand-slapping, but if I ever do then I can imagine that, like for my mom, my ambivalence about it will be the cause of much hilarity.

I think that my mom's approach to discipline, which is more egalitarian and breaks down the boundaries between parents and children, establishes a comfort-level with talking things out which will bode well for a lifetime of close relationships.

At the same time, I find myself aware that there is a benefit in also establishing a clear boundary between the childrens' needs and the grown-ups' needs in our home. In this respect I find myself drawn to my Dad's approach with surprising frequency -- even if I haven't resorted to a "Hands!" yet.

I sometimes hear myself empasizing to George (who is 3 and 1/2) that he should do what I say because I have reasons for what I say. Grown-up reasons. And sometimes, when he is fighting with Cole (who is 2) I tell him that, frankly, I don't always need to enumerate all of my reasons to them; that can come later... Maybe the reason is only that their mother and I are at wit's end after a long morning of demands, whining, mishaps, spills, and squabbles. That's reason enough!

I think it is healthy for children to know that their parents listen to them. We can even change our minds and admit that we were wrong, if that is the case. But it is also healthy for kids to know that their mom and dad are the ones who get to call the shots. At least this will set them up to assume their own authority when they raise their own children. It will feel familiar to them.

*

What's the political angle into all of this?

An article in this week's New Republic, by Jeffrey Rosen, reviews Supreme Court Clarence Thomas' new memoir, My Grandfather's Son, and a new biography on him as well. Rosen points out that over the past 20 years or so politicians have been reeling with the ever more egalitarian drift of our culture. The larger-than-life profile of the leader has disintegrated in our celebrity culture. Now we are all just doing "our thing." You may be a Movie Star, you may be a Senator; I have chosen another path... So what have you done for me lately?

In this way of looking at it, as a culture we seem to have abandoned any pretense of the "grown-up world." We are all just kids now ("Do you wear boxers or briefs, Mr. Clinton?").

Rosen's point is that Thomas has ruined his stature as a Supreme Court Justice by publishing his self-pitying, self-congratulatory memoir. It's like a parent telling his kids why he's so great. It has brought him down to size.

The article made me think: Which national politicians out there still retain a quality of being "grown-ups" -- standing slightly apart, as parents stand apart from the boundary-less disputes of their children? Perhaps McCain. Perhaps Hillary. Perhaps Obama. Perhaps Dodd. Certainly Russ Feingold... Certainly Jim Webb... I can't think of any others. The rest stoop too low or reveal too much.

To take it a step further: Who are the politicians who combine this stand-apart, "grown-up world" quality (my dad's approach, good for establishing priorities) with a sense of equal-standing, of genuine interest in the views of the voters (my mom's approach, good for establishing trust)? Who brings both understandings to his or her commitment to public service?

You've guessed my answer. It seems to be the theme this week.

(Starts with an "O.")

The Earth Is Hard

I watched the documentary No End In Sight yesterday, and I felt utterly devastated by its depiction of what we have done -- and are doing -- to the people of Iraq by invading their country preemptively.

There is a scene in the movie which shows an Iraqi man crying openly, telling anyone who will listen about what he just witnessed. Apparently, a car drove up, parked, men came out, grabbed four young children from a shop across the street, and then drove away.

The Iraqi man shown in the film (the children's father?), sobbing uncontrollably, shouts to anyone who will listen that he has already gone to the Mahdi Army, and they have denied any knowledge of the children.

I couldn't believe what I was watching. Because as I watched I felt as if I was that man.

This UNICEF report on the humanitarian plight of Iraqi children from May, 2007, puts the number of children who are refugees from that country at nearly 2 million. This report from the United Nations suggests that in the past two years alone tens of thousands of women and children have been kidnapped for ransom -- a number growing, in painful, personal circumstances like those just described, every day.

When you watch, back to back, Donald Rumsfeld's laughing, proud-as-a-peacock, too-clever-by-half style in his Defense Department press briefings, and then the destruction of people's lives on the ground in Iraq, your heart does more than sink. It feels like something inside you is being bruised.

Or when you see Paul Wolfowitz (who of course, like most of the other decision-makers in Bush's cabinet, including Cheney, has had absolutely no experience in the military) talking nonsense about how he can't "imagine" that it could take more troops to occupy a country than to invade it -- which is so basic a point that it is simply assumed in military planning -- you begin to feel a little crazy in the head.

You also feel ashamed for what your country has inflicted on people on the other side of the world: as if, intentionally or not, we have reached out to touch them with a poisonous tendril from some overgrown hothouse here at home.

But that last image is too poetic. The truth is more plain.

What we see in the faces of these architects of the Iraq War is simply a mix of ignorance and arrogance, common the world over. The difference is that here they hold positions of power which allow them to cause disruptions in the lives of others on an unprecedented scale.

Goddamn it! How do we warn our children about what the world can do to people?

How do we break it to them that the world is not cushioned and forgiving and warm? That this cushioning which most of us feel is a temporary condition, a stroke of luck, a perk, not unlike an unexpected upgrade to first class on a long flight... Champagne, anyone?

But lucky streaks end. The flight will end. The plane has to land.

And the hard earth is still there.

What I must somehow tell my children, but I do not want to, is that the earth is not as soft as we like to think it is. Its verdant valleys, cool bodies of water, and fields of flowers are just a thin, top layer. Underneath it is hard. It is made of iron.

And sometimes, without warning and without meaning, it reaches up and hits people, crushes them, and it has no remorse.

Our fellow citizens sometimes seem to have no remorse either. You watch the Republican debate last night on CNN, and you hear and see the crowd cheer when the candidates say that the best way to reach the Muslim world is to "remain on offense" (Giuliani) and "continue this surge" (McCain). When the candidates take turns boasting about their private gun collections or make a joke that "Hillary could be on the first rocket to Mars" (Huckabee), they get more clapping.

Except for Ron Paul (who is booed loudly by the audience on a number of occasions), nobody talks with sadness about the loss of life or suffering caused by the war. Nobody talks about the difficulties faced by most people in the world. On the contrary, Representative Duncan Hunter gets a huge wave of applause for explicitly refusing ambivalence: "I will never apologize for the United States of America."

Never. For nothing. We are preemptively right about everything. Always. Cue applause.

*

This is not a new story.

The hills of Berkeley, where I live, are the sites of hundreds, even thousands of murders of the local Ohlone Indians by Spanish and Anglo-American settlers, roughly between the years 1820 through 1880. Vigilante groups formed with the stated goal of removing the entire population of Indians.

This passage from a book I am currently reading, a brilliant book, Ishi: Two Worlds, makes that abstraction more real. The few surviving Yahi, once thriving in the hills of Northern California near Chico, were finished off as a tribe on a single day in 1870:

"In this remote and seemingly safe spot were gathered more than thirty Yahi including young children and babies, well supplied with food, even to fresh and dried meat. They were helpless against the four armed men who forthwith killed them all. Norman Kingsley, as he explained afterwards, changed guns during the slaughter, exchanging his .56-caliber Spencer rifle for a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, because the rifle "tore them up so bad," particularly the babies. There is today a Kingsley Cave, only about two trail miles from Wild Horse Corral. This is presumably the cave of the last massacre."

When I walk with my family on the paths winding through Tilden Park, which runs along the top of the Berkeley hills, I know with certainty that we walk past once bloody caves, and that we kick up dust made up of particles of the whitened bones of some of those who walked there before us. It was not so long ago, during the life of my great great grandfather, when these people lived here.

The bullets and knives which did the killing were hard. They were made of metals pulled from the earth. They returned to it.

The earth is hard. And we should never forget that when we find it soft.

The Mysteries of DNA, Charlie Chaplin's Genius, and a Good Laugh

In the latest flurry of articles and media stories about self-DNA testing, we are to understand that even some of our most specific traits are answerable to our genes. A writer for the New York Times, for example, found that after receiving the results of her DNA test from 23andMe.com, she will never again boast unself-consciously about her ability to memorize long quotations. Her genes just don't support the inference.

Lately I've been wondering: Is our sense of humor inheritable?

The question occurred to me when, faced with a moment of play overload, I sat down one afternoon last week to watch a few scenes from my old beat-up VHS tape of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator with my boys, George, 3, and Cole, 2 (my seven-month-old, Adeline, was spared).

Cole stood stock still, holding his ragged pink bunny in one hand and staring at the screen without expression. George turned to me repeatedly and laughed harder than I have ever seen him when watching other TV shows or movies. The hair-raisng part was that we found the same exact moments funny.

We started in the scene where Chaplin does an imitation of Adolf Hitler (or as he is called in the film, "Adenoid Hynkel") and speaks to the assembled masses.

Chaplin famously prepared for this scene (and the exaggerated "German" he speaks) by standing in front of a projection screen showing actual newsreels of Hitler speaking. A man who witnessed the rehearsal claims that Chaplin, working himself up into a fury of gestures and squawking, shouted out spontaneously: "Oh, you bastard you!" at one point. A master of manipulation (albeit for the good) would recognize another master of manipulation for what the he is doing on a deep level, wouldn't he?

Here's the clip, which I do recommend as one of the great moments in comedy of the 20th century:

I would draw your attention to a hidden and chilling surprise in this clip. You may need to watch it again to see what I mean... Look again at Hynkel's interaction with "Herring" (a send-up of Hitler's Commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goerring). Who does this guy remind you of? As I was watching it with my boys, it hit me: George W. Bush's now retired Press Secretary, Scott McClellan. Do you see it?

Which drew my attention, of course, to Hynkel's other sidekick: Herr Garbitsch (based of course on Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels). I think you know where I am going: he is a dead ringer for Cheney, with his unemotive style and cool, collected self-love.

Anyway, back to the comedy.

George has been doing the "Hynkel snort" repeatedly over the past few days to emphasize points. A typical moment in our house from last night:

"George, time for dinner."

No response.

"Go and sit down now. We've got spaghetti!"

And then it comes: Snort.

"George?"

Snort, snort.

Then laughing.

Then running the opposite direction as I chase him down.

So after enjoying ourselves thoroughly with the wild circus act of Hynkel addressing the German ("Tomainan") people, we then skipped ahead to the classic "globe dance," which if you do not know it, you simply must see:

The boys particularly enjoyed the hitting-the-ballon-with-your-butt part. (Well, George did. Cole stood transfixed and speechless throughout, which as a filmmaker I would interpret as a positive response.)

Is a love for Chaplin (and not so much for Buster Keaton) inheritable? Will they also fail to see the brilliance of Ben Stiller but love Goldie Hawn?

For an uplifting grown-up message, here is the Jewish barber's speech from the end of the movie, when he is mistaken for Hynkel and thurst up onto the world stage. Expecting more of Hynkel's rage and lust for conquest, the audience gets this instead:

But notice how at the end of the speech even the Jewish barber has slipped into "us-vs.-them" rhetoric -- "machine men!" -- and the passions of ideological certitude. As has become familiar from this blog, we find ourselves thrown back into complexity and uncertainty once again. We have to stand up for our moral beliefs, yes -- but we do so knowing that we stand on treacherous ground.

How Prejudice Slinks Away -- Quietly -- and What It Means for Our Kids

Bad things -- from war, massacres, murder, rape, mobs, car crashes, terrorist acts, industrial accidents, unjust imprisonment... all the way down to food fights and schoolyard teasing -- are usually loud, attention-grabbing, sudden, alarming, often lit up in orange and red, fire and blood and flushed cheeks.

Good things are nearly imperceptible. They only reveal themselves gradually, in someone's half smile, a newly confident way of walking, a handshake, a healthy child.

But even when conditions get better in society, even when people become more equal in their opportunities and status, it often means more conflict, more noise, more obvious bad things. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed: "Democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have the least fuel." As people get closer they tend to harp on small differences even more vociferously.

So what does this have to do with prejudice?

Prejudice is an obvious bad thing. It shows itself in extreme acts of cruelty and brutality -- genocide, pogroms, lynching, gay-bashing, and a thousand other nameless acts, undertaken by states and individuals alike. It is ubiquitous; it seems intractable.

But sometimes it goes away. And when it does, it goes away quietly. And it seems to me that this has profound implications when we think about how we raise children.

Let's take a specific example: prejudice against homosexuality.

See if this story is familiar to anybody.

When I was in public school in Berkeley, California, in the early 1980s, although Berkeley was (is it still?) known for its social awareness (we were taught "herstory" along with history at Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High), I had absolutely no compunction -- not even a tiny flicker of self-consciousness or shame -- about using the term "fag" or "faggot" with my friends.

We called one another that term as a kind of all-purpose putdown. The idea that someone in our social group -- some guy -- might take offense (amazingly, from today's perspective) never even occurred to me.

By the end of the 1980s, even in my teenage circles, something was changing. Thanks to the efforts of many activists, and the simple, graceful, increasingly out lives of many gay and lesbian people, and the added attention that the AIDS crisis was generating for the homosexual community, the idea of gayness, beyond the schoolyard taunt of "fag," had trickled into my adolescent consciousness. Arrriving at college in 1987, I found that I had a gay Resident Assistant in our freshman dorm. Cool, I thought. Whatever. But there still wasn't much of a dent in my thinking. Maybe I had grown out of childish putdown words like "fag," but it still wasn't personal to me.

Then I spent a summer in New York in 1988, and I stayed with a good friend. I admired him and thought he was handsome as well -- I always had (but never thought much of it). On my last night in the city, as we sat talking, the TV on with the sound off, a rainstorm streaking down the windows, there was a kind of erotic charge in the air. I didn't realize it at the time, but thinking back on the night the next day, from my position in the window seat in an airplane preparing to take off, it occured to me that... being gay might... could... oh my god... even apply to someone like me.

I knew I liked girls, a lot, but what was it that was in the air as we sat in his apartment talking, laughing, enjoying each other's company?

Staring out the airplane window, watching baggage carts move around in the rain, I forced myself to say aloud, just to see if I could do it: "I... am... gay." It was difficult to form the words, and when I said it I felt relief. (I have no idea what the man in the business suit in the seat next to me was thinking!) I knew then that I could face it -- if that was the case.

I had broken my threshold of prejudice. I also sensed at that time that my acknowledgement of the erotic charge with my friend on that particular, aesthetically-pleasing night did not actually make me "gay." Perhaps in some scenarios -- as a Samurai in 12th century Japan? as a teenager in 21st century America? -- I could engage in fulfilling same-sex relationships. But the fact is that my heterosexual urges always buried -- and bury -- whatever potential there is under a landslide of inchoate longings for the female form. (It's kind of like asking a gay man if he could imagine being with a woman: "Ah, sure," he might reply. "But why?")

Perhaps this personal revelation of mine -- confronting my own prejudice against homosexuality -- coincided with an awakening in much of young, heterosexual America, I don't know. What I do know is that beginning in the early 1990s people who were not gay started accepting gay identity on equal terms. Yes, I know, it was then that Clinton backed off his efforts to allow gay men and women to perform military service openly -- the political cost, he no doubt concluded, was too high. But something was changing nevertheless. When Kurt Cobain french kissed his bassist Krist Novoselic on Saturday Night Live in 1992, or when he sang (in "All Apologies" from 1993's In Utero), "Everyone is gay," these events were perfectly in synch with the culture. They shocked, but not too much -- we knew what he was doing in rejecting the clumsy categorizations of our religion-soaked, rigidly gendered, traditional, homophobic culture.

Still, some prejudice remained in me. In graduate school I briefly dated a bisexual woman and felt threatened by her previous relationships, wondering if she was missing something that I couldn't provide (well, maybe that was not so much prejudice as paranoia). I remember talking with friends during those 20-something years about what could possibly rattle us if we were parents someday. I distinctly remember us agreeing that, for all of our self-congratulatory open-mindedness, we would be rattled if our teenage kids came home with a same-sex date and said, "Mom, Dad, it's no big deal -- everybody does it." Special gayness was all right, but not matter-of-fact, everyday gayness.

And then, somewhere along the way (I would like to think it was sometime around 1994?), even that residue of prejudice just dropped away for me.

Now I think of gay or lesbian orientation as being akin to other personality traits -- a mix of genetic predisposition, choice, who cares. When people find love in each other, it makes me happy. Period.

I don't make any distinction anymore between gay couples or heterosexual couples. Gay marriage is plainly needed -- now. The issue of gay adoption confuses me -- Why would this be a problem? You mean you would object to a loving couple wanting to adopt a child in need of a home?

If my child came home and announced he or she was gay (or just mentioned it in passing, for that matter!), I would have the same questions that I would in regards to any relationship. I would be interested in how he or she was feeling. I would want to know more. I would be concerned that my child is careful about using condoms. And I would be just as excited for the romantic adventures, highs and heartaches, which loomed ahead, as I would be if this same child were heterosexual.

What I am saying is: the prejudice against gays or lesbians now strikes me as bizarre. And a recent poll conducted by the New York Times and MTV shows that, for a growing number of people in the U.S. under the age of 29, it is a relic of the past.

But this change in me was not marked by high-profile events. It happened quietly.

How does this story translate into an approach to parenting? Well, it occurs to me that we need to make an effort as parents to get around the noisy, alarming, bad things which take up the foreground of our concerns. Of course we need to worry about drunk driving and the like. But we also need to make the time with our children to explore with them the quiet ways in which we choose to appreciate other people and open our minds.

If, for example, we meet a transgendered person, instead of just registering surprise or curiosity, we should take the opportunity to talk to our child about the frustrations which the transgendered and transsexual communities face. Continue the conversation at home. Rent Transamerica (actually do that regardless -- I just saw it and recommend it).

I guess what I am saying is that if we see anything that is unfamiliar to us, don't just shrug and move on. Initiate a quiet talk with your kid.

Who knows, we may end up learning more from our children than they do from us. Because, when you think about it, it's the act of listening -- the state of attentiveness to others -- which creates good things most of all.

The Boom Is Over, What Can I Say?

We see it everywhere.

"For Sale" signs linger awkwardly on quaint, neighborly streets. Sometimes, in a move of desperation, the owner tries a one-day-only private auction. Nothing comes of it. The "For Sale" sign comes back out, looking more morose than ever. We drive by and notice the changes (and the lack of results) with a mixture of sympathy and schadenfreude.

Sales are down. Foreclosures are up, and they are going up further next year. If you live in the U.S., then it's happening not far from you, in multiple places around your town, behind drawn curtains: people are packing their possessions into moving boxes, forced to go it doesn't matter where, away, by whatever corporate entity owns their ARM or balloon payment mortgage now.

The boom is not only over; we're in the eerie silence after the echo fades. A recent article in Fortune magazine suggests that in the area where I live, the East Bay, housing prices could drop an additional 31% in the next five years.

That doesn't sound good.

It's not that my wife and I plan to move or sell our house, or even that we have an urgent need for a home equity loan at present. It's just that I used to lie in bed with the sense that while my children slept in their beds down the hall, the house was, very quietly, with the occasional creak, gaining in value around them. It was like a grown-up security blanket. And now it's gone.

Instead we have property tax payments, mortgage payments, insurance payments, utilities, fees for the alarm system, unexpected maintenance "events" (baby wipes, it turns out, do not engage on favorable terms with sewer lines). All for our home sweet home, yes -- but also all for an investment that is, at best, holding even.

Economic insecurity pervades our nation. Consumers are fretful. The only people who are positive are men like Fred Thompson and the two guys who founded YouTube.com on a lark a couple of years ago.

Which brings me to my point:

If the crash comes, if we all lose most of our assets in the Great Depression of 2008, how will we react as parents?

If inflation meets illiquidity, meets a new oil crisis, meets increased governement debt and a weakening dollar, meets a decline in consumer confidence (meets its hard-nosed brother, a decline in consumer spending), meets a downturn, meets a recession, meets a full-blown depression, well (obviously) I'm no economist but I can imagine a very real impact on my children's future.

Right now my focus as a parent is to help them develop into wonderful human beings. That's about it.

But in the event of a crash in the U.S. economy, I imagine that my focus would shift pretty rapidly into helping them acquire marketable skills for purposes of survival.

That is of course the traditional role for a dad. We can easily imagine some dad in the 1930s or 40s or 50s, or even 60s, after his son's high school graduation, pounding his fist down, and saying, "Time to get a job, son! You're on your own now!" (Why does this scene begin to get hazy in the 70s? Marijuana smoke aside, it becomes more difficult to imagine without a coda of the long-haired kid rolling his eyes and saying, "Whatever, man. It's the journey not the destination.")

Times have changed considerably -- at least in well-off, blue-state America. We don't often think in terms of practical consequences -- it would be seen as old-fashioned and controlling and limiting to our children to think that way. We aim to give our children love and support, a sense of the value of practice, an independent will and a charitable heart. We don't aim to give them, say, carpentry skills, or a facility with computer programming -- although if they come to discover those activities themselves we would be thrilled!

The bottom line is that I would have to refocus my thinking in a major way. We all would. When do we start? How would we begin?

Here's what I've come up with:

The year is 2012.

A rickety table stands at the center of a kitchen. A few ragtag kids sit around it, their legs splayed in different directions from an odd assortment of chairs.

A world-weary father and a bone-tired mother stand leaning against a greasy wall, holding hands (I figured we needed some uplift here).

One of the children speaks, "Dad, I was fixing the heater today, and I made a new switch for it. It's red so you can see it better down there under the house!"

Ah-ha! A spark of interest. Here's where my new approach would kick in. I would emphasize (more than I would now) the need for pursuing that activity, that skill set (in this case, fixing electrical things), to the point of excellence, even mastery. We would discuss the directions it might go, even the opportunities for work that it may present in the future.

In having this talk, and more importantly, backing it up with daily efforts to support my child's access to that activity (send him back down to the basement?), I would try not to overemphasize its money-making potential. Even if conditions were desperate, and we needed bread on the table, I just don't think I could be that single-minded about it.

Maybe I'm naive, but in the long run I think it would be more valuable to try to teach my children to explore the challenges -- push through the challenges -- and the satisfaction of doing things that other people want. If my children gained skills that way, then I expect they would be that much better off providing for themselves during hard times.

It occurs to me that what I have just described has been what good parents have done for their children through most of history. The fact that this materialistic emphasis is so out-of-fashion among parents that I know, is shocking. That fact that it feels uneasy for me even to imagine myself as that kind of dad -- presuming to look past their college years, past the obvious benefits of a liberal education, to the workplace they will enter -- is revealing.

Due to the anomaly of the economic boom in the U.S., which carried us through the latter part of the 20th Century all the way to the present, many people have not had to worry about the specifics of their children's futures for some time. Sure, there's the general anxiety about what they will do when they grow up. But moms and dads have trusted that, with the right support, their children will... find their own way.

But that is definitely an anomaly.

We may be in for a change. History resists anomalies. Hold your nose, fasten your seatbelt...

[insert your own metaphor of descent here].

Do Some Cultural Practices Mean Some Parents Love their Children Less?

An article in the New York Times today caught my attention -- and made me really, really sad.

It's about a recent decision by the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals to deport a young woman, Ms. Alima Traore, back to her home country of Mali. Ms. Traore is currently living in Maryland, where she works as a cashier.

Ms. Traore's concerns about returning to Mali, which the three-member panel rejected, are:

1) upon her return, her father has arranged for her to marry her first cousin ("My decision is irrevocable," her father insists, "...the animal sacrifice has been made for the village"); and

2) having had her own genitals cut as a young girl (her clitoris and vulva were removed as part of the standard practice for young girls there), she fears that any daughters she may have will face this same procedure.

"While we do not discount the respondent's concerns," the decision reads, "We do not see how the reluctant acceptance of family tradition over personal preference can form the basis" for allowing Ms. Traore to stay in the United States.

I think you will agree that this three-member panel of the Board of Immigration Appeals is -- how to put it?

Confused? Idiotic? $%@!&*?!? (Excuse my language.)

We are not facing here a question of Ms. Traore's "reluctant acceptance of family tradition." We are facing a question of her reluctant acceptance of something that is wrong, regardless of the cultural and family traditions of Mali.

But how can I flat-out say it is wrong? Can something that is imposed on 95% of the girls in Mali be wrong? Aren't values merely social and contingent for "secular progressives" like me? (I can practically hear my religiously-inclined readers "amen"-ing this point and sighing in disapproval.)

