In the spring of 2007, I attended an international women’s conference in Amman, Jordan.  On the way home, I stopped over in Rome for a brief vacation with my daughters.  Rome has long been one of our favorite cities, and we enjoyed a lovely, leisurely few days together.  Then the older daughter traveled north to Poland, where she was embarking on a course in Yiddish, which she had realized she needed to learn in order to complete her Ph.D. dissertation.  Younger daughter and I went south to Sicily, where my girl wanted to show me the art works she had written about for her senior honors thesis at NYU.  This was her fourth trip to Sicily—at age twenty-three!—even as it was my first.

I tell you a bit about my daughters as a way for you to have a few important details about my family and me.  First of all, obviously I suppose, the nuclear family is important to us.  Above all else, our closeness has given shape and meaning to our lives.  This value system we share with so many upper-middle class Americans of our time.  Where we are somewhat different, and rather old-fashioned, is that we cherish our privacy.  Separately, my husband and I both brought this propensity to our marriage; our daughters have inherited it.

Also characteristic is our intellectual bent, unusual for individuals who did not grow up in academe.  If my husband and I are well-read and have travelled—our children are even more so.  They are part of the globalist vanguard of this new century, and in that sense my husband and I follow in their wake.

Arriving in Palermo, I did not give this framework of my life a second thought.  It was the bulwark that I took for granted.

The next morning, May 22, I awoke at the Villa Igiea in our corner room with its long windows overlooking the sea.  Although it was very early, my daughter had arisen and gone.  I had been having a vivid dream, one that, unusually for a wordsmith like me, unfolded as a series of illustrations. Excited to turn the dream into a book for teenagers, I pushed aside pillows and reached for the Villa Igiea pen and pad on the table next to the bed.

The dream was a romantic triangle, a young woman and two young men—really a ménage a quatre, counting the hunting dog who was also a major character.  In the fluidity between sleep and waking, absurdities open appear reasonable.  How else to account for that second when I was inspired by the possibility of a sexual ménage, one in picture book form no less, as a teenage novel?  Even as I grabbed the Villa Igiea pen, however, the lusciously detailed vision began to dissolve, sequence by sequence.  Despite my efforts to hang on, I was left with only the last illustration, which, along with its meaning, I still hold to this day.  But in the moment I was bereft, for I had always wanted to be a writer—and now this, too, this lovely story, was coming to naught.  In a spasm of loss, I was tumbling into despair.

“The dream is a gift.  Just for you.”

Propped on right elbow, pen in left hand, I turned from the bedside table and looked up.  On the bed—to be precise, on the side of the bed, in the space between my feet and the baseboard—sat a Woman, and Woman with a capital W is appropriate, for even as she was there in being she also filled the large room and filled my mind.

In mind, a name.  Sophia.

And Sophia said, “You are to write.  You are to keep writing, no matter what.”

What. the. fuck.  What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.  My consternation could find no better words.

My first coherent thought:  I am a Presbyterian!

And Presbyterians, like most Protestants, do not go in for Beings, neither angels nor saints, much less divine manifestations.

I stewed.  Should I tell my daughter?  What did Sophia mean?  Did she mean that I should soldier on with the monograph I was writing on my great-great-grandmother Mary Wood Hill?  I had finished the history, written for family, of her husband Napoleon Hill, but I was finding the humorless Mary rather hard-going.  Maybe Sophia wanted me to turn to my grandfather’s personal correspondence, which I owned.  He had been mayor of Memphis in the 1930s, and I had his letters to FDR and other political figures of the Depression.  Was this what Sophia meant?

And why Sophia?  I did not know any Sophia.

The following day, I realized that I did know of a Sophia.  Two summers previously, my younger daughter and I, travelling in Turkey, had made the usual tourist visit to Hagia Sofia in Istanbul.  I had found this relic of Byzantine Christianity to be a depressing derelict and had quickly put it from my mind—or so I thought, but somewhere in the depths I must have retained some notion of Sophia, incarnation of divine wisdom.

Quickly, realization followed realization.

