Her hoarding was a manifestation of what psychiatrists called “German war baby syndrome.”  A darker, sadder example, again from years past, was a friend’s German husband, his father killed on the Eastern Front, who spent his childhood foraging for scraps of food in American G.I. trash bins.  Brilliant, charismatic, he had a lucrative business career in the United States as well as his much-loved American family–who, nevertheless, he deprived of the day-to-day necessities in order to build a financial bulwark against possible future catastrophe.  His life did not end well.

When I think about evil, I remember these two American immigrants.  Their lives are a reminder that evil acts grow long tentacles deep into, far into, the future, sometimes with incidental effect (the Belgian woman), sometimes with tragic (my friend’s husband).  This woman and this man were good people, whose adult minds, choices and actions were shaped by a German war of aggression long-since history.

This is the significance of Chechnya in the lives of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers who perpetrated the horrific violence that began with their pressure-cooker bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon.  Before emigrating to the United States, neither brother ever lived in Chechnya. Neither was born there. But they were ethnic Chechens, their parents part of the diaspora fleeing the homeland.  And the misery and violence, death and destruction–the evil–executed by Russia against Chechnya has now extended tendrils here, to America.

What grievance has Chechnya against America? None.  In the early days of the post-Soviet oppression of the Chechens, we spoke out against Russia’s actions.  But violence begets violence (Chechens have executed blood-soaked terrorist attacks against Russians, in reply). Grievance has been implanted.  And a shard of that grievance, understandably a component of every Chechen’s identity, was embedded in the Tsarnaev brothers’ violence.  Precisely where embedded, we do not yet know. To the extent a reflexive sense of grievance was a prime mover for the Tsarnaev act of terrorism, we do not know.  We may never know.

But the lesson here is vigilance against, and respect for, the long arm of evil. The effects of Russian brutality against Chechnya have now extended as far as an iconic American sports event.  Today I am reminded of Martin Luther’s declaration, in his great hymn in praise of and reliance on God, that nevertheless–but still “Our ancient Foe/doth seek to work us woe; His [Satan's] wrath and power are great, and armed with cruel hate, on earth is not his equal.”

The second lesson the Tsarnaev brothers teach us is the importance of family.  Theirs was dysfunctional, primarily because the head of the family, their father, returned to Russia (specifically the subject state of Dagestan), leaving his impoverished wife and children to fend for themselves in a place where they were not acculturated and not feeling part of a community.  (At some point, the brothers’ mother, although separated from her husband, also moved to Dagestan.)  There is a grim story here–and we do not yet have it–but we know there is a fuller account because so far the pieces we have do not fit together. 

Recently, Charles Murray has written about the decline of the American working class, using a lower middle class Boston neighborhood as one of his case studies in Coming Apart.  His is a compelling work, which has generated much discussion and some controversy.  But who, from the disputants to Murray himself, could have dreamed that his sobering analysis of joblessness, single parenthood and the weakening of familial, church and other community ties would find its Boston apotheosis not in, say, a meth epidemic but a killing spree tinged with colors of Islamic jihad? 

The Tsarnaev brothers have acted out Murray’s thesis, nevertheless.  Young people cannot thrive without two structures:  a job, or working/studying towards one that is a likely prospect; a community, with all the social and cultural expectations and strictures upon which a sense of community is built, including a strong belief in marriage and support of children as bedrock.

The third lesson we should take from Boston this week is more complicated–more complicated for one reason.  So far, we Americans have not been able to face it.  What is the lesson? 

The deleterious effects of individualism are waxing, not waning, in our society.

Allow me a few paragraphs to explain.

A frequent comment about the Tsarnaev brothers and their violence is that they are representative of the larger problem of alienation, and particularly the alienation of young men, in America today.  On the surface, this appears to be an apt observation.  Certainly, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar felt alienated. Their postings on social media, Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, are testimony.

But when we place the brothers in a larger context, this argument for alienation as the prime mover for their terrible actions falls apart.  During the Great Depression, a decade of much greater joblessness and social upheaval, through forced migration (the Dust Bowl and other foreclosing on farms and homes), there was no talk of personal alienation as a reason for, say, the prevalence of small-town bank robberies.  In short, there was no excuse–no quarter given to explanation–however dire one’s personal circumstance, for bad acts.

An even more revealing comparison is with the Tea Party.  I have a few acquaintances in the Tea Party. I have written about the Tea Party.  Every day I get a plethora of emails from Tea Party groups and individuals.  And if you credit one thing that I tell you, take this:  there are no more alienated people in the United States today than Tea Partiers. Betrayed by the Republican leadership. Maligned in the mainstream press and by the liberal elites who shape much of our shared culture.  

Alienated, yes.  Bomb-throwers, no.  The various and sundry American Tea Parties and their members have used the rights of the American public square–the right of assembly, the right of free speech, the right to organize and to vote–to express their sense of grievance.  And the same can be argued for the Occupy Movement.

Therefore, alienation cannot be the prime mover of the violent acts of the Tsarnaev brothers and the other young American men perpetrating mass violence in recent years.  A lot of people in America are alienated, and yet they do not hurt others.

A second look at the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement reveal some significant differences.  Tea Partiers are mostly older folk.  The Occupy Movement was full of artists who by disposition were drawn to street theater, free-form and chaotic, and to anarchist manifestos, as ways to express grievance.

Public safety in numbers?  Yes, in a way.  Sometimes crowd mentality leads to violence, but more often the group constrains the individual impulse.  For surely over time the Tea Party and Occupy have attracted homicidal outliers, and yet the power of the group has contained personal behaviors.

The Tsarnaev brothers, however, were not part of a group.  Had they been, say, members of a local Muslim youth organization, however inflammatory and anti-western the group discussions, likely theirs would have been a different journey. 

What the Tsarnaev brothers did draw upon, however, was modern individualism, that sense of entitlement to personal expression, that need to be Somebody, or at least to get recognition for accomplishment or injury.  Individualism is an infection gone rampant in American culture–one that my father’s generation, the Greatest Generation who grew up in the Depression and fought the Nazis–would hardly fathom.

I can hear my father and his friends now.  You don’t like what’s happening to you? Suck it up. Shoulder your responsibilities.

My generation, and perhaps because we Baby Boomers are the bridge between the Greatest and the Offspring we have raised, have lived the shift in consciousness.  An example I often give is President Kennedy’s address to the nation, post-Sputnik, that we were now in a space race with Russia and therefore must concentrate more in math and science in our schools.  At that time, I was a student at a girls’ school where, perhaps because the curriculum was weak in math and science, none of us liked those subjects.

But it never occurred to any of us that our disinterest in math and science was a reason not to follow our President’s dictum.  Our personal desires were of no matter. We never thought–the idea never crossed our minds–that not liking what we were asked to do could, should or would factor in.  And so a generation of young Americans mastered at least the rudiments of math and science.  That was how we had been raised:  the needs and desires of adults, family, community always came first.

There have been many, disparate examples lately of this shift in attitude and behavior.  One I have been pondering is the life and death of Aaron Swartz, a young digital prodigy who founded Reddit, among many other accomplishments, and yet committed suicide a few months ago.  At the time, he was under federal indictment on several counts of fraud and computer fraud.  Many of you readers will never have heard of Swartz.  Among digital, media and political elites, he has been a cause celebre, his death a rallying cry for Internet freedom, a cry stoked by the conviction that, despite his long-time, severe and chronic clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, the Feds hounded him to death.

If you would like to know more, here is a link to Larissa MacFarquhar’s dispassionate profile in The New Yorker (March 11, 2013).  [Update:  Google the article. For some reason, the link does not work.]

This disturbs me about Aaron Swartz.  As a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Ethics, he obtained guest library privileges at nearby M.I.T.  While visiting M.I.T., he illegally downloaded via the M.I.T. web portal a large cache of academic articles not available for free to the general public.  For this act, among a few others, he was arrested.

This was a solitary act. Swartz did not consult others.  This was a clandestine act (computer hid in a janitorial closet).  This act was hallmark Swartz:  the kind of brilliant computer manipulation for which he was known.

What this was not was an act that benefits American society.  Although Swartz was (presumably) being paid by Harvard to contemplate ethics, and although he was merely a guest at M.I.T., he pre-empted ethical and communal choices to do his own thing.  He did not bring what he considered an injustice (having to pay for knowledge) to the attention of M.I.T.  He did not try to rally students around his conviction.  He took a shortcut that necessitated a detour around the public square–that public square with its rights of assembly and speech and voting mentioned earlier–that square at the center of who we are as a nation.

Despite his intellect, furthermore, Swartz never talked to academic journals, never inquired why they charge for content, never looked into the reasons behind the processes by which academics share original research.

These actions–inquiry and marshaling forces–require time and work and cooperation.  They can be tedious and frustrating.  Therefore, the lone act is a beguiling temptation, particularly for young men who, like Aaron Swartz, were born to privilege in upper middle class America and who always found doors opening easily and wide.  Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker profile of him is an outlier because, unlike the hagiography of Swartz on wikipedia (a nota bene if there ever was one to beware wikipedia) and elsewhere, hers is a skeptical and less than laudatory account (and revealingly not cited in wikipedia).

Although the Tsarnaev brothers’ background and means of expression, and those of Aaron Swartz, could hardly be more different, the similarity of impulse is striking and also troubling for our country.  The three young men were driven by convictions fueled by a sense of self entitlement, detached from empathy, detached from concern for consequence, detached from a sense of attachment to and respect for their surroundings, for our larger society and its embedded rules of order.

The Tsarnaev brothers, and Aaron Swartz to some extent, take me back in time to the Weather Underground.  Remember them? The white children of American privilege who in the 1960s and 1970s turned to the message delivery system of terrorism, setting off bombs as an expression of their anger with the U.S. government.  Several blew themselves up, as well as their Greenwich Village townhouse (next door to Dustin Hoffman’s), instead of the military officers’ dance for which they were making the bombs. 

Looking back now, the Weathermen appear bizarre and delusional.  How could such well-educated young men and women think they could overthrow the government of the United States of America?

How could Aaron Swartz, a fellow at a Harvard institute who had never acquired even an undergraduate college degree, imagine that he could change the process by which professional academics with Ph.D.s add their increments of learning and research to the larger body of knowledge?

How could Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev believe that they, too, were making a statement, one that would be heard above and beyond the noise and smoke of their bombs?

How?

All these young people thought they had the truth. They were beacons of light in a sea of ignorance.  They were out to do their part to right the wrongs engendered by that ignorance.

Underpinning this cockamamie conviction is a feeling of superiority.  By our actions, by my action, I am going to teach you what’s what.

This would be a laughable delusion, except that in all three instances–the Weathermen, Aaron Swartz, the Tsarnaev brothers–consequences have been tragic.  This is the end to which our society’s enabling of that sense of entitlement in our youth can lead.

Now at this point you may be asking why I say that the Tsarnaev brothers felt superior.  After all, they were immigrants with strange names. Their parents struggled to make ends meet.  They lived in that “coming apart” working class Boston chronicled by Charles Murray.

It’s easy to see that young people educated at our top universities (Weathermen) and one of our computer geniuses (Swartz) might, even if unconsciously, feel superior. But Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?  They did not even know that there is a daily limit on an ATM withdrawal!

The Tsarnaev brothers Muslim heritage and faith gave them that sense of superiority. 

This is my final and most important point.  A lot of Islam went into the making of those pressure-cooker bombs.

And it is Islam that is most important in the Tsarnaev story because it is precisely that part we Americans as a society, together, cannot face.  Why? Because our national political dialogue, beginning with the leadership of President Obama, the remnant of our mainstream media that remains non-partisan, and our colleges & universities–all of which are largely secular–have an aversion to religion.