As an atheist, or a secular humanist (or your fellow-citizen in a Republic, if you like), how can I condemn the cultural practices of another people, living as they do, far across the ocean, by their own codes of right and wrong?

Well, here goes...

The fact that my moral reference-points are Shakespeare, Hume, Woolf, Kafka, Wittgenstein, Dylan and Rorty, does NOT mean that I have to abdicate my moral judgment.

When I say something is "wrong" I mean it is wrong. We atheists, humanists and fellow-citizens are allowed to take that word out of quotes too.

I mean, let's speak plainly. You and I know ( if nothing else then as parents) that genital cutting -- cutting off the clitoris and vulva of a healthy girl with a saw-toothed blade without anesthesia -- is wrong.

The people of Mali, emeshed in cultural traditions of their own -- can say it is right all they want. They are free to say that, if that's the kind of world they wish to inhabit and defend.

But we can respond, with equal passion: No, it is wrong. We will fight it.

And we can then look at our various means of persuasion, from firsthand accounts of suffering, meant to evoke sympathy (as in Uncle Tom's Cabin or Boys Don't Cry, to take two examples), to full-out invasion (as in the NATO-led war on Serbia over Kosovo). Here I encourage readers to read Rorty's article, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality if you haven't already.

It is tremendously important, I believe, for people who believe that values and moral judgments are not received but are instead built up -- from a mix of our basic instincts, our use of language, and our social relations -- to make our beliefs of right and wrong known, loud and clear. For the responsibility is ours to change other people's judgments.

*

One sensitive area when it comes to making moral judgments is of course, parenting. We are all rightly careful not to critize our friends or siblings for their parenting practices. At least not too hastily.

Most of us notice small variations in others' approach when contrasted to ours. But these are minimal, and we recognize that every parent-child relationship has complicated dynamics and challenges and aspirations which we cannot hope to understand. So it's generally best to reserve judgment and enjoy learning from examples that we like.

But when it comes to outright shocking practices like genital cutting, I believe that we can and should speak out, even as parents. So let me be blunt:

To mutilate your daughter's genitals for any nonmedical reason -- causing your daughter a lifetime of pain and agonizing complications -- means that you do not love her as much as I love my daughter.

That will anger some people, to hear it put that way. But I ask you: is your experience of love at all reflected in the willing infliction of suffering on one of your loved ones? Is the infliction of such suffering on a loved one ever justified by some other countervailing concern?

I would ask the people of Mali to apply the same standard when they criticize our family traditions. I would love to listen and learn from any insights they have into how in my role as a father I inflict suffering on my girl. I mean this seriously! I would expect them to listen to me with the same openness, considering that we both recognize how important the concerns are.

I would like to believe that even if I had lived my whole life in the cultural tradition of Mali I would refuse to have my girl undergo this procedure.

And if this is just my own cultural bias talking -- and if I had been raised in Mali I would feel differently -- then I stand by my cultural bias with everything in me.

Either way, I'm sorry, I will say it: It is less loving to cut a girl's genitals than not to do so.

Sam Harris makes a similar point, with characteristic force, in his book, The End of Faith:

"Consider the practice of "honor killing" that persists throughout much of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We live in a world in which women and girls are regularly murdered by their male relatives for perceived sexual indiscretions-ranging from merely speaking to a man without permission to falling victim of rape. Coverage of these atrocities in the Western media generally refers to them as a "tribal" practice, although they almost invariably occur in a Muslim context. Whether we call the beliefs that inspire this behavior "tribal" or "religious" is immaterial; the problem is clearly a product of what men in these societies believe about shame and honor, about the role of women, and about female sexuality...

Given the requisite beliefs about "honor," a man will be desperate to kill his daughter upon learning that she was raped. The same angel of compassion can be expected to visit her brothers as well. Such killings are not at all uncommon in places like Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. In these parts of the world, a girl of any age who gets raped has brought shame upon her family. Luckily, this shame is not indelible and can be readily expunged with her blood. The subsequent ritual is inevitably a low-tech affair, as none of these societies have devised a system for administering lethal injections for the crime of bringing shame upon one's family. The girl either has her throat cut, or she is dowsed with gasoline and set on fire, or she is shot. The jail sentences for these men, if they are prosecuted at all, are invariably short. Many are considered heroes in their communities.

What can we say about this behavior? Can we say that Middle Eastern men who are murderously obsessed with female sexual purity actually love their wives, daughters, and sisters less than American or European men do? Of course, we can. And what is truly incredible about the state of our discourse is that such a claim is not only controversial but actually unutterable in most contexts."

An important corrective that I would add to Harris' point is that I do not think he should generalize about all "Middle Eastern men murderously obsessed with female sexual purity" in contrast to all "American or European men." It sets up a false opposition between a particular group of Middle Eastern men and the whole population of American or European men. Certainly there are American and European men who -- in view of the callous or selfish nature of their actions, and the brutal consequences of them -- love their wives, daughters and sisters even less than the aforementioned Middle Eastern men who are "murderously obsessed wth female sexual purity." Unhappily, we may find that it is a toss-up in many cases.

But his larger point is well taken. Some of the things parents do (even if they are merely following the cultural practices of their community) mean that they love their children less, in any meaningful sense of the word love. Love without quotes.

This sad conclusion gives me serious motivation to examine my own cultural traditions -- to see where I might be less loving to my children than I believe I am.

Any thoughts from readers about the ways in which we are blind to the suffering we cause due to our own cultural traditions? Bulimia comes to mind. Or pole dancing classes for 8-year-olds. Any others?

For some interesting further reading on the neurological underpinnings of "goodness" and altruism (and some of the anxiety these latest findings provoke in people), I refer you to a review by Oren Harman of a book on the topic in this week's New Republic.

The Despotism of "Father Knows Best" and the GOP

The great French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, who may have had more influence on the framers of our Constitution than any other one thinker, wrote famously of three basic kinds of government:

1. Despotism (rule by force)
2. Aristocracy (rule by the few), and
3. Republican Government (rule by the people).

He suggested that each of these forms of government has a principle which supports it and which must be active for it to thrive.

Despotisms, or dictatorships, operate on the principle of fear, with recourse to the use of physical coercion to get what they want.
Aristocracies, or monarchies, operate on the principle of honor, with status or rank being of paramount importance to their subjects.
Republics, or democracies, operate on the principle of virtue, with each citizen demonstrating (through voting or other forms of civic engagement such as forming a group of like-minded people) concern for the interests of his or her fellow-citizens.

These points made a strong impression on me when I first encountered them. It amazed me how Montesquieu was able to take a step back and study our systems of self-rule from the vantage-point of a scientist. (Alexis de Tocqueville is another Frenchman who followed in this approach.) In some chapters of his most influential book, The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu even discusses ways in which different types of soil or climate may determine which form of government that prevails in a given country.

When you read The Spirit of the Laws you can't help but ask how well the form of government prevalent in your own country is functioning.

He makes political science seem so clinical, as if we are merely examining the health of our respiratory system by listening to our breathing in a few standardized places. Just a regular check-up.

But when we perform this check-up on ourselves, we find there are some worrying wheezes and rumbles going on in there. This passage from The Spirit of the Laws particularly chilled me when I first read it back in 1994 (and it does even more today, seven years into the Bush administration's cronyism and ceaseless talk of "tax relief"):

"When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. The objects of their desires are changed; what they were fond of before has become indifferent; they were free while under the restraint of laws, but they would fain now be free to act against law; and as each citizen is like a slave who has run away from his master, that which was a maxim of equity he calls rigour; that which was a rule of action he styles constraint; and to precaution he gives the name of fear. Frugality, and not the thirst of gain, now passes for avarice. Formerly the wealth of individuals constituted the public treasure; but now this has become the patrimony of private persons. The members of the commonwealth riot on the public spoils, and its strength is only the power of a few, and the licence of many."

Yikes. To think this was written some 260 years ago.

I bring up an 18th Century French Enlightenment philosopher now, partly for its own interest, but also because it strikes me as a useful way of reflecting on our approaches to parenting too.

Tolstoy may have opened Anna Karenina with his assertion that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But the truth is that we have to look more closely at the structures of authority, the system of self-rule, adopted in each family, if we want to determine the particular ways it is happy or unhappy.

We don't have elections in my family, thank god. But I would like to think that the active principle supporting our family is virtue -- concern for one another. So I guess I would like to imagine that my own family has the form of a Republic.

My thought is that perhaps family values really do guide people in their politics, beyond the media's focus on the "hot-button" issues gay marriage, abortion, or sex education. Family values are actually based on deeper understandings within each family.

Those who live in a state of fear at home (with the threat of physical punishment) may vote more willingly for a strong executive, a big military build-up, a government which emphasizes security. Giuliani has postitioned himself as the star of this "father knows best" role. The columnist Jimmy Breslin described him as a "small man in search of a balcony," which says it all.

Those who live under extreme strictures of place and status at home ("because I said so!") may vote more willingly for a government run by oligarchs, see corporate influence as a boon, and embrace big tent parties. I would say that Clinton and Romney are vying for this role. Clinton with her obfuscations on the campaign trail, so as to preserve her lattitude once she is our Inevitable Leader, and Romney with his sense of giddy excitement about bringing big business into the center of American life.

Those who live in families which value the views of all members may be more willing to vote for those who emphasize these open, democratic (some would say "socialist") values in public life, in the form of progressive taxation, universal health care, public education, and absolute freedom of speech. I would say that Kucinich lives up to this role the best; though Obama, Edwards, Biden, Richardson, Dodd, and even McCain all make claims to it.

Anyway, I think it's useful to take Montesquieu's approach to look at our own families, and examine both the outward show of our family's interactions, as well as the principle which holds it together.

Every family would no doubt insist that love is what holds them together, but it is more interesting to take a more fine-grained approach and ask what motivates our most common, every-day interactions.

When a father takes it as granted that he "knows best," what does that teach that father's child about his or her role in the world at large?

On Carving a Pumpkin and the Democratic Debate

Perhaps you watched the Democratic debate on MSNBC last night, and you heard many of the candidates talk at length about their foreign policy experience, the bills they wrote in Congress, their experience negotiating with dictators (if I hear Richardson talk once more about how he went "head to head" with Saddam I think my own head might explode), in short, all of the stuff they have done.

If you are anything like me, you felt... what's the word... glassy-eyed?

The strange and wonderful thing about democracy is that it is entirely forward-looking. Sure, we want to know the basics of where a person has been, but our vote goes to the person who we think will, from this point going forward, represent our views best.

You can't rest on laurels. Past performance is not relevant. I was watching for who they are now, not who they were or have been.

An experience I had as a dad last night, which happily coincided with the Democratic debate, brought this point to mind.

Just as the debate started, at 6 pm, you could find me outside on our front deck, with Cole and George, a large pumpkin, a sharp knife and a trash bag. As the sun set, I carved a goofy, toothy face into one side of the pumpkin and then scraped out the pumpkin pulp and seeds and transfered them to the trash bag. George was willing to reach in and grab handfuls of "mushy" pumpkin to help; Cole chose to abstain, responding to each of my offers that he reach in the pumpkin with a soft-spoken but definitive "no."

Then I had an idea. I asked George to go get one of his Batman shirts from upstairs. He brought it down. Carefully following the design on his shirt, I carved Batman's bat logo on the opposite side of the pumpkin.

George got so worked up that he was running circles by this point, screaming about how the "ghost Batman" would be coming to our house that night. Understanding but a few words of George's monologue, Cole nevertheless got worked up into a fever pitch himself. As I lit the candle inside the pumpkin, the two of them were spinning around like two Sufi mystics.

Cut to a half hour later. They are both now in pajamas, their teeth brushed, tucked in bed. They begin issuing various demands, each boy using his own variation of "Daaaaadddyy!" in a rising vocal pattern not unlike the rhesus monkeys of the Himalayas.

Cole wanted a "rock hug" on his chair. George wanted another story. Then when Cole was finally down, George started shouting for Daddy to show him the moon. We went out to see the moon. No moon (fog). At which point Cole woke up again... what with the noise... and needed another "rock hug." Then he insisted on making some unintelligible point about his bunny, to which he wanted me to respond appropriately. Then George wanted to read another book. Which request woke up Cole again.

My wife, downstairs, was doing the dishes and oblivious to all of this.

I tried to get stern. I pleaded with George not to wake up his brother again. I pointed at him in a vaguely threatening way, without any idea what the consequences of more noise would be except to plead with him some more. Now both were crying. I went to Cole again. George started shouting something about his night light, which was on as usual.

And that's when the thought came to me: But weren't they happy, these two little sons of mine, a half hour ago? Didn't I deserve some quiet, and a gentle "Goodnight, Daddy," now? Did I or did I not carve a fucking bat logo into the back of the pumpkin?

But I couldn't play that card. I couldn't make the technical point that the day was a good one, and Dad is tired because he's been attending to your needs for two hours straight, and Dad deserves a break.

They're only two and three. They're tired. They feel like fussing. And anyway, that was old news.

Past performance is not relevant. Being a Daddy is always now.

And like an elected office, it requires a permanent campaign, always looking forward to the new day.

Weirdness and Politics

One of the interesting things about politics is the way that, despite the constant, fervent effort of politicians to make sure it does not, life, in all of its weirdness, finds a way to rear its head.

Just think of Jefferson's Sally Hemmings scandal, JFK's tryst with Marlene Dietrich (now there's a creepy story), Nixon's White House tapes which revealed his pathological hatred of Jews, Nancy Reagan's astrological readings, Clinton's unusual use for a cigar, and most recently, Larry Craig's tap routine. Although they try to keep their bosses air-brushed, consultants and handlers can't keep the odd sexual proclivities and other rough-edges of personality down. You can't squelch life.

I had a dream once, during the height of the Clinton presidency (before the Lewinsky impeachment proceedings in his second term), in which I got to have a casual talk with the man himself. We were walking across a street somewhere, on a nondescript, sunny day, and I asked him if he ever experienced moments when he just wanted to throw his hands in the air and say, "Oh well, whatever!"

Considering the enormous responsibilities of the office, it seemed to me a natural human reaction to have -- one which you would then overcome and get back to work.

Well, in my dream Clinton just fixed me with a cold, steady look. He stopped walking, so as to make his point all the more forcefully. I felt a rush and stopped in my tracks to face him.

"No, I don't have that urge, Tom. Never. I always take my responsibilities seriously."

In the dream, I knew right away that we had hit against the limits of our communication as two very different people. He was a politician to his bones. It was impossible for him to admit human foibles, irrational moments, the possibility of the absurd. It would violate his deepest picture of himself as a public servant. Whereas I valued more than he did staying alert to the weirdness of our experiences -- and trying to understand that weirdness as best we can. My outlook emphasized inquiry; his, continuity.

Both outlooks are important. But it is interesting, I think, to reflect on which we value more, which we prioritize, for our children. Do we want our child to make outlandish gestures towards free inquiry? Or would we rather that our child gains the respect of his or her peers and authority figures for the ability to fit into social groups and, if challenging their norms, doing so in the accepted languages of those groups?

This distinction will be more obvious when my children are teenagers... Do I really want him to post that hilarious but obscene video he made with his friends on YouTube? But everything we do as parents even in these early years teaches which outlook we favor in our home.

As food for thought, I'll end by giving you two poems by politicians. Both poems were written before the politicians' careers took off. Both poems were written when they were still open to weirdness, as expressed in the personal imagery of their poems, the use of rhythm, meter and juxtaposition to open windows into aspects of life (regret, sadness, fury, disorientation) which as politicians they learned to edit out.

The first is from Lincoln, written in 1844:

My childhood's home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There's pleasure in it too.

O Memory! thou midway world
'Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise,

And, freed from all that's earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle
All bathed in liquid light.

As dusky mountains please the eye
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-notes that, passing by,
In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar--
So memory will hallow all
We've known, but know no more.

Near twenty years have passed away
Since here I bid farewell
To woods and fields, and scenes of play,
And playmate loved so well.

Where many were, but few remain
Of old familiar things;
But seeing them, to mind again
The lost and absent brings.

The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray,
And half of all are dead.

I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I'm living in the tombs.

The second is from Barack Obama, from 1981:

Underground

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

--

Weird, eh? Wonderful too.

Thomas the Tank Engine, Anti-Semitism, and the Sex Pistols

A friend told me a few months ago that she won't let her son read Thomas the Tank Engine stories -- or watch the TV series -- because of the anti-semitism contained within them.

That caught my attention.

I had been watching Thomas and Friends on TV for over a year (maybe once every two weeks or so) with George first, and now Cole too. I had found the episodes mildly entertaining. They mostly functioned as an opportunity for me to get up and do the dishes while the boys stayed on the couch.

Sure, I had noticed that irritating catch-phrase, "You are a really useful engine!"

And come to think of it, certain values -- industriousness, respect for authority, devotion to duty -- seemed to underlie the stories.

And, well, now that you mention it, Sir Topham Hatt, the bald, black-top-hat-wearing Chairman of the Railway, has a kind of obsessive, ruddy-faced concern for the status quo...

But what of it?

For a few months I scoffed at the idea that the series is "anti-semitic." My friend's comment seemed in line with the regrettable tendency for political pundits, when cornered, to compare their adversaries to Hitler. But her comment continued to nag at me.

So I started thinking about the show in its particulars.

Written by an Anglican minister, the Reverand W. V. Awdry, beginning in 1943, for his son Christopher, these stories have a modest, typically English concern for the trivial concerns of everyday life. (Orwell wrote marvelously about how the English character, molded by the familiar details of small town life, resists the dangerous lure of abstraction, in his essay, England Your England.)

But everyday life in the world of Thomas the Tank Engine comes with a difference. It is hyperclean, without regrets, unreal. Watching the episodes of the TV series "Thomas and Friends" you will notice immediately a kind of utopian dream in the clouds and greenery that introduce the Island of Sodor. We enter an idealized place, where everything can and will be resolved within the span of a single episode.

Bridges may need repairing, helicopters may threaten the trains' self-image, Cranky the Crane may dump a crate of fish on a newly-washed train (usually James). But everything is manageable. It's all good for a laugh.

There's certainly something clean-as-a-whistle and safely conformist about this island and its inhabitants.

Then too: the lines of authority on Sodor are unmistakable. Sir Topham Hatt's word is supreme. The trains are encouraged to run on time, avoid risks, help others, and most of all, obey.

Vanity proves wasteful. Paranoia proves unfounded (rest assured, that red hot-air balloon will not take business from the trains after all; it will merely provide another attraction on the island!).

Kafka would have a lot to say here. The Kafka of Sodor would grapple with all those sticky, ugly little concerns which are otherwise pushed under the oncoming trains. But Sodor has no Kafka. It has no subversive current running through it at all.

You start to realize that if only these primary-colored engines (Thomas, Percy, James... the whole gang) could just repress any vestige of unique personality, they would show themselves to be, at last, once and for all, "really useful engines."

On the surface all of this is harmless. And I don't worry about any damage I may have inflicted on George and Cole's psyches.

But it got me thinking: "Wouldn't it be great if just once a rainbow-colored, feather-bedecked engine came whistling down the track?" "Wouldn't it be great if this engine didn't have to justify itself by proving its usefulness?"

Which brings me back to the anti-semitic charge my friend made.

No, I'm not saying that Jewish people have a proclivity towards rainbows and feathers (though a visit to the open-air stalls on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley on any given Saturday may suggest this surprising connection). But let's revist the arguments in 1930s Germany directed against the Jewish population of Europe.

Anti-semitism has always used the language of "usefulness." Relegated to minority status, and in most cases restricted from owning property, Jews throughout Europe developed roles outside of the traditional agrarian ones. They charged interest (gasp!) for money-lending, and their religion's reliance on the word of the Talmud led many Jews to find work in journalism, academic pursuits, literature and the arts.

Degenerative Art. "The Non-productive few." Pseudo-scientific concerns about hygiene (in the amazing documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah, the Nazis who are interviewed reveal their disgust for the dirt and disease of those in the ghettos -- which they mistake for a cause, instead of an effect, of their actions). It would all seem perfectly natural in the world of Sir Topham Hatt.

I don't mean to say that Sir Topham Hatt is a closet Nazi. I don't mean even to say that the Thomas the Tank Engine series is overtly anti-semitic. Or that W. V. Awdry was a Nazi sympathizer while writing children's stories for his son during the aerial bombardment of his country by the Nazis.

But the parallels are there. The conformist outlook in the series does match that of regimes (throughout history) which favor social control and work to restrict, or even criminalize, individualism.

What kind of values do I want my children to internalize? I would prefer individualism, thank you.

In the end, we kept our Thomas books around. I still read them to the boys some nights. But my dishwashing innocence is gone. I am now more aware of the need to balance out the conventional values of the Thomas books with the downright weirdness of my bedtime stories.

Less trains meeting their schedules.

More pirate ships which sprout orange trees from the mast...
only to be eaten in one gulp by a giant squid...
which then spits the orange seeds out, along with the rum-drunk pirates...
until they land, in a heap, orange seeds, eye-patches and all, on the shore... making an orange-flavored pirate rum cake.
Something like that anyway.

Let weirdness prevail in all of your bedtime stories.

For a taste of Thomas the Tank Engine (fittingly, an episode called "Escape"), see below.

For a taste of the subversive current running through England ("God Save the Queen / the Fascist Regime / That made you a Moron / Potential H-Bomb..." etc.), see here.

Obama's Example for Parents: It's Better to Hedge than to Lie

Telling the truth can be problematic. We all know that.

I propose that we take a personal example and a political example in turn, and see what they show us about the importance of having respect for the truth -- in life and in politics.

First the personal example:

My two-year-old, Cole, looks up at me, his face smeared with chocolate. His eyes fierce.

"'Nother cookie!"

I know what he wants. He wants another chocolate chip cookie, and dammit he shouldn't have had even the first one, because it is bedtime. And he's tired.

And now he is shouting for "'nother one," jumping up and down, pointing to the cupboard where he knows that, earlier in the day, we hid the tupperware containing the cookies meant for tomorrow's party.

Have you been there? Is this familiar? If so, then you may know what happens next.

I blurt out: "Cookies all gone!" It just comes out before I can check myself: "All gone!"

Cole glares at me silently for a moment. Then even louder than before: "'Nother cookie!"

"Cookies all gone!" I insist.

I meet his gaze, my eyes widening in that give-away, "Who me?" expression I always get when I'm bluffing. His eyes narrow into a suspicious squint.

And he gives up. He sinks to the floor, muttering about cookies. I scoop him up and head upstairs for pajamas, storytime, and bed.

But it sits wrong with me later. I lied to my child. I lied to Cole. He knew it. And he knew I knew it. It can never be made good, not ever... something is broken, lost.... (okay, I'm tired -- I get dramatic when I'm tired). I go to bed.

But in the cold light of day, I think it over. Outright lying is always wrong -- even trivial lies like that one.

It would be better, if I can handle it emotionally, to suffer the outburst, the tantrum, whatever the consequences. Pick him up and take him away from the kitchen. Do what I need to do. But don't lie.

Why do I say this? Because I believe that the most important thing that I can do as a parent, other than love my children, is to establish unquestioned honesty in my communication with them. Without this, I would quickly lose a sense of how to adjust to my children's changing needs. They would stop telling me what's on their minds, and our communication would be broken.

If I allowed the little lies, the little distortions, to build up into a kind of static in our communication, my children would gradually develop a more cavalier attitude towards my word. They would begin to assume that behind what I said is really only my authority and, worse, my concern for expediency.

Even if lying about the cookies worked in the short-term with Cole, it was the wrong way to go. I should have picked him up, kicking and screaming, and carried him upstairs.

*

So now I want to turn to a political example to show how we can get by without lies. It's hard to do, and we may as well turn to someone who has the motivation to lie all day long but the good heart that keeps him from doing it.

Barack Obama has many problems which trigger this same truth/expediency dilemma. Here's one of them:

Obama personally opposes discrimination of all kinds against gays and lesbians. Yet many people in the country have a prejudice against homosexuals, and they feel threatened at the prospect of gay marriage...

Obama knows that if he speaks out for full legal rights for gays and lesbians, which of course would include access to the institution of marriage with not only its privileges but also its symbolic value, he would instantly lose many potential voters. This is true in the Democratic primaries, but even more so in the general election.

So what does Obama do? He hedges.

How do I know this? I saw him do it.

On February 19 this year I went to hear Obama speak at a fundraising event in San Francisco. There were about 80 to 100 people there. He was asked about gay marriage (or "marriage equality" as I recall the questioner phrased it).

In that small setting, without ever saying so outright, Obama made it very clear that his decision not to support gay marriage was based on political expediency. In an attempt to get us to understand his predicament, he drew an analogy.

He mentioned that under the miscegenation laws which existed in the 1960s (before Loving v. Virginia in '67) his own mother and father could not have married in many states. And so he understood personally the importance of "marriage equality".

But then he drew the audience's attention to the work of Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s -- those same years leading up to Loving v. Virginia -- on issues such as voting rights, employment discrimination and education. He told us that he had asked himself many times, if he had been in King's position in 1963, would he have "leaned" on the issue of miscegenation -- or would he have postponed it?

His answer of course was that he would have put it off -- even if it meant that his own parents' marriage would have remained illegal in many states.

This pragmatic argument -- coupled with a rueful mention of the mixing of the term "marriage" with religious traditions in many people's minds -- was the best he could offer. In effect he was saying, I can't do this now -- I can't even say anything more... We have to wait.

Strangely, his tone was so personal and thoughtful that, from what I saw, he won the crowd to his side -- at least in the moment.

It helped that he finished his answer with a direct look at the questioner and then a scan of the audience as a whole, saying very clearly, "I will continue to listen to my gay and lesbian friends on this." It almost felt as if he was winking at us in some solemn way (I can't say it, but I am with you!).

What impressed me about Obama's answer at the time was that he did not lie to us. Admittedly, he did not say outright what he hinted: that he personally opposed discrimination of all kinds, including marriage. But he didn't say that he was opposed to gay marriage either. He did a dance in which he managed to avoid lying while avoiding the truth.

As I said, he hedged.

*

This, I think, is the way to go as a parent (when you can't just tell the truth -- which remains the first and best option). It feels dodgy of course. When your kid looks you in the eye and demands "'nother cookie!" it is hard to worry about finessing the point. But finesse is exactly what you need.

If you say, "We're not going to have any more cookies!" in the melancholic tone of "All gone cookies!" for example, you have avoided lying.

You child may get confused. But he doesn't glare at you, knowing that you intentionally used words to express something untrue.

There is a difference, and the difference is a matter of respect.

That's why I am determined to avoid outright lying to my children on any point, however small.

I know that in the teenage years it's going to get a lot more difficult to trick my children with tone. The art of hedging will have to become increasingly advanced.

Perhaps I'll just have to face more temper tantrums...

But come to think of it, with a relationship based on telling the truth, perhaps, even when the truth hurts we will still be able to look each other in the eyes and resolve to disagree. We will have learned to have that kind of mutual respect.

(I'll have to get back to you on that one in about 10 years -- I can hear those of you with teenage children saying softly, "Good luck.")

Doomsday Thinking in our Popular Culture

To continue on the theme of the politics of fear from the last post, I want to share with you an article from The Nation that made an impression on me. It's about the role of the media, and our popular culture generally, in preparing us for doomsday thinking.

No wonder the area where the two towers fell was quickly dubbed "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for the spot where an atomic explosion had occurred... No wonder the events seemed so strangely familiar. We had been living with the possible return of our most powerful weaponry via TV and the movies, novels and our own dream-life, in the past, the future and even--thanks to a John F. Kennedy TV appearance on October 22, 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis to tell us that our world might end tomorrow--in something like the almost-present.

Read the full article here.

I definitely feel a need to think more deeply about the messages that my children are getting from the media.

I invite parents to share their thoughts on this. So far in my home we have introduced the following concepts:

Thomas the Tank Engine
Superman, Batman, the Riddler, the Joker, Aquaman, Aqualad, etc. (mostly DC comic superheros with a 70s feel).
Pirates of all kinds, including Captain Hook -- and Peter Pan
Tintin and his cohorts
Various children's stories, including Where the Wild Things Are, Cordoroy, Olivia, Mike Mulligan, etc.
49ers football games (10 minutes at a time, but enough to get the concept)
Cars -- the Pixar Movie ("Lightneen the Queen" is a current favorite in our house)

Do these stories provoke fear?

How can we make sure our children gain knowledge of this world -- not stand apart from it -- and yet avoid the doomsday dichotomies of good vs. evil in our popular culture?

Write in!

The Politics of Fear and the Urge to Control (a Parenting Perspective)

Yesterday in a press conference, President Bush mentioned the possibility of, oh, "World War III" in passing:

"I've told people that, if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

You can watch him say it here.

That's a good example of what could be called raising the stakes.

It's also a good example of the politics of fear, which we have seen a lot of since 9/11.

But hey. I'm a parent, I know fear. As a dad, I now live in a state of constant fear that some harm will come to one of my children.

My wife and I have an expression: "Little heart attacks every day." We say it to each other after we catch our breath and recover from one of the many near-accidents which occur in our home every day.

You see your child trip on the stairs, and his face just misses the end of that black iron, ornamental, oddly pointed piece at the end of the railing as he falls. Another child has a strange coughing fit in the middle of the night, which sounds like a horse munching on hay, and then is gone as fast as it started. Your doctor notices a slight heart murmur in your child during a routine check-up, and in the moments before he pronounces it "innocent" (wonderful word!) you have actually died, lived an eternity in some insufferably hot and sulphur-smelling place in which you adamantly don't belive, and then come back.

We know fear.

One time I was telling a friend about my dread that my children will, sometime, get injured. I was saying that I feel I should prepare now in some way, since the overwhelming onslaught of adrenaline and heartache which would hit me, if I got a call saying that... that... (my voice building to a fevered intensity here) my child had broken his leg in three places, might be too much!

My friend started laughing. I looked at him blankly. I asked why he was laughing.

He said, "I can see you're worried. I've never actually heard of a leg breaking in three places at school or anywhere else. I would be worried too!"

Oh I can imagine specifics, let me tell you. And I do.

So what you got, Bush?

Fear? World War III? What's that to me? What's that to any parent?

But the other thing a parent knows is that you can't get too hung up on your fear. You have to let your child take risks (within reason), wander off to play, investigate new things. In short you have to let your most loved little ones find their own way in the world. And it starts early.

Sometimes I have to remind myself to back away when I'm standing too close and commenting on every little step they take on a play structure. "How about sitting down on the bench and just watching?" I have to remind myself. And so I sit, and they're fine. Maybe some sand gets in someone's eye. Maybe someone is too scared to go down the slide and gets shoved out of the way by another kid. Big deal. They learn how to wipe the sand out or get out of the way faster.

So there is a balance. Fear plays a role in motivating us to protect and moniter our kids. But we also need to resist our fear. Resist our urge to control.

And this is the insight that perhaps our experience as parents tells us about the Bush administration's use of the politics of fear. It is motivated partly by an urge to control. (It is not only motivated by an urge to protect. And it is not only a cynical election strategy either. Though it is both of these too.)

The politics of fear's deeper motivation, I think, is the urge to control, albeit presented in the form of a humble concern for the safety and simple well-being of others.

Since at least his time in the Nixon administration as chief of staff, Cheney (along with his pal Rumsfeld, who was then Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity) have sought to expand the power of the Executive Branch. They watched in despair as Congress dismantled the levers and knobs which they and others had manipulated in Nixon's White House. They determined to do something about it.

This urge to expand the power of the Exectutive Branch took wing, during the Reagan and Bush years, in a a catchy legal theory called "The Theory of the Unitary Executive." During George W. Bush's years in the White House we have seen its effect: signing statements, expanded Executive privilege, a general disregard for consultations with Congress, the frequent use of interim appointments, and of course a shrugging off of concerns about the politicization of hiring practices at the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales.

Is it a coincidence that this attempt to expand the power of the Executive, this urge to control, has occurred at the same time that we have witnessed the use of the politics of fear? Smoking guns as "mushroom clouds," equations of domestic dissent with "emboldening" the enemy, casual talk of "World War III" -- all of this is directly connected with the urge to control.

And what lies behind this urge to control?

As parents, we know. It is to avoid messiness, the unexpected, accidents of all kinds. When you ask yourself what is at the bottom of it, I think you will agree.

Take a moment, if you will. Really ask yourself. What is it that lurks behind your own occasional, manageable, but never completely absent urge to control the lives of your children, your urge (which you overcome every day, and will overcome every day for the rest of your life) to have them always in your arms, home-schooled, safe from the influences and dangers of the world?

What really is there, I think, behind this urge, is a flat-out terror of disease and decay and injury and... death.

Death.

It goes deep down to our amygdala, that little part of our brain that we share with animals and reptiles alike.

Picture a lizard sitting on a rock. A shadow moves over it. It's eyes send an signal to the visual part of the brain, and then that part send a signal -- ping -- to the amygdala. The amygdala sends a strong signal back: Must. Get. Control. Now! And the lizard is off and running. That's about the whole of what's going on in America these days.

So perhaps what we really need to say to Bush and Cheney in their final 15 months in office is this: How about sitting on the bench for a while?

Do your preparation, bring lunch, check for mean kids, keep an eye out for sharp objects, and then just watch. We're fine. It's sunny out.

After a while, you might even find yourself smiling, Mr. Cheney.

Thoughts on George W. Bush's... Unique Way with Words

Here is a provocative theory.

We all know that George W. Bush mangles words.

Recently, while promoting the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, he comically urged that "childrens do learn." Over the past six years his clumsy speaking style drew frequent contrasts to Tony Blair's endlessly cheerful, sustained eloquence. As Bush acknowledged, meeting with French President Nikolas Sarkozy in August: "I don't [speak French], I can hardly speak English!"

Although Bush's unique way with words is a frequent topic in the media, it has never interested me much on the face of it. We all know people who do not speak extemporaneously very well but nevertheless have intelligent and complicated responses to the world. Vladimir Nabokov, for one, was famously tongue-tied in person. He demanded interviewers submit their questions in advance, so as to avoid his endless "umms" and general incoherence as an interlocutor. What they got, after submitting their questions as instructed, was stunningly lucid language, which Nabokov made to seem effortless only by a massive amount of work.

So give Bush a break. Forget "misunderestimate" and the like. Imagine if any of us had to speak spontaneously every day in front of multiple recording devices. I know I would spend every night with my regrets.

But maybe there is something about the way he talks that is significant after all.

This is what got me thinking:

I noticed that Bush not only says silly things -- it's the way he says them.

I'm sure it has caught your attention that he also emphasizes words more than most people. Jon Stewart's imitation of Bush captures some of the habitual emphasis he puts into his sentences with that sharp, downward gesture with his hands on the last word (followed of course by the "he he" knowing laugh).

Think back to every time Bush has introduced an appointee (or said goodbye to a departing one) in his administration. He often says, "He's a good man" in a strange way, as if this simple description carries with it a tremendous amount of meaning -- which we are expected to share. Or think more recently to the clips you have seen of Bush insisting that we "don't torture people." Again, the word "torture" has a kind of talismanic quality for Bush, as if by saying it out loud, and insisting that it is what our country does not do, he has separated himself from it. Done deal.

Well, what's wrong with this use of emphasis? It gives him a kind of charming everyman quality, doesn't it?

Exactly. It does give him an everyman quality. And how does it do that? It signals that words to Bush are not malleable -- they represent fixed things in the world. Bush's way of talking suggests that he believes that things simply ARE a certain way, and he is privy to the key, the talismanic words, which reveal the simple truths of this world (which were obscured behind, no doubt, a cloud of confusion stirred up by liberal "PhD types").

It's very effective, this certainty Bush has about even the most abstract words like "good" or "freedom." And it's very dangerous.

I would imagine that this misapprehension about the nature of language is natural for someone who struggled with it as a child. If we can imagine that George W. found reading difficult because of his dyslexia (or some other learning disability), he might have learned to think of words as deeply mysterious, holding some key that was often just beyond his grasp.

The point of all this is that he used this mindset to craft a very powerful self-image -- a man who speaks more haltingly and simply than his friends at Andover and Yale, but who nevertheless has the keys that are necessary to access the Kingdom of Things as They Really Are. He believes that words count, and he makes you feel that.

You might be saying... Wait, words do count. Isn't Bush right in this?

Of course they do. We rely on them to count every time we speak. But most of us know, consciously or intuitively, that words are only approximations of meaning -- and inextricably social in their meaning at that. They do not represent anything fixed underneath them, any Platonic ideal that stands apart from their use in context.

I am influenced by the philospher Wittgenstein here, who pointed out that without both a speaker and a listener -- a social interaction -- words cannot have any consistent meaning through time. Robinson Crusoe on his island, calling a bird a "redfeather," would have no way of confirming that when he called a bird a redfeather the next day it would still be the same word or the same kind of bird. The sounds produced by "redfeather" would simply have no meaning. (This, incidentally, is what is known in philosphy as Wittgenstein's "anti-private language argument.")

So instead of thinking of words, rightly, as a social process, and definitions as fluid, Bush learned somewhere along the way to think of words as, well, name tags, each placed on a definite and unchanging thing. "Torture" has some meaning in his mind (I don't even want to know the series of images that flash through his consciousness). So when he says that we don't "torture," he means it. The problem is, without discussion it means nothing to anybody else. The word alone is worthless. And so is the false sense of sanctimony that his private languge provides him.

Here we begin to see how Bush's problem with language has many real-world repercussions. A talismanic understanding of language (perhaps brought on by a childhood learning disability?), has created a kind of short-circuit to our President's ability to think in terms of process, streams of data, analysis.

He is the Decider. The One Who Knows What Things Really Are.

The rest of us, still mulling over nuances are, in his mind, merely "PhD" types. We can debate into the night, while he sleeps the sleep of the innocent.

Most voters, or half of the voters in this country at least, apparently appreciate this short-circuiting of thinking. If you say, in a subtly aggressive tone, "I don't know about you, but I love America because it is free," then you don't leave a lot of room for a discussion about what this term "freedom" conveys. If you have to ask, you are on the wrong side to Bush and those like him.

Perhaps to compensate for boyhood slights due to difficulties with what is often called "book-learning," Bush has developed an uncanny ability to channel the charisma of not-thinking. When he speaks in simple terms of freedom, evil-doers, or even hot dogs, we are compelled to listen because he invests in these words a sense of an unchanging, unreflective meaning which they otherwise lack.

The last point I would leave you with is that neuroscience may support a connection between difficulties with language (diagnosed as dyslexia or some other learning diability) and a tendency to impulsive decision-making. We may be able someday to speak accurately about specific areas of the brain which are affected. Wouldn't it be interesting if someday, in a peaceful world (a guy can dream, can't he?) the disasters wrought by the Bush Presidency are taught in terms of the unique nature of his brain and his adaptations to it as a teenager?

If only it were that simple.

Integrity vs. Reputation

The awarding of the Nobel peace prize to Al Gore today caused me to reflect on two different understandings of honor that are floating around in our contemporary culture.

To me, Al Gore represents the kind of honor which is rooted in his own private sense of self. It is inward-looking. When, for example, Gore conceded the 2000 election to Bush, he acted in a way that was no doubt painful when considered from the perspective of his public life, but which his inward sense of honor told him was right.

For some, his concession forever branded him with the stigma of a "loser." (Who can forget the bumperstickers and signs we saw during that time saying "Sore/Loserman"?)

I felt that, on the contrary, we witnessed, on live TV, a true act of patriotism; whether right or wrong, Gore made his decision based on what he believed was best for the country at the time. Gore's honor is strongly associated with the idea of integrity.

Consider another kind of honor that competes with Gore's. This other honor requires the vigorous and constant defense of a person's public image. Justice Clarence Thomas makes clear in his recent book that he believes that great harm was done to his honor in the Anita Hill controversy. He carries his bitterness with him even today. But what harm could possibly be done to his honor if he simply carried himself in a dignified manner, acted as he saw fit, and told the truth? Justice Thomas' idea of honor -- traditionally heralded as "a man's sacred honor" -- is strongly associated with reputation.

The tension between these two conflicting ideas of honor -- one based on integrity and the other based on reputation -- lies beneath many of the cultural skirmishes we see playing out in our national debate. The media promotes reputational honor above all else -- because this kind of honor requires an active defense on the part of those who feel their's is under attack, and that helps ratings.

As a result, most TV talk programs (spanning the political spectrum from Bill O'Reilly to Keith Olberman) present everything as a debate between opposing sides. One side says something shocking, and the other side defends itself.

In our private lives, however, many people continue to cherish the idea of a quiet, private sense of honor based on integrity. We tear up when we hear stories of dedicated parents who provide for their children, without any recognition, in the face of enormous hardships and even humiliations.

This cuts across both political parties. Republicans and even the religious right do celebrate integrity-based honor when they see it in a working family who quietly cares for the poor in their charity work. The left celebrates honor based on integrity when they see someone working for an unpopular cause such as ensuring a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, despite the protesters outside the door.

Both also celebrate the kind of honor based on reputation: members of the Republican Party, reflecting the values of the Old South, talk of facing down opponents almost as if they wish to fight a duel -- as Limbaugh did last week when he called for Harry Reid to act like a "man" and to come on his program to discuss the "phony soldiers" comments personally. Democrats celebrate honor of this kind too when they vaunt Hillary's "experience" over Obama's naivete. What is naivete but sticking to your own sense of what is right in the face of tough odds (in other words, showing integrity)?

As a father, I hope to teach my children to value the kind of honor that Gore shows. I sense that it starts, for Gore, with childhood, for this is the reference for our most closely-held sense of identity.

My sense is that the other kind of honor, the one based on reputation, starts not in childhood but in adolescence. It recalls our first victories and embarrassments among our peers. It is suggestive of high school shenanigans.

Reputation is a poor substitute for integrity.

Raising Children Right... or Left

Do we make our children liberal or conservative by the way we raise them -- even before we ever discuss politics with them expicitly?

I would argue that we do give them an outlook on the world which likely predisposes them one way or the other.

But there are too many dimensions to politics, too many values informing our positions, for our children's political views, once they emerge, to conform perfectly to our own. Thank golly.

Into this teeming mix of values and lessons and clashing political views -- familiar to parents with teenagers, I imagine -- comes a new theory. It is worth examining from a parenting perspective.

Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, has proposed a theory of morality which involves 5 "moral axes." They are: harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity. His ideas were discussed in the New York Times's Science section a few weeks ago, and the article generated a storm of commentary on the internet.

Haidt claims that liberals and conservatives, answering the same questions (you can do the test yourself to see where you come down) will find that their results cluster around different axes. Liberals will, according to Haidt, put far more emphasis on avoiding harm and ensuring fairness. Conservatives will add to these concerns a strong feeling for ingroup loyalty, a respect for authority and an interest in preserving sacredness/purity.

So Haidt would suggest that we are influencing our children's politics by the values we teach them.

"Of course," I wanted to say when I first read this. "Values inform politics, what else is new?"

But something about Haidt's approach continued to nag at me in the week after I read about it. Then I finally realized why. He suggests that conservatives have more moral axes, more resources for decision-making, than liberals -- five rather than the stunted two that I favor.

Here's how I counter Haidt's theory:

A dear friend of mine had a birthday recently, and I was thinking about his great qualities. One of his qualities is his deep loyalty and steadfastness towards his close friends. Suddenly, I remembered the Haidt moral axes. And so I asked myself, "Does this loyalty that my friend shows make him more moral in my view?" My answer was no. I realized from this that I do not consider loyalty to be a moral quality, merely an admirable personality trait.

With this thought-experiment in mind, the three "conservative" axes, (loyalty, authority, and purity) seem to me more tied to personality traits than they are a sense of morality.

Haidt (and cultural conservatives) would argue of course that I am so steeped in the contractual model of morality that I simply can't see these for what they are -- axes of moral decision. But the burden is not on me. It is on Haidt to demonstrate that his "5 axes" matrix is truly an exhaustive list of moral axes. Otherwise it's just a cute exercise.

Has he done that? I don't think so.

Why not add a few more "moral" axes, such as flexibility/rigidness, or openness to difference/desire for homogeneity? These two suggestions have a bias towards recognizing culturallly "liberal" acts of generosity and kindness as opposed to the Haidt axes of purity and authority and loyalty, which are biased towards recognizing conservative virues. But aren't they just as legitimate?

I would bet that we could generate a list of some 20 or 30 axes which would be borne out in studies as distinguishing liberal vs. conservative inclinations about morality. In short, the whole thing reeks of the typical weakness of psychology: mistaking labeling for insight.

Certainly, by encouraging, say, "openness to difference" rather than "ingroup loyalty," I am predisposing my children to political views on the liberal side of the spectrum. On that we can agree. But I am not making them morally deficient. They have the two crucial "moral axes" covered: minimize harm and try to be fair. The rest are a matter of taste. And some, like the cult of sacredness/purity, are not to my taste at all.

President Hillary

Just over a year from now, Hillary Clinton may be elected the 44th President of the United States of America.

My first reaction to that prospect is relief.

But once I get over my relief that it is not President Guiliani or President Thompson, what about President Hillary Clinton herself?

I feel mixed.

First, the good. I would argue that there are, to put it very bluntly, two competing narratives in American history: rights and power.

The Clintons, whose political education took place in the civil rights era, are part of the "rights" narrative.

This narrative, the Clinton narrative (and my narrative), goes something like this:

From its pinched beginnings (see the denigration and destruction of the indigenous people's way of life, the institution of slavery, etc.), America has steadily expanded the rights accorded to its citizens. Our ideals continue to live precisely because they are still unfulfilled ideals which require new efforts every day to acheive them. The Clintons' narrative is one of progress through process.

By contrast, under Bush and Cheney, we have had seven years of a "war" narrative. This shadow narrative of America, which takes aggressive form on Fox News every day, emphasizes above all the history of this country's ever-expanding power -- political, economic and military. Our greatness is our greatness.

So rather than think of ourselves as humble citizens, we are encouraged to think of ourselves as fighters for the cause of Freedom in a conflict waged overseas (so as not to interfere with our other "sacred" role as cheerful consumers).

History is written by the victors, so the war narrative looks pretty grand in retrospect. The genocide of the Indians was, well, an unavoidable consequence of Manifest Destiny. We crushed the British, the Mexicans, the Spanish, the Kaiser, the Nazis and the Japs, and our ideological figurehead Ronald Reagan vanquished the Soviet Union. (We'll skip over the Koreans, the Vietnamese and a certain bearded irritant named Fidel Castro.) We stand against Europe and the Arab World to defend our friend Israel and its efforts to establish a... well, if not a pluralistic democracy, then at least a stategically important outpost of empire. And so on.

Insofar as she rejects this war narrative in favor of a rights narrative, the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton is good.

But here's the bad part. Over her past seven years as a Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton has:

authorized the war with Iraq (which has led to a foreign policy disaster that is still unfolding);
refused to renounce the K Street culture of lobbyists in D.C. (the number of lobbyist has grown exponentially);
recently voted in favor of a resolution declaring the Iranian Republican Guard a "terrorist organization" (paving the way for a reckless military escalation sometime in Bush's final year);
and on the campaign trail, used the now familiar political techniques developed over the 1990s by the Republican Party (quoting out of context, knowing distortion of the facts, repetition in the face of denials) to label Senator Obama as "naive and irresponsible".

None of this is shocking.

Each of these can be explained by reference to that hoary old phrase: bare-knuckle politics. Clinton is willing to make concessions to the war narrative as necessary to secure political gains.

She knows that, as a woman running for President (as she has been all along in the Senate), she cannot seem weak on security. Hence the Iraq war and recent Iranian Republican Guard votes. She knows that money drives politics in Congress. Hence the position on lobbyists. She knows that she needs to get through the crowded field of the primaries to be the one Democratic candidate. Hence her treatment of Obama.

Indeed, the tone is familiar. The Clinton's, for all of their concerns about civil liberties and equality and inclusiveness, for all that they value the "rights" narrative of America, are ruthless political players if nothing else. They decided long ago that means justify the ends in politics.

Is this the only way to power in the current political world? I don't know. I do know that, if they are right, then the political model upon which this Republic is based is simply broken.

Who can feel triumphant about the future of America if politics has devolved into a charade, a game, a contest of wits. If that is so, how can we expect policy to lead to progress?

*

Here's where the parenting side of this post comes in. I would ask the moms and dads out there to look at their own homes as an analogy to this country as a whole. Can you raise healthy, loving, confident children in a household that functions on white lies and subterfuge? Even with the best intentions, parents who lie to their children undermine the basis for their family's love and closeness. Then they wonder why the children grow apart and stop calling.

In their many concessions to power, the Clintons concede too much.

I will vote for her if she is the nominee. I will feel relief and even a little exhilaration. But I will also feel a sense of sorrow. America the ideal will have to wait. We'll be back in the right narrative for this country, but it will be one with little momentum, little pace, and lots of maneuvering.

Behind the Bright Lights of Tonight's Republican Debate

Watching the Republican Debate tonight on CNBC, I was struck most of all by the production values, and what they say about how our media distorts our lived experience, even in this supposedly "unfiltered" setting of a live debate.

Just as in every TV debate I can remember, the candidates were placed against a red, white and blue, luminous backdrop. Patriotic design elements (stars, stripes, etc.) appeared to dance around their heads.

The faces of these older white men looked well-tanned (read: made-up), and their eyes flashed pleasingly in the lights. The graphics that introduced them to the viewers were swift and expressive. The snatches of music that led into advertisements -- and grabbed us again after breaks -- were, frankly, invigorating.

The candidates' answers, of course, were uniformly banal, just as the Democrats' answers are in their debates.

What is going on?

Well, here's what I think. What we are seeing is something profound: a picture, if you will, of our society's blinkered values, presented in flashing lights and smiling faces.

We have grown accustomed to a picture of the world, as presented on TV, that is protected from suffering. This picture does not show garbage loosely strewn across the floor. It does not show skin cells that are infected and pink, or lacerations on cheeks, or stubbed toes with cracked nails. It rarely shows tears, or if it does they are stylized (Paris Hilton shielding her tender face from paparazzi). They are not the snotty tears, the snorting gasps and choked-off shouts that we experience in our private lives.

Where on that stage could possibly fit anything recognizable from daily life? Where would we indicate -- in that spare, "patriotic" design -- the odd mix of cultures which we now see in most American cities, large and small?

We're so used to it that it is easy not to see anything is amiss. But while Romney and Thompson share a laugh over whether the debate seems like an episode of "Law & Order" (ha ha!), the country's homes are filled with people who actually don't have health care, who actually smoke marijuana, who (some of them) actually talk in languages other than English, who actually can't pay for a new transmission for the car and so will have to take the bus to work for the foreseeable future.

I don't mean to sound righteous at all. I live in that privileged world which the media does represent on our TV screens -- the "high-protein land" (as the band Pavement once memorably put it). I drink cafe lattes, never question paying utility bills, call friends long distance, worry only occasionally and indulgently about financial ruin.

But without sounding righteous, I can say that I do recognize my world as uncommon, an anomaly. A fraction of us (including most of the people in the national media) live like proverbial royalty, while the rest of the country has a far more immediate sensory experience of poverty, filfth, unwanted noise.

To look at the Republicans debate is to know where they stand. And the same goes for the Democrats (perhaps Gravel excepted, since every time he speaks he angrily attacks the frame). The politicians, as presented by our media, are just as "clean" as Senator Biden controversially described Obama. They stand in opposition to darkness, smelliness, toughness, dryness -- in short, the world as lived by most of the people in it.

How do we teach ourselves and our children to break through this shimmering barrier of media and see behind it? It seems to me that we must actively seek media alternatives. I welcome suggestions.

Obama the Dad

Barack Obama has spoken at length about the anguish he sometimes feels when he considers how his political career takes him away from time he would otherwise spend with his two girls, Malia (9), and Sasha (6).

I can hardly imagine how painful it must be to lose so many opportunities to witness and participate in your children's development. When do our responsiblities to our careers, to the world outside, outweigh our responsiblities to our own family?

I happen to admire Obama greatly. I have read both of his books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. I consider him a brilliant, searching, driven, caring man, as well as pretty much the ideal candidate for President.

All that said, I find it difficult to understand how he could leave his children so often.

I find it hard to imagine leaving my kids even for a weekend.

But I suppose that it is a question of the possible influence that you can wield.

In the cost-benefit analysis for Obama, the benefits (leading the nation from the White House in a time of global terror; changing the American narrative of race forever) are far greater than they are for me. And our costs (time lost with our children) are the same. The little brass weights on the "benefits" side of his scales are simply heavier than mine.

The quick conclusion to draw from this is that I should get a life, maybe run for office somewhere, anywhere!

But another way of looking at it is this: How sad for Obama that this great responsiblity, drawing him away from his private life and the presence of his loved ones, has become unavoidable for him.

Perhaps, as a person who has shown a commitment to thinking carefully about consequences, he feels he has no choice. Certainly his public service is something to be praised.

But cannot we also feel sorry for him?

Thinking along these lines I find myself suddenly aware of the strange undercurrent of sadness that flows through gatherings of politicians. Take any debate -- scan the faces of Guiliani, Romney, McCain, Brownback, or Clinton, Edwards, Obama, Gravel, Biden. Or a press conference on Capitol Hill -- Reid, Pelosi, McConnell, Graham, Kennedy, Stevens. Isn't there a palpable sense of loss amid all of the urgency, the clarion calls to action, the passion? These people are driven to fulfill what they see as their responsiblity; they carry on their shoulders the burden of power. Most have actively sought it; for some, it arrived through a chain of events only partly of their choosing. But whatever the history, they are now in a position in which their private lives are severely diminished. And public concerns dominate their waking lives.

This of course goes back to any chapter in the life of our republic. Jefferson famously complained about spending any time away from his home in Monticello. Lincoln wept openly and trembled as he stood speaking to his friends and neighbors on the morning he left Springfield for Washington D.C. Even our current G. W. Bush (a hard man to sympathize with, but I'm trying to be inclusive) gets a jauntier step when he's back in Crawford.

Those whom we ask to lead must lose something that we take for granted: home. For those who, like Obama, cherish the intimacy they have with their loved ones, it must be nearly unbearable at times. For those who don't, I imagine that, sometimes imperceptively, they cross over into a life that is permanently public -- and unmoored from the deepest kind of attachments.

Maybe the pained expression that appear sometimes on Obama's face when he is on the campain trail, or the lines that became deeply etched in Lincoln's cheeks and brow as he drew apart from Mary and his sons (and lost Willie) during his time in the White House -- maybe these signs are the best indication we have that a leader is still psychologically whole.

Maybe great leaders are always sad.

When Religion Comes Up in a Secular Home

I'm still thinking about Burma...

My children are only 3, 2 and 5 months, so I have not yet had the opportunity to discuss religion with them at length -- or really, at all. So how do I talk to them about the monks making news in Burma?

As someone who believes that the major monotheistic (read "sky-god") religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are dangerous and lamentable -- yes, I am with Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the "New Atheists" here -- I have a certain amount of reluctance about broaching the subject of religion with my children. When I do talk religion with them, I hope that we will be able to discuss these Iron Age fairy tales (with various embellishments and borrowings), blood-soaked as they are, with a view to their decidedly mixed history.

It seems too complicated a topic to open up just yet. They have enough to worry about when it comes to Lex Luther and monsters in the closet. I would like to wait.

But how do I talk about the monks?

Can I describe them neutrally? Or does it open a floodgate of supernatural thinking to discuss even this distant religious tradition with my children at this early age? Should I just dodge the subject altogether?

Of course I don't want to dodge anything when it comes to my children. I want to answer their questions in the most appropriate way I can. So here goes:

Let's imagine that my oldest, George, catching sight of a report on Burma tonight on TV, asks: "Who are those funny orange guys, Daddy?"

I believe that, for now, I would avoid the dogma of Buddhism. It's too early to get into enlightenment and reaching nirvana. Instead I would focus on the tradition in that country for young men to choose a life of quiet and contemplation, where they can dedicate themselves to being attentive to the details of their existence: a bowl or rice, a ceremony, a gesture... I would tell him that they live together in monastaries, where they do all the work and sit still for long periods. In efffect I would secularize what they do.

Some religious people may criticize my approach to talking to my children. They would ask me to acknowledge the courage, the love for humanity, and the steadfastness which the monks' Buddhism -- their form of religiosity -- gives them. Is this not evidence of a benefit from religious devotion? Doesn't it at least support the idea that religion is a spur to social transformation?

I hear these arguments, but I am not convinced of this link. And therefore I think it would be too blunt a message, as well as misleading for a child of his age, to tell him about their religious status as monks.

I know that in Burma today (and in the U.S., say, during the civil rights movement of the 1960s) acts of unbelievable courage are taken with a religious pretext. And the language of religion certainly expresses many of the longings of those on the front-lines of change. Yet I would argue that this religious aspect to these movements is not inextricable to it. It is the legacy of millenia of religious tradition, based in ancient texts and superstitions, whether in Burma or here. It may provide the symbols and language of the movement, but without these symbols and language the movement would stand on even stronger footing.

Replace the saffron robes -- or the clerical collars -- with a group of diversely dressed people with flushed faces, and you get the same result: a picture of human beings banding together to do something greater than themselves.

I am in awe of the Burmese monks who walked the streets of Rangoon and now find themselves in mortal danger. They have done something great -- I will never forget it. In saying this, I do not believe that I also need to feel awe for their religious commitments, ceremonies, and stories. These may have aesthetic value (I'm sure they do, as do temple, church and mosque services in our more familar traditions), but that does not translate to something important that I must tell my child at this early point in his development.

As my children get older, of course we will talk about the attractions of religion, as well as the distractions and delusions it causes in otherwise kind and forthright people. But now is not the time.

The religious side of the Burma situation is secondary. The people are primary.

Torture, First Principles, and Our Children

The New York Times today revealed the existence of "secret memos" in the United States Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzales, which authorized "enhanced interrogation techniques" for use on terrorism detainees. "Enhanced interrogation techniques" is of course a euphemism; the same phrase in German, "Verschaefte Vernehmung" was used by the Nazis during World War II.

In either language, it means torture. The United States of America, our beloved country, now belongs to the long list of nations which have used and continue to use torture as a tool of public policy.

How does that make you feel?

The specific techniques -- a word that is far too sterile and scientific-sounding as a description for the sweat-stained, shit-streaked, brutal actions involved -- which Gonzales' Justice Department authorized, and the Bush administration used, include:

keeping detainees naked and shivering uncontrollably in extremely cold cells;
keeping them in a sleep-deprived, semi-deranged for extended period of time;
playing non-stop loud music;
hitting them on the head repeatedly;
and waterboarding.

This brings to mind the question of how to instill moral "first principles" in our children. By first principles I mean bright lines over which we simply cannot cross without losing a sense of who we are.

I believe that opposition to the torture of another human being is a moral first principle (just as the stirring statement in the Declaration of Independence about those rights which we hold to be "self-evident" represents a political first principle).

Let's examine what morality is at its core. I would argue that it starts with that most unique human characteristic: our capacity to empathize with other human beings by way of our imagination. It is this capacity, coupled with our pre-cognitive instinct to protect other human beings from harm if we can imagine them facing harm, that is the source of morality. With this small imaginative leap -- "Oh, that sharp stick will hurt him if I poke him, just as I have felt sticks hurt me when I am poked!" -- we begin a huge project, taking place mostly in our formative years but also throughout our lives, to build a sense of moral interconnectedness to others.

If you follow me so far, that the basis for morality is our capacity for empathy (by way of the imagination), then I am sure you will agree too that there can be no clearer violation of what we term "morality" than the intentional causing of severe pain to another person. If we do not renounce this act unequivocably and unmistakably, then morality becomes nothing more than a strategy for advancement, a code for proving loyalty to our own in-group. But morality is something else than a strategy or a code. It is a stop, a boundary, a means of knowing who we are.

Of course there are scenarios in which we would be tempted to physically hurt another person, even severely, for some larger cause. If you have watched a recent debate between the Republican Presidential candidates then you have been conditioned to think reflexively of the example of the nuclear device primed to explode in a major metropolitan area, and the one man that can defuse it glaring at us with defiance. Guiliani relishes this hypothetical -- there is a glint in his eyes when he brings it up. In such a situation, I would not predict how any of us would act. I suspect that most of us would do something that would qualify as torture under those circumstances. But this act -- which we must remember is an unlikely occurance, as it would require an astonishing constellation of events to create this scenario -- must be considered outside of our moral range. it would change the person doing it forever. It should be viewed as rupture of our moral principles rather than an adaptation within them.

For someone to claim that this would be a morally justifiable act shows that his or her sense of identity is simply not bounded by first principles. He may be a charming person; she may live a generally admirable life; but such a person, I would argue, missed out, at some formative stage, when it came to establishing a bedrock upon which to build a coherent moral outlook.

So back to the initial question of this post. How do we instill first principles, particularly moral first principles, in our children?

Already, when faced with an altercation between our 3-year-old and our 2-year-old (his birthday's today!) my wife and I say things like, "There is no hitting in this house!" But those are just rules, and they are understood as such. I believe that first principles are not taught through catch-phrases or "time outs." My sense is that first principles are taught by the everyday reinforcement of the values which define the relationships in the home.

If, as I would like to think, our compass needle points regularly to the practice of love and concern for others, then when the needle spins the opposite direction to the practice of dehumanization and cruelty to others our children will have an immediate gut reaction that something is off.

Those times in my life when I have managed to dehumanize someone enough to be cruel, I have felt an uneasy feeling, a gathering creepiness, inside. You can't always put it into words, but you know it.

I believe that it is up to us, as parents, to encourage empathy, to ask questions about other people, to speculate about our children's friends' feelings with them -- "Why was Jack crying? Was he upset that his bubbles spilled?" In short, to create a sense of a larger world of sentient human beings -- in which each of us happens to inhabit only one body. When we do this -- in a million ways, by the way we make sure they share their birthday cake as well as the vigor with which we wave goodbye -- we create the sense of first principles without ever overtly discussing them. The outer boundary, the web that holds our moral self together, if you will, is woven from countless, subtle, daily interactions, not from spoken rules.

In this way, as parents, we create citizens who would simply not endorse the physical abuse of detainees as matter of public policy. It is not even arguable -- regardless of the perfect-constellation hypothesis about a ticking nuclear bomb pitched by Tim Russert or Brit Hume on any given night.

One wonders what the parents of the polite, articulate John Yoo, architect of the legal memoranda in the Justice Department supporting these secret memos, did NOT do. Surely they taught their son manners. Surely they taught him how to succeed in the world. Surely they taught him much about equipose and patience. But why did he not acquire a set of first principles which would exclude torture? I would find it very interesting to know how much value, if any, John Yoo's parents placed on the imagination (and the capacity for empathy) when he was growing up.

Memories of Burma and the Impetus Behind Politics

One thing I did not mention in my last post is that I traveled in Burma with my family when I was young. It was 1981, and I was 12. The memories I have are so vivid -- and, what is more relevant to this meditation, they are from a child's perspective.

I believe that the direct, non-analytical nature of these experiences, even dating back 26 years, adds to my feeling of connection to the people there today -- and my sense of political urgency about the situation.

Let me share some of my memories with you:

In Rangoon (now Yangon) we stayed in a creaky, gorgeous colonial British hotel. It had slowly circling fans in the lobby, where we drank lime juice on ice to stay cool. Vintage 1940s and 50s cars lined the streets -- used without thought to their antique looks, but simply because those were the models of car available. I suffered a mysterious allergic reaction (never repeated) one night as we returned to our hotel room, and I began breathing frantically, trying to get air. In retrospect I can only imagine how frightening that was for my parents. I remember they called the front desk to try to get medical assistance, but by the time they had communicated the problem my attack had subsided.

I remember the beggers and the monks, the gleaming, gold surface of the central Buddhist temple (the Schwedagon pagoda), the talk of the Buddha's tooth once preserved there. We then traveled north to Mandalay, and we also visited the most fantastic place I had ever seen, Pagan (now called Bagan).

There are hundreds of temples dotting a flat dusty plain in Pagan. They have secret stairways, ornate carvings, impossible balconies, and dark tunnels. Each one is different in design. My sister (a year older at 13) and I raced around these temples, laughing and gasping for air while my parents took a more leisurely pace and considered the history.

My sister and I felt as if we had discovered the real Disneyland, the one that wasn't at all ersatz -- a true lost kingdom with crumbling stone and stange aromas and odd shafts of sunlight. We rode from temple to temple in a horse-drawn cart, with our driver occasionally giving rides to villagers. The people smiled and some spoke broken English. It was the most memorable single day I experienced in all the travels that my family took through Asia during those years (we lived in Hong Kong from 1979 through 1981 and took the chance to travel extensively in the region).

How do these memories bear on politics?

The simple point I take from this excursion into my private archive of sights and sounds is this: We are driven poltiically as much by what we FEEL as what we think. I feel sorrow (and anger too) when I think of Darfur -- as when I watched the documentary by a friend of mine, Annie Sunderberg, "The Devil Came on Horseback," at Sundance this year. But because I have no direct, sensory connection to that part of Africa, my motivations are more analytical than visceral. When it comes to supporting aggressive action again the regime in the Sudan, I am all for it -- but out of calculation rather than the force of conviction. When faced with similar suffering Burma, however, my childhood memories provoke me to brood on it more. I am more inclined to talk about it with loved ones, check to see what my government is doing about it, even take to the streets (if the chance arises).

This makes me think of a great essay by Richard Rorty on human rights. It's called "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality." Read it if you want to be provoked.

Rorty's argument is, in a nutshell, that we should forget claiming that we are on the side of reason, that we are "right" and those who abuse other human beings are "wrong" in some absolute sense. Rather, the only effective way to change people's behavior (short of the use of force) is to appeal to sentiment. Show them photographs of their victims. Make them confront what they are doing directly through some method of storytelling (film, TV, theater, writing). Get them to see, and smell, and feel the consequences of their actions. And then ask a simple follow-up question to provoke them: Is THIS the world that you would like to live in?

As David Hume famously wrote: "Reason is the slave of the passions." It doesn't work as well the other way around.

When it comes to Burma, I find that my reason is at work, trying to find ways to alleviate the suffering, because my passions for that country were ignited 26 years ago as a child.

What passions are we igniting in our children today that will motivate them 26 years from now?

Burma, Assault Weapons, and Our Kids

The crackdown on monks and other protesters by the military junta which rules Burma (Myanmar) raises questions for me as a parent.

The obvious first question is: What would I do? The people of Burma do not have weapons with which to defend themselves. They are trying to confront a brutal regime which has shown no compunction about taking murderous action against innocent civilians. To name only one area of past human rights abuses by this regime, this same military dictatorship deliberately engineered the systematic murder, rape and forced labor of many villagers in its efforts to build the Yadana gas pipeline (assisted by Total S. A. and the American oil company, Unocal, now merged with Chevron).

It does not get more ruthless than this regime. They possess the will and the weaponry.

By contrast, the civilians of Burma are only in possession of their lives and their hopes.

But would I, with three young children, join in the movement for democracy in Burma? Would I risk losing my life and leaving my children? The fact is, I don't know if I would. None of us does without being in that situation.

This question of what I would do -- and the fear that it generates in me to contemplate taking life-threatening action -- makes me think of my support for a ban on assault weapon in this country. This has always been a clear-cut position for me: Why would regular citizens need assault weapons?

But what if our country deteriorated into a dictatorship? The growing politicization of the military, the rise of military options outside of civilian control (Blackwater), the increasing links between the Christian right and high-ranking military officers... It may be unrealistic to imagine a dictatorship anytime soon in this country, but it's not impossible -- which is shocking to consider.

And then, what defense would we have? What means of persuasion, other than lofty rhetoric and Constitution-thumping, would we have to confront this take-over of our democracy?

In the end, I still believe that the value of regulating assault weapons – and the resulting lives saved in the short term – outweighs the value of protecting the possibility of armed resistance to an imagined coup d’etat (or, perhaps more likely, an insidious and creeping authoritarianism). I’m sorry, I just don’t think criminals should be able to outgun police.

But the question is not an easy one, and the events in Burma this weekend make it increasingly obvious to me that at some point I might reconsider.

*

Crackdown. What a casual word for the gashes, the holes in the head, the blood, the pain. We can hardly picture the horror felt by those who are in it.

The other question that this “crackdown” raises for me is: How do I talk to my children about the horrors in the world, the cruelty, the violence?

My oldest, George, is only 3 (my two younger ones are Cole, 2, and Adeline, 5 months). But in just a few years they will hear of events like these and ask for explanations. I could shield them from it. Dismiss it with a quick sketch, and a passing reference to good people overcoming bad people. But that won’t do, and I know it. I believe that I will need to confront these events directly.

Of course there are numerous hardships in our daily, more immediate lives. But macro-events, world-historical events, are important too. They shape our view of those things and people whom we never meet. They shape our sense of right and wrong by providing hypotheticals and extreme examples. They give us a sense of the grinding, inexorable consequences of history as it is made outside the home.

So I guess I will say now just what my impulse is. I want to sit down with my kids. I want to get out a globe or an atlas. Show them Burma. Show them monks in photographs. Tell them about Buddhism. Tell them about colonialism. Tell them about governments that rule by force and governments that rule by laws, and how they both mix it up together. I want to tell them about the courage of these Burmese who are resisting. Tell them about the fears of those who are hiding in their houses and apartments, as well as the fears of those boys who are hiding behind the steel mesh of their helmets and behind their machine guns. I believe that the more honest talk we give our kids, the more we allow them to reframe and advance the conversation in their own lifetimes.

Maybe someday they will face a crackdown like the one the people of Burma face, but here in our own country, on our own streets. And maybe, unlike their Dad, they will know that, despite the risks, they need to join the crowd on the streets. Weapons or not.

Why Democrat Dad?

This blog will explore the intersection of politics and parenting. I invite other dads, moms, or anyone else who is interested, to contribute to the conversation. My intention is to write every day on some issue which connects politics with parenting.

Why "Democrat Dad"?

I am a citizen and a Democrat, and I believe that these are not mere labels. They are important aspects of myself.

Why is my political identity so important that I feel compelled to write a blog about it? Well, I believe that we all have a responsibility to take politics seriously.

Those of us worried or enraged or disillusioned about our country cannot simply escape, drop out, or (romantic as it sounds) "drop off the grid," without losing much of what we cherish about ourselves.

I agree with Aristotle here (see his Politics) that human beings, choosing to exist outside of their community, are abdicating part of themselves. They are living as either "god or beast" -- the lives of monks or hermits, but not something that is recognizable to me.

My values are informed by the opinions of others; and this is not a point of shame. We are social creatures. We respond to praise and blame. Our participation in society is a pre-condition of language and a basis for morality.

I am enamored of our country and its laws. When I think of it... when I picture the whole whirring, clicking machine going like crazy on any given day... I am inspired to believe the best of my fellow-citizens and our future, all over again.

Through multiple decisions at many municipal, state and federal levels, through checks and balances of the different branches of government, through experments in legislation taking place concurrently in the states and in Washington D.C., through elections for offices ranging from a seat on the local school board to the Presidency of the United States -- through all of this never-ceasing activitiy -- our system of law provides what I like to think of as a perfect fit.

Think of it as a complex, ever-adjusting, digital map of the analog curve of our collective needs. And it is all thanks to the best "software" ever designed for the organizing of human beings and their diverse interests: the Constitution.

I am a citizen of this country, and proud of it. And politically, I am a member of the Democratic Party.

Hence, Democrat Dad.

Please join me. I look forward to thinking through parenting from a political perspective -- with you as my fellow-parents and fellow-citizens. Fellow Democrats of course are invited. Republican Dads and Moms too! Let's get started!