Why Sophia?  Because God needed a way to get through to me.

I was not much of a Christian.  Although I had been born again at age sixteen, that conversion experience had not radically changed me—maybe because even from childhood I had always been sure of the existence of God.  But I seldom read Scripture; I prayed only sporadically.

Remember the thriftiness of God that I wrote about last?  In Palermo, Sophia was an example of divine thrift.  To characterize God in human terms for a moment, God reached for something to hand that would get my attention.  The image that came to me that second day in Palermo had nothing to do with thrift, however.  I saw a heavy sheet of glass.  God on one side.  I on the other.  He had been rapping on the pane.  Sophia had been the knock-knock.

In the next moment, I realized that what Sophia had been ordering me to write had nothing to do with me myself at all.  It was not about me.  Somehow I grasped instantly that likely I would never know the reason I had been given this task.  But do it I must.  Do it I would.

In the instant I understood, the glass dissolved and I stood in the presence of God the Father Almighty, Creator.

I do not know how long I stood before Him.  Likely nothing to be measured on earth.  At  one and the same time, I hovered, as if at a threshold, while, opened to His Immanence, I experienced how completely God is present in every atom of his creation.  How He is always with us even as most of us do not recognize Him, the one and only truly real thing.  I felt the Completeness of His Love, and its Finality outside time.

As I write, I cannot think what else to tell you about that second day in Palermo.  Since then, I have never been afraid of death.  On the contrary, I long for the day when, in the words of the Psalms, I finally get to fly for God’s holy mountain.

May 23, 2007 is a demarcation line for me.  Before.  After.

And the afterwards is history.  Tomorrow I will take up the story of Sophia’s command and how that worked out, as I look back upon the events of 2007-2008.

For now, I will end with the same observation that closed my last piece on Paulo Coelho.

God is not interested in Fairness.  Let me repeat.  He is not about being Fair.  My theophany is an even better example than Coelho’s popularity of the (from a human viewpoint) divine unfairness.

Why me?  I was not a good Christian.  I did not deserve to stand in the presence of the Living God.  What about the millions of believers who will never have this experience? What about God’s devout who live by faith alone?  Why not any of the Christians and Jews and Muslims I know who have better loved and honored God?

I cannot answer the question. Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son encapsulates the way of our Creator, but as often as we digest, or think we have digested, the lesson, a new iteration gobsmacks us.  For our century in the West, with its struggles towards social justice and equality, this is a hard truth.

Who is God then?  Well, first of all, He is God—and here is a corollary that should be obvious but somehow never is.  Everything He does works towards His own ends, not ours.

August 4, 2014

Farther and further:

Luke 15: 11-32

Acts 9:10

Really!

You industrious ones among my readers are objecting.  Vociferously.

And yes you are correct.  Paulo Coelho is the Marianne Williamson of the Spanish-speaking world.

More often than not, Coelho tweets from the land of the Hallmark card.

Coelho is a Pied Piper of Easy Belief, and as such, one of many who have entranced our fellow wayfarers.

At the end of my last piece–and wasn’t it sweet?–don’t expect that in future–I gave you a morsel from the end of Coelho’s Pilgrimage.  But here is a more representative passage:

“Petrus was right again: by teaching myself, I had transformed myself into a Master.”

No wonder Paulo Coelho is revered.  His message is that Truth–however you name it–the meaning of life, the divine–is to be found in oneself.  By looking deep.  By performing the spiritual equivalent of a daily fitness workout.  Recognize this sentiment?  It is a commonplace of our Age of Individualism.  If you listen to Krishna Das or other yoga teachers, as I do, you are familiar with his directive to his followers to find the Divine within.

Coelho’s particular schtick is to meld Christian tropes with this core assumption that “the self” is the center of the world.  Here is a sample of Coelho’s apotheosis of belief at the end of his pilgrimage:

“‘My Lord, I said, finally able to pray, ‘I am not nailed to this cross, nor do I see you there. The cross is empty, and that is how it should stay forever; the time of death is already past, and a god is now reborn within me.  This cross is the symbol of the infinite power that each of us has.  Now this power is reborn, the world is saved, and I am able to perform your miracles, because I trod the Road of the common people [the camino] and, in mingling with them, found your secret.  You came among us to teach us all that we were capable of becoming, and we did not want to accept this. You showed us that the power and the glory were within every person’s reach, and this sudden vision of our capacity was too much for us.'”

A mere moment of consideration lays bare the essential absurdity in the notion that each human being is himself or herself a little god.  And as adults, we should be able to grasp the banality here, because God has given us the gift of intelligence if not divinity.

Do not conclude, however, that Coelho’s particular version of Easy Belief–or Krishna Das’s for that matter–is my point.

What is my point?  Why am I ragging on Paulo Coelho?  Because he is just like me.  Like you.  Like all of us.  He wanders off into the weeds that grow along the road of faith.  For all his literary gifts and glorious imagination and empathy, Coelho is a dunderhead.  He–we–cannot keep focus on the road.

The road is not circular.  It is not internal.  It does not lead back to or in to ourselves.  It leads outward, through acts of discipline and searching and commitment and self-abnegation and ultimately witness to God.  I will be writing about these acts in future weeks.

We lean upon the staff of humility.  We do not raise up  in judgment.  That act belongs to God alone.

So yes I point out Coelho’s inanities–how could I not?  For God has given me–has given all of us to greater and lesser degree–the gifts of intelligence and discernment and He expects us to use those gifts.  But I do not sit in judgment on Paulo Coelho.  I would very much like to meet him someday, and I feel quite sure that I would love him.

And here is a wonder-filled corollary to our particular stupidities.  God uses our wanderings off-course for His own ends.  Paulo Coelho is a conduit through which God reaches other human beings.  I do not know these people, maybe many maybe a few–in a sense it is none of my business–but I am sure this is true.  Why?  Because I see this dynamic everywhere.  Earlier I mentioned that I listen to Krishna Das.  In fact, I listen to Krishna Das yoga radio on SiriusXM.  Krishna Das and other yogis sing the names of God.  In devotion.  In discipline.  Daily.  For hours.  Here is the true practice of the First Commandment:  love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.  Here is real praise music.  And here is God using what we seekers bring with us, however broken our offerings and clouded our beliefs, to reveal Himself to us.

God is Thrifty.

One more thing about Paulo Coelho.  In my previous piece, I wrote that he has 2 million followers on Twitter.  I need to update that figure.  He now has 9.1 million followers on Twitter.  Oh wait a minute.  He has a few more.  Now 9.3 million followers on Twitter.  A development that leads me to another nature of the divine that I will address next:

God is Unfair.

August 1, 2014

Farther and Further:

Mark 12:28

Matthew 22: 35-40

Paulo Coelho recent tweet:  “Thank you! #Adultery in the top of the lists in every single country it is published. Today: Korea & Bulgaria.”

Krishna Das available on iTunes.  On SiriusXM, by premium subscription only.

I was a pilgrim, one of the first of thousands who would pour in streams through the winding medieval streets of Santiago during the following week.  We were arriving from all over the world—later I would share Mass with a fellow middle-aged woman from Brazil—for the Feast of St. James, which is celebrated in Catholic Christendom on July 25.  When July 25 falls on a Sunday, the commemoration is a Great Feast Year.  And so it was in 2012—and not again until 2020.

Towards evening that first day, the square was almost empty, but I had no inclination to move from my perch.  I was enjoying medieval Spanish Latin church music, coming from a source I could not see, but amplified by the ancient paving stones.  From the stops and repetitions, I concluded that I was listening to a rehearsal for the festivities ahead.

I am not a Catholic.  It seems to me unlikely that the martyred body of James, the brother of Jesus and first leader of the early church in Jerusalem, found its way to Galicia and was buried, to be discovered in the ninth century.  But no matter.  Santiago de Compostela is a holy place—one of a few I have been privileged to see—sanctified by the faith and works, even the imprints of the steps, from the centuries of believers who have travelled there long before me.

I was on a quest, just as pilgrims to Santiago in Chaucer’s day had been.  I was trying to find closure to the extraordinary and largely inexplicable previous few years of my life.  I would eventually get that satisfaction, and Santiago was a way-station.   A link in the bracelet of end. 

Ending.  Beginning again.

And so the Great Day of St. James is an appropriate place to launch this new chapter in my blog Nattering On.  

Surely, it is time for me to share the few truths I have learned, for family or friends or acquaintances or former readers or whoever might read.

In August, I will turn sixty-eight.

If not now, when?

This is a scary move for me, for reasons that will become clear as I write more.

But back to July, 2012 in Santiago, Spain, where in the unfolding of that evening lies a shard of truth.

I was alone.  A middle-aged American woman who spoke no Spanish.  It was dusk, and I did not know where I would spend the night.

On the cathedral square, just behind my perch on the parapet, reigns the Hostal dos Reis Catolicos, founded in 1492 by King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella as a pilgrims’ hospice, since many of the visitors to fifteenth-century Santiago arrived sick and dying.  The doors of the Hostal have been open ever since.  Today it is the best hotel in Santiago, one of the loveliest in Spain.  It had been booked solid years in advance of July, 2012.

Yet somehow I knew that the Hostal would have a room for me.  I stood, turned around, walked up the broad steps and through the fifteenth-century arch.  The desk clerk could not have been more gracious and welcoming.  Of course, he had a room.

And so my spiritual journey turned out to be temporal as well, for during Feast Week I would sit in close proximity to King Juan Carlos, now recently abdicated, but at the time crowing and regnant—I remember thinking that here was a man who had just entertained his mistress.  And in contrast, his inward-looking wife, the drawn-faced but forbearing Queen Sofia, with her ladies-in-waiting passing by me on her way to and from her suite at the Hostal dos Reis Catolicos.

I talk with (now former) King Juan Carlos of Spain

I would enjoy the spectacle of Paulo Coelho and his retinue of lovely women at the Hostal.  Coelho, the most famous living chronicler of the camino, the pilgrimage road from France to Santiago, was the guest of the King and Queen of Spain for festival week.  I do not know Coelho, but he is a fellow believer, and today I am one of the Brazilian writer’s two million+ followers on Twitter.

My sojourn in Santiago encapsulates much of what I will be sharing with you in the next few weeks.

Lately, I have been thinking about how the Lord, other than in Scripture, teaches us about Himself and our relationship to Him.  Basic question:  who are we? And who is He?

To begin, with the kernel in my Santiago story. Life unfolds simultaneously on two parallel tracks.  We have been made creatures of a material world subject to the laws of physics and limitations of biology.  Gathered in communities of our making, we daily live and work.  Yet we are hardwired to seek He Who Hath Made Us, our Creator who is both immanent within the world and outside it beyond time.

Therefore, all of us—you, me, everyone we know and will never know—are at one and the same time the Mayhill that day in Santiago de Compostela and the innkeeper who took her in.  We are seekers—and surely if you are reading this far you are either already curious about God or about to submit yourself to the discipline or on your way and yearning for Him.  Some of you have travelled farther with Him than I ever will.

But most of the time we live in the rhythm of our daily chores.  There is a deceptive simplicity to rhythm.  It is hard to go about our business mindful at all times that a tedious stranger could be the angel in disguise mentioned in Hebrews.

The desk clerk at the Hostal dos Reis Catolicos undoubtedly was tired by nightfall.  He had been dealing with entitled, imperious rich people all day.  Even as I approached, a gentleman was grumping away from the massive desk.  But the receptionist looked at me, looked again.  He was calm, but with a flicker in his eye.

“Of course, we have a room for you.”

I will never forget the ripple of expression.  It was as if a half-millennium of caring for strangers—more than—since 1492—suddenly coalesced, descended and gathered into one face.

His awareness.  That young man.  That stranger.  I never asked his name, but he is in my thoughts and sometimes my prayers.

I do not know the why and wherefore of that evening.  And sometimes mystery is beautiful.  (If often not—as you will hear from me in subsequent weeks.)  Perhaps there is timelessness in the power of community, as believers join one by one, but linking, hand-to-hand and face-to-face as we live, day by day, year into year, passing the connection on to those who come after us, century after century.

July 25, 2014

Farther and Further:

James 1:26

Hebrews 13:2

Camino De Santiago:  Medieval Music from Spanish Pilgrimages (available on iTunes)

Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage (account of the camino and his spiritual journey)

Coelho, from Pilgrimage:    “And when I think about it, I guess it is true that people always arrive at the right moment at the place where someone awaits them.”

A classic beginning – to a story that confirms the current revelations about U.S. government surveillance.  Indeed my family’s experience shows that American eavesdropping is much more advanced than is being posited this minute in the press.

The caller in that spring of 2004 identified himself as an FBI agent, phoning from New York City–from, in fact, in front of my daughter’s former apartment in the West Village.  The super did not have her forwarding address.  Could I give this caller her whereabouts.  The FBI wanted to ask her about some phone calls she had made from Lisbon, Portugal five months ago, in January.

Perhaps needless to say, I refused.

As soon as the caller rung off, I phoned the local FBI office in San Francisco and described the New York call to the agent who answered.  I was curious whether or not the call had been legitimate.

An hour later, the head of the San Francisco FBI office called me back.  A chatty man indeed.  From the government’s point of view, too chatty.  Why?  Because I deduced the most astonishing fact from his conversation.

The head of the SF FBI told me that the New York call had been legit, although the man should not have called himself an FBI agent.  He was one of many people currently on temporary contract to the FBI during its investigation of phone records after the Madrid, Spain terrorist train bombings a few months earlier in March.

I will never forget what the FBI chief said:  “We are investigating all the phone calls made from the Iberian Peninsula in the wake of the Madrid train bombings.”

All. the. calls.

But it was not the sweep of the investigation that took me aback.

It was the timing.  The terrorist attack on Madrid happened in March.  But my daughter had phoned from Lisbon in January.  Two months before the attacks.  By March, she was back in college here.

There was only one conclusion I could make.  The U.S. government captures all telephone calls and holds them against future use/need.

Furthermore.  Given the volume of “all calls from the Iberian peninsula,” the government must have quite a sophisticated (likely more so now, nine years later) Artificial Intelligence to sift through the millions.

I suppose that one of our intelligence agencies, if not the FBI itself, gave its AI a few key words to winnow down the calls.  And then human beings listened to “the capture.”

Certainly, human beings later that spring had listened to my daughter’s January Lisbon phone calls.  The FBI chief in San Francisco knew that she was phoning her own apartment back in New York City and talking to her boyfriend in the apartment.  The FBI chief knew the boyfriend’s name, even though he was not on the apartment lease.  The FBI chief knew the tenor of their relationship.

How my daughter phoned home back then adds to the creepiness factor.  She did not have a cell phone.  In Lisbon, she went to the corner tobacconist and, with cash, she bought a phone card.  Then she went to the pay phone booth on the street to call the boyfriend.

There is no way the U.S. government could interest itself in my daughter’s overseas phone conversations with her boyfriend without (1) sweeping up her pay phone calls into a large database; (2) holding that database against future need; (3) using Artificial Intelligence to listen.

A year later, the FBI finally caught up with daughter, when she answered a knock at the door of her current apartment in the East Village.

The final lesson I take here.  Never think for a minute that our government is not serious about terrorism.

Postscript.

In case you are wondering how the story ends.

“FBI,” the agent announces himself.

My daughter bursts into tears.

It turns out that the FBI is interested in the now-ex-boyfriend.

Why??? I can not imagine.  The sweetest guy.  Wouldn’t hurt a flea.

My daughter does not know where he lives now.

One of the two FBI agents at the door gets in the parting shot.  “In future, don’t live with a guy who can’t or won’t put his name on a lease.”

June 7, 2013

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