To those of us who worship God, this aversion is understandable.  It is a way of avoiding  thinking about the possibility that religious faith might be connected to something that is real, that is true, that is the ultimate prime mover.

In our pluralistic, multi-cultural America, moreover, it is all too easy to fall back on the bromides about all faiths being equal and all religions respected.  We have religious freedom. Indeed a good and great American right.  So go worship. If you want. Or not. End of story.

Here is the problem.  Islam is not one among many paths to God.  It is the higher way.  It is the superior faith, the purest revelation.  Even in tenth/eleventh-century Islamic Spain, rightly remembered as a golden age of learning and art, and one of tolerance, when Christians and Jews lived peaceably under the caliphs, Jews and Christians could not practice their faith as freely as Muslims.  Jews, Christians, Muslims–all dhimmi, “people of the Book [Bible]“–but Muslims first among the three.

Let me give you an example from my own experience.  In 2007 I attended a woman’s leadership forum in Amman, Jordan, hosted by Queen Rania.  At one of the discussions, the panelists were young Muslim western-dressed Jordanians, men and women both.  All had been born to wealth.  All had been educated at the top prep schools in England and America.  Now they were lawyers or studying to be lawyers.  One was currently a student at Harvard Law School.  The contingent of women from Toronto, Canada asked for the panelists’ expertise.  Toronto had recently defeated an initiative to pass a law based on a version of Sharia–but barely defeated.  How should they, as Toronto citizens and activists, handle this situation in the future?  Mistaking, utterly, the thrust of the question, the young Jordanian from Harvard calmly and matter-of-factly replied, “Don’t worry.  It will pass next time.  In time, Sharia will prevail.”

It was a moment of perfect perplexity.  A kind young man, he was trying to reassure and comfort the women from Toronto!

Now, of course, there are Christians who also believe ours is the superior faith.  But in western Christianity–and here is the crucial difference–there is an ongoing conversation, a back-and-forth full of questioning and argument and testimony, about “the way.” When Christians go astray–think Westboro Baptist Church–other Christians, the majority of Christians, speak out and even act against them.  And Christians at-large are not engaged in a global perversion of jihad.

Like many journalists who follow foreign affairs, when we learned that the explosive devices in Boston were pressure-cooker bombs, I strongly suspected a terrorist act inspired by Islamic teaching.  I knew that “suspect no. 2 in the white cap” was an Islamic jihadist when I saw, the minute the FBI released video, his neck scarf.  But I also knew that I would hear nothing about this on T.V. from the terrorist experts whom I have met and from whom I have learned and who therefore I knew knew what I knew.

It is an irony of our times that even as we live, most aware and thankful, in a country with constitutionally-protected free speech, we are silenced by political correctness.

But we need, as a nation, to be talking openly and honestly about Islam, even if that means asking dumb questions and shouting back-and-forth.  Ignorance and stupidity, after all, are the beginning of learning.

Our eschewing to bring debate about Islam into the public square is dangerous.  It is very dangerous.  I go so far to say that this willful avoidance is our greatest weakness today.  Our Achilles heel. 

Why?  Because this silence allows many of our Christian congregations to believe that Christianity and Islam are at war to the death.  This silence allows Muslim-American communities and mosques to keep silence, too. 

This conviction that we are engaged in final conflict, on the one hand, and community passivity, on the other, must be called out. Confronted. Checked.  Only from talking with one another, in the kind of conversation across cultural divides that America makes possible, challening one another, in the back-and-forth, will we grow in knowledge, learning from one another (even if we don’t want to admit it), figuring out, together, how secularism and religious faith can come together to confront this war of aggression in our own time.

Where are our political, military, academic and pastoral leaders here? I am particularly disappointed in the media, which has a powerful megaphone and therefore wields enormous influence.  Yes, most in media are secularists who wouldn’t know a Jesus parable from an Aesop’s fable. But there are Christians and Jews among them.

A profound ignorance of religious faith has characterized all the media coverage of Boston.  Of course, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a sweet boy.  Of course, Tamerlan had done some admirable things in his life.  They were good young men.  Only such as they seek a higher truth, desire a larger meaning to life–and so are drawn to God.

Their beliefs were perverted–still our ancient Foe/doth seek to work us woe–remember?  But such perversion is not going away–however much avoidance we practice–because it springs originally from something real and true and powerful, the wellspring of faith in God.  Another of course:  they were and are responsible for their actions, whatever the nature of our teleological universe. 

Mike Allen, Dave Weigel, Andrew Sullivan, Jon Meacham, even Cokie Roberts and Peggy Noonan–where are you here???  And don’t give me the excuses “I am too old,” “I am happy doing what I’m doing now,” because I am here to tell you that at age sixty-one I was called out of retirement to do something completely foreign to me, and I did it, and I contributed significantly to an ongoing conversation as a result.

Last week the Tsarnaev brothers armed themselves with the same cruel hate that Martin Luther knew five hundred years ago.  We will never be able to confront and oppose this particular manifestation of evil in our time, Islamic terrorism, until we, even the secular among us, take religion seriously and as a consequence bring Islam into the public square as a permissible subject for debate.

All of us know that random acts of violence inspired by Islamic jihad will continue.  What we must forestall–and seize the day now through knowledge and understanding–is that future young man or young woman, emboldened by a sense of entitlement and an assumption of superiority, who combines the brilliance and expertise of an Aaron Swartz (who never would have hurt a fly) with the violence of the Tsarnaev brothers.

April 23, 2013

This our nation’s 57th inaugural address is not what any of the former presidential speechwriters interviewed on TV over the last few days predicted.  Obama did not deliver what political wise ones, such as the men and women quoted in the Sunday New York Times, asked for from him.

A speech at once lofty and  yet anchored in a felicitous and therefore memorable sentence, as predecessors like FDR and Kennedy gave us?  That we know from history both Obama and his speechwriters have the ability and acumen to provide?

No.

On the contrary, despite the expected echoes of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King (Monday was MLK day, after all), Obama’s second inaugural struck some off-notes.  ”Peace in our time.”  Perhaps Obama was thinking about Eddie Money’s beautiful lyrics; but most people heard Neville Chamberlain.  All the more disconcerting because what we might call the “foreign policy” part of this inaugural address was a declaration that “the anchor of strong alliances” and renewing “those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad” will bring this peace in our time.

A speech that makes all listening Americans feel included?

No.

What could Obama have supposed 45% of his fellow Americans would make of this declaration:  ”we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.”  Conservatives are taking this straw-man construct as a slap-in-the-face.  Why?  Because this provocation is precisely the kind of false dichotomy that Obama wielded throughout his re-election campaign.  Why false?  Because no conservative, no Republican, is talking about changing entitlements for our current generation of elderly.

And Obama cannot resist a swipe at Mitt Romney here, with his comment that “our commitments we make to each other”  . . . “do not make us a nation of takers.”

A speech that otherwise eschews policy specifics?  Leaving the particulars of a second-term agenda to the upcoming State of the Union address?

No.

Who could have predicted that President Obama would take up the arms of speech on behalf of two of the most contentious issues, arising out of profoundly different world views, that divide our country today:  gay rights and climate change?  For me, Obama’s yoking of Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall was moving.  But I know many good people who will have found his naming of names, “our gay brothers and sisters,” alienating, threatening.

Climate change.  Wow.  We do not now at this point in this century have the technology to create low-cost, easy-to-use and therefore attractive (people will flock to use it) green energy–much less on a scale that could shift the climate patterns of a planet.

If Obama’s loving mention of gay Americans is much in keeping with the man as an incrementalist–after all, only four years ago he would not speak in favor of gay marriage–and reassuring to all thoughtful Americans precisely because the change is in character–then the lengthy disquisition on climate change and its connection to “the creed our [Founding] fathers once declared” is a cold clarion wake-up call both to Democrats (who have been whining for four years that Obama has not done enough) and to Republicans (who have been afraid of him from day one because they knew with a loser’s gut instinct that Obama would bring enormous change).

The chutzpah of the man.  The ambition.  The Caesar-like self-confidence.  The throwing down of the challenge.

Here is a president who always thought, in his gut, that he could heal the partisan divide.  And now he lays before our feet, at one of the most important moments of his presidency, his vision of America’s future that in both choice of subject matter and manner of delivery (lest people mistake his intent) was and is deeply divisive.

And yet.

Go back and read again this second inaugural.

We.  We.  We.  The recurring pronoun.  Along with its brothers and sisters:  our, together, one.

Obama’s second inaugural is a hymn to togetherness.

We gather to inaugurate.

We bear witness.

We affirm the promise.

We recall.

We hold.

We continue.

In a speech shot-through with anaphora, none is more striking than “together, we determined,” “together, we discovered,” “together, we resolved.”  What is striking is the rhetorical assurance of three assertions of working together that historically are true only in retrospect, from the distance of time.  Yes, we now have railroads and highways; we have financial regulation; we have a social safety net.  We did NOT, however, work together over the last two centuries to bring these developments to pass.  We were in furious opposition to one another, and these changes to the American landscape came about through  the messy and discordant clash of opposing forces, by trial and error, with profit and loss, in the refiner’s fire of tragedy and violence as well as the slower process of acceptance and adaptation.

What does it mean, therefore, that Obama misleads here?  That, at minimum, he’s got the history wrong.

Barack Obama has a vision that, like all visions, is not embedded in the actual facts on the ground.

This observation leads me to the most important element of his second inaugural address.  It is a profound testament of faith.

And I say this as someone who spent five years not that long ago reading many of the last wills & testaments that our eighteenth and nineteenth century American forebears recorded for posterity.  I say this as a Christian who has always lived in the American borderland and therefore straddles the gulf between our increasingly secular culture, empowered by the voices of coastal elites in media and entertainment, on the one hand, and the widespread renewal of our religious faith, already entrenched in our history, on the other.

Americans on both sides of the divide have doubted Barack Obama’s religious faith.  Some friends, usually but not always Democrats, say, “When Obama closes all his remarks with ‘God Bless America,’ he’s reading from a teleprompter.  He does not really believe what he is saying.  It’s politics.”  The underlying reasoning here:  Obama is highly intelligent and educated, just like me.  Ergo, just like me, he must at heart be a secularist, although he can never say so.

Other friends, usually but not always Republicans, say, “Obama is not really a Christian.  Unlike me, he is not churched.  He is a biblical illiterate who knows only the bit about brother’s keeper.  Unlike me, he does not have a wide and deep knowledge of Scripture.”  Ergo, he must at heart be a secularist, although for political reasons he can never say so.

Well, I am here to tell you that Barack Obama is a religious man.  If there is only one thing you keep in mind at all times about our president, let it be this.  He believes–let me say this more strongly–he has a quiet certainty that the Lord God our Creator has called him to lead us.

More than anywhere else lies, just here in his faith, his sense of affinity with Lincoln.  Like Lincoln, Obama is utterly disinterested in doctrine, in sectarian particulars.  Here is the crux of Obama’s always thinking about Lincoln.  And so language in this second inaugural echoes Lincoln’s second inaugural, his Gettysburg Address, his 1862 speech to Congress, and perhaps more revealingly, in his appropriation from Lincoln’s struggle to foresee a place for African-Americans in a post-slavery America, Lincoln’s often-used phrase “the wages of honest labor.”

Take away these Lincolnian allusions and the twenty-first century second-term to-do list, Obama’s second inaugural is a history lesson from a man who once was a teacher.  In implicit confrontation with the Tea Party, Obama, taking us to what he calls that “spare Philadelphia hall,” summons the Founding Fathers.  This second inaugural is an invocation of what Obama calls “our founding creed,” and Obama wields the word “creed” again and again.  This is the noun, among so many he could have chosen, that Obama associates with the actions of the great men of 1776.  A word imbued with religious association, declaration of faith, serious intent and its corollary action.

Creed.

The noun–the one word–from which everything else in this second inaugural arises.  What a bold choice from a man who, as I just observed, is utterly disinterested in doctrinal and sectarian particulars.  What a bold choice for man who knows full well that many of his influential supporters and his partisans among the media find the idea, much the reality, of “creed” anathema.

Central to our creed, as Obama sees it, is us, we the people, moving forward together as we continue to improve on the American political and social experiment.  Implicit to the word “creed,” however, is faith.  A creed has always been a set of religious beliefs–and never more so in history than among American immigrants who even now come here to practice faith according to creed unacceptable elsewhere.  At heart, this is what is so astonishing about Obama’s second inaugural.  His history lesson Monday is a declaration that faith in God is inextricably intertwined with our political heritage from the Founding Fathers, even as our Bill of Rights guarantees that every one of us is free to embrace the specific creed or set of beliefs of our choice.

The mind and character of Barack Obama are shaped by paradox.  This is one of his traits that makes him difficult to understand.  He is that rare individual who can hold in equilibrium, within himself, one idea or strategy or action and at the same time its opposite.

And, of course–really, need I say?–the conviction that the intent and actions of our Founder Fathers, as well as the documents they have bequeathed us, were and are inextricably part of a teleological universe–well, that’s a conservative view today.

In talking about the imperative of dealing with climate change, Obama says, “That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.  That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.”

The various presumptions in these two sentences!  Suffice to say, for my purposes here, that again Obama has intertwined divergence.  He has taken science and religion and history and ancestral devotion and made them same.

Portent.

What does Obama’s second inaugural mean for the future?  If anything?

You know how pundits and presidential historians have been predicting the arc of Obama’s second term.  The common observation:  Obama will have one year, at best eighteen months, to get anything done.   After that he is a lame duck.

Forget it.

Obama’s second term is going to be crammed with myriad launches, whether through executive orders or legislation or inchoate decision-making, to the end.  It is going to be a roiling experience, also because neither of the two assumptions Obama made in his second inaugural will hold.

“A decade of war is now ending.”

“The wages of honest labor [will] liberate families from the brink of hardship.”

No great power ever sees the end of war.  The American economy will continue to limp, and jobs will still be scarce.  Nobody will be happy.  Not Obama (anemic economy, coffins forever at Andrews Air Force Base).  Not the American people, who are going to be pissing mad at rising taxes, the chaos and cost in implementing ObamaCare.  Those of us who care about foreign policy will have to witness the tragic spectacle of an imploding Afghanistan, after we leave next year, when its neighbors move in for the kill.

But we will be living through four years of great change that will, I believe, make us Americans better prepared, firmly situated, tougher, to face what the rest of this century gives us.

Lest you think I am wrong, remember this second inaugural.  Obama’s force of will, his certainty, his resolve.  Above all, his religious faith.

We who have lived into the second decade of the twenty-first century know what religious faith can accomplish, for good and ill.  After all, it is the force that can move mountains.

January 22, 2013

It was not about money or jobs or the unemployment rate.  This was from the start a wrong assumption among our punditocracy and political operatives of both parties.  In his election night victory speech, Barack Obama said “our economy is recovering.”  I disagree, and I think most Americans were of the same mind when they voted Tuesday.

Nevertheless, we re-elected a man who has failed to deliver a robust economy and who continues, as in his Tuesday night speech, to over-promise.  We went out to vote Tuesday knowing in our gut—we are not fools!–that this new health care reform is going to cost us, cost all of us, rich and poor, more.  Nevertheless, we re-elected the prime mover of Obamacare.

We are a troubled nation, feeling for the first time in nearly a century powerless—unable to bridge our increasingly partisan divides, unsure what it will mean if, as we believe (true or not), China is supplanting us as the world’s superpower.

We thirst for leadership.  Sporadically, Obama has fed our need (killing Osama bin Laden, “rescuing” the auto industry).  And his demonstrable leadership ability was one reason he was re-elected.

But we wait for more.  We have been waiting, and ever since 9/11 we have been willing to do our part to strengthen the nation, to sacrifice for her.  And yet, except for our military and those young men and women who felt called to enlist in the past decade, we have waited in vain.  And now the moment of willingness for shared sacrifice to achieve a common end may have passed.

Does anybody not know that we need a new and large energy strategy involving hard choices?  That we need to improve—soon, sweepingly—the education of our young?  That we need to restructure entitlement spending, shifting more of our resources from our elderly to those very young who are our future?

Where has been the leadership here?  Certainly not from President Obama, in his first term.

And yet we re-elected him.  Why?  One reason, to which I alluded yesterday, was the strength of his get-out-the-vote grassroots organization, which has sealed change in the methodology of American politics going forward but also now reveals the growing influence of digital, information-rich resources.  Profound and questionable, because we cannot see where such access will take us.

But let’s step back for a minute and take a look at Iowa.  How could Obama possible have won Iowa? Comfortably.  Iowa is a more conservative state than it was in 2008.  Yes, the Obama campaign established then and has continued to run for the last four years a deep grassroots organization there.  But phone calls, canvasses and emails take a campaign only so far.  Americans are independent-minded, increasingly resistant, through over-exposure, to such outreach.

Why Iowa?  Why America?  Why Obama for four more years?

In the absence of canny leadership, we have had to find our own bearings, in an age of great change. Now maybe all ages are ones of “great change,” but the way in which ours is media-saturated and media-assaulted has made the experience acute, uncomfortable.

A multi-ethnic America—as never before, even though this is our heritage.  A diversely religious population.  A multi-lifestyle America, some of us welcoming gay rights, some of us not.

How do we find bearings in such a multitudinous landscape?  By finding common ground.

This was why Barack Obama won a second term.  Why Democrats held the Senate.  We Americans did not want this election to be about wedge issues:  abortion, marriage, illegal immigrant stances or the other life choices that separate us and that Republicans nevertheless have made their own.

This was why Mitt Romney lost.  Because he was a Republican.  However moderate he may be himself, he was running as a Republican, not in the party of Nelson Rockefeller but in the party of Darrell Issa.  He was tied to these divisive issues that a majority of Americans reject.

However, I can see the mass consciousness of our pundits and pols slowly reaching an awareness tinged with irony over the next few years.  Barack Obama is going to be much less moderate than a president Romney ever would have been.  We are in for four stormy years as Obama tends not to his legacy (you know a cable TV pundit understands nothing about Obama when he or she suggests this) but to the completion of remaking the nation so we can better face the challenges of this century.  This was the job that he feels God called him to do.

More on Obama next.  I will try to write about him over the weekend.  Meanwhile, before reader agitation sets in, back to the present and the mundane.

This was the sense and sensibility election.  Our realization that we need, whether we like it or not, to share the field for values.  First and foremost, this is who we are as Americans:  a people who sometimes hospitably but most often grudgingly find a way to live with people not like us.

This core dynamic of American life and history is one that today’s Republican Party has forgotten.  In a curious way, the Republican Party has returned to its radical roots, to its character in the days of its founding by Evangelical Christians, who in the nineteenth century were, almost by definition, Abolitionists.

Americans are not absolutists, as the Abolitionists were.  I have been re-reading Eric Foner’s careful accounting of Abraham Lincoln’s slow and circuitous decades-long journey towards the Emancipation Proclamation, The Fiery Trial, Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.  Lincoln was not an Abolitionist, even though he abhorred slavery, precisely because he was ever aware of the need to find common ground in life and politics, even with Southern slaveowners.

From the need to find common ground had grown a nation.

Why do you suppose so many towns from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, our first westward expansion, are laid out along the same plan?  Almost all have a central square, in the Roman model, with a neoclassical public building, usually a courthouse, in the middle of the square.  Often these squares were finished long before the streets were paved or the town paid for a central water supply.

This pattern is particularly striking when you consider that the men who built these towns in this way were usually pioneers, not well-educated in the sense of the day (a classics & divinity education back East), usually only a generation or at most two from familiarity with the twisting and turning narrow streets of the European medieval towns from which they, their parents and grandparents had come.

What did this mean?  What is it here, so central to who we are, that the Republican Party has lost?

Let’s zero in on the town of Bolivar, in the now very conservative red state of Tennessee.  Today Bolivar is a blip on the map, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was the richest town between Nashville and the Mississippi River.  I know it well and can easily travel back in time there through all my family’s diaries and letters.  One day an Irish Catholic bought land in Hardeman County, purchased slaves and through both instant declarations of wealth planted himself among the town elite.

The earlier settlers (by a decade) were flummoxed.  They had already had to accommodate themselves to each other—English settlers who loved everything British and Scots-Irish settlers who loathed their English persecutors, back home, and therefore supported Napoleon and the French.  But at least they were all Protestants!  And now they had to accept a Catholic family, too?

It took some time.  But the ground for inclusion had been laid.  All nineteenth-century American settlers had a historical memory so destructive and violent that it lasted viscerally down the generations until the Civil War.

The religious wars in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and the continued persecution of Protestants like Presbyterians and Quakers well into the eighteenth century, had brought these families to North America.  Back home, men and women slaughtered one another over small differences in belief, over doctrinal controversy about the Eucharist, the role of Scripture, the means to salvation.

All so pointless to the more pragmatic English, French, Scots, Welsh, Irish Protestant (and later Irish Catholic) and Germans who had the opportunity to leave all that behind.

But they could not leave behind the prejudices by which they had been raised and taught.

And so to further and to cement the American enterprise—an endeavor that could lead a man to a sense of ownership and independence that no common man in the Old World could have imagined—these our first settlers built town squares as public spaces, like the Roman forum, where all men could come together, secure even in their differences of opinion and faith, because of the rule of law that the town square stood for.

The American town square was the ground of shared, pragmatic values:  the rule of law above all, the possibility of prosperity that the rule of law sustains, accommodation to difference in belief, because other actions lead away from prosperity.

These towns were the center of a largely agricultural world of barter, shared physical undertaking and the connectedness cemented by the byzantine maze of loans that fueled a seasonal economy, loans obtained from those wealthier than you and given to those below you, all on a handshake.

It is hard for us now to fathom such a world—a paternalistic one, furthermore—where it was the height of honor both to take on a loan from a wealthier man and to give one at the same time to a poorer one.  (It is not hard for us to understand the depth to which these pioneer farmers and planters distrusted banks.)

But this was the patterning of our nineteenth-century growth as a nation that has stayed with us, that has remained, even as these early towns have declined and decayed, so that this pragmatic impulse to inclusiveness, to the need to find common ground, to beware the extremist edges, determined the presidential election of 2012 and some of the senatorial contests these two centuries later.

The town square and what it stood for, the sure sense that it was the bulwark of both prosperity and something larger shared, if not named, among men of diverse backgrounds and beliefs, was also the counterweight to a different but equally important dynamic in the settling of North America.

If many of our first settlers were pragmatists, others were fierce believers in their particular faith who were sure that they had been called to the New World to establish that city on the hill, the New Jerusalem, where men could at last have the freedom from outside interference to create a social compact in harmony with God’s Will.

The Puritans of Plymouth Rock.  The Puritans of the southern and lesser end of the Virginia Colony who were my own ancestors.  The Scots-Irish of North Carolina.  New Harmony, Indiana. Any of the religious utopian communities that grew up in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.  Secular utopian communities would follow, from Nashoba (a failed experiment in whites and freed slaves living and farming together) to The Farm, perhaps the best known of the hippie communes to arise out of the foment of the late 1960s.

In its essence, incorruptible, the New Jerusalem can never be a city of man.  It is the City of God, which Christians believe they will inhabit in the next world.  This tenet of faith, which all Christians hold, has not stopped us from trying to build it on earth.  Again and again and again.  The soaring cathedrals of Europe represent this yearning.  Oliver Cromwell’s England.  The New England Puritans’ rejecting all rites and rituals, even the celebration of Christmas, which they believed un-Christian.

Today the Puritans’ strictures strike us, unpleasantly, as fanatical and narrow-minded.  But these were religious beliefs for which they had been willing to face exile and death.  They were central not only to the practice of their faith but to their conception of human community itself.

Many of my Presbyterian ancestors did not dance and kept silence on Sunday. These faith practices were just as important to them as the abjuration of abortion and homosexual practice is to Christian Evangelicals today.

All these strictures of faith, set as bulwarks, seen as foundation stones of any human community in which they conceivably might live, from 1620 through 2012, have been absorbed, one by one, into the larger, more complex and protean America that a nation built by successive waves of immigrants from everywhere was always going to be.

Inherent always in First Concept, Freedom—here on these shores far from Europe we are free to practice religion as we please—has been the corollary of freedom.  If I am free to be a Puritan, then you are free to be a Muslim.  Both of us may not like it, but our neighbor is free to be an atheist.

Today’s Republican Party, however, has found itself stuck to one of these American cycles of New Jerusalem religious yearning.  But history shows (and church history always warns) that these attempts to bind a force like community—which by its very nature, growing, living, dying, changing is a force—to particulars of faith fail.

My sixteenth and seventeenth-century Puritan and Scots-Irish ancestors?  They never reckoned on the corollary.  But their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren lived it.  After the first immigrant generation, more and more in each subsequent generation moved away from the faith practices of their ancestors.  Some of my Virginia colony forebears got it right away:  if my parents came here to be free to practice Puritanism, then I am free, too–to do as I please.  And I do not want to be a Puritan.

Reading the letters, diaries and last wills and testaments (the will distributed property, usually down to the last nail; the testament was a last testament of faith) of my maternal ancestors, I have been struck by the patterns of religious faith.  Through the Revolutionary War generation and up until the 1820s, many were devout Christians, doctrinally observant, reading the Bible regularly.

By the time so many of them came to Bolivar and other farms and towns in the Old Southwest, the land east of the Mississippi River and south of the Ohio?  Not so much.  Everybody believed in God—that was a given—but few went to church regularly or read the Bible every day or proselytized.  The general feeling seemed to be that the older generations had done enough praying and practicing to last for awhile.

Astonishingly, I can look down the generations from my greatgreatgreatgreatgrandmother Drusilla Lane, whose first husband fought in the Revolutionary War, and who was a devout Christian, and I cannot find another Christian of serious faith and practice until my own time.  And now, in my generation, in my extended family, there are dozens of Evangelical Christians.

I point this out as a way to illustrate the hard truth that it is not going to be easy for the Republican Party to expand beyond its base.  What observers now call the Fourth Great Awakening swept through this country in the 1970s and 1980s and it is still a living fire.  It will be several generations before the descendants of these Evangelical Christians, with different experience later in this century, will build anew on the old foundation.

November 9, 2012

First and foremost, Americans cannot be bought.

Despite all the doomsday punditry about the Super PACs and the 6 billion spent this election cycle, we Americans are not taken by the hand and led into the voting booth by political ads and tweets.

Remember that, Linda McMahon, should you think about trying to buy a Connecticut Senate seat for a third time.  Remember that, billionaire Sheldon Adelson.  Your millions given to the Romney campaign have been humbled before the ornery self-determination of the American voter from the Age of Jacksonian Democracy forward.

Let me pause for a few caveats here.  Sheldon Adelson is not a crank.  Democrats should think hard about Adelson’s op-ed piece on how it came to pass that a Jew who grew up poor and Democrat on New York’s Lower East Side left the party.

Second caveat.  American democracy has a long history of vote-buying.  The Clinton campaign handed out “walking-around money” to precinct workers in her battle against Obama to win the South Carolina Democratic primary in 2008.  That same year older North Carolinians reminisced to me about the days when their votes could be bought for twenty dollars and a shot of whiskey.  Ward heelers passing out the bucks and the booze fueled the great party machines of the twentieth century and enabled city bosses from Daley in Chicago to Crump in Memphis to keep tenacious hold on power.

If anything, the rise in political spending and its spread through multiplying media (2012 is the first Twitter presidential election) have inured many American voters to influence.

Third caveat.  Political money is one of the forces chipping away at our personal privacy—and somewhere down the road, there will be a reckoning.  It may come as soon as a full account (and there will be one) of the depth of the Obama campaign voter data base and how campaign operatives acquired personal information about individual voters.  There will be a backlash felt by future campaigns.

Personally, I felt the chilling effect this campaign cycle when I received several emails from Obama informing me (first email) that there are ten voters in the United States with the first name “Mayhill.”  In the second email, last week, “Obama” (obviously, he does not send out these emails himself) told me how many of these Mayhills had already voted.

Done with the caveats.  This piece is not supposed to be a downer but a celebration.

Second reason for celebration.  We almost elected a Mormon.

And we did elect a Hindu, our first, Tulsi Gabbard, who will represent Hawaii in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat.

Four years ago, Romney’s Mormonism was one of the reasons he did not get the Republican presidential nomination.  This year his church did not matter.

Although I have said “Forward” was a lame slogan for Obama’s second presidential campaign, maybe I should eat crow.  For we have strode forward here.

In so many ways, we Americans feel stuck-in-place, battered and cornered by opposing economic forces (the simultaneous needs to spend, in order to be globally competitive, and yet to cut our deficit spending), lethargic about national decline.

But here in 2012 we see further movement along a road that has always been central to the American experience.  So many of our ancestors (and yes, recent immigrants, as well) came here for religious freedom.  That fact is not just an old chestnut of American history that my generation (if not current ones) learned in grade school.

My maternal ancestors were English Puritans, Scots-Irish Presbyterians persecuted by the Church of England, and French Huguenots, forced to leave France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  After Thanksgiving, I will be visiting my younger daughter in the Netherlands, and I plan to spend a day in Leiden, retracing the footsteps of my English Puritan ancestors during their Dutch sojourn, before Dutch Protestantism turned inhospitable and they decided to sail for the New World.

Whoever I am, a woman of this modern century and the last, I am in part chiseled from first American bedrock:  the imperatives of faith.

Of course, my ancestors never dreamed of Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims sharing the American landscape of religious freedom.  Likely, they knew nothing of such faiths.  They didn’t take kindly to Catholics (indeed nineteenth and twentieth-century American politics is shot through with anti-Catholicism).  They knew Deists and atheists.  An ancestor, Ezekiel Polk (grandfather of President James Polk), was thrown out of North Carolina for his atheism.  Polk’s will shows him to have been a believer in God and probably a Deist; nevertheless, the powerful Presbyterian divines of North Carolina told Ezekiel to pack up and move west.

Isn’t it ironic how every generation of Americans who arrive on these shores fails to recognize the consequence of religious freedom?

If I can practice my faith as I please, others who follow after me can, too.

This is a dynamic with which we Americans struggle, and sometimes our presidential elections mark our progress toward this truth.  The election of Catholic John Kennedy in 1960 was one such moment.  To think now that my parents worried over voting for Kennedy because he might take orders from the Pope!

Perhaps the struggle is a necessary part of American tolerance, in that this our core is a living thing, protean and not easily handled by its very nature.

So today we celebrate the fact that this time around Mormonism was not a factor in Romney’s defeat.  We celebrate the election of Tulsi Gabbard, who also, by the way, is the first of two American female combat veterans to be elected to Congress.  The other is new Illinois U. S. congresswoman-elect Tammy Duckworth.

And a little reminder here to those intrepid but foolish friends and family who bet me that Romney would win, when I have been trying to tell you since last election day that Barack Obama would serve two terms, and certainly I have been writing since then from the point of view of my certainty.

What is the reminder?  Didn’t I predict four years ago that our first female president will be someone who served in Iraq?  So keep your eyes on Tulsi and Tammy.

Final note:  the title of today’s piece comes from “Election Day, November, 1884” by Walt Whitman:

“This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now,

I’d name—the still small voice vibrating—America’s

choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the

main, the quadriennial choosing,)”

The Election of 1884 was just as nasty as ours in 2012.  Grover Cleveland, not destined for greatness, was elected president.  Whitman’s party, the Republican Party of Lincoln, was now suddenly out of power for the first time in two decades.  But Whitman found cause for celebration.

November 7, 2012

The media wants the presidential and vice-presidential debates to be contests—naturally, the media shapes the upcoming evenings so—because pundits and reporters need stories.  And the best stories arise from conflict.

That is not how I see this particular presidential election.  To use the old metaphor of the forest and the trees, this 2012 election has been full of trees:  Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain, egoistic Donald Trump and mild Mike Huckabee, ObamaCare and the Catholic Church, Catholic Rick Santorum, the Republican war on women, politicians’ traditional wives, the (first version) Democratic platform, percentage (1%, 99%, 47%) as a continuing meme, the monthly jobs statistics (another percentage), the rise of the SuperPac, money money and more money, the endless Obama fundraisers and tin-cup email rattlers, gaffes, a chair—and a weariness, out here in the heartland, with anything having to do with foreign affairs.

These are a few trees.  And not to forget the mud-slinging from both sides that all too often descended to the level of Nazi accusation.

The forest?

The Obama Presidency has not finished.

Now this may seem like a strange observation.  And certainly the 2012 Obama Campaign slogan “Forward!” captures its lackluster performance, especially compared to four years ago—but Forward—if ever there were an adverb shaping the vote—it is precisely, on point, here.  Forward.

The American people have lost faith in going forward, in the possibility of doing so, but we have this leader, this president, who, whatever his faults—and they are many—believes that we can.

Maybe we don’t share that energy, but we are curious, still, if less fervently, to see where Barack Obama tries to take us next.  In our gut, we know we can not go back, return to the past.  Maybe Obama will get nowhere, maybe we will refuse to be persuaded, but he held out too much promise four years ago for us to be done with him yet.

Counterintuitive, but the truth.

Let’s be clear about one more thing.  Obama’s second term will suck.  Why?  Because the two major achievements of his first term—health insurance reform and extricating us from unpopular land wars—have consequences.

As ObamaCare is slowly implemented, everybody is going to be pissed off, angry in many directions, from the higher costs and taxes we ALL will pay to the difficult adjustments the formerly uninsured will have to make to the realities of modern medicine: no such thing anymore as “keeping your own doctor;” the various burdens of responsible medicine, such as coordination of care, fall upon the patient.  And that’s just the beginning.

Whether we will or no, increasingly we will have to watch the fallout from our leaving Iraq and Afghanistan.  Already this is not a pleasant picture.  Slowly, Iraq is becoming a client state of Iran, which at this very moment is using Iraqi air space as a conduit for supplying the beleaguered Assad regime in Syria.  As for Afghanistan, we are already seeing the consequences of our 2014 departure:  regeneration of the Taliban, Afghan soldiers, whom we have paid and trained, murdering American soldiers, the further deterioration of our relationship with Pakistan, and finally Afghanistan’s devolution into a failed state, where its neighbors Iran and China, Russia through its ‘stan proxies, and of course Pakistan v. India, move in to establish spheres of influence—the better to avail themselves of Afghanistan’s vast natural resources.

And that’s just for starters in Obama’s difficult second term.  I believe that he will take on entitlement reform.   Why?  Because Obama measures himself against our great presidents, from Lincoln to Reagan, and he knows that he will never be judged as such unless he lays the groundwork for getting our fiscal house in order.  Who will feel most betrayed?  His fellow Democrats.

I could go on, but really this piece is supposed to belong to Mitt Romney.

In 2012, the tree is the historical force embodied in Barack Obama.  But the tree has many rings—to continue my analogy—and the inner rings, if not the outer bark, are layers of Romney himself:  his comments about the 47% of Americans who—presumably, he meant who don’t pay income taxes—a campaign-ender right there; his insult to the British before the summer Olympics—another campaign-killer, because first and foremost we Americans recoil from leaders who embarrass us abroad; his awkwardness on the campaign stump; his perfectly dreadful, horrendously awful campaign (I could go on adjectiving), which has allowed millionaire, prep-schooled, Ivy Leagued, privileged Obama claim the high ground on wealth and money-making.

The heart of the tree—this big picture I’m creating of the 2012 presidential election—is the American people.  We ourselves.  Increasingly, we are not the three things that today say Republican:  old, white, rigid.  And by rigid I mean rigidly doctrinal (historically, we have been an accommodating people), rigidly observant of the law (here is where Obama gets it wrong, for we have not succeeded as a nation of small businesses “playing by the rules”), rigidly purging, in this case within a political party.

What we are is resigned.  Neither Obama nor Romney sees this.  As leaders, perhaps they can not, will not, see this.  Perhaps it is better that way—lest they, too, lose faith.  But we already know the jobs are not coming back—not in our lifetime, and in our grandchildren’s only if the American public education system undergoes a convulsive revolution.  We know that income inequality is here to stay—that’s the power of globalism.  We are already adjusting to a lower standard of living.  Certainly, that is the case with my generation, the Baby Boomers, who, if with ghoulish humor, have already moved on from the loss of money put away over a lifetime of work in tax-deferred retirement savings accounts.

A revealing statistic put forward last week at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York—and I apologize that I cannot recall which head of an NGO so remarked—is that only 4% of young Americans, when asked in a study by the NGO, said they would be interested in starting their own businesses.  Abroad, almost 50% of young people responded affirmatively.

In this new world of the twenty-first century, where we Americans are no longer going to be the people, de facto, at the top of the pecking order, we and our leaders have adjustments to make.  I have just mentioned a few that we citizens have already accomplished, and are accomplishing, on our own.

Furthermore, we know, even if the media (using a broad brush here) and many politicians do not, that leader and the led do not have to be in sync.  Mohamed Morsi, the new president of Egypt understands this, and I hope to write about him and his revealing Q & A with former President Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative—soon.

But today a leader must be nimble.  This is the ring of the tree that fascinates me the most, because it is formed through an appreciation of inter-connectedness and a willingness to keep re-learning, both of which success in a globalist world requires, and which Obama has mastered and Romney has not.

The dark side of this ability, this awareness, is a moral ruthlessness that, for all his position-trimming in politics and business-restructuring at Bain, Romney, unlike Obama (his increasing reliance on drone strikes, for example), does not possess.  (The most astute piece I have ever read on Romney touches here.  Nicholas Lemann’s “Transaction Man” in the October 1, 2012 New Yorker.)

At the Clinton Global Initiative last week, Romney delivered a lovely speech.  He reminded me very much of Hillary Clinton at the end of the campaign trail, acknowledging a looming loss by reaching deep inside to touch base with whatever commitment and passion had set the first journey.  Therefore, Romney embodied a centeredness that day (just as Hillary Clinton had, at the end)—a centeredness that Obama, speaking at  Clinton Global a few hours later, just after his UN defense of free speech, lacked.

At CGI, Romney delivered a paean to free enterprise.  Entrepreneurship.  Social enterprise.  Freedom.  The dignity that comes from work.  The freedom to build your own life.  Romney spoke about Americans’ sense that our foreign aid is not effective, that it is vitiated by corruption.  “For American foreign aid to become more effective, it must embrace the private sector,” Romney said.

There was only one problem with Romney’s speech.  He did not realize that he was speaking to a room full of powerful people who had already, before him, reached the same conclusion.  He had no idea that the Clinton Global Initiative, increasingly, partners with global businesses instead of non-profits to effect change.  Just the day before at CGI, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had said, speaking to a room peppered with NGOs, that the State Department was moving away from channeling our foreign aid through NGOs (where much of money spent here on employees and reports rather than on target population in the Third World) and looking to partner more cost-efficiently with American business.

There at CGI was Willard Mitt Romney in essence:  an honorable man who has come to terms with losing but who believes still in free enterprise.  Maybe he will never wrap his mind around the fact that his entire campaign was founded on a wrong presumption:  that Americans care first of all about the economy.  This is particularly ironic, because Romney understands business much better than Obama ever will.  To my mind, undoubtedly I will say, Romney would make a much better president for the small business community—just in terms of restoring their confidence and encouraging expansion, borrowing and hiring.

But Romney, as his speech at CGI showed, is also walking a step or two behind.  He is, after all, a man of the last century.

October 3, 2012

I have kept these men and women at the heart of my Twittter feed as a reminder to myself that they–whatever the frustrations they feel now, whatever their dark impulses, and let me tell you, the anti-Copt sentiment in Egypt even among people we would call liberals runs deep–nevertheless, they are the future.  Why?  Because by mid-century over half the world population will be Muslim.  Why?  Because the arc of history for this century, unlike the last, is bending away from secularism and materialism and towards faith.  Yes, the Islamic world–whatever that means, for the cultures and countries are various–is grappling with an inheritance of western values–both burdensome and wished-for.  But it is they, and not us in the West, and specifically in the (still) remaining one world power the United States, who will define for this new century “liberty” and “human rights.”

A harbinger of this new dynamic played itself out today at the Clinton Global Initiative meet-up in New York City.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke this morning at her husband’s annual event–to wide applause, both from attendees and also from (most unusually and some would say unprofessionally) the press.  While I was listening to Hillary Clinton, I was scrolling through link after link on Twitter, posted from the Arab and Muslim world, to an op-ed piece, below the fold, written by Pankaj Mishra for today’s New York Times. 

Here are a few of Mishra’s observations:

“It is as though the United States, lulled by such ideological foils as Nazism and Communism into an exalted notion of its moral power and mission, missed the central event of the 20th century:  the steady, and often violent, political awakening of peoples who had been exposed for decades to the sharp edges of Western power.”  As a historical argument, this is simplistic, in that weaker nations and ethnic groups were also exposed to the sharp edges of Soviet power.

But Mishra goes on to observe, accurately, as I think we all realize now, that “the United States faces a huge deficit of trust” in the Middle East.  He talks about the “intense desire among humiliated peoples for equality and dignity.”

The problem for us–I call it the aging power’s need to acquire bifocal lenses–is that the “awakened peoples,” as Mishra terms them, define equality and dignity differently than we do.  And this has become an American political issue just this week as Mishra’s observation that the Obama administration has engaged in “fresh overestimations of American power in that region” has played itself out in Benghazi, Libya.

And we Americans have been greatly troubled by recent violence in Benghazi:  the death of our ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, the slow response of the State Department to suspect that it was not mob reaction to an American YouTube clip mocking the Prophet but a co-ordinated attack by Islamic terrorists via local militia groups, the subsequent revelation that the so-called consulate in Benghazi was a poorly-guarded compound, the fracas over CNN’s reporting on Ambassador Stevens’s private journal, in which he wrote about fear for his life from Libyan militants. 

In that context, which many of us must have been thinking about this morning, here is former President Clinton introducing his wife before she speaks at CGI:

“We’ve already had a good morning laughing and talking about what happened yesterday, getting a report from Chelsea about a dinner she attended last night. . . . As Secretary of State, she [Hillary] has done an enormous amount to extend the diplomatic efforts of the United States into not just stopping bad things from happening or diffusing crises or dealing with all the things that she’ll have to deal with today as soon as she leaves us [such as a meeting with the Libyan president], which means she may drag out her remarks a little bit to avoid having to face some of them.”

The Clintons, of necessity, now live in a bubble (despite all that tree-planting in Malawi Bill Clinton reminisced about yesterday); therefore, I believe we have to make allowances for that reality.  Nevertheless, Bill Clinton struck a dissonant note, given the national mood, while introducing his wife. 

Early in her remarks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says, “We must think and act innovatively and be willing to change ourselves to keep pace with the change around us, and at the same time, we must stay true to our values.  Otherwise, we will lose our way.”

Isn’t that the issue?  How do we honor our American values while respecting the very different ones of, for example, Mohamed Morsi and the majority of Egyptians whom he represents?

The curious thing about Secretary Clinton’s remarks at CGI was that they underscored her perception of the various ways in which the world is now inter-connected and driven.  She talked at length about the role of development in national security, about the changing role of that development from NGO-based to private business investment, the role of risk assessment in investment decisions abroad, the increasing emphasis on a developing nation’s taking responsibility for its future, “building the capacity to set priorities,” as Clinton says.

And yet, in her closing remarks, Clinton says, “So let’s get to work for more freedom, democracy, opportunity, and dignity.”

In one moment, Secretary of State Clinton exemplifies Mishra’s observation, which has proved so resonant in the Middle East, about America’s “exalted notion of its moral power and mission.”

Earlier, she talked at some length about a new Korean apparel company in Haiti.  Gave us the details.  Later in the day, after her appearance at the Clinton Global Initiative, she officially launched the State Department’s new Global Philanthropy Working Group (aimed at reducing tax burdens and paperwork for overseas giving).  And then even later, she met at the Waldorf-Astoria with Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf before the meeting at the U.N.

The flowery remarks and condolences on both sides (death of the Ambassador) seem to have led to a misuderstanding.  Secretary Clinton praised the Libyan people for their courage:  “courage to rise up and overthrow a dictator; courage to choose the hard path of democracy; courage to stand against violence and division in their country and the world.  And Mr. President, that kind of courage deserves our support.”

My Arabic Twitter feed has taken her remarks to mean increased financial aid.  But Secretary Clinton could just as easily mean we will use our drone strikes in Libya cautiously, so as to kill as few civilians as possible.

Libya has become the biggest foreign policy blunder of Hillary Clinton’s career as Secretary of State, and–most ironically in a venue like the CGI, dedicated to global cooperation and understanding–she seems not to grasp the extent of the consequences.  Wanting to believe in courage and democracy, for a sweep of desert that has never had any kind of civil society, not even something as small as a scout troop, but that instead is an overlapping and often hostile mix of ethnicities, tribes and religious orientations, now armed with rocket-propelled grenades, thanks to us, Clinton has failed to heed the warning signs of trouble ahead there for us.

Since the revolution, the World War Two cemeteries in Libya have been desecrated.  The graves defaced with anti-Christian and anti-Semitic graffiti.  Classical monuments in ancient Roman ruins have been removed for safe-keeping, because of anti-western sentiment.  The violence in Benghazi had been slowly escalating before Ambassador Stevens’s death.  There had been earlier rocket attacks.  American intelligence has long known that al Qaeda has a strong presence in Libya.  And now, in the aftermath, despite the violent reaction of some Benghazi citizens against the militias who may or may not have had anything to do with the attack on the American consulate there, the situation on the ground is very complicated.  Some of the militias are protected by the new Libyan government, because some of them do security work for various ministries.  Basically, the new government does not have the power, much less the police and military force, to enforce peace.

So what does Secretary Clinton mean when she says, “we will continue to stand with you?”  Who, in a fragmented society like post-Qaddafi Libya are the you?

Unlike Italy, for example, the United States gets no oil from Libya.  We have no national security interests in Libya.  But the fall-out at home for our leaders Clinton and Obama in believing in the implementation of a western-style civil society there has been enormous, for the debacle has stoked American Islamophobia.

The American people see the “deficit of trust” that Mishra describes.  We know, as he points out, that our influence in the Middle East is waning.  For many, this is a relief.  We have never wanted to be imperialists–and that is one thing that the Middle East does not understand about us.  But for some reason our leaders cannot see the forest for the trees.  For Secretary Clinton right now, the Libyan trees are “MANPADS and other excess weapons,” settling the issue of Pan  Am flight #103.

In the Clinton Global Initiative opening plenary session yesterday, former President  Clinton made a striking comment.  “We’re not very good at creating jobs and employment.  There are many more moving parts to creating good things than in stopping bad things from happening.“  This is a provocative statement.  I’m not sure I agree with him.  Certainly, his wife has had no success, despite tremendous effort, in improving our relationship with Pakistan–it has grown much worse over the Obama presidency–precisely because there are so many moving parts.  And as for Libya (and Tunisia), those World War Two cemeteries full of Allied soldiers are testimony, if mute, to just how very difficult it is to stop the bad things.

September 24, 2012

Tomorrow:  last day of CGI:  Romney, Obama and post-partisan Clinton

Bill Clinton’s marathon on behalf of Hillary Clinton–he sometimes made 7 to 9 small town speeches in one day–is lost to history.  If I had to do it all over again, assuming the choice could have been mine, I would have concentrated exclusively on following Bill Clinton on his journey. And I would have photographed all those small town events, for that kind of American political campaigning–the front porch speech–historic–has almost passed away.

Those of you who know my work probably find it odd that it is the early morning Clinton pit stop that has stayed with me.  It is an encounter with Clinton later in the day that made the news.  But those of you who are getting older, like Clinton and me, are not surprised, for we have experienced the second takeaway:  it is always the fragment of deep feeling, that rare instant of revelation, that endures.

So today, four years later, here I am in New York for the annual Clinton Global Initiative, because globalism is the driver of everything I write now. And I see Bill Clinton again. He has a bald spot in his mane of white; he has the older man’s tremor, in his left hand. (But then I’ve aged, too; I’m limping around the Sheraton on a cane.). But the great thing about Bill Clinton in 2012 is his boldness–I like to think that I too am bold, but I cannot begin to match him.  Really, this is age’s reward: ever Forward! for you have nothing to lose.

The recent rise of Bill Clinton’s reputation (many CGI attendees clutching the latest issue of Time) pricks my natural bent toward cynicism.  The national media astonishment at Clinton’s nomination-of-Obama speech a month ago at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte–well, you guys, if you had followed Bill through North Carolina in 2008, you could have put that speech in a timeline. 

The night before I flew to New York, I attended an  “Obama Report Card” panel hosted by the University of California at Berkeley law school.  Robert Reich gave President Obama a B-, overall.  Former California Governor Pete Wilson gave O an F in foreign policy. All the panelists, left and right, had nothing but praise for former President Clinton.  It was an evening of Clinton praise music.  From people who wouldn’t have given him the time of day four years ago.

Boldness.  What does it take? Clintonian boldness is steely; he is not as garrulous as before.  He has become a geography unto himself:   a campground where scourged reputation and thirst for something better meet, meld and grow.

I witnessed this dynamic today at the Clinton Global Initiative.  As a reporter, I am first and foremost a questioner. And there was plenty to doubt on this the first day of the annual conference, which, from an utterly skeptical point of view, can best be described as a  revival meet-up for wealthy and well-intentioned do-gooders.  (Who curiously gravitate to distant Africa, as American missionaries before them.)

My favorite inanities of the day.  From U.N. Secretary Ban Ki Moon:  U.N. launching a new education initiative with the UK. (UK Border Control is just now severely restricting the number of foreigners who can study in Britain.). A young presenter talking about Congo (a failed state): “we are empowering young women to become creative agents for change.”

But then I heard Bill Clinton and Heikki Holmas, the Norwegian minister of international development, address, impromptu, a press gaggle (the Norwegian press making it clear to the rest of us that “Heikki” is not a Norwegian but horrors a Finnish name) about their latest joint initiative. Clinton Global/Norway is convening meetings with 22 small island nations, which are most in danger from global warming (rising sea levels) and which pay the highest energy prices in the world.  Clinton reeled off energy costs here and abroad.  The plan is to make green energy work first, on the islands, in small scale.  Each island will need a different project: geothermal in Grenada, for example. Cutting use of imported and therefore pricey diesel everywhere. Trying to bundle 6 to 8 islands together in one project, so that it is worth it for a big company like Siemens to take on.

Norway is putting 3.9 million into the islands project.  Eventually, the savings from freedom of dependency on diesel fuel will allow each nation to pay for the energy source switchover. The Clinton Global Initiative, with no financial interest, will act as “a trusted third party,” providing the business know-how to put the projects together.

As Bill Clinton said several times, it’s the small scale here–the islands consume very little energy compared to other nations–that will make it possible to prove whether or not green energy is viable in every way.  Clinton and Holmas chatted fondly about their earlier success in Malawi with tree-planting, so they have confidence–but really this is bold.

And yet they have convinced me, through Clinton’s command of fact and Norway’s experience (more electric cars than any other country in the world, and at the forefront of battery-charging), that this cockamamie scheme just might work. Might be a tipping point. And, as a Californian, I drive past the weed-infested Solyndra plant several times a week and watch my neighbor’s chronic travails with the solar panels on his roof.

Boldness–surging through the security-threaded halls and conference rooms of the New York Sheraton today.  Unilever:  aims to reach one billion consumers and to teach them to wash hands five times a day and therefore cut infant deaths in half. With Lifebuoy soap.  A brilliant five minutes from the Unilever rep on habit-making behavior.  “Presenting a negative perception of what people should do differently does not work.”

At the same session, Molly Melching, talking about what she has learned in her life’s work to end female genital cutting in Senegal:  “Understanding the nature and dynamic of social norms is crucial. You are dealing with a behavior to which people are strongly attached, and give value. Change must come from within.”

If only President Obama could have been at CGI today, and listened, instead of doing the helicopter-in moment he’s scheduled for at CGI two days from now.  Because Obama has forgotten how to be bold. And his de-friending Egypt from his world Facebook page shows that his brief Indonesian sojourn did not teach him, despite his self-confidence, how to understand and communicate with and persuade world leaders and peoples of different beliefs and culture.

The irony of CGI today was that, despite all the CEOs and world leaders and NGOs mingling, the most important man of the day in New York was elsewhere.  Mohamed Morsi was at the U.N.  Morsi is proving himself to be a formidable leader for post-Mubarak Egypt.  He is re-shaping U.S. Egypt relations, whether we will or no.  As a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he is feared and misunderstood (out of ignorance) by most Americans.

Morsi, just like Obama himself, is a hinge upon which this century is beginning to turn in a new direction.  And yet Obama, pusillanimous, refused to meet with Morsi.  Really, I have nothing but contempt here for our president–and if you follow my blog, you know this is a rare condemnation.  Really, Mr. President? You were so afraid of what American voters might think? Surely, you always knew in your gut you have a second term before you. So fear of losing to Romney–nonsense.  Worse, your caution feeds an American Islamophobia rampant.

September 23, 2012

Tomorrow:  more from CGI.  (My New York Times piece–still working on it.)

“Jesus, Jim,” I said, “Leni Riefenstahl’s come back from the dead to choreograph this thing.”  I was watching an Obama rally, in the lead-up to the North Carolina primary.  I was creeped out.  The call-and-response between Obama and his supporters had been giving me the willies over a couple days’ worth of small-town events.  But I could hardly believe what I was witnessing now in Charlotte.

“Please, please,” my husband said, “don’t write that.”  The begging in his voice—intense—did the Blackberry vibrate in my hand?

As all reporters know, resorting to a comparison with the Third Reich is ever problematic.  And so, telling myself that it was a stylistic choice, an eschewing of language, I did not write the complete story of that evening.  I cut and pasted.  I said something about Obama needing to get outside “the circle of devotion” that surrounded him now.

I chose not to give the American public, front-on, as best as I could from my observation point, a feeling for the grandiosity that had come to characterize the Obama Campaign, coupled with the way in which Obama himself was not fully present in North Carolina, “phoning in” his speeches and persona, and how those two qualities, married to crowd fervor, were creating a weird synergy at event after event.

I made this choice out of fear.  I regularly got death threats and vicious emails then.  As a neophyte reporter, I did not know, as I do now, that a reporter is not doing his or her job—and the same for politicians—unless he or she regularly gets pushback from the dark side of human nature.  Today I am inured.  But not in North Carolina, 2008.

That evening at the Cricket Arena:  maybe three-quarters full, an African-American crowd, with, as usual, the rows behind the podium, which would show on TV, carefully arranged as a flower bouquet with plenty of white folks, as well. (Props to Jeff Zeleny at the New York Times for pointing this out.  Although such staging was an Obama Campaign ritual, reporters seldom mentioned it.)

The Invocation, garbled:  “We need You on our side/The only remedy is not to cure this country/Balm in Gilead/A balm in America/Be with our fearless and courageous leader of change.  Grant him Divine favor as Your change agent!”

The Obama field organizer:  “This is my seventh state with the campaign—and I don’t use! We’re here to change America!  We’re here to change the world!  Let’s be the change!”

Local politician:  “The hour is almost upon us.”

When Obama takes the podium, he feeds the now pulsating frenzy.

“You have fronted our campaign at twenty-five, fifty dollar increments. [Our campaign] is not funded by lobbyists. . . ours is a new Jacksonian Democracy. . . We gotta change our ways. You don’t need a president who tells you what you want to hear—you need a president who’s gonna tell you what you need to know. . . We’re gonna save the planet in the bargain. . . I have a confession to make, Charlotte, it’s not about the polls, the Super Delegates, it’s about You!”

The enthusiasm I had witnessed the past several days shook the Cricket Arena.  On a larger scale.  The energy: inchoate.  At that moment, Barack Obama could have ordered the crowd out to do most anything.  It was mass hysteria, and it was frightening, and it was indeed the relationship between leader and people that had once gripped Germany.

You did not know that this was how the Obama Campaign went down in North Carolina, did you?  Except in the most general terms (a mention of the “it’s about you” meme), no reporter described the phenomenon.  Just as no reporter, until in post-election postmortems, pointed out that in reality the Obama Campaign was not empowered from the bottom up (from the grassroots) but was the most tightly-controlled-from-the-top—and brilliantly so—campaign of modern times.  No reporter mentioned how he or she had been browbeaten, even physically, by Obama campaign handlers.

The classic reporter’s excuse for not telling it like it is:  if I do, I will lose my access to the campaign, to the candidate, to his or her staff.

This may be part of what happened in North Carolina.  Yesterday, after going back over my notes and clippings from North Carolina, I see that there were other forces in play.  The Big Story concurrent with the North Carolina primary was the finale of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright saga, when Obama had to break with his minister after Wright made his incendiary remarks at the National Press Club in D.C.

Reporters are particularly susceptible to the herd instinct, and so everybody was writing from North Carolina about Obama, Wright and race.  The one Obama event in North Carolina that packed the house with the A-list press (who, of course, have the biggest readership) was Obama’s press conference in Hickory, when, in both anger and sorrow, he broke with Wright.

Wright, Wright, Wright.  Same story, same assessment of damage, same musings on race in America.  That was the Obama reportage—along with fond accountings of Obama’s basketball game at UNC Chapel Hill—from North Carolina.  Ironically, no reporter, until Richard Wolffe’s postmortem of the election in his book Renegade, put together the full story—although it was already obvious to fair-minded, churchgoing Americans.  Obama and his family had seldom gone to Sunday church back in Chicago, and therefore had never heard a Wright stemwinder.  But during the election, with his faith already called constantly into question by the religious right (and privately doubted on the left), Obama was in a bind.  He could not distance himself from Wright with the legitimate excuse that he was unfamiliar with the hate-filled sermons because the Obama family’s was a Christmas/Easter kind of attendance.

How little the Wright brouhaha resonates now.  But the consequences for the American press and for us in not getting all the Obama Campaign story?  Enormous.

Obama and his team, upon reaching the White House believed, understandably, that the national press would write about him as they had carefully and cautiously on the campaign trail.  When this did not happen, and the press grew emboldened, and the relationship poisonous at times, the White House reacted in exactly the spirit of insularity that Obama had promised on the campaign trail would not characterize his “new Jacksonian” administration.

Why the change of attitude in the press?  The press, usually unawares, drank a bit of the Obama Kool-Aid during the election and afterwards sobered up.  Never was this more apparent than the reportage on Obama’s July 2008 speech in Berlin, which I attended and wrote about much more honestly in my book than at the time (that caution, again).  The ebullient and fawning nature of coverage was so pervasive that now the event is preserved falsely as a grand success—at least until a yet-born generation of historians begins to research the Obama presidency.

Reporters thought they were seeing straight; they were not.  The national media presented us Barack Obama not as he really is. Large consequences here:  disappointment among Democrats, especially, as well as many Independents and Republicans who voted for Obama, because the press at-large did not report carefully enough what Obama was saying, and not saying, as well as who he was and was not.  The tenor of press coverage allowed an Obama voter to believe that the “change” Obama promised was the change or changes that particular voted wanted to occur.

And yet it was always clear to me that the change Obama envisioned was of a different tenor:  the larger force, like a law of physics, which he knew he had what it takes to help the American people weather.

From North Carolina in 2008, I wrote, “Often on the campaign trail, however, despite his frequent comment that as President he will listen to the American people, Barack Obama seems to hear only what he wants to hear.  Given the mass adulation with which he is received now, audiences don’t seem to perceive Obama’s selective detachment.  If Obama is the next President of the United States, however, the mainstream media as well as bloggers will be busy documenting the various scenes in which this dynamic manifests itself.”

Katharine Q. “Kit” Seelye, a reporter for the New York Times, was a lovely mentor on the campaign trail.  Now I realize that she was my North Star.  One afternoon, talking to me about the common charge against national reporters like her that they have a liberal bias, or some kind of bias, she said, “What readers don’t understand is that every day with every piece, we reporters are making serious, carefully-considered choices about what and what not to put in—and that has nothing to do with personal bias.”

I have often thought about Seelye’s comment.  At that moment, she was defining real reporters, those lucky enough to be called to the profession, those determined to get the full story no matter what, wherever it may lead, to however uncomfortable a truth.

North Carolina 2008 was the time that not only the Obama team became unhinged but also the press allowed something personal (a determination that Obama was indeed the One we had been looking for, or in my case fear—or in many instances mere exhaustion, because the primary campaign trail had been so long) to determine coverage.  We fell down on the job.  We have been paying the price ever since.  More importantly, so have our fellow Americans.

We Americans, for better or for worse, don’t have much capacity for historical memory.  The role of the press in the French Revolution is a cautionary tale for journalists, and the historian Robert Darnton, now at Harvard, has exhaustively and compellingly documented it.  I think about the eighteenth-century French press every single day—but once again I have been lucky, because my daughter, a historian, pointed me towards Darnton’s chronicling of the up-and-coming among the younger generation of scribblers who believed they could be part of an historical moment by influencing its direction but got too close and were consumed by it.

Postscript:  don’t listen to any reporter or pundit this week who questions the importance of Bill Clinton’s presence in Charlotte 2012.  This is the man who stumped for his wife back and forth across North Carolina, from small town to town, speaking from front porches and the back of trucks, at the rate of 7 to 9 rallies a day (and this is no Paul-esque exaggeration).  I had the good fortune to follow him on that journey, and I tell you now that North Carolinians love the guy.  Just as they respect his wife, whose magnificence at the end of the primaries, knowing she was going to lose but soldiering on–how could that not have touched a Carolinian heart? That transference of approbation–a joining of hands, if you will–is enormously important for Obama’s prospects in holding onto North Carolina in the general election and for keeping Independent voters nationwide.

Next up:  last piece in the series.  The New York Times and why its choices matter for all of us.

September 4, 2012

Click on the link and then come on back.

Why is this an absolutely fantastic piece of reportage?  First and foremost, because Weigel captures, perfectly, the feel on being on a convention floor.  TV cannot give us this.  Most of us will never have a convention floor pass.  So Weigel’s piece, in its way, is important.  He is also funny.  Succinct.  In few words, he gives us both context (something that happened with Hillary in 2008) and hard news (the convention rules fight with Ron Paul supporters).

Unfortunately, unless you are either a media maven or a Tea Partier, likely you have never heard of Weigel.  Even then, you may not have seen this article.  And that is one of the secondary problems (in my previous two essays I talk about the most important) weakening American media.  Turbo-charged by the invention of the Internet, event reportage and commentary have grown so large that, in a way, American media is collapsing in upon itself.  This is what happens when a user cannot find the good bits, like Weigel’s coverage, in the dump of dreck.

Where does a reporter like Weigel come from anyway? American media’s great years began in the last century when editors and reporters began to marry storytelling with fact, as Weigel does.  This was an enormous change from nineteenth-century news coverage, where neither reporter nor reader seemed to expect a story to be true in the factual sense.

I discovered this—peculiarity—while spending five years hunched over microfilm machines in Memphis and New York, researching a series of family monographs, for which also I collected old issues of Harper’s Weekly and Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Comparing the illustrations and reportage the Harper’s correspondent had done for the Civil War Battle of Memphis with contemporary photographs of Memphis and local diaries, I could find no similarity.  I realized that the Harper’s reporter had never accompanied Grant down the Mississippi to Memphis, but likely had remained on the safe haven of a bluff farther up river.  In short, he made the whole thing up.  He imagined what Memphis probably looked like, and how the battle, from what he heard, unfolded.

Another example.  I spent a delightful afternoon in the New York Public Library reading a labyrinthine piece from a New York Times reporter, writing in the early 1890s, about Florida.  The only problem was that the poor man had been to Florida only once, several years before, and yet now he had been tasked with writing a very long piece on “the new Florida,” about St. Petersburg and its grandiose just-built hotels, where he had never been.  I could picture the whiskey bottle at hand, as he added filler after filler about birds and feathers and women’s hats and waterways and more birds and feathers, puff, puff, puff.  Likely, the railroads had told the New York Times:  “we have that new terminus to St. Pete—give us 10,000 words.”

So if you suppose there was a Great Day of Journalism buried deep in our distant past, let these two examples disabuse you of that notion.

Our golden age of journalism arose out of our need to figure out the role or roles we would play, as a nation, in wars that did not threaten us here at home:  the two world wars, Korea, Vietnam.  Americans were growing better-educated, both reporters and readers.  Ironically, the reportorial voice could be heard because the pool of Americans from which that voice could arise was small, limited in ways we abjure today.  Most reporters were male and white.  He had to have started at one of the heartland newspapers flourishing then or to have attended the Ivy League.  (Exceptions always made for women married to powerful men, of course—see Clare Boothe Luce.)

As the century progressed, his voice was amplified, by war newsreel, by radio, then television, then not only television but cable.  War and new invention:  Manichean forces.  Every golden age plants the seeds of its own destruction.  For journalism, the seed has been celebrity.  Slowly, the journalists at the top of the profession (certain columnists, evening TV correspondents, a few magazine writers) became rich and famous.  Even though more than a few may be or may have been among the most humble of men (what I find to be the case at the tip-top of every profession), egoism, entitlement and a sense of detachment from the masses began to filter down through the ranks.

This was the world of American journalism into which I stumbled in 2007.  This was what I observed—not so much on the campaign trail, where reporters keep a sense of balance by clinging to an old-time faith in themselves as proles—but at glitzier media gatherings in New York and D.C.  Sometimes I felt that I had wandered by mistake into a gentleman’s club, membership leaning into each other over jolly drinks, not looking around to note how the club now looks a bit down-at-heels, its day come and gone.

And so from Tampa, unless you shut your eyes and ears, you were inundated with the sorry American journalism that the old clubsters are coughing up.  Here, alas, is such a piece:  “Chris Cillzza:  Why Campaigns Don’t Need the Media,” by Howard Kurtz, for The Daily Beast, August 19, 2012.

No reportage there, right?  One inside-the-beltway guy talking to another insider.  Kurtz and Cillzza shooting the breeze.   A plug for one guy’s book, to boot.  Pathetic.  Even more so:  they can think of nothing to say (name-calling in 2012, importance of ads and links) that the rest of us aren’t already contemplating too much, as it is.

Unfortunately, American journalism is weighted down with Kurtz/Cillzza puffery and blocking our view of the Weigels.  (Jesus, it just occurs to me that in its own way Howie Kurtz’s piece is like the 1890s NYT ramble through an imaginary Florida.)

The humbug cliché of the moment is that, in order to spare us such non-news, reporters should quit going to conventions.  Here is media pundit Jeff Jarvis, with a “no more cakes and ale” harrumph:  “Reporters:  Why Are You in Tampa?”  He thinks the cost—a hypothetical $60 mil—could have been better spent elsewhere.  But—and why do I feel I must point out the obvious?—the conventions are very important.  They are one of the few occasions on which all Americans watch the same TV (if on different channels).  Watching and talking about the speeches are one of the few things left that draw us together as a nation.  Some viewers like to prolong the moment by listening to cable commentary afterwards.  Is that so very terrible?

Much of the convention media is foreign, by the way.  From my experience in 2008, foreign reporters caution about in bewilderment—you’d think they would understand the American political dynamic by now—but since not, thank God they are in attendance.

Now, allow me to tie down my own hat of humility as well as one for Jeff Jarvis to point out that it is easy, not tasked with covering a convention, to sit back and carp.  But it is simply not true that nothing of real importance happens at conventions.  If Kurtz and Cillzza got off their duffs, there were stories to be had out of Tampa.  Sometimes they are not the stories you expect, or want, or are happy to follow, but you go where they lead, nevertheless.

To my mind, there are four great stories out of Tampa still to be finished:  the disjunction between the Republican platform and the rise of so many women within the party; the two delegates’ own stories about nut-tacking the CNN camerawoman (perhaps within the context of roughing-up being a hazard of the journo profession—happened to me twice—what is the psychology here?); what it means that so many Americans are unfamiliar with rather typical behavior for an octogenarian like Clint Eastwood and why we find it particularly disturbing on stage; fact-checking Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech.

Fact-checking is one of the tasks that American media continues to do better and better.  The exception to my argument, you might say.  The problem is the complexity of every issue that I talked about in my last piece.  The best fact-checker is Politifact.org.  Go read their research on Ryan’s Medicare assertions.  Not easy to parse.  Moreover, Politifact—the task being difficult—still has not gone through all Ryan’s statements.  By the time Politifact is done, our attention will be elsewhere.

The corollary to the Jarvis screed is the reporter excuse.  Sorry, folks, nothing happening here at the convention, per usual, so I’m forced, for my daily report, into repeater mode.  What my peers are saying.  What my contacts who work for the campaigns are promulgating.

Consider for a long minute the laziness here.  This is like a reporter in Afghanistan (or any war zone) talking only with the general, allowing himself or herself to be driven around by an army liaison to see whatever the general wants the public to know, writing a piece based on that access, and then calling it a wrap.  No American journalist covering a war today would do such a thing.  Indeed our golden age of journalism continues on largely because of our intrepid war reporters: Jon Lee Anderson, Dexter Filkins, George Packer, to name a few.

Political reporters at home complain that political campaigns increasingly restrict access to their candidates and to stories.  In my observation, that is just an excuse, another example of the satiety and couch potato syndrome afflicting us now that I wrote about in my last piece.  On my initial encounter with the traveling presidential campaign press, during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses in 2007-2008, the very first thing that surprised (and shocked) me was their passivity.   Like a herd of sheep, I said to myself, at the end of that day.  And unfortunately, with rare exception (shout-outs to Kit Seelye and Joe Klein), I never had occasion to improve the view.

Vasily Grossman, writing from the Battle of Stalingrad, has given us perhaps the best modern journalism.  And he was Russian.  And a Jew, always in easy reach of German capture.  A be-spectacled man not in the best of health—certainly not in good shape physically.

To put today’s American reporter’s complaint of lack of access in perspective, Grossman had a lot more to worry about when he went out to write about the Russian campaign than a little roughing up by a disgruntled stranger or an oleaginous, stone-walling campaign handler.  The NKVD liked to shoot reporters who annoyed the censors.  And every reporter, like every general, had such a minder, who dogged his every move.

But Grossman used what he had at hand to get the story.  He discovered that he did not fall apart mentally under sniper fire, and so he dodged from ruin to ruin in Stalingrad to talk with Russian soldiers trying to hold onto the city, block by block.  He discovered the use that could be made of chaos and near-defeat:  the political handlers tended to stay away from the ever-moving front.  He discovered (like Dave Weigel) the power of humor, and that he had a gift for listening for it.  He knew in his gut—the niggling all good reporters have—that this was his moment, that such times call for tirelessness, and so he moved back and forth from building shell to sniper outpost to commander bunker and never stopped until he got that story.

In my last piece, I talked about the reservoir of will in the American people.  A new generation of journalists will find that source of resolve and discipline.  I already see it in a few reporters I have met who work for Al Jazeera. But the new club will be international—a mixture of races and nationalities and languages—and it will be interesting to see what of our American media heritage makes it into the global portmanteau, taken from the American journalist experience, a kind of memory, coming to hand to get the story.

Labor Day weekend, 2012

Next up:  the New York Times.  The press returns to North Carolina.

Good reporters cannot rest until they feel they have found the whole of a story, as if such were the holy grail, the righteousness after which we are supposed to hunger and thirst and then be fed.  I know, I know, immediately appearing in mind are any number of well-known pundits, bloggers and cable TV personalities who do not seem to fit my description.  But now take a minute and think about it.  Every profession has its hacks–law, medicine, mechanics, priesthood.  It’s a rare and precious day when you encounter someone who has a calling to do what he or she does.  My latest is a dentist in New York, a Ukrainian immigrant–so, yes, now I will be going to NYC for my dental work.  I don’t know about good dentists (paucity or plethora), but I do know, having met them, that there are enough fine reporters laying down for posterity the American narrative that I can assert, as I did yesterday, that bias, liberal or otherwise, is not the problem.

If there are so many honest reporters, you well may ask, then why is there a widening gulf between the world of media and the world in which the rest of us live?  Why hasn’t the full and fair reportage been able to build–at least, help to build–a bridge of respect and trust?

The big reason–and this is the other half of the communication & connection chasm:  you, American consumer of news, you are the problem.  You are not listening.  You are not joining in that hunger and thirst for the truth.  For the record–and symptomatic is my need to say this–I am pointing to Democrats and Republicans alike, to atheists and believers, to all, including me.

An oddity of our American life right now, still in the early years of a new century, is our satiety.  This is a strange problem to have, considering that the American standard of living is declining and job insecurity is likely to be a defining characteristic of the younger generations coming along.  But we no longer hunger and thirst.  We are accustomed to so much that we have lost the ability to acknowledge the abundance we take for granted.  In my life, moving back and forth between California and Texas, I meet many, many immigrants who have done well in this country, and often one reason they work so incredibly hard at jobs native-born Americans would never deign to consider is that they have an acute, visceral memory of real stomach-clenching hunger.  In the same way, through the lives of my daughters, who are peripatetic academics living and working here and there around the world, I hear about their peers, in these other countries, who are aware, acutely, of what it means not to enjoy freedom of the press.

We no longer thirst for the truth.  Yes, this is much to do with larger forces than choices we each make.  We no longer gather around the radio in the evening to get the war news, as my parents’ and grandparents’ generations did.  We no longer congregate so habitually, as if we were all one big American family slowly being introduced to a kind of national disturbance, in front of the home television for the half-hour dinner time report, in color, from that ABC, NBC or CBS man in Vietnam.  That was the defining American news experience of my teenage years.

On the contrary.  We are inundated with news, opinion, statistics, faux news, breaking news, tweets, text messages, social media pings, friends’ email links, frantic doomsday scenario letters from politicians and their celebrity flacks–and just plain salacious gossip.  It’s too much of a good thing.  But at the end of the day, if we do not hear, it is our fault.  All the freedoms with which we Americans have been blessed are based upon personal responsibility.

Therefore, dear friends, if you believe that American media has a liberal bias, or if you believe, to the contrary, that a nefarious conservatism is gripping the nation, you have become a news couch potato.  Life is so easy, even pleasurable, validated, your own fears and suspicions and experiences confirmed, when you return again and again to the cosy nest of Fox News or MSNBC.  To The Nation or The Weekly Standard.

Let me be clear.  You are not getting an adequate daily dose of news if you watch only Fox or MSNBC, read only liberal or conservative blogs.  If a major source of your news (be honest) is email–specifically, the links sent around by like-minded friends and their friends. If you read and listen to people like you only.

When you consider just for a minute, you will realize that the charge of liberal bias in American media is quite ridiculous.  The Wall Street Journal is the second-most influential paper in the country.  It is profoundly conservative.  I can think of only one editorial in the last few years with a bit of grudging praise for President Obama.  Furthermore, the WSJ is on a roll.  I say that because in Silicon Valley the WSJ weekend edition has become a must-read.  (All that conservatism must “bleed through”–to use Arthur Brisbane’s verb–the glorious articles on houses, food, books and culture.)  In our pre-eminent paper, the New York Times, the columnists hitting their stride right now are David Brooks and Ross Douthat, both conservatives, with what influence, from their op-ed page perches, we can but imagine.

I am going to close for the day with a widening of our lens, because the disconnect between media and public is really only a harbinger of the larger challenge facing the United States in this century.  That challenge is globalism, and the need to embrace it, ride it, wield it for our best uses.  So far, we Americans are not doing very well in coping with the new dynamic.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the iconic American song “Shenandoah,” recordings of it, and how they illuminate our difficulties here.

Most singers do versions of the first verse–and a magnificent capturing of the American experience it is:

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you/Way, hey, you rolling river/Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you/Away, I’m bound across the wide Missouri.

Today most Americans probably couldn’t point to the  Shenandoah Valley or the Missouri River on a U.S. map if their lives depended upon it.  But we all get, in our gut, the song.  We are a journeying nation, always on the move, many of us from someplace else.  We are a people who feel pulled forward, upward or downward, but always away, by something larger and more powerful than ourselves.  The price for that is homesickness, for where we were born, for our childhood, for who and what we left behind. The song is great because it captures perfectly that moment when innocence is not quite relinquished but the premonition of its loss pervades all.

Few singers do the second verse.  Here is Connie Dover’s version of the lyrics:

For seven years I courted Nancy/No other girl would suit my fancy/She would not have me for her lover/But I never courted any other/One day she went to Kansas City/And there she had a little baby/She must have had another lover/It must have been that cavalry soldier/Oh Shenandoah, I loved your daughter/Though she’ll never cross your shining water.

Huh??? Kansas City? Not a place with a particularly salubrious reputation, back then.  And a baby, out-of-wedlock?  So, wait a minute.  Are we singing about a place we left behind or some girl who broke our heart?  Is she dead now?  Or something?  Who, or what, or where, was Shenandoah, anyhow?

The song is no longer simple and straightforward.  The narrative has gone messy on us.  We Americans, just like most humans, move towards the simple and straightforward.  We do not like messy and confused.  We are not at ease with complication.

This is why we are having so much trouble with embracing globalism.  Globalism entails complexity.  Other peoples–from necessity, or seizing a moment, or the toughness of spirit that arises from being a nation of survivors–have found their sea legs here.  I am always struck by how much more easily my daughters’ colleagues from the countries of the former Soviet Union, and my husband’s colleagues from South Asia, move and work around the world with such assurance and aplomb.  The people, and their leaders who will ride the wave of globalism are those men and women, from any and everywhere, who can handle the complicated and the ever-more interconnected.

In this new world, it is not surprising that the facts and contexts of news stories are ever more multi-faceted and nuanced.  We want–oh so dearly we want–choices about business regulation, delivering health care, providing jobs to be simple.  But we longer live in society that can solve problems with WPA projects.

Good journalism, therefore, is increasingly infused with nuance and detail that can be difficult to assess, to consume, to build upon.

I have never been a believer in American exceptionalism, but I do believe that we have a reservoir of resolve waiting to be tapped.  Ironically, it is our great good fortune as Americans (our geography, our wealth, our immigrant heritage, our multi-culturalism, our free press and legal system, the fact that our homeland was spared the horrors of the last century’s wars) that hinders us now.  We have grown spoiled, soft.  We cannot wrap our minds and will around a great change:  being American is no longer enough.

Personally, I believe in a teleological universe.  But its laws are pitiless.  Those who can adapt to global complexity will thrive.  My daughters are part of a new generation of internationalists whose breadth of experience and knowledge and acceptance of difference, not to mention mastery of languages, are gradually drawing them away from that identification with nationhood that has driven western history for almost half a millennium.  I can hardly comprehend the scope of their lives.  For the rest of us, we will adapt as we are able.

American journalism would be remiss if it did not reflect this new complexity.  You don’t want to have to deal with it?  Stick with Fox or MSNBC.  But the real story of women and the Republican Party?  Not one-sided.  President Obama’s European-style socialist agenda?  Yes and no.

As a sometime-reporter, I follow the persecution of  journalists in China and Turkey.  Not to mention the astonishing number of journalist executions in Mexico.  Labor Day approaches here–always convention time–prompting patriotic reflection–and so an occasion to honor our freedom of press.  Not to say that we don’t self-censor.  It always amuses me that the press, at large, pretends that the Fourth Great Awakening, which is the fount of so much in current politics, never happened.  American reporters today are not comfortable writing about religious events.  A lapse with consequences–always, always consequences.  But,  meanwhile, we live at the end of a golden age of American journalism.  A golden age!  Did you know that?  We are fortunate.  So very fortunate.  Let us celebrate this time of ours by going online and reading more and ever more from the great range of the American reportorial voice.

Tomorrow:  where to find good reporting.  great reporting from Tampa.  the lesser forces weakening American journalism.  all the more reason to celebrate Tampa.  and you opine journalism is meretricious now–let me tell you about the American nineteenth century paper.  Weekend:  the choices reporters make.  why don’t we listen to Robert Darnton on the role of the press in the French Revolution? could have been a corrective to a choice we made in 2008. looking forward to Charlotte:  will there be consequences then of that choice we made?