Reflections

2011

2012-01-02T19:47:00.000-05:00

On January first, 2011, Estonia adopted the Euro currency, becoming the seventeenth nation to do so. Today, the future of the Euro is in serious doubt. Europe is teetering on the edge, about to tip into an economic catastrophe that would see unemployment rates which would make the United State’s eight percent look great by comparison. And should this economic catastrophe come to pass the Atlantic Ocean will not provide enough of a barrier to stop the damage from hurting the United States.

The U.S. didn’t have the best year, either. Our labor market is in bad shape. That means serious problems for real people. Many men who would like to be working are instead sitting at home, their skills rapidly deteriorating to the point that they may remain forever unemployable. Many young people can’t get a job at all, thus delaying the acquisition of skills. Many families are in dire straits, and had little to be hopeful about this Christmas.

An outgrowth of this terrible reality is another (much lesser) tragedy: the absurd amount of attention paid by “serious people” to the Occupy Wall Street movement. As someone said, perhaps these “protesters” should stop occupying Zuccotti Park and start occupying a desk. Or, as anyone who has ventured down there and inhaled has thought, perhaps they should occupy a shower. We should remember Mr. Lebowski’s words to the Dude: “My advice to you is to do what your parents did: Get a job sir.”

Absolutely enough said about those people.

The federal government did not have a stellar 2011. The Tea Partiers in the House of Representatives are … troubling. They were largely responsible for the utterly embarrassing and seriously damaging debt ceiling standoff, which in turn was largely responsible for the United States losing its AAA credit rating. It was incredible. The debt ceiling was raised eighteen times by Ronald Reagan. The debt ceiling was raised seven times by George W. Bush. The fact that a routine operation of government was so contentious that it led many people to conclude that the United States is ungovernable is … troubling. Ironically, the Tea Party has served the following purpose: serious people in the political middle now wonder whether it is wise to give the Republicans control of the White House in 2012. A Democratic president would serve as a nice check against the Tea Partiers in the House. And the Democrat’s candidate, whom many in the middle will be voting for due to the Tea Party, will be President Obama.

The president, at various times in 2011, was running against Donald Trump and Herman Cain. What a circus. The most troubling thing is not that these folks weren’t immediately laughed off the stage. What is most troubling is that they were allowed onto the stage in the first place.

2011 saw another fascinating and troubling development: Mitch Daniels didn’t enter the presidential race. Why? Because he didn’t want to put his family through the circus. What does it say about our country that those skills, talents, and attributes which would make a person a good president are the very things which prevent good people from running for president? Those who would be a good president cannot run for president precisely because those traits which would make them a good president stop them from running. What does that say about our politics? Nothin’ good.

At this point, one of the best things the Republicans have going for them is that in 2012 the Supreme Court will decide whether Obamacare is constitutional. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the Supreme Court determined the outcome of yet another presidential election?

But enough about politics. Culture and religion and economics and technology determine politics, not vice-versa. On to more important things.

A perfect example of this is the Arab Spring. One year ago next week Zine El Abidine Ben Ali abandoned his post as president of Tunisia and fled to the protective embrace of Saudi Arabia. Colonel Gaddafi fell in Libya, mercilessly executed by his former subjects. Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt when 2011 began, but no longer. And civil uprisings and protests have swept the Arab world.

Many heralded this as the advent of a better age in the Middle East, fixated with and elated by the live reports from Tahrir Square. But it is not obvious to me that we will be happier with the Middle East in ten year’s time than we were ten years ago. The same holds with the happy death of Kim Jong Il. It is great that 2011 saw him go. But will we want him back ten years from now?

Speaking of ten years, 2011 saw the tenth anniversary of 9/11. And 2011 saw the death of Osama bin Laden, taken out by the combination of the Bush administration’s hard work, President Obama’s political courage, and the impressive skill of the U.S. special forces. One of the finest moments of the year occurred when the United States honored Muslim burial traditions and treated bin Laden’s remains with respect. We are better than our enemies. We are not like them.

But are we as good as we think? I was troubled by the bloodlust, vengeance, and exuberance in the celebrations which followed the death of bin Laden. I was more troubled by the odd and absolutely disturbing riots which protested the firing of Joe Paterno. And I was more troubled by the riots in Britain. I don’t like to see evidence that the great achievement that is Western civilization is breaking down. But there it is.

More evidence: 2011 found that just fifty-one percent of adults in the United States are married. That’s all. In the very near future, married individuals will be the minority of American adults. The cornerstone of a healthy nation is the two-parent family. Parents and children, and then the children go on to become parents. The great cycle. But perhaps no more. Adults aren’t getting married. An embarrassingly high fraction of babies are born out of wedlock. Those babies grow up into adults who do comparatively and significantly worse than children from traditional families. It is hard to see how our country and culture can be strong if the institution of the nuclear family continues to dissolve.

Borders went bankrupt in 2011. A year ago, Borders employed twenty-thousand people and had over five-hundred bookstores in the United States. Today, Borders no longer exists. Will 2012 see a further decline in reading among the American people? The Founding Fathers knew that in order to succeed their great experiment required a virtuous citizenry. It is hard to cultivate virtue without receiving the wisdom of the past. It is hard to receive the wisdom of the past without reading. But bookstores can’t stay open. Writers can’t earn enough money writing to make a living. Newspapers and magazines close around the nation. I fear for what this suggests about our country’s future.

A writer whose words were sold by Borders passed away in 2011. Christopher Hitchens, the great polemicist, the great atheist. Hitchens wrote a book attacking Mother Teresa, of all people. (He titled it The Missionary Position. Call me crazy, but I think that’s great!)

Of course, I disagree with Hitchens’ arguments against Mother Teresa and I disagree with Hitchens’ stance on God. But despite these, or perhaps because of them, Hitchens was one of the very few writers whom I read, if you will, religiously. I never wanted to miss a word that flowed from Hitchens’ pen. I always wanted to know what he thought. He lived a life of courage. His life centered on many of the things I love: ideas, conversation, friends, reading, writing, language, literature, the public square, inquiry, and Johnnie Walker Black. I hope he is making friends with the communion of saints, perhaps letting the Lord know his opinions on how the Lord can better reveal His will to those of us on this side of eternity. I would, of course, be fascinated to read what Hitchens thinks on the subject. Maybe one day.

Others passed away in 2011 as well. Václav Havel passed away, a true hero if there ever was one. Steve Jobs died, leaving the world with a little less color and beauty than it had before his passing. The Big Man Clarence Clemons, saxophonist in and soul of the mighty E Street Band, died before his time. The E Street Band will never be the same -- indeed, in the eyes of many, will never be again. I pity all those who will now never see the greatest rock and roll performance in all history. And let us not forget the thousand upon thousand who died tragically in the Japanese tsunami, proving again that man is not the absolute master of this earth.

But 2011 wasn’t all bad.

We saw the marriage of Prince William to Catherine Middleton, created the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The BBC reports that up to two billion -- that’s billion, with a b -- people around the world tuned in to watch the spectacle and the ceremony and the tradition and the living history. I was among them, sitting in a friend’s living room, eating a delicious breakfast. In one sense, we all watched another chapter in the British monarchy, one-thousand-years strong, unfolding before our eyes. In another, we watched two young people, just another young couple, happily beginning their life together. Both are mysterious and magnificent realities. Both should be celebrated. The world happily complied.

And in 2011 we glimpsed the future. A thirty-six year old cancer patient needed a new windpipe. Scientists in London created an artificial one and coated it with the patient’s own stem cells. Surgeons in Sweden installed it in the patient -- the world’s first synthetic organ transplant. Imagine the possibilities, the new ways we can treat the sick, just up ahead, a little beyond the horizon.

We were filled with awe. In August we found evidence that Mars may host liquid water for part of its year. In November we launched Curiosity, the most elaborate Martian exploration vehicle ever, from the Kennedy Space Center. It should land on Mars this summer. The last month of 2011 witnessed the discovery of a planet orbiting its sun within the “habitable zone” -- just the right distance from its sun to allow for liquid water, and life. Two other planets were found in December orbiting stars similar to our sun, both very similar to Earth and both less than one-thousand light years away.

Will 2012 be the year when we discover that we are not alone in the universe?

The whole world was turned on its head in 2011 by the possibility that e may not equal m-c-squared. A neutrino was fired 454 miles from a supercollider outside Geneva to an underground facility in Italy. It was clocked at exceeding the speed of 186,282 miles per second. If this finding holds up we must throw out the textbooks; the speed of light will not be the speed limit of the universe. Our entire understanding of the nature of the physical world needs to be rethought. The physicists must return to the drawing board.

But if objects can go faster than light, then can they travel through time? A joke was circulating around the internet: “We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in this bar,” says the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

Why doesn’t that make sense? Because neutrinos can’t be told to leave a bar before they have entered it. Or? Can? They?

What else about which we are so sure is actually false?

Perhaps 2012 will see a rediscovery by our culture of awe. The so-called Enlightenment teaches us that nothing in the universe is outside the power of understanding offered by human reason. Its reductionism and materialism have removed the mystery and majesty from daily life. Largely gone from the intellectual and personal life is any sense of the numinous -- mysterium fascinans, certainly, but especially mysterium tremendum.

The Apostle Paul teaches us that “now we see through a glass, darkly.” We do. Perhaps the tantalizing hints of 2011 will bring verified discoveries in 2012, and with them humility. And wonder.

Thirtysomething

2011-12-01T11:27:00.001-05:00

I don’t watch much television, but I was home for Thanksgiving last week and while watching a rerun of an old sitcom I realized, to my great surprise, that the characters I was identifying with were the parents, not the children.

It used to be the children. When I was in elementary school I used to watch Saved By The Bell and wonder whether my high school experience would be like Zach and Kelly’s. My real idol was Mike Seaver -- as a ten-year-old I used to wonder if I would be as cool as Mike when I hit the ripe old age of sixteen.

But there I was a few days ago, watching Growing Pains and wondering how I would act if my kids were misbehaving. While watching these shows I used to wonder how my parents would react to me as a teenager. Now, apparently, I wonder how I would react as a parent.

It’s really weird. I think it’s because, along with most of my friends, I’ve finally left my twenties behind.

Personally, I’m relieved. My twenties were great in their own way, but I wouldn’t wish them on anyone. I’m looking forward, and I’m genuinely surprised by how much I enjoy being a real adult.

Thirtysomething is a great age. You are still young enough to be physically able to do most anything, you have money to play around with but no tuition bills to pay, and you are liberated from certainly social expectation: I’ve never known the name of the quarterback of the football team or the newest rock band. Now, it’s more okay that I don’t. You’re more comfortable in your own skin at thirtysomething than you are in your twenties.

Still, though, I’m surprised by how much the thirties enforce a certain conformity. When you’re younger you can allow your personality to shine through in a much more direct way. My friends used to wear a myriad of clothing styles to fit their personalities: athletic gear, hipster shirts, ripped-up jeans, classic polos. People used to have earrings. One friend went without a shirt every day he could during the summer. In general, my friends used to be much more expressive and individualistic.

Now, everyone pretty much wears the uniform: collared shirt and khakis. People do less, too: no one is in a band anymore. There’s less room in the day for self-expression. There’s less room for self-discovery. There’s less free time, I suppose.

Is individuality suppressed by employment and responsibility? Are creativity and self-expression childish indulgences? Or do thirtysomethings just grow out of that phase in a natural way that isn’t externally enforced?

BY THE TIME you hit thirty the variance across your cohort has set in. When you’re a high school and college student everybody is pretty much in the same place. Sure, some people have higher GPAs and SATs than others, some people are in the hard major and others aren’t, but all in all everyone is the same: a student. Even in your mid-twenties, everyone is pretty much just starting out. No one is more than a few rungs up the ladder. Some people stagnate, some people skyrocket, some people fall back -- but all within a pretty narrow band.

Before you’re thirty, you are establishing yourself. By the time you’re thirtysomething, you’re pretty far along to being established. And that’s when you look around the group of guys and gals you were friends with in high school and college and see a cold hard fact: some people do better than others.

They do. And it’s weird. It’s strange to see that one guy is earning six figures while another guy still lives with his parents, even though both had about a 3.4 grade point average in high school, went to the same college, and majored in business together.

In your twenties you think some of the people who are pulling down the average still have time to catch up. You don’t know where everyone’s place will be in the ranking. When you’re thirtysomething, that hope vanishes pretty quickly. You know where people are going to be. Sure, there will still be changes and surprises. But you can see a lot, and there is variance, and it is sometimes hard to deal with.

WHEN I WAS a kid I used to wonder what it would be like to be an adult. I never really articulated it as such, but I always thought that I would be something like a different person. I would still be me, but the me of the moment would largely be a memory, and the adult me would be something different and unknown to myself as a twenty-three year old.

But every year that passes brings with it an interesting reality: you feel pretty much like you did the year before. And by the time you are thirtysomething you are let in on the secret that you are who you are.

You are who you are. I hope that at sixty year old I will be wiser than I am. Hopefully I will be a better person than I am, having spent the next three decades working on some of my many flaws. But at my core I know that I will still be me, much like I was me half my life ago and will be me half my life from now. It is a deep realization, but also a comforting one.

WHEN YOU ARE thirtysomething the weight of the world has set in. You have real responsibilities, and you feel real stress, often for the first time. Your grandparents may no longer be with you, or if they are, they are experiencing real health problems. Your parents may as well. Your parents look old to your eyes in a way they never did before.

You have a wife. You may have children. You have a mortgage. You have trouble sleeping because you are stressed. You come home at the end of the day and pour yourself a drink as an act of self medication. What’s more, you know this is what you’re doing. You have indigestion. Maybe you actually start smoking.

You worry about your career. You have real responsibilities at work, and for the first time in your life you can actually screw something up. Your actions affect others and not just you. No one is there to look out for you.

A certain soberness sets in. The days of carefree youth have left. You are too tired to go out two nights in a row. Many weekends are spent alone with your wife, or with just a few friends. You want to rest with your time off.

Your midlife crisis hasn’t started yet, but the hints of it are emerging. You start to ask yourself questions: What am I doing with my life? Is this all there is? You’ve gotten up, gone to work, worked all day, come home, gone to sleep, and done it all over again more than two-thousand times -- and you still have thirty or forty more years to go. Is this life?

You have friends who have passed away -- peers. You realize that in this life promises are broken. Dreams don’t come true. The ending of the story isn’t always happy. There is real tragedy in the world. Life can be a struggle.

BUT YOU ALSO experience real joy for the first time. The joy of meeting your responsibilities. The joy of having a wife -- they joy of existing in a state where your home isn’t a place, but instead is another person. They joy of having children and watching them grow. The joy of living for others -- for your family; for your friends -- in a very real way.

This joy is born of sacrifice -- the sacrifices you make for your family and friends. You are starting to understand that the ancient wisdom you heard so much about as a kid is true. There is comfort in that, and some serenity. You are anxious to pass that wisdom along to your own children. You should.

For the first time in your life you are old enough to have old friends. You discover the joy of simply being present during another person’s journey through life. You discover the joy that is found in having a drink with a friend, looking back on memories of your friendship that stretch from high school to college to his wedding day to the birth of his children.

If you are lucky, you have different groups of friends -- each drawn from different stages of your life. Some friends you talk to regularly; with others, months pass between phone calls or visits. But all are special in their own way.

You thought you understood friendship when you were in your twenties. But now that you are thirtysomething you understand better just what a wonderful gift your friends are. They are guideposts along the road you have traveled. They help you to understand your roots -- they cut through the clutter and the noise and the deafening urgency of the moment and remind you of who you really are by reminding you of your past. In that way, they shape your future. In a very real sense, they are you.

Seven weeks

2011-10-08T17:46:00.000-04:00

The past seven weeks have been particularly stressful and busy at work, a side effect of which has been a lessening of my ability to follow the news.

Is it that, or is it a lessening of interest? I don’t know. It seems that political news can be summarized by two headlines: “President Obama Fails To Live Up To His Own Self-Created Hype”, and “Republican Lunatics Run For President”. C’est la vie? I sure hope not. But certainly such is life in 2011 in the United States.

Politics is determined by culture and economics, and not vice-versa. The economic news can be summarized by two headlines as well: “Global Financial System In Peril (Yet Again)” and “U.S. Workers Still Unemployed”. Those are bad, bad realities, and they bum me out.

So maybe it is a lessening of interest, after all. A sufficient condition for the destruction of our great republic is an apathetic citizenry. I have noticed a lot of apathy. I hope it’s not persistent.

I CAN’T SAY for even one moment that any part of me is upset that I haven’t seen the Republican presidential debates. From what I have heard they are really a disgrace.

Stephen Hill is an active-duty soldier serving in Iraq. He chose a Republican presidential debate to announce his homosexuality to his brothers in arms and the nation at large. Why? I don’t know, and I don’t care. At least superficially he did it to mark the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but what underlying characteristics -- spiritual, emotional, psychological -- compelled him to stand up I cannot divine.

I do know that his announcement was greeted with loud boos from the crowd. And then a deafening silence from the candidates. Their silence screamed so loudly that there is really nothing left to say, cutting through flesh and muscle right into the soul, penetrating the visible world and exposing the invisible. And what was exposed was a vacuum of courage and a void of integrity. What was exposed was powerlust. A leader would have condemned the boos. A coward would not. And, at least on that day, all the candidates were cowards.

This is not all we have seen. The crowd cheered when Rick Perry claimed that he hadn’t lost any sleep over the 234 executions he had presided over as the Texas governor. Stop here for a moment and imagine that? How has Governor Perry not lost any sleep over this? Really, not any sleep? Even if I supported the death penalty and even if I knew for sure that the accused was guilty, I sure wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing that I had the power to stop the switch from being flipped.

Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul to imagine a scenario wherein a healthy, thirty-year-old young man arrives at a hospital in a coma. The man has no health insurance. He needs intensive care for six months. “Who’s going to pay for that?” asked Mr. Blitzer. Answered Doctor Paul: “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks.” The audience erupts in applause. “But Congressman,” asks Mr. Blitzer, “are you saying that society should just let him die?” Some members of the audience yelled “Yeah.”

Yeah. The young man made a choice not to buy health insurance, but then ended up needing intensive care. He can’t afford it. Who should pay? No one, answered those members of the audience. We should let him die.

AMANDA KNOX IS free. That’s nice. I haven’t really followed the story that closely, but from what I have read the evidence against her was ridiculously insufficient to merit jail time. Some are arguing that we are seeing justice at work: the Italian system allowed the appeal, and Ms. Knox was set free. I can’t believe she was convicted in the first place.

The poor girl has spent four years of her life in prison. That’s not a short amount of time. And then there are the scars. The word is that she was sexually harassed in prison. She is a celebrity, and will be recognized on the streets and in restaurants. She will have trouble trusting anyone; she will have trouble with the fear and anxiety that come after life slaps you around and you realize in a powerful and dramatic way that you are not in control of your future.

Her short press conference in Seattle was both joyful and heartbreaking. She is home, and all she wants is to spend time with her family. All the peripherals have faded away, and what is important remains: those she loves. She had to pay an extremely high price to learn this lesson. And the sad reality is that in her life the price may be greater than the benefit.

Let justice be done though the heavens fall, so said the ancient Romans. The heavens fell four years ago, just down the road from Rome, and shattered the life of a young girl from Seattle. Here’s hoping that she can pick up the pieces and carry on. In this fallen and broken world that is far from certain.

WESTERN EUROPE… WHAT to say? We recreated the world after the Second World War, and what we made seems to be breaking under the pressure of irresponsible governments, citizenries which lack any fidelity to virtue and the common good, and the slow and unstoppable evolution of culture. It is very possible that we will all wake up one day, get our coffee, sit down in front of the newspaper, and witness in real time the destruction of the modern order. It may happen in a split second. In a flash. And then it will all be over. And we will all wonder how we didn’t see it coming.

SO YES, THESE past seven weeks have seen some challenges. The Republican debates highlight the way that the citizens of a democracy can destroy their own country. Most Americans are good people, but those on the fringe have the passion necessary to be involved and have a disproportionate influence on who leads our government.

Those who boo an active-duty soldier who is fighting in a war because of who he chooses to sleep with are not my brother. Those who would let a sick man die to prove some silly point based on a superficial understanding of liberty and collective life are not my brother. I will not be led by a man who can so casually talk about the execution of criminals, and I will not be in fraternity with those who cheer his unbothered conscience.

These people are seriously harming our country.

These seven weeks have seen Amanda Knox come home. Her story is a dramatic example of the extent to which our lives are not our own. This reality is terrifying. Look what happened to her. While most of us will not be in danger of spending four years in an Italian prison, we all are at risk of being a victim to life, to fate, to circumstance, to chance.

One of those circumstances may be the unfortunate luck of being young and alive in 2011. If Western Europe goes, we all go. And Western Europe could go.

BUT LIFE IS full of surprises. On September twenty-first we all went to bed in a universe where energy equals mass times the squared speed of light. A pillar of e=mc^2, and of Einstein’s theory of relativity, is that nothing can ever go faster than the speed of light. The next day, on September twenty-second, we discovered that Einstein may have been wrong.

A neutrino was fired 454 miles from a supercollider outside Geneva to an underground facility in Italy. It was clocked at exceeding the speed of 186,282 miles per second. That’s the speed limit of the universe. Nothing can go faster than that. But it seems that something did. Sixty nanoseconds faster, to be precise. The neutrino was sixty nanoseconds faster than light in getting from Switzerland to Italy.

Brian Greene, professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia, says that if the European findings are correct “this would change the idea of how the universe is put together.” Professor Greene added: “I would bet just about everything I hold dear that this won't hold up to scrutiny.”

But perhaps it will. And if it does, perhaps we can rediscover a greater sense of awe and mystery. The so-called Enlightenment has robbed us of that. In its reductionism many phenomena become nothing more than what they weigh and measure, than how they compute. In its hubris it believes that sensibly-posed questions must be material or logical in nature.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly,” the Apostle Paul writes. His words echo through the ages -- we were reminded of them on that day three weeks ago when a tiny neutrino threatened to overturn our entire understanding of the physical world.

Awe and mystery may be returning, and with them humility -- an understanding of our proper place in the created order.

DURING THESE SEVEN weeks my goddaughter was born. I have been thinking a lot about the world she entered, and shared some of my thoughts with you here today. But I also think about the world she will inhabit, the world she will grow old in, the world decades after I am gone. Who knows what the future will hold? There is reason, of course, for hope, though at times it feels like we must struggle to see it.

But as with the baby born in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, sometimes the reason for hope can be found where it is least expected. During these seven weeks, my reason for hope was simple, is simple. It is her.

Steve Jobs and Dr King, and hope

2011-08-28T12:11:00.000-04:00

I am not a techie guy. My brothers would ask for gadgets for Christmas; I would ask for books. I didn’t want a smartphone. I didn’t want a portable PlayStation. The television in my living room still has a tube; I don’t have cable -- I just use it for movies.

For the longest time I resisted Apple. I really didn’t know what I was talking about, my lack of interest in the world of technology being so strong, but I did know one thing: Apple was a cult. And the leader of the cult was a man named Steve Jobs.

Then, about five years ago, a group of friends bought me an iPod. When I opened the gift I was sure I wouldn’t use it. Boy was I wrong. I ended up using it every day. It was a miracle of technology. I was living on the Upper East Side, where a quick trip home often takes an hour, and it was just so nice to have all my music right there, in one tiny, elegant device. I would listen to it at work, or in the gym, or on the subway, or in the park. It was valuable to me.

About three years ago my younger brother decided that he needed an iPhone. The best route to this destination was, in his mind, to convince my mother and dad that they needed iPhones as well -- family plans are cheaper per person than going it alone. It ended up that my dinky Sprint phone with no data plan (I barely even sent text messages at this point) was actually more expensive per month than one-fourth of the monthly iPhone family plan. I caved and went in.

After about three days with my iPhone I came to understand that Steve Jobs isn’t a cult leader. He’s a visionary leader.

I just love my phone. It is beautiful. It is elegant. It works so well. I love the little things, the details: the noise that the phone makes when I send a text message, the way my email inbox seems to vanish into the center of the screen whenever I minimize it, the sound the phone makes when I lock it. It’s just wonderful.

I don’t feel ownership over most of my possessions. I don’t feel brand loyalty very often. But I do for my iPhone. For the longest time I was pissed: if only someone else would invent a smartphone as good as my iPhone, then I wouldn’t have to support the cult. But the cult has won me over:

But is Apple a cult? Maybe it’s just better than the competitors. Are Apple users cult members? Maybe they just know that Apple is the best.

RUMOR HAS IT that when Steve Jobs personally persuaded John Sculley to leave PepsiCo and to join Apple he asked Mr. Sculley, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Mr. Jobs came about as close to changing the world as a technology leader can. Lamenting the fact that most of the news coverage during the past few days regarding Mr. Jobs, who announced last week that he is resigning as Apple’s chief executive, centered on the iPhone and iPad, Joe Nocera reminded:

“Have we forgotten already that Jobs virtually invented the personal computer, with the introduction of the Apple II, when he was barely 21? That a few years later he saved Apple from near-disaster by creating the Macintosh -- the first machine with a mouse and windows, and all the other features we associate with modern computing? That the NeXT operating system was critical to the next generation of Macintosh computers after Jobs returned from a 12-year exile in 1997? And, yes, then came the iPod, the iPhone and iPad -- all of them so elegant in their look and feel that they became more than devices. They were objects of lust.

“There’s more, of course. Steve Jobs persuaded the recording industry to use his iTunes to give consumers an easy alternative to stealing music online. The iPhone completely upended two industries: computing and cellphones. The iPad is in the process of doing the same to the written word. And let’s not forget Pixar, which Jobs bought at the same time he was starting NeXT, and which has become the greatest maker of animated films in modern times, steeped in Jobs’s aesthetic and attention to detail.”

Throw in Mr. Jobs’ visionary push for iCloud, Apple’s cloud computing service -- a technology that I predict will revolutionize computing as much as the introduction of the laptop -- and you have a man who has left his mark on the United States and the world.

A modern-day Henry Ford? That’s for historians to decide. But in this sense the comparison is false: Henry Ford offered his famous Model T to a customer “painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” Mr. Jobs, with his eye constantly attuned to elegance and beauty and efficiency, not only offered his products in vivid color, but added color and richness to our daily lives as well.

TWO DAYS BEFORE Mr. Jobs announced his resignation the memorial to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. opened in Washington. For Dr. King we don’t have to wait for the historians to decide: this man is one of the greatest, most influential Americans to ever live. His memory is now enshrined in stone, situated adjacent to Franklin Roosevelt’s memorial, directly across the Tidal Basin from Thomas Jefferson’s beautiful temple -- Dr. King stands shoulder to shoulder with these American giants, and in some sense towers above them.

The opening of Dr. King’s memorial and the resignation of Mr. Jobs reminded me of a reality both profound and easy to forget.

In American politics today, we do not have heroes. There are no towering giants in high elected office. There are no visionary leaders, taking us boldly into the future. There are no moral leaders, summoning us to our better selves.

If you wanted to forecast the future of the United States and you only looked at our political leaders, then you would think that our best days are behind us.

And perhaps they are. But I find myself this week hopeful, because the greatness of America is not found in our politics.

Steve Jobs was a young man with a dream working out of his parent’s garage. He went on to create a company that, on August ninth of this year, was briefly the largest company by market capitalization in the United States. This summer, Apple had more cash on hand than the federal government.

There is simply no country in the world, in all of history, that is so successful at transforming the dreams of ordinary citizens into reality. Steve Jobs wasn’t the first American to change the world, and he surely won’t be the last. Our national spirit was forged by the drive westward, by Manifest Destiny. Ours is the spirit of a frontier nation, constantly pushing, constantly discovering, constantly doing the impossible. We are adventurers and explorers. We went to the moon. It is this spirit which fuels our great entrepreneurs. And it is our great entrepreneurs who drive this country’s marketplace forward, leading the world.

Dr. King had a dream, too. He was a moral leader of the first order. The spark that was the Montgomery Bus Boycott lit a fire, and that fire changed the hearts of men from the “mighty mountains of New York” to the “prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire”, from the “snow-capped Rockies of Colorado” to the “curvaceous slopes of California” -- from sea to shining sea.

STEVE JOBS CHANGED the way that we live our lives and run our businesses. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. changed our hearts.

Medgar Evers was killed by the Klan. Bull Connor turned attack dogs and fire hoses on innocent blacks. And in the midst of all this suffering and injustice and evil, Martin Luther King Jr. had the moral clarity, faith, and compassion to summon all Americans to perhaps the most challenging commandment Christ ever issued: Love your enemies. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.

Dr. King followed in the footsteps of the Lord, doing the hard work of implementing God’s will here on earth. And his courageous witness made it a little easier for the rest of us to do the same.

There is nothing about personal computers, portable music devices, beautiful movies and elegant smartphones that is unique to America. And the message of the Gospel championed and personified by Dr. King is eternal, knowing no allegiance to time or nation. But the stories of Mr. Jobs and Dr. King are quintessentially American.

During this time of political cowardice and myopia, they give me hope for my country’s future.

Walking to New York

2011-08-02T15:43:00.001-04:00

I should like to begin by pointing out something remarkable: the deficit reduction measure signed into law by President Obama this afternoon is to my political right. In the past three presidential elections I have voted for the Republican each time, and even given that it is simply the case that the fiscal policy set by this government -- both the unfortunate extension of the Bush tax cuts and the deficit reduction bill signed today -- is to my right.

The new law requires that 917 billion dollars be cut from agency spending over the next ten years, with twenty-five billion in cuts in the coming fiscal year. Later this year, a special committee is charged with cutting at least 1.2 trillion more out of the ten-year deficit. There is a “trigger” to enforce this: if the committee fails, then that amount will be cut by reducing spending across the board, with a fifty-fifty split between domestic and defense spending.

What’s missing? Revenue enhancements.

Come on, folks. Do we really think that controlling our debt and deficits should be done only through spending cuts? The fact of the matter is that we have a fourteen-trillion dollar debt, and that we are adding to it by running trillion-dollar annual deficits. As healthcare costs continue to rise and to rise our debt is projected to grow and to grow. How does it make sense to solve this problem only through spending cuts?

A few years ago, Warren Buffett made headlines by pointing out that he paid 17.7 percent on his taxable income of over forty-six million dollars, while his receptionist paid about thirty percent on her taxable income. This is more common than you’d think, and it begs an obvious question: Is there really no room for tax reform? Is there really no room for revenue enhancements? Last year, in a year in which it made billions of dollars of profit, General Electric paid no federal tax. None. Nada. How can we reasonably argue that revenue enhancements shouldn’t play a role in getting our debt and deficit under control?

It’s a simple issue of fairness. The idea that we would cut down the size of our budget deficit exclusively by taking away government services from those who need them is unthinkable. There needs to be pain spread all around. So, in addition to taking away government services from those who need them, let’s also make sure that Warren Buffett pays at least as much in taxes as his receptionist, and that General Electric pays more than zero dollars in taxes. I challenge anyone to argue against this judgment.

But that’s not the deal the president signed. As of this afternoon, our government has a policy of achieving deficit reduction through the exclusive use of spending cuts.

We don’t have European socialism under President Obama, as many on the right have feared. Indeed, the fiscal policy of the United States government under Mr. Obama has been to my right. Some polls show that our government’s fiscal policy is not only to the right of the average voter, but it is to the right of the average Republican voter. This is incredible. And it is deeply unfortunate.

THAT’S THE SUBSTANCE of this afternoon’s law. The politics here are simple: everybody loses.

When Mr. Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president, he declared that “if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…”

The president has not been able to slow the rise of the oceans. (Are they rising too quickly?) I’m pretty sure that we did not begin “to provide care for the sick” after his election, and the jobless aren’t doing so hot.

The president hasn’t achieved any of the transformative change around which he happy-talked his way into the White House. Big surprise. Many of us knew that he was selling snake oil during the campaign -- trying to intoxicate the young and those who yearned for better politics in order to further his own personal ambition.

But what actually is surprising is the degree of his weakness as a leader. He let Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats kick his ass all over town for his first two years as president (e.g., the Obamacare debacle), he let the military kick his ass all over town on Afghanistan, and now he is letting the Tea Party kick his ass all over town on fiscal policy: Mr. Obama extended the Bush tax cuts. Mr. Obama extended the Bush tax cuts. And now Mr. Obama has signed into law a deficit reduction bill that does not include revenue enhancements. Unbelievable. This man is the very definition of a weak and powerless leader. He is so far in over his head that he doesn’t even know which way is up anymore. Or left.

The Republicans are worse off, as well. What we have learned during this whole episode is that the reasonable Republicans are not in charge. The masters of the Republican Party are the Tea Party. There’s no way in hell I’m going to vote for a Republican presidential candidate if it means giving control of both the White House and Congress to this group of zealots. The debt ceiling debate has damaged the Republican brand to an incredible degree. It may take decades to recover fully.

Comparing the stunning reasonableness of President Obama’s deficit reduction proposal to the stunning lunacy of the Tea Party’s helps crystallize my 2012 vote. Does it help to crystallize yours? The 2012 GOP nominee has a big mess to clean up if he wants to win independents.

I AM OF mixed emotions on the fact that this bill does nothing to address the actual, structural problems with our fiscal position.

On the one hand, I’m glad. Rewriting the social contract by reforming Medicare and Social Security is not something that should be done in an atmosphere of crisis with the Tea Party holding a gun to the head of the reasonable and responsible Republicans and Democrats.

On the other hand, I agree with the president and the speaker of the House that we had a real opportunity here to use the debt ceiling increase as an opportunity to achieve a Grand Bargain.

But accept the premise of my statement as a fact: this bill does nothing to address the underlying, structural problems which face the federal budget over the next fifty years. “It eliminates no program,” writes Senator Coburn, “consolidates no duplicative programs, cuts no tax earmarks and reforms no entitlement program.” All the hard choices about Medicare and Social Security are put off into the future.

Until when in the future? Do we really think that the Congressional “super committee” will attempt to reform Medicare and Social Security during an election year? The Tea Party has been extremely good at talking about the need to cut spending without actually listing what they would cut and how they would cut it: Do we really think that the 2012 Republican presidential candidate will try to win an election by telling the elderly and about-to-be elderly that he will reduce their Medicare and Social Security benefits? If you answer yes to those questions, then I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.

AT THE END of the day, this has been a bad, bad chapter in the life of our nation.

Taking first things first, it is utterly ridiculous that we had to reduce our deficit in order to increase the debt ceiling. There is no reason under the sun that the latter requires the former. The debt ceiling was raised eighteen times by Ronald Reagan. The debt ceiling was raised seven times by George W. Bush. And the debt ceiling has been raised three times already by President Obama -- this afternoon’s legislation marks the fourth. So all this outrage about raising the debt ceiling is simply at odds with the facts: hitting the debt ceiling is not a function of a government “out of control”, or “Obama socialists”, or anything else. It is a routine operation of government.

The fact that carrying out a routine operation of government proved to be this difficult is a problem.

I don’t see how the bond ratings agencies won’t take away our AAA rating. Apart from actually failing to raise the debt ceiling, it is hard to imagine how the United States could have demonstrated more powerfully that our political system cannot deal with the serious, empire-ending fiscal problems coming our way. Yes, we raised the debt ceiling, and yes, we coupled the increase with deficit reduction. But we did not do a damn thing about (a) Medicare, which is the real problem we face, or about (b) our tax code, which needs to be reformed in order to deal with (a). We simply have to both (a) reform Medicare and (b) increase government revenues in order to solve our fifty-year fiscal problems in a humane and moral way. We. Simply. Must. And since we showed no ability to even begin to address these issues, it seems to me that holding our debt is riskier. And since holding our debt is riskier, it seems to me that we’ll lose AAA. I’d say the probability of losing AAA equals three-quarters.

This whole experience has been embarrassing. It only adds to my doubt that our government will ever be able to handle the big issues of Medicare and Social Security reform. If not now, then when?

Senator Alexander summed up the deficit reduction law: “If I were sitting at Union Station trying to catch a train to New York City and someone offered me a ticket to Baltimore or Philadelphia, I’d take it, and then find a way to get to New York from there.”

This is not how great nations behave. If a great nation needs to get to New York, it does not take a train to Philly and walk the rest of the way.

Senator Blunt adds pith: “This isn’t the best possible bill but it’s the best bill possible.”

I agree with the senator. This is the best bill possible. And that fact alone should send shivers down the spine of anyone who loves this country and cares for its future.

Reasonable men, coolly consulting?

2011-07-18T10:09:00.001-04:00

“The two great questions of funding the debt and fixing the seat of government have been agitated, as was natural, with a good deal of warmth as well as ability. […] They were more in danger of having convulsed the government itself than any other points.”
-- Gen. Washington, president of the United States, to the Marquis de la Luzerne, August 1790

“We keep on talking about this stuff and we have these high-minded pronouncements about how we’ve got to get control of the deficit and how we owe it to our children and our grandchildren. Well, let’s step up. Let’s do it.”
-- President Obama, Monday, July 11th, 2011

In the summer of 1790, a little over one year into General Washington’s first term as president of the United States, the leaders of our nation were divided over a controversial funding bill championed by Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary.

The Revolution War had been expensive, and the states were in debt. The northern states were in much worse financial shape than the southern states, some of which had paid off a good share of their war debt, and some of which didn’t have much to begin with. For a number of good reasons, Hamilton proposed that the federal government assume the debt of the individual states. This effectively meant, of course, that the taxpaying citizens of the southern states would have to pay off a portion of the debt incurred by the north. The southern states, including the Virginia delegation, were strongly opposed to Hamilton’s plan.

The situation was dire. The very existence of the United States was threatened. There was talk of dissolving the union.

Thomas Jefferson, the first secretary of state, describes the stakes as such: “Congress met and adjourned from day to day without doing anything, the parties being too much out of temper to do business together. The eastern members particularly […] threatened a secession and dissolution.”

Jefferson bumped into Hamilton outside President Washington’s residence in New York. “Hamilton was in despair,” recalls Jefferson. Though he claimed ignorance of the financial matters Hamilton was discussing, Jefferson reasoned that if the rejection of Hamilton’s bill “endangered a dissolution of our Union at this incipient stage, I should deem that the most unfortunate of all consequences.”

“I proposed to him,” Jefferson writes, “to dine with me the next day, and I would invite another friend or two, bring them into conference together, and I thought it impossible that reasonable men, consulting together coolly, could fail, by some mutual sacrifice of opinion, to form a compromise which was to save the Union.”

Jefferson ended up inviting a friend, James Madison, father of the Constitution and a leader of the Virginia Congressional delegation. The three men ate (and, I hope, drank) and worked out a compromise to save the union. In exchange for the passage of the Assumption Bill, which Madison could assure, Hamilton would ensure that the permanent location of the United States Capitol would be in the south, in Washington, D.C, something which the southern states very badly wanted.

They had dinner. They talked. They worked it out. A trade was made. Each side got something that it wanted. Neither side got everything that it wanted. “Reasonable men, consulting together coolly,” did not fail.

This is the behavior of statesmen. And today, over two centuries later, I am writing about it and you are reading about it. It is known in history as the great Compromise of 1790.

I’VE BEEN THINKING about that dinner party quite a bit as our leaders fight it out over the debt ceiling.

Though not a dinner party, the golf outing shared by President Obama and Speaker Boehner had the feel of something grand -- like a throwback to the days of Jefferson and Hamilton. But we don’t even have to go back centuries -- it wasn’t that long ago when President Reagan and Tip O’Neill, that great Irish Democrat, the speaker of the House, would have drinks together. They were friends “after six p.m.,” as Reagan himself wrote, and the two forged an important compromise in 1983 to keep Social Security solvent.

The golf outing had the feel of statesmanship -- of a smoke-filled room or an antechamber, from which great and powerful men would emerge with a solution to the nation’s problems. And it was the speaker, not the president, who was pushing for a Grand Bargain, telling Mr. Obama, “Come on, you and I, let’s lock arms and we’ll jump out of the boat together.”

After the golf outing, the president and the speaker decided to take over the debt negotiations. The speaker wanted a bigger deal than the 2.4 trillion in cuts demanded by Congressional Republicans in exchange for a similar increase in the debt ceiling. The speaker held several private meetings with the president in the White House residence, including a Fourth of July weekend meeting. Their advisers were kept in the dark. Members of Congress were kept in the dark. The two were acting like leaders.

According to press reports, the president and the speaker agreed to a remarkable compromise. The speaker agreed to revenue enhancements of eight-hundred billion dollars, to be generated by a phase-out of tax cuts for the wealthy and special interests and through closing loopholes in the tax code. The president agreed to over four trillion dollars in deficit reduction over ten years, including cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and, remarkably, to raising the age of eligibility for Medicare. The speaker reportedly went so far as to agree not to push for a repeal of Obamacare.

“There’s no point in dying on a small cross,” Vice President Biden is fond of saying. The president and the speaker took that message to heart. They were going to do something real, something substantive, about one of the biggest problems facing the United States today. Theirs was a Grand Bargain. They were the model of “reasonable men, consulting together coolly.”

And then, the weekend before last, the speaker consulted with his allies in the House. They ran him down. He understood that if he continued to push for the Grand Bargain that he would be edged out of the House Republican leadership. He would lose the speakership.

Last week followed, which was a disheartening sight to see: nothing but squabbling, which reportedly included, according to some accounts, the majority leader of the House, Eric Cantor, acting like a jerk during a meeting with the president, and the president storming out of the room, asking Mr. Cantor if he thought that President Reagan would have tolerated being treated so poorly. Seriously.

This week won’t be much better. The House and the Senate will pass resolutions which the other chamber cannot support, some rogue members will offer their own plans, and adults all over the country will continue to wonder how it is that the leaders of our nation are such unserious clowns.

Where are the statesmen? Where is the leadership? Where are the “reasonable men, consulting together coolly”? I’ll tell you: on a golf course a few weeks ago. The problem is that, unlike Hamilton and Madison, the president and the speaker are simply unable to control the whack-job elements of their parties. When Eric Cantor and the lunatic Tea Partiers told the speaker that if he continued to push for a Grand Bargain then they would send him packing to Ohio, the true leaders of the Republican Party revealed themselves.

THESE ARE THE people to blame.

The reality is simple: The United States is going to hit the debt ceiling limit in about two weeks. If that happens, there likely will be a catastrophe. Congress and the president have to make a deal to avoid this. The president backed down and agreed to tie budget cuts to a debt ceiling increase. According to widespread media reports, the following is true: The president has agreed not to raise tax rates. The president has agreed to four trillion dollars of deficit reduction over the next ten years. The president has agreed to cuts in Medicare and Social Security, including raising the Medicare eligibility age and changing the Social Security inflation index. The president has agreed to a three-to-one ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases.

All the Republicans have to accept is less than one trillion dollars of revenue enhancements. And they won’t.

The Democrats are correct in their opinion that in addition to spending cuts there should be revenue enhancements. They are obviously correct. A group of House Republicans, acting like a bunch of lunatic fanatics, have shut down negotiations over this point.

The Democrats are acting like responsible adults, and these House Republicans are acting like a bunch of toddlers throwing a temper tantrum. The Democrats have given Republicans an incredible deal, and this group of Republicans, apparently in some quasi-religious display of zealotry, refuse to accommodate the completely reasonable request that revenue enhancements be made part of the deal.

Now, the smart money is on the debt ceiling being raised. The United States will not default. We pay our bills. Great nations pay their bills, and, contrary to what our politics projects, we are still a great nation.

But the willingness of these House Republicans to play games with the debt ceiling is terrifying.

The speaker and the president tried for a Grand Bargain. Achieving something big and meaningful would have gone a long way to restoring faith in America’s political system. That the negotiations of these two leaders, a throwback to days past, failed so spectacularly tells us something about the composition of our political class.

It is a curse on both our houses, to be sure. But in this moment, the president is showing compelling leadership and reasonableness. Yes yes, he was late to the party, short on specifics, and all the rest. But for the past month he has been a true leader and reasonable man.

If things continue as they are right now, then in two years, why would we give the White House to the Republicans? Would a reasonable Republican, like the speaker, be able to control these House Republicans as president? Indeed, the fight over the debt ceiling has clarified much, including this: If the 2012 election were held today, Mr. Obama would have my vote.

Leaving Afghanistan

2011-06-30T09:35:00.001-04:00

The first thing to say about President Obama’s speech last week on Afghanistan is that the president is finally acting like the commander in chief. Regardless of what you think about his Afghanistan policy, this is welcome news.

The president plans to withdraw ten-thousand troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2011, leaving two-thirds of the West Point surge troops in country until next summer, when all thirty-three thousand will be home. “After this initial reduction,” said the president, “our troops” -- at this point in the calendar to be numbering close to seventy thousand -- “will continue coming home at a steady pace as Afghan security forces move into the lead. Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.”

This is not what the military wanted. The New York Times reports that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates “argued publicly against a too-hasty withdrawal of troops, but he said in a statement last Wednesday that he supported Mr. Obama’s decision.” Secretary Clinton was also reportedly concerned about the scale of the troop reductions.

General David Petraeus, the commander of the war, did not endorse the president’s decision. “He and other military commanders argued that the 18 months since Mr. Obama announced the troop increase did not allow for enough time for the Americans to consolidate the fragile gains that they had made in Helmand and other provinces.”

Despite the advice of his military commanders, the president is pulling out the surge troops.

He only halfheartedly committed them in the first place, simultaneously announcing in December 2009 the West Point surge and the date for the beginning of the withdrawal. Bob Woodward painted a picture in Obama’s Wars and in the pages of The Washington Post of a weak president who was misled by his commanders -- of a president who wanted to send in far fewer than thirty-thousand troops, but who was unable to impose his will on the military brass. It seems, thankfully, that the president has overcome that deficiency.

Having said that, it is the case that General Petraeus is probably correct: pulling out the surge troops will not give us the time needed to solidify our hard-won gains. The general turned around Iraq with a similar surge. He wants more time in Afghanistan to do the same.

In his West Point speech announcing the surge, the president declared that “our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” And not just ours: “what’s at stake is the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.” We are left, then, with the central question of the president’s Afghanistan policy -- a question that we have been asking for over a year: If what happens in Afghanistan is so important, then why are we leaving according to a timetable?

Maureen Dowd summarizes the problem: In Afghanistan, the president “wants to go but he wants to stay. He’s surging and withdrawing simultaneously. He’s leaving fewer troops than are needed for a counterinsurgency strategy and more troops than are needed for a counterterrorism strategy -- and he seems to want both strategies at the same time. Our work is done but we have to still be there. Our work isn’t done but we can go.”

What to make of this?

Yes, it is the case that we will still have close to seventy-thousand soldiers in Afghanistan on Election Day 2012 -- nearly twice as many soldiers as were in Afghanistan on the day the president took office. And it is true that the president promised that the “process of transition will be complete” by 2014, and not that all our troops will be home. But, on balance, what I heard in the president’s speech last Wednesday was an admission that we have done all that we can do.

We have done all that we can do. At least, politically.

We have been in Afghanistan for a decade. George F. Will writes that our involvement in World War II lasted 1,346 days. “U.S. fighting in Afghanistan reached that milestone six years ago (June 14, 2005).” I am writing this essay in the Detroit airport. Walking to the airport bar I passed a soldier whose left leg was replaced by a prosthetic. Walking from the airport bar to the gate I passed a group of seven or eight uniformed soldiers. They looked very young. How many of them will be maimed in Afghanistan over the next two years? How many of those young men will be killed?

We are weary. We are weary of the war, and we are weary of the future. We are plagued by a pervasive sense of national decline. “The rise of the rest,” as Fareed Zakaria puts it, has put us ill at ease. The unemployment rate, the growth rate of wages, the debt-to-GDP ratio, the size of our deficit, the coming entitlement crisis, and, most importantly, the sense that our political system is simply incapable of handling any of our problems has us downright frightened. We have problems of our own. We have lost the stomach to solve problems abroad, even if those problems are of our own making, and even if those problems, today in a faraway land, very well may one day return to our doorstep.

I have argued in this space that we need to stay in Afghanistan, or we need to go. We can’t remain in limbo, which is what the president’s policy has been. If we’re going to stay, then we need to win -- we need to commit the money and troops necessary to achieve a real victory. But if this is not politically feasible, then we need to leave. Fast.

Last Wednesday night, the president opened the exit door. We are leaving Afghanistan, with or without victory. We discovered last week the point at which the political constraint binds. We discovered last week the limits of American power.

The rapture, Hell, and Biblical literalism

2011-06-06T21:33:00.002-04:00

I was having dinner last week with a cradle Catholic and two atheists. The subject of the rapture came up, and it was lost on none of us that May 21st came and went without the beginning of the end of the world.

Harold Camping is the man behind all of this, an evangelical Christian radio broadcaster. You would not believe how he came up with May 21st, 2011 as the date of the rapture. Apparently Noah -- of the ark -- was given seven days to prepare for the great flood which would wipe out all life on earth. Mr. Camping takes seven and multiplies it by one-thousand. He then adds seven-thousand to the date of the great flood of Noah, which he somehow assigns to the year 4990 B.C. Being careful to subtract one from his calculation “because the calendar does not have a year zero,” Mr. Camping comes up with the year 2011 as the start of the apocalypse. I will not describe how he gets to May 21st, but doubtless you can imagine the sort of journey required to get there.

This I knew before dinner, having stumbled upon MSNBC on May 20th and seen the “countdown to the rapture” clock ticking off in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. What I learned at dinner was that Mr. Camping has revised his date from May 21st to October 21st. Something about the difference between a “spiritual”, “invisible judgment day” and the real thing. Yup.

I find this both funny and sad, but more sad. The Washington Post reports: “Believers had spent months warning the world of the pending cataclysm. Some had given away earthly belongings. Others took long journeys to be with loved ones. And there were those who drained their savings accounts.” It is sad that people have destroyed their finances because of Mr. Camping’s arithmetic.

Still, though, when I read about this, I can’t help but smile slightly and think: There they go again, those crazy evangelicals, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

If you take away Christian tradition and theology and the institutional church, then you are left with the Bible and your wits to nurture and explain your faith. When you are left only with the Bible and your wits, it is unsurprising that you would lean on them heavily. Hence a possible explanation for the prevalence among evangelicals of Biblical literalism -- of a desire to interpret the Bible literally.

Now, I don’t have a problem with the Bible, I don’t have a problem with reading the Bible, and I don’t have a problem with people reading the Bible, evangelical or not. I just wish that some of these very vocal and, in this case, very self-destructive evangelicals simply were better at reading the Bible. (Maybe they would find it easier to read and understand the Bible if they could avail themselves of Christian tradition and theology and the institutional church…? On second thought, let’s not open that can of worms.)

For example, for those Biblical literalists out there, where is the ambiguity in the following passages? Jesus is asked by his disciples, “Tell us, when will this happen, and what sign will there be of your coming, and of the end of the age?” Jesus responds: “But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Matthew 24:3, 36).

A lot of people would today have a lot more money if they had literally read that passage literally, and not looked for codes in the Bible about the date of the end of the world.

SOMETIMES THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE misunderstandings aren’t the entirety of the story. Sometimes, others are caught in the crossfire.

During the course of the past month, prompted no doubt by all the attention on the May 21st rapture, two of my friends have called me to tell me that an evangelical has told them that they are going to Hell. What is the evidence presented? Herewith, two examples of many:

“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’” (John 14:6). “That is why I told you that you will die in your sins. For if you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins” (John 8:24).

It goes without saying that my two friends shared a common trait: a lack of belief in Jesus Christ.

Faithful readers of this space know that I believe in Jesus Christ and I believe in Hell and I believe that Christ saves and I believe that men need to be saved. But I do not believe that we can go immediately from these translated passages -- which in their original language documented an oral tradition of the statements of a man who died two-thousand years ago -- directly to the damnation and condemnation of perfectly good and moral people.

Lumen Gentium -- The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church -- promulgated by Pope Paul VI at the Second Vatican Council agrees, and states in clear and certain terms that the position of the Church is that a specifically articulated belief in Jesus Christ is not a necessary condition to avoid Hell. As an easy example, think of all those people who were born in the tens of thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The Church teaches that those people were eligible for salvation. Many evangelicals with whom I speak have the opposite view.

An appeal to dogma will not persuade our evangelical brothers and sisters that my two friends and the other billions and billions and billions of non-Christians who have walked this earth are not necessarily going to Hell, either on May 21st or October 21st or whenever the apocalypse beings. For them to be persuaded, we must appeal directly to Scripture. Onward, then, we go.

If, as Scripture tells us, “just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life” (1 Corinthians 15:22), then how can it also be true that “those who find” the path to eternal life with God in heaven “are few” (Matthew 7:14)? If many people, or even one person, goes to hell, as Scripture clearly suggests, how can it also be true that one day “God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28)? Saint Paul seems to argue that the universal condemnation brought to mankind by Adam was answered by the universal salvation brought to mankind by Jesus: “just as through one transgression condemnation came upon all, so through one righteous act acquittal and life came to all” (Romans 5:18). If so, then how can we make sense of the passages in Scripture which suggest that a great many people go to Hell?

Scripture clearly tells us, referring to Jesus, that there does not exist “any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved” (Acts 4:12). But if this is true, then how could the people of Athens have been worshiping the God of Abraham, as Saint Paul argues in Acts: “What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23)?

Jesus says that “if you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins” (John 8:24). But Paul declares in Romans that the Gentiles -- many of whom had never heard of Moses or Jesus -- still “have no excuse”, because “ever since the creation of the world, [God’s] invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (Romans 1:20). It seems as if Paul is arguing that creation itself is a testament to God’s will for the behavior of mankind. If not being taught the law of Moses and the divine nature of Jesus Christ is “no excuse”, then is Paul arguing that, at least in the time before Christ, living a human life is a sufficient experience in and of itself to be able to accept or reject God’s gift of salvation? If so, then salvation must be available to those who, by nature of the time and place of their birth, “do not believe that I AM”. Indeed, Paul explicitly states in Romans that “the demands of the law are written in [the] hearts” of the Gentiles (Romans 2:15).

The first letter of Timothy argues that God “wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). If this passage of Scripture is true, and if God is all knowing and all powerful, and if explicit belief in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth are required for salvation, then we have arrived at a paradox: How could those three objects be true considering the fact that God created men all over the world who had never heard of Moses and who had never heard of Christ? If God “wills everyone to be saved”, then would he not offer a road to salvation to those people? Saint Peter seems to think so, as stated in Acts: “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. / Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34-35).

Do we truly believe that the beautiful words of the Lord in Matthew’s Gospel -- “seek, and you will find” -- need the caveat that you must have been born in a time and place that had knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth?

WE CANNOT DENY that the formula extra ecclesiam nulla salus contains truth, nor would we want to. But coming to a better understanding of that truth has required centuries of hard thinking. And surely we do not completely understand it even today.

We know that Hell is real and we know that Hell is a possible outcome for any man. But has any man gone to Hell? Is any man in Hell now?

Who knows? How could we know? Scripture is not clear -- we can interpret Scripture in many different ways; in one passage it seems that many are in Hell, in the next it seems that all are saved; in one passage it seems that an explicitly articulated belief in Jesus Christ is required for salvation, in the next it seems that the existence and requirements of God are known to all people, even those who have never heard of Moses and Jesus. Indeed, the population of Hell could be zero or it could be billions. On this side of eternity we must learn to live with the mystery.

Who is eligible for salvation? I stand firmly with the late Cardinal Dulles, who writes: “Catholics can be saved if they believe the Word of God as taught by the Church and if they obey the commandments. Other Christians can be saved if they submit their lives to Christ and join the community where they think he wills to be found. Jews can be saved if they look forward in hope to the Messiah and try to ascertain whether God's promise has been fulfilled. Adherents of other religions can be saved if, with the help of grace, they sincerely seek God and strive to do his will. Even atheists can be saved if they worship God under some other name and place their lives at the service of truth and justice. God's saving grace, channeled through Christ the one Mediator, leaves no one unassisted.”

God does not deny his grace to those who need it. This holds true for you and me, and it holds true for the person born in China four-hundred years before the birth of Christ, and it holds true for the illiterate Muslim woman born forty years ago in the Middle East, and it holds true for the devout Jew living in Brooklyn -- God does not deny his grace to those who need it.

God does not deny his grace to those who need it. This holds true for you and me, and for my non-Christian friends.

And with Scripture so difficult to penetrate, and a literal reading of the Bible so confusing, perhaps it is prudent not to speak for God on the matter of the demographics of the damned.

We know neither the day nor the hour, though I’d bet good money that the day will not be October 21st. And we know not who will be saved -- or, more to the point, we know not who will be damned. But we do know this, straight from the gospel: We have been instructed not to attempt to remove the splinter from our brother’s eye until we have removed the wooden beam from our own.

The royals, and us

2011-05-01T15:45:00.008-04:00

Perhaps it is the Burkean conservative in me that reacts with such confusion to the implications of the most popular question of the week: Why do we care about the wedding of two young British citizens? Indeed, my impulse is to turn the question around on those who ask: Why are you surprised that we care?

Consider that both across time and across geography nations have organized themselves with a king and queen as the head of state. The great emperors of Japan; the hundreds of Chinese emperors spread over two-thousand years; the kings of African tribes; the ajaw of the Mayans, the kings of the Aztec empire; the caliphs, sultans, princes, and kings of the Middle East; the czars of Russia; and, of course, the European monarchs of which we in the West are so familiar demonstrate the point quite nicely.

These political and cultural institutions did not occur as a result of random chance. They did not happen by accident. Their prevalence and popularity speak to something basic and innate in the human soul -- we need this. There is something about human nature which deeply desires a society with a royal family at the top. And so we see that system, over and over again, no matter which part of the globe we look.

Now, I am very much a (small-r) republican. And I am very much an American. But I do not believe that the experience of our nation refutes my point.

In the United States our headship of state is not passed from father to son, as it is in Britain. Instead, our head of state is the president of the United States. Consider that in the twenty-four years between 1980 and 2004 -- over ten percent of the life of our nation -- a Bush or a Clinton was on the ballot for president or vice president in every presidential election. Of our forty-four presidents, two have been father-son pairs, including our second and sixth presidents. Theodore Roosevelt was a fifth cousin to Franklin, and the uncle of Franklin’s wife, Eleanor. The current governor of New York is the son of a former New York governor. The current mayor of Chicago is the son of a former mayor of Chicago.

And, of course, there are the Kennedys. Camelot. After Bobby was tragically assassinated during the 1968 presidential campaign such was the desire to see a Kennedy in the White House that there was a movement to draft his thirty-something younger brother Ted as the Democratic nominee for president. Each year from 1947, when Jack was elected to Congress, until 2011, when Patrick Kennedy stepped down, there was a Kennedy in the House or the Senate -- over a quarter of the life of our nation.

Why is this the case? From where does this desire come? To focus the question and bring it home to the issue of the week, Why do we care about the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton?

People have a desire for celebrities, and people like their celebrities to be glamorous, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy. To some, this is a sufficient reason for their interest in Will and Kate’s wedding: they are two good-looking people with boatloads of money leading a glamorous life filled with limos, helicopters, beautiful clothes, and photographers capturing their every move. And now they have fancy new titles: the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

(Likewise, the Kennedys -- an extremely photogenic family filled with good looking people who were filthy rich leading glamorous lives. No surprise that we choose them to be American royalty.)

The Anglican bishop of London, in his sermon, nicely summarized what is my second reason explaining the interest in the royal wedding: “Many are full of fear for the future of the prospects of our world but the message of the celebrations in this country and far beyond its shores is the right one -- this is a joyful day! It is good that people in every continent are able to share in these celebrations because this is, as every wedding day should be, a day of hope.” Put it another, slightly more cynical way: Times are very tough, the future is terrifying, and people need a pleasant distraction. And what distraction is more pleasant than two young people, obviously in love, starting their life together? Theirs truly is a fairy tale romance, complete with a real prince and a real girl, a commoner, who will one day be crowned queen.

But I don’t think the whole story is as simple as those two reasons would suggest. Or as superficial.

There is, to be very Burkean about it, a little thing called tradition to consider. People have a deep and undeniable need to be part of a community, there cannot be community without tradition, and in Britain tradition is embodied in the monarchy -- the monarchy, a one-thousand-year-old institution.

It is true that most of the readers of this space are not British and that many of you were interested in the wedding. We are interested in their traditions, to some degree, but we are interested in tradition in and of itself as well. Ours is a young nation, born of a revolution. We don’t have all that much by way of tradition vis-a-vis our British forefathers. We like to see it. We like to watch the master at work. We long to have a part of what they have -- a part of what our revered founding fathers gave up over two centuries ago: a tangible link, made real by and maintained in living human beings -- this week, in Prince William and Princess Catherine -- connecting the centuries that came before us to the present day.

Moving a bit deeper still, I believe that part of the interest in and fascination with the royal family comes from my answer to the frequent criticism that the royals did nothing to deserve their success other than to be born into the royal family.

Well. This myth of meritocracy really is at the heart of the issue.

It is true that Prince William will one day be the head of state of sixteen countries and the figurehead for dozens more, and it is true that the only thing he did to “earn” that role is to have been born the eldest son of The Prince of Wales.

But what about me? Did I “earn” my success? Does anyone? But for the accident of birth I could be a poor peasant in China. I could be a jungle tribesman in Africa. I could have been born the son of a poor fisherman in Latin America. Instead, without any control over it whatsoever, I was born into a family which could afford to send me to good primary and secondary schools and which valued education. This nearly necessary condition made possible any later success. But did I “earn” those later successes? Invariably, along the way, there was some generous benefactor and mentor, some turn of good luck, some connection that helped me. And in all cases I have used my intelligence and other abilities -- all of which I was born with, none of which I “earned”.

The reality is that life largely happens to us. Those who believe in the myth of meritocracy find this particularly hard to stomach, but all of us, to some degree, have trouble facing the reality that our lives are not our own.

We are fascinated with royalty, then -- we are fascinated with Will and Kate -- because they highlight in such a spectacular and powerful and undeniable way the reality that we spend so much energy fighting and trying to understand: there but for the grace of God go I.

Mr Obama's "plan"

2011-04-17T18:36:00.005-04:00

I was excited when I read that President Obama would be giving a speech this past Wednesday. The speech was to be an answer to Rep. Paul Ryan’s long-term budget and debt plan. It was to be the Democrat’s answer.

A smart adviser to the president in December 2010, during the aftermath of the midterm elections, would have told him this: “Mr. President, the Tea Party is a real force in American politics. Our massive debt and deficits are going to be a major issue in the 2012 election. Beyond political considerations, the debt and deficits pose a serious danger to the economic future of the United States. We have to do something about them, both for the sake of the country and for the sake of your second term as president.

“Mr. President, the Republicans are going to put forward a plan for the debt. Paul Ryan is going to be chairman of the budget committee when the newly-elected Congress is sworn in. He’s going to put forward a plan. Mr. President, we have to wait until he announces his plan to announce ours. There is an enormous political cost to going first. Chairman Ryan is almost certain to dramatically reduce spending on Medicare and social welfare programs. If we’re lucky, he’ll include a tax cut in his plan as well, but that is almost surely too much to hope for. What we need to do is wait for his plan, attack it vigorously in order to rally our liberal base and help you get reelected, and then announce our plan in order to get you the moderate independents who will not react well to much of the Ryan plan.”

That’s what a smart adviser would have told him.

When the president announced his 2012 budget there was nothing in there to get the cost of Medicare under control. A part of me thought that the president may have been holding out for the Ryan plan. Mr. Ryan hadn’t made his move, and the president was waiting, patiently. Like a pro.

Mr. Ryan announced his plan on April 5th. The president announced his response this past Wednesday, April 13th. And so I was excited, because it looked to me like the president was doing what the smart adviser would have advised him to do: wait for Mr. Ryan, win the politics by going second, and present an alternative. The speech was billed as a budget speech. The speech was billed as one that would present a plan to get our debt under control. The speech was billed as one that would find the president fulfilling his often-repeated promise to “make tough choices.”

That didn’t happen. The president punted, again. Again. Again, we got no policy leadership from the president. There was nothing in his speech that could reasonably be called a “plan”. I don’t think there’s anything in the president’s speech which could even be called an “approach”. Instead, we got vague promises.

Like it or hate it, Chairman Ryan proposed to replace Medicare with a voucher-type program. That is a huge, massive change. It rewrites the social contract -- it represents a new relationship between the elderly and the rest of society. It is seismic.

Compare that with what we got from the president: “We will reduce wasteful subsidies and erroneous payments. We will cut spending on prescription drugs by using Medicare’s purchasing power to drive greater efficiency and speed generic brands of medicine onto the market. [...]

“We will change the way we pay for health care -- not by the procedure or the number of days spent in a hospital, but with new incentives for doctors and hospitals to prevent injuries and improve results. And we will slow the growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts and consumers who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services that seniors need.”

Vacuous talk. Promises. A lot of we will do, but not any how we will do it.

The president’s “plan” also includes triggers: If Medicare costs per beneficiary exceed the growth rate of GDP per capita plus 0.5 percentage points then a trigger will require automatic cuts in Medicare. A nice aspiration, but certainly not a binding constraint. There’s a similar trigger for the ratio of debt to GDP. Again, though, there isn’t a credible enforcement mechanism.

As far as I can tell, the most tangible aspect of the president’s “plan” is found in this sentence: “[I]n early May, the vice president will begin regular meetings with leaders in both parties with the aim of reaching a final agreement on a plan to reduce the deficit and get it done by the end of June.”

That’s the president’s plan: more meetings.

I was talking with an old friend this afternoon. He is to attend a wedding this summer, held on a Saturday, and then wake up on Sunday morning, fly across the country, and work Sunday night. “You’re going to have to control your drinking at the reception,” I said, “or Sunday is going to be the worst day of your life.” “I’ve got a plan,” my friend responded. “What’s your plan?” I asked. “I’m not going to drink much at the reception.”

That’s not a plan. It’s a goal. The goal of not drinking much is not the same as a plan not to drink much. Someone should tell the president, likewise, that the goal of reducing healthcare expenditures is not the same thing as a plan to reduce healthcare expenditures.

IN THE LAST essay I posted I discussed the need to have a serious conversation about political philosophy. “Aristotle conceived of politics,” I wrote, “as citizens gathering together in the public square to address the following question: How ought we to order our collective life? How ought we to? Ought implies that politics is fundamentally a moral enterprise. And it is.

“In the Age of Austerity the government will have fewer resources than before. We have to allocate those scarce resources across competing interests. My third suggestion is that we think seriously about how to do so. What is the face of a just society? What should be the content of our national character? What does America look like in the Age of Austerity? What kind of country will we create over the next few decades?”

To his great credit, the president started this conversation in his speech: “This debate over budgets and deficits is about more than just numbers on a page; it’s about more than just cutting and spending. It’s about the kind of future that we want. It's about the kind of country that we believe in.”

While acknowledging that “we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government,” the president spoke eloquently about the other “thread running through our history -- a belief that we’re all connected, and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.”

The president continued: “Part of this American belief that we’re all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security and dignity. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff may strike any one of us. ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ we say to ourselves. And so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, those with disabilities. We’re a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further. We would not be a great country without those commitments.”

I couldn’t agree more -- “we would not be a great country without these commitments.” But in order to keep these promises, we simply must have a serious policy solution to the problems of healthcare costs and debt. So far the only serious solution has been presented by Chairman Ryan.

The president, as usual, is absent.

Navigating austerity

2011-03-13T15:55:00.000-04:00

Those with even a passing familiarity of public affairs have known for over a decade that the party is over -- at least for some time. As a student in introductory macroeconomics you learned that, in theory, governments must select the correct ratio of spending between guns and butter, trading units of one for units of the other. For many years now the United States has avoided making any choice between the two and has indeed purchased a great many things besides. The demographic reality of the retiring Baby Boom and the political reality of governments -- federal and state -- for years refusing to face reality have conspired to create what will probably be the next era in American politics: The Age of Austerity.

The demographics of Social Security tell much of the story. A 2005 report by the Social Security Advisory Board states that by 2030 approximately twenty percent of the population of the United States is expected to be over the age of sixty-four. In 2005 the corresponding number was twelve percent. In 2004 there were 3.3 workers paying into the system for every one person receiving benefits. That ratio is expected to be dramatically lower, 2.1 workers per beneficiary, by 2035. Given the structure of the current system, relatively more retirees (who will be living much longer, on average, than now) and relatively fewer workers means that either taxes must go up or benefits must go down. Period.

These demographics affect the other, much more expensive component of our federal entitlement structure: Medicare. In the summer of 2008 the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Medicare spending will grow and grow, gobbling up more of our G.D.P. every year, and that Medicare’s share of G.D.P. will one day be as large as the federal government’s total share is today. This event will happen well before the current century expires.

Medicare is affected by more than the fact that many of those workers who will retire to collect their Social Security checks will also enroll in the government healthcare program. In addition and more importantly, healthcare costs are expected to continue to rise rapidly. And advances in healthcare technology will continue to appear, and government will continue to buy them and offer them to the sick. (More on that in a moment.)

That the federal government is in deep trouble is quite clear. The state governments, while on average in better shape, also face some major course corrections.

The biggest challenge facing the states is the cost of public-sector employees. Many states offer pensions to public workers, like teachers and policemen. As the Baby Boom moves into retirement, the demands placed on state pension systems will stretch many to their limit, and may even break some others. In an excellent profile of New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Matt Bai of The New York Times writes that “New Jersey doesn’t have nearly enough money on hand to cover its pension obligations to teachers and other state workers. At no time in the last 17 years has New Jersey fully met its annual obligation to the pension fund, and in many of those years, the state paid nothing at all.” In addition to pension obligations, Mr. Bai reports that the state will dish out nearly three-billion dollars in health care premiums for state workers this year, despite having “exactly zero dollars” set aside for this expense.

So the problem is clear. Retiring Baby Boomers are owed Social Security and pensions, and all the money they have been promised just ain’t there. And, more importantly, at a time when healthcare costs are rising rapidly, retiring Baby Boomers will dramatically increase the number of elderly folks enrolled in federally-funded Medicare and receiving state-funded retirement healthcare packages.

(As one of the youngest members of Generation X, it pains me to reflect on just how much my generation has been screwed by the Boomers. The Boomers simultaneously made and broke all these fiscal promises, and it is their retirement which will push the system past its limits. Thanks folks.)

The opening salvos of the Age of Austerity center on the question of what to do about this fiscal trainwreck. Many thought that President Obama’s proposed budget would take steps to address the federal government’s budget situation. They were wrong.

Robert Samuelson summarizes: “Under [the president’s] proposals, annual federal spending rises from $3.7 trillion in 2012 to $5.7 trillion in 2021. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (the three major entitlements) account for 60 percent of the projected $2 trillion increase. Higher interest payments on the debt -- mainly reflecting our inability to control big entitlements -- account for 31 percent. Altogether, that's 91 percent of the increase; the rest of government accounts for 9 percent.”

And it’s not as if we’re in good shape right now, only having to worry about the increases in spending and debt over the next few decades. Indeed, the increases are relative to our current situation, and we are currently sitting on fourteen trillion dollars of federal debt. To put that number in perspective, our G.D.P. is about 14.9 trillion dollars. Moreover, President Obama is racking up trillion-dollar deficits. So yes, the party is over, at least for some time.

THE PROBLEM IS clear. What is the solution? Unfortunately, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem to have the political stomach to take on entitlements. Why? Because the elderly -- and the Baby Boomers, about to become elderly -- vote, and politicians want their votes. In addition, there is the ever-present problem of our political system being unable to intelligently handle massive, medium-term problems which are dry and technical in nature. Politicians want sound bites because voters respond to sound bites. And it simply is next to impossible to intelligently address fiscal policy in sexy sound bites.

What is needed is a policy seminar. What is needed are charts and graphs and a serious national conversation about how to get out of our fiscal situation. We need less “hope and change” and “we are the ones we have been waiting for”, and we need more substance. Unfortunately, there are no signs that we are going to get what we need anytime soon.

So instead of dealing with entitlement spending and debt in an intelligent way -- e.g., means testing Social Security, raising the retirement age, restructuring our tax code, considering cost-effectiveness in Medicare spending, conducting research on innovative healthcare technologies, altering in an intelligent way some of the sweetheart deals the state public employees unions have extracted from state governments, changing the fiscal relationship between state and local governments, etc. -- the worst fear of many is being realized: we are handling the Age of Austerity as poorly as we handled the politics and policy which created the problem in the first place.

What would a better public conversation look like? What would smart policy look like? Herewith, I offer three suggestions.

FIRST, WE MUST use public money to invest in the future. There is currently a climate of panic inspired by Tea Partiers. We don’t need to panic, but we do need to take action. And we must recognize that simply cutting those programs which are politically easy to cut is an unintelligent way to handle our fiscal challenges. We need to keep in mind that some public money which is spent today could generate enormous additions to G.D.P. and employment in thirty years.

Unfortunately, we don’t seem to understand this. David Brooks summarizes: Under the Republican’s proposal for the federal government, “financing for early-childhood programs would fall off a cliff. Tens of thousands of kids, maybe hundreds of thousands, would have their slots eliminated midyear. Out in the states, the situation is scarcely better. Many governors of both parties are diverting money from schools in thoughtless and self-destructive ways. Hawaii decided to cut the number of days in the school year. Of all the ways to cut education, why on earth would you reduce student time in the classroom? Texas is taking the meat cleaver approach. School financing will be cut by at least 13.5 percent, around $3.5 billion. About 85,000 new students arrive in Texas every year. There will be no additional resources to accommodate them.”

This simply doesn’t make sense. Sure, cutting funding for schools will save money this year. But the medium- and long-run costs of a poorly educated workforce are massive. The better educated our children are today the more productive they will be during their careers, and the more wealth they will create, and the more jobs they will create. The same goes for other government programs which will be on the cutting block, like early childhood development programs. This is basic human capital theory, and our federal and state governments don’t seem to grasp it.

The same goes with basic infrastructure spending. Over the past few years we have seen rolling blackouts in New York and California, a bridge collapse in Minnesota, and many other examples of our failing and aged infrastructure. We need government investment so that our economy has a strong backbone. A little spent today on infrastructure will allow a lot of wealth to be created over the next fifty years.

Fine, fine, you might say. But we know we have to cut somewhere. So if we aren’t cutting education and we aren’t cutting early childhood and we aren’t cutting infrastructure, then where will we cut?

Defense would be a good place to start. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute calculated military expenditures per country for 2009. According to their data, the nations of China, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, and Italy combined spent 485 billion in military expenditures. The United States alone spent 661 billion. Given that disparity, we could trim a little.

That said, an even better place to start than defense would be end-of-life medical care. The journal Health Affairs published a study in 2001 which found that over twenty-five percent of Medicare funds were spent on the last year of patients’ lives. In 2008 The New York Times reported that “total Medicare spending in the last two years of life ranges from an average of $93,842 for patients who receive most of their care at U.C.L.A. Medical Center to $53,432 at the Mayo Clinic’s main teaching hospital in Rochester, Minn,” with other top-ranked hospitals falling in between.

Even if our public debate is so prone to stupidity and hysterics that we can’t talk about limiting end-of-life care (death panels!), surely we can talk about how to get U.C.L.A. to spend less. After all, if Mayo can hit fifty-thousand, why can’t U.C.L.A.? (And, for the record, we do need to talk about spending less public money on end-of-life care.)

We only have so much money to spend. We need to spend a lot of it on investments. The financial rate of return on the last hundred billion dollars of defense spending has got to be pretty close to zero. The financial rate of return on end-of-life care isn’t even zero -- it is negative. But the rate of return on quality primary and secondary schools is enormous. The rate of return on early childhood development programs is enormous.

We need to put our public money where it will create the most wealth over the next fifty years, even if doing so is politically challenging. Politics be damned.

THE SECOND OF my three suggestions for the future deals with the tone of our public debate and the tactics of our politicians. We’re going to face some tough choices. Put bluntly: people are going to get screwed. There’s no way out of it.

We’re going to face some tough choices, but I hope (though given what we’ve seen I don’t expect) that we can make these choices while still holding on to our humanity.

Look at the situation in Wisconsin. That state has an extremely modest FY2011 budget shortfall of about 137 million dollars, and a relatively modest FY2011-FY2013 budget shortfall of 3.6 billion. To put those numbers in perspective, there are about 5.7 million people in Wisconsin, so the 2011 shortfall is a whopping twenty-four dollars per person, and the 2011-2013 shortfall is about 630 bucks per head.

Why Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and his supporters seem to think that this is a crisis passes my understanding. It is not a crisis. It is not an emergency. It is an easily manageable situation. Individuals lose more than 137 million dollars in a year and do not engage in the type of hysterics we have seen in Wisconsin.

To deal with the shortfall, Governor Walker decided to make state employees pay 5.8 percent of their salaries towards their pensions and pay12.6 percent of their healthcare costs. (In addition, he signed into law tax breaks for businesses which will create 120 million dollars in deficits for the 2011-2013 budget period, but never mind that.)

The money teachers will lose as a result of the 5-and-12 plan is not a small amount. If you’re a teacher, as many of these folks are, and you earn sixty-thousand dollars per year, then all of the sudden you’ll have to pay 3,480 dollars per year towards your pension and, say, another two-thousand dollars per year for your healthcare. That’s well over five-thousand dollars per year that you will no longer have. It’s almost ten percent of your pre-tax income, gone with the stroke of the governor’s pen.

Make no mistake: that’s getting screwed.

But someone has to get screwed, and it seems to me that the governor’s proposal is completely reasonable. I support the 5-and-12 plan completely. It is a perfectly sensible way to deal with Wisconsin’s shortfall, and while it’s not fair to the teachers, it is as fair as any fix can be.

But I am not a fan of Mr. Walker. Because in addition to the 5-and-12 plan, he has removed the rights of public workers to collectively bargain for their compensation. Well, that’s not quite correct: he will continue to allow law enforcement and firemen to collectively bargain. Why the differential treatment? The most plausible answer I’ve seen is that it was the police and fire unions which were most supportive of his gubernatorial campaign.

That’s exactly the type of unserious nonsense which needs to stop. Now.

Talking with many of my friends, I sense a palpable anger towards public workers. Conversations are littered with suggestions that they should stop whining, should quit their jobs if they are so harshly treated, and should take what’s left of their pensions and shutup.

I understand this frustration. Public workers have received sweetheart deals over the past few decades. While times were good no one took much notice. But with a nine-percent unemployment rate and many workers’ savings wiped out from the financial crisis, many folks are feeling resentment towards public workers due to their pensions and healthcare. This frustration is understandable.

But what isn’t acceptable is for politicians to surf that wave of resentment with the goal of reelection and national prominence. It is appalling that politicians would stoke us-versus-them anger at a time like this. It is shameful.

Mr. Walker’s decision to drum up the modest deficits faced by Wisconsin and his quest to remove collective bargaining rights from that select group of public workers, including teachers, strikes me as naked politics. He wants to make himself a hero to right-wingers, and he is going to bust the union to do so. He is behaving like a vile opportunist. I have yet to see any good reason why this fundamental employment right should be taken away from these workers.

The Democrats and union leaders in Wisconsin have been behaving poorly as well. Schools have had to shut down because so many teachers have taken “sick days” in order to protest in the streets of Madison. The Democrats in the state legislature went into hiding in Illinois to avoid a vote on the governor’s bill. Childish nonsense, all around.

We need a tone of empathy in the Age of Austerity. We need to acknowledge that folks are going to get screwed, whether it’s the teachers in Wisconsin or Baby Boomers who will have to work longer to get their Social Security or elderly folks who may have to be denied certain end-of-life medical care or middle-aged workers who will have to pay higher taxes to support our entitlement structure or a fifth grader who will never set foot in a music class. We don’t have enough money to buy everything we want, and we are going to have to say no to a lot of people. We need to do so with compassion and with kindness, and with respect, and with a sense of shared sacrifice.

And our elected politicians absolutely shouldn’t pour salt in wounds in order to score political points. The teachers in Wisconsin are losing a lot of money. We don’t need to take away their right to gather together and negotiate their compensation collectively, and we certainly do not need to do so in order to advance the political career of the governor. We don’t need to demonize them and their unions while lightening their wallets.

ARISTOTLE CONCEIVED OF politics as citizens gathering together in the public square to address the following question: How ought we to order our collective life? How ought we to? Ought implies that politics is fundamentally a moral enterprise. And it is.

In the Age of Austerity the government will have fewer resources than before. We have to allocate those scarce resources across competing interests. My third suggestion is that we think seriously about how to do so. What is the face of a just society? What should be the content of our national character? What does America look like in the Age of Austerity? What kind of country will we create over the next few decades?

Earlier I mentioned that the elderly are being preferred to the young. Another group being differentially hurt also has no public voice: the poor.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops offers some examples from the FY2011 continuing resolution being discussed in Washington. “The proposed $1 billion cut to Community Health Centers will deny health care to nearly ten million poor and vulnerable people including mothers and children at risk. These centers are often the only access to health care for tens of millions of people in our country.” The proposed 2.3 billion dollar cut in affordable housing programs hurts the poor; the proposed cutting of job training programs by 1.75 billion dollars hurts the poor and unemployed; the proposed cuts in refugee funding hurt the poor. Cuts are proposed in the C.R. of twenty-six percent of poverty-focused international assistance, but of only 2.6 percent in cuts overall.

President Obama’s 2012 budget proposes to cut the already-underfunded Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program by 2.5 billion dollars, down from 5.1 billion. This program helps to heat the homes of poor folks who cannot afford heat on their own. In the same budget, the president proposes to spend over fifty billion dollars on high-speed rail.

Fifty billion on high-speed rail, but cuts in emergency funding to heat the homes of the poor? Come on, Mr. President.

This is exactly what I’m talking about. We need to think hard about what our budget priorities say about us as a nation, about our collective life, our morals and our values. Do we want to be the kind of nation which lets the poor freeze to death in the winter in order to build a fast train between San Francisco and L.A.?

The bishops write that “decisions on how to allocate opportunities and burdens in setting budget priorities are more than economic policies -- they are significant moral choices.” We need to use the words “moral” and “justice” a lot more in our national conversation, and words like “birth certificate” and “death panels” a lot less.

“Especially in a time of austerity and fiscal restraints, the poor have a special moral claim on limited financial resources,” argue the bishops. I couldn’t agree more. Substituting away from high-speed rail for the middle class and towards heat for the poor is just one example. Does Bill Gates really need a Social Security check? Does Bruce Springsteen? Do other millionaires? Let’s take their Social Security money and spend it on Community Health Centers.

The president extended the Bush tax cuts for millionaires, while at the same time proposed to slash funding used to give the poor access to healthcare, job training, and emergency financial assistance. Is this the kind of situation we want in America? Are these our priorities? Does this reflect our national character? Is this the face of a just society?

“Shared sacrifice,” the bishops write, “is one thing; it is another to make disproportionate cuts in programs that serve the most vulnerable. It is morally unacceptable for our nation to balance its budget on the backs of the poor at home and abroad.”

Morally unacceptable, it is. Given our limited financial resources, what does justice require? What is the moral way to spend our public money? What does our budget say about us, and what do we want it to say?

It takes a serious nation to answer these questions. And it is exactly seriousness which is required to successfully navigate austerity.

Blessed are they

2011-02-06T10:57:00.010-05:00

Walking up Fifth Avenue, I spot a man trying to pull his Porsche onto the road. There is still much snow on the streets and the man’s luxury car is stuck. Its wheels are spinning. But all it needs is a little push. The man hops out of the Porsche. He is wearing at least three thousand dollars of clothing if he is wearing one dollar. He is smoking one of those elegant cigars. He is wearing gold rings. I ask him if he wants a push. He brushes me off. I smile slightly, and turn to continue on my way.

The very next thing I see is a person in a wheelchair. He is wearing military fatigues that look to be decades old. He is sitting on Fifth Avenue. He looks like he is sleeping in his chair. He has a sign asking for money. His legs have been amputated.

I am startled by the contrast, but not terribly so. This isn’t the first time I have walked the streets of a major city. But I do pause and reflect on the vast inequality -- the vast injustice -- which so characterizes our world.

I am walking up to Seventy-Ninth Street, about twenty blocks uptown. I see the same thing, over and over again. The poor. The hungry. Folks asking for money. The temperature was right at thirty degrees, and I saw one old woman bundled up in old, dirty blankets, sleeping on the sidewalk. Will she live until tomorrow? Will she freeze to death during the night? The old woman was sleeping on the sidewalk, just down the street from multi-million dollar townhomes. There again is that contrast, that injustice.

I hop in a cab to take me to the church for Mass. There is something about New York City cab rides which always put me in a reflective mood. I am thinking of the poor, never more visible in my experience than in this city of greatest wealth. The cab drops me off and I walk into the church. While inside, I hear the gospel reading, the word of the Lord, the Beatitudes:

Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.

IMAGINE YOURSELF SITTING on the ground in Palestine some two-thousand years ago. It is a warm, comfortable day. A slight breeze is making its way across a field. You reach down and pick some blades of grass. You play with them, tear them into pieces and let them fall from your fingers. You have come to see a man. He is in his early thirties. He is from a backwater village of a few hundred people, maybe a thousand. You heard a rumor that he was run out of town by the people he grew up with. He is causing quite a controversy; rumors about him and his words and his deeds are spreading like wildfire. You want to see him for yourself.

This man arrives. He speaks: Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.

Utter nonsense, you might think. As was the case when Christ walked among us, two-thousand years later in New York City there is not a shred of evidence that the poor are blessed. There is not a shred of evidence that the hungry will be satisfied. There is not a shred of evidence that the weeping will laugh, or that those who are meek will inherit the land, or that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied. Why would we think that those who are merciful will be shown mercy? What in our life experience and knowledge of the world would lead us to believe these things?

MASS ENDS AND I make my way to a celebrated bakery, just one block down from the church. I am going to a dinner party on the Upper West Side and I want to bring some dessert. I buy a box of small items -- shortbread cookies, rugelach, things of this nature. I pay about thirty bucks.

As I walk out of the store I am hit with a pang of guilt. Thirty dollars. I could easily have purchased six-thousand calories worth of food for thirty bucks. That’s a good-size dinner for six hungry, homeless people. I realize that I am part of the problem, tainted with original sin, living in a fallen world.

I pick up the newspaper this morning and see that the turmoil in Egypt continues. Here are mass protests with over one hundred dead and thousands injured. The Egyptian people are rising up against their president, Hosni Mubarak -- a man who has held power for over thirty years and who wanted to install his son as his successor, and who recently has sent thugs into the crowd of demonstrators to beat them, and who has most likely ordered the attack of Western journalists in the futile and desperate attempt to keep the world in the dark about what is happening in Egypt.

Here’s a prediction: Mr. Mubarak, who is eighty-two years old, will leave power gracefully. He will be honored. He and his family are worth tens of billions of dollars, and he will keep that money. Sure, he will be replaced, but another like him will succeed him. The meek -- those in the streets, fighting for their basic political rights -- will not inherit the earth, at least not anytime soon.

DESPITE THE LACK of evidence -- the unbelievable nature -- of the revolution prophesied by Christ, there is a very strong attraction to his words. We want to see the hungry satisfied. We want the poor to be blessed. We want the weeping to laugh. We want those who hunger and thirst for righteousness to be satisfied. We want the merciful to be shown mercy.

More than that, we expect that these things will be so. I was just on the phone last night with an old friend who was upset to learn that the high school boys whom she teaches on occasion act disrespectfully to girls. In a very real sense she was surprised by this. But shouldn’t this be her expectation? What about the world makes you believe that it is good, and just, and decent?

We are surprised by the injustices we see. We will be surprised when Mr. Mubarak is not brought to justice -- we expect that justice will prevail. We expect the good guys to win. We are surprised when we first learn of the latest genocide in Africa. We are surprised to learn that our acquaintance is cheating on his wife.

We think a better world is at our fingertips. If only we work, we can create the world we want to live in. If only we vote the right way in the next election, or choose a humanitarian career instead of a Wall Street career -- we think that ours will be the generation which sees the hungry satisfied, which sees the weeping laugh, which sees the merciful shown mercy.

But this, of course, isn’t so. It has never been so. The world breaks our hearts, over and over again, generation after generation.

And yet we yearn. And yet we long. We yearn for a better world; we long for a better world. We want the world to be better and we expect the world to be better. Alexandre Dumas writes that all of human wisdom can be summed up in the words wait and hope. I would add some words to his list of two, but hope is exactly what we do. Or, rather, what we should do.

Instead of hoping, some of us blame things. The world would be better if Mr. Mubarak weren’t so intent on creating a dynasty. The world would be better if only Republicans and Democrats could work together. The world would be better if only my husband weren’t such a jerk. The world would be better if only those damned doctors could come up with a cure for cancer. The world would be better if only the culture showed women more respect.

Of course, some of these are true. But changing them would not cure the world.

Instead of hoping, some of us become disillusioned. We just accept that the world is unjust. We accept that we won’t be truly satisfied with our lives. We accept that we will always feel a certain emptiness inside. We accept that looking at the world will always break our hearts. We accept that ethnic cleansing will continue. We accept that children will continue to get cancer and die. We accept that famines will result in mass starvation for the poor. We accept that the greedy will live in comfort. We accept that those who lust for power will be satisfied, while those who thirst for justice will not. We accept that the strong will dominate the weak. We accept that our marriage will not be what we had hoped. We accept that our career will not change the world, as we would have liked. We become disillusioned. We become stoic.

Of course, the disillusioned are correct. But they are not complete.

THEY ARE NOT complete. We must ask: Why? Why do we expect to see the hungry satisfied? Why do we expect to see the weeping laugh? We do we expect that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied? Why do we expect the merciful to be shown mercy? Why do we expect these things?

Why do we expect these things? Why are we angry when we notice that our world is not characterized by justice? Why are we angry at the world when the child of our friend is stricken with a deadly cancer? Why are we angry at the world when Mr. Mubarak will hold on to his dignity after sending in goons to beat journalists?

And if we no longer expect justice and if we are no longer angry, then why are we disillusioned? Why have we adjusted? Why have we lowered our expectations? Or, rather, why were our expectations in need of lowering -- why were they high in the first place?

C. S. Lewis writes, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

We expect these things, we are angry at injustice, we are disillusioned, we feel a certain emptiness, we have expectations which need lowering -- we are this way because we are made for a better world. The Beatitudes speak to us because they describe our true home. Our true home is the home we yearn for. The home of our longing. The home of our desires. This is what it means to hope: We hope that this home exists. We hope that on the other side of eternity we will find our true home.

Our hearts were not made for this world. Our souls find no rest here. But we hope that there is a world which conforms to our expectations and our desires, and as evidence of this audacious claim we submit those very expectations and desires, our anger and disillusionment and grief and frustration. They are the evidence that our hope is not in vain. And there, in the world that will not break our hearts, we will find peace.

A FRIEND OF mine and his lovely girlfriend were recently in Cambodia. They were upset by the horrific and rampant prostitution which they encountered. As they should be. I would hate for them to read what I have written above and think that the appropriate course of action is to wait until death for heaven. I would hate for them to read what I have written above and come to a sense of resignation about our world -- a call to inaction.

In the gospel of Saint Matthew the Lord says: “Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles.” Roman soldiers in Palestine had the right to require the Jews to carry their property for the length of one mile. Christ is telling the Jews to carry it for a second mile, an additional one after the first. Surely the Roman has the power for the first mile. But who has the power for the second mile?

Jesus wanted to turn the world upside down. He wanted to upset the order of things. And so radical were his teachings and so influential was he that after only a year or so of public ministry he was perceived as such a threat that he was executed by the state.

Perhaps therein lies the lesson? Namely, that we are called to fight, even if we are not called to win.

Mr Obama lifts our souls

2011-01-13T12:26:00.006-05:00

As a faithful reader of this space you have betrayed yourself to be thoughtful, intelligent, serious, and purposeful, and so I am sure that you have felt this week exactly as I have felt: despondent, depressed, and confused.

First, there was the tragic shooting in Arizona. How could a person do such a thing? Was he mentally ill? Does that matter? How could he buy a gun? How could anyone shoot a nine-year-old girl?

As if that wasn’t depressing enough, then came some of the most prominent members of the left. Some waited hours and some waited a day or two, but they came. They blamed the Tea Party, they blamed Sarah Palin’s rhetoric and her now-infamous map, they blamed Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck and whomever else. You know who these members of the left are. I will not dignify their behavior by writing their names, but I will ask some questions:

How was assigning blame to politicians and commentators their first public reaction? How was it even among their first public reactions? What could possess a person to assign motive publicly to a vicious murderer without any evidence whatsoever to support the assignment? Publicly accusing someone of being an accessory to murder is a serious, serious, serious thing -- within just days of such a terrible tragedy, how could a decent person accuse Ms. Palin or Mr. O’Reilly of being an accessory to murder without any evidence to support the charge? Where was their humanity?

Those on the right, particularly those specifically accused, were understandably angry. They came out forcefully to defend themselves. I wish they hadn’t. I wish they had the composure to let their accusers’ vicious and thoughtless accusations speak for themselves. But they did not, and that they did not is understandable, and regretful. And before you knew it, the public square was afire with the same old left-versus-right, overheated, hyperpartisan lunacy.

Debra J. Saunders, columnist with The San Francisco Chronicle, captured the moment: “It seems that as a country, we have forgotten how to mourn.”

Is there nothing, I asked myself and my friends, that happens in this country that is not immediately shoved into the boring and unproductive and self-absorbed fight between Republicans and Democrats over which side will have the guy who wears the windbreaker on Air Force One? If the deaths of six people, including a nine-year-old little girl, and the attempted assassination of a member of Congress results in a partisan food fight, then what wouldn’t?

IT WAS ANNOUNCED that President Obama would speak last night, at the memorial. I did not get my hopes up. I did not think that the president was up to the job. My prediction was that the president would give a fine speech, but that his speech would do neither harm nor good. The chatter from the White House yesterday afternoon confirmed my prediction.

I was wrong.

The president’s speech was beautiful. It was lyrical. It was literary. It was grand. It was ambitious. It delivered.

If you have been reading this space for any time at all then you know that I am not a fan of most of the president’s speeches. They have often been deeply narcissistic and full of irresponsible, empty, vacuous rhetoric: hope and change, we are the ones we have been waiting for, blah blah. Not this one. Last night’s speech was a homerun across every dimension.

The president spoke in big themes, of good and evil, and acknowledged that, despite our best efforts, “we may not be able to stop all evil in the world.” Of course we can’t. We can’t stop evil -- we can’t end the war between angels and demons. George W. Bush often spoke of evil, as did Ronald Reagan and presidents before, and they were derided by some for using the word. But they were right to do so, as Mr. Obama was right to do so last night. Evil is at work in this world, and thankfully the president sees that and is unafraid to say so.

The president told the stories of the deceased in a way that was touching, creative, and celebratory. “We see ourselves in them,” said the president, who continued: They are our husbands and our wives, our mothers and our grandmothers, our brothers and our sons. “And in Christina,” the little nine-year-old who was killed, “in Christina we see all of our children. So curious, so trusting, so energetic and full of magic.” Listening to the president link the deceased victims to our own families was moving -- this exercise in imagination honored the dead while humanizing them, celebrating them. It was a lovely tribute.

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT is the head of his political party, the head of government, and the head of state. These roles can come into conflict. Members of his political party have been disappointed by this president’s party leadership, and many in the country, including myself, have found his actions as head of government to be lacking.

Could Mr. Obama fill the role of head of state in the wake of the murders in Arizona? many wondered. Could Mr. Obama rise above the politics? Could he offer a vision of leadership to the entire country? Could he rise above the hurt, above the confusion? Could Mr. Obama elevate the country and help us heal? Could Mr. Obama articulate a way forward, a path for our nation to follow, in the wake of this tragedy? Could he offer not just political leadership, but moral leadership as well? Could Mr. Obama summon a phoenix from the ashes?

Whatever your answers to those questions would have been yesterday morning, this morning the answer is clear, and it is yes.

The president attacked the public debate, declaring that “what we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.” True, true. But then, a few paragraphs later, came the inspiring:

If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let's make sure it's worthy of those we have lost. Let's make sure it's not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives -- to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.

The president singled out the deceased little girl:

Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us -- we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.

There it is. That is the moment of leadership: The president is calling on the country to use this evil as motivation for good. What good can come from this tragedy? The president gives a compelling answer: we can live our public life, our life together, in such a way that would make the deceased proud of us. We can live up to the expectations of little Christina Green, whose life was ended in a senseless act of violence. We can live up to the expectations of all our children. We can create together the country that lives in our hearts, in our imaginations. We can be better -- we can be better, not only for us, but for them.

Last night, the president paid honor to those who have fallen. He earned our thanks. He lifted our souls.

Censoring Twain

2011-01-09T06:54:00.001-05:00

I was utterly horrified this week by reading a news story in which I learned that NewSouth Books’ upcoming edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be censored -- apologists, own it: censoring is exactly what NewSouth is doing -- by replacing the N-word in the text with the word slave.

Having written the paragraph above, I have spent several minutes looking at the screen and wondering whether I should replace N-word above with the N-word. As you can see, I have decided not to do so, reflecting the unusual delicacy which must be recognized and respected when using that word. I myself hate that word. I do not like it when blacks use it, and certainly whites should never use it in their everyday speech and writings. Indeed, I find it so offensive -- those who know me know that I am not a candy-glass liberal who is prone to being offended -- that I don’t want it on this site.

The effort to censor Huck Finn is being led by Alan Gribben. I do not know Dr. Gribben, but judging by his C.V. he is a serious man: PhD from Berkeley, expert on Twain, and chaired professor at Auburn University. Dr. Gribben has been quoted as saying: “Race matters” in Huck Finn, but “it’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”

Given the special sensitivity of the N-word and the fact that schools around the country have been denying their students access to Huck Finn because of it, serious people are obliged to pause and reflect on whether Dr. Gribben is correct to censor the novel.

My conclusion: Dr. Gribben is both well-intentioned and wrong, and Huck Finn shouldn’t be censored.

Novels are written in a time and place, and they reflect their time and their place. Really, life is lived in a time and place, with circumstances and history and culture shaping decisions. We forget this. Sure, there are moral absolutes, and the author of life has written them onto the human heart, sewn them into the fabric of our souls. But they are easier to see in some circumstances than others -- during some times they are more clear, more readily known.

Novels are written in a time and place, and Huck Finn is no exception. It is a great novel, written in part for the people of the time, which forcefully illustrates that blacks are every bit as human as whites. Twain attacks racism head-on, and often presents Jim, the slave character, as being morally superior to his white masters. In order to tell the story -- in order to show his readers that blacks and whites are morally equal -- Twain uses the language of the time. This is not racism; it is storytelling. Huck Finn could have happened in real life, just as many blacks surely were morally superior to many whites during the time in which the novel was set.

If we worry that children will be so shocked by the presence of the N-word that they will be unable to get past its use and see the book for what it is -- and what it is is a head-on attack against racism -- then I have a novel suggestion: Teachers can do some teaching.

Teachers can teach their students what the book is saying. Teachers can teach their students why Twain uses the N-word. Teachers can teach their students that that word was very common at that time, and explain how far American society has come towards the goal of racial equality.

Teachers can guide their students through the story, increasing the maturity and the literacy and the historical knowledge of their students along the way, just as Twain guided his nineteenth-century readers through a beautifully human and moral journey along the Mississippi River and away from the foolishness and evil that is racism -- just as Twain has guided us, for generations, into the twenty-first century.

Impossible, the opposition might argue. No teacher can pull that off. Well, for starters, I disagree. But then again I was taught by the Jesuits, and not every American is so fortunate. Fine, then. Huck Finn is not like food and water -- students do not need to read it in order to stay alive. If a school lacks confidence that a teacher can adequately teach Huck Finn, then that school shouldn’t require students read it. But the answer is not to change the book.

Because if we changed Huck Finn, where do we stop? Do we go through every book and take out the N-word? What about the word “girl”? The feminists would like that one gone. What about books that portray women as less human than men? Should we burn them? What about books that actually are racist, that embrace racism? Should we wipe them from our collective memory, destroying all evidence that they ever existed?

Where does it stop?

That we can’t answer the question implies that we shouldn’t start.

On a deeper level, just as Twain’s use of the N-word is a sign of his time, the push to censor Huck Finn is a sign of our time. I detect at least a whiff of white guilt here, for one. But much more than that, a large role is being played here by the decidedly current idea that Americans have the right to glide through their lives without being offended.

Sure, some kids will be offended by the N-word. And yes, that is a problem and it is deeply unfortunate, especially so if those kids are black. But in order to avoid offending people are we really going to go so far as to censor one of the greatest works of American literature? Ernest Hemingway described Huck Finn as the source “of all modern American literature” -- are we really going to defile it with a find-and-replace procedure?

The answer is yes, according to Dr. Gribben and NewSouth Books.

Which brings me to my final point -- really, the only point that matters: Censorship is wrong. Schools are free to ban the book and teachers are free not to teach it. Kids are free not to read it, and society is free to let it collect dust in libraries until no one remembers that it was ever written. But no one is free to censor another’s work.

Censorship is cowardly. We ought to have the courage to confront Huck Finn as it is, to teach it as it is, to allow it to teach us as it is. And if we can’t summon that courage, then we ought at least to have the respect to leave it alone.

Doubting and believing at Christmas

2010-12-23T19:03:00.006-05:00

If it is possible for you this Christmas season to pause amid the shopping and traveling and gift giving and cooking and entertaining and stress and chaos, you may wish to reflect on the awesome strangeness of the Christmas story.

John’s gospel proclaims: “He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. […] And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth.”

That is really quite something.

Note that this is not a metaphorical or analogical statement. The Christian faith holds quite literally that Jesus of Nazareth, whose birth we celebrate this Christmas, who was born some two-thousand years ago in Palestine, who lived in obscurity for most of his life, who was an itinerant preacher for a few years, and who was executed in his early thirties, was and is God.

I have been spending some time with babies lately, so I know a thing or two about them. Like all babies, had Mary, his mother, not fed him in the months after his birth, the first Christmas, Jesus surely would have died. Like all babies, Jesus was born that first Christmas with limited vision. Like all babies, he could not walk until around the second Christmas. Like all babies, he had not mastered the concept of object permanence -- when Mary left the room, Jesus thought that she left reality. Like all babies, he did not have control over his bladder. Like all babies, he slept a lot.

And yet the Christian faith teaches that this baby was the being which created heaven and earth, created all that is seen and unseen -- “the world came to be through him.”

How can we believe this?

It is difficult.

While he was Father Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict was a professor of theology. He gave a series of lectures for a university course, an introduction to Christianity, which he published as a book in the late nineteen sixties. While reading the book this Christmas season I was edified to see that Ratzinger tackled the difficulty of belief head-on; indeed, the first chapter is titled “Belief in the World of Today,” and the first subsection, “Doubt and Belief -- Man’s Situation Before the Question of God.”

Ratzinger writes that “the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief,” and that “for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world.” Belief in God is difficult. It is difficult to “believe” in atheism. On this side of eternity nothing is certain, and man’s thirst for certainty serves only to amplify the troubles any man faces in deciding whether there exists a God to serve -- whether that gurgling, half-blind, helpless, hungry baby born to Mary in Bethlehem during the reign of Augustus really was the “word made flesh.”

“In short,” writes Ratzinger, “there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man. […] It is the basic pattern of man’s destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty.” This Christmas, we may add that a manifestation of this “unceasing rivalry” is uncertainty as to the truth of the Nativity.

This doubt plagues the saints. Ratzinger writes of Saint Theresa of Lisieux. One of the most revered saints in the Church, Saint Theresa was declared by Pope John Paul II to be the thirty-third Doctor of the Church, joining the ranks of such great Church teachers as Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Canisius, and Robert Bellarmine. Toward the end of her short life she wrote that she was “assailed by the worst temptations of atheism,” experiencing what another Doctor of the Church, Saint John of the Cross, experienced, and what he termed a dark night of the soul.

In recent times, surely the most famous Catholic to experience the dark night was Mother Teresa. These passages can be found among a collection of her letters, published after her death: “For me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, -- Listen and do not hear -- the tongue moves but does not speak.” “Such deep longing for God -- and … repulsed -- empty -- no faith -- no love -- no zeal. -- [The saving of] Souls holds no attraction -- Heaven means nothing.” “What do I labor for? If there be no God -- there can be no soul -- if there is no Soul then Jesus -- You also are not true.”

Reading these passages is difficult. Catholics of my generation were raised to regard Mother Teresa as a model of Christian living. Indeed, not only Catholics: she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Doubt plagued even her? How can there be hope for the rest of us?

Father John Kavanaugh, a Jesuit priest and professor of philosophy, writes that he once asked Mother Teresa to pray for him. “She said ‘for what?’ ‘For clarity,’ I pled. And she immediately said no, she would not pray for that. I complained that she seemed always to have clarity and certitude. ‘I’ve never had clarity and certitude,’ she said. ‘I only have trust. I’ll pray that you trust.’”

“I’ll pray that you trust.”

QUESTIONS OF GOD and ultimate purpose engulf those persons serious enough to look them in the eye and not to blink. We wrestle. We struggle.

At the end of the day, this most important struggle of existence seems to me to boil down to the following question: Have I had a personal encounter with God, and do I choose to ignore it?

Only after making this choice can we pray for trust -- trust that the baby in the manger is the Son of God, our savior, our deliverer, the Word made flesh, who came down from heaven to heal our bitter and broken world. Trust that the baby of the Nativity will lead us through this world, this wasteland of doubt and uncertainty, through this life, and into eternity.

Mr. Jefferson, please. Not Tom

2010-12-10T11:38:00.009-05:00

Catholics disagree over whether the Second Vatican Council, to take the extreme position, ruined the Church. I disagree very strongly with the extreme position, and others choose to disagree with me. But surely we can all agree -- Catholics and non-Catholics alike -- that one new custom spawned from the Council needs to be laughed out of the room: the convention of addressing clergy by their first name.

When I was in seventh grade I received the Sacrament of Confirmation. The archbishop gathered all the children in the basement of the church, gave us a preview of the Mass, and in the process told us to call him Archbishop Jim.

Archbishop Jim. Here I was, twelve years old, about to confirm my allegiance to the Catholic Church and her teachings -- teachings which include the doctrine that “Archbishop Jim” is a direct successor to Christ’s twelve apostles -- and “Archbishop Jim” is asking me to treat him like one of my buddies. No thank you. As disgusting as the word station is to the post-1960s sensibility, Archbishop, you and I do not share the same station. We are not peers. I will not call you by your first name. And I did not.

When I find myself chatting or corresponding with a bishop, I refer to him as your excellency. Why? Because that is the proper form of address. Cardinal Dulles and I conversed at length a couple times, and I referred to him as your eminence. Why? Because that’s their proper form of address. Cardinal Dulles and I were not peers. We did not occupy the same station. I would fly to Milwaukee to drink beer with my buddies, while his eminence would fly to Rome to hang out with the pope. There was no chance I was going to call him Cardinal Avery.

The same holds for priests. While in prep school I once asked a Jesuit why I could call my parish priest Father Bob but I had to call him Father Jones. Without missing a beat, he replied, “Young man, do I remind you at all of your parish priest?” He didn’t. Do you know why? The answer is found in the difference of opinion the two priests held over whether they found it acceptable for a fifteen-year-old boy to address them by their first name. Leave it to the Jesuits to hold on to some class.

This rudeness, this false intimacy, this false leveling of station -- this utopian, egalitarian fiction that society is one big happy friendship circle -- has infected the rest of society as well.

Imagine that you are in an airport in two weeks. You have spent five-hundred dollars on a plane ticket to get home for Christmas. Your flight gets canceled because of “weather”, so you get rerouted to another city and have to rent a car and drive. The airline loses your luggage. You are trying to get it back, and the guy at baggage claim keeps calling you John. Well, you are not John. You are Mr. Doe. You just spent five-hundred bucks on a plane ticket which purchased you a front-row seat to the most incompetent operation on earth -- incompetence which greatly inconvenienced you. You don’t know the guy at baggage claim, he doesn’t know you, and to address you as if you two were pals is simply disrespectful. Mr. Doe, not John.

I went to a physician about twelve months ago and am still arguing with the insurance company about who should pay what. I was on the phone for the six- or seven-hundredth time with them this morning and the woman on the other end kept calling me by my first name. I wanted to snap. I wanted some distance between us. I wanted some separation. We were not interacting in a friendly social situation; we were interacting in a contentious business situation, and goddammit I wanted some professionalism. Instead, I got some pot-smoking, Woodstock-attending, bath-bead-using, hemp-necklace-wearing, we’re-all-pals-inspired, horseshit insistence that there is no such thing as distance or separation in a modern egalitarian society. Hence my first name. Hence this essay.

I was giving a lecture at my alma mater recently, and I noticed that a curious development had occurred since I left: some of the undergraduates were referring to the professors by their last name -- not Professor Underhill, but simply Underhill. It took all my self-control not to smack these young people in the face. Granted, calling you professor Underhill is much better than calling him Frank, but it is still extremely disrespectful. They are undergraduates and the professor is not. They are very young and the professor is a grown man. They do not occupy the same station in general, and certainly not in their common institution. Professor Underhill, if you please. Dr. Underhill, if you must. But not Underhill.

Most shocking to me about this was the evolution in this false equality. When I was an undergraduate there, I’m sure no one would have dared to address a professor without including his title. The trend is moving in the wrong direction. We need more formality, not less.

I erred in this regard exactly once. Remember the Jesuit I mentioned above? I noticed that some of the other teachers would call him by his first name. I asked him when I would be able to do this, and he replied “no sooner than your graduation.” So, being the impertinent little prick that I was, exactly one week after graduation I called him Dave. He didn’t react to it at all, but the moment the word Dave came out of my mouth the enormity of the disrespect I had shown him hit me, and hit me hard. He will be Father until I am dead.

The same goes with my friend’s parents. Sure, I could get away with calling my friend’s parents by their first names. But why on earth would I want to call Mrs. Bradshaw Mary, or Mr. Maese Brook? We are not peers. These people have successful raised grown children, succeeded in their careers, paid off their mortgages, and lived decades longer than me. We do not occupy the same station. Why would I choose not to acknowledge that? Why would I choose not to show them as much respect as possible? I could be fifty years old, but Mrs. Creal will always be Mrs. Creal.

My parents tell me that when I was three or four years old I took to calling them by their first names. I don’t remember this, but I suppose the revelation that they had names was pretty interesting to me at the time. Surely we can excuse a three year old for acting like a three year old. But we cannot excuse adults for acting as if they were three. We should stop doing so immediately.

The economics of airport pat-downs

2010-11-24T13:51:00.004-05:00

Your university years can contain magical moments -- occasions when the age of your mind rapidly increases, dramatically outpacing the hands of your clock. To paraphrase Graham Greene, these are the moments in your intellectual childhood when the door opens and lets knowledge and mature judgment -- your future thinking life -- in.

At the beginning of my sophomore year of college I was a humanities man. I knew I wanted to major in history, and was determined to couple that with a major in English literature, philosophy, or theology. One day I was breezing through the course catalog, trying to find English classes, and I accidentally turned the page of the catalogue to economics. Some of the courses looked interesting. I mentioned this to a friend of mine, and he told me that he wanted to minor in business, and asked if I would be interested in taking the introductory microeconomics course with him that fall. Sure, I said. And so I did.

The first day of class we went to the room. The professor was a minute or two late, and so in dramatic fashion walked through the door and posed the following question as he made his way to the lectern: “What is the optimal amount of global pollution?”

“What is the optimal amount of global pollution?” he asked again. “A show of hands: Who in this room thinks that the optimal amount of pollution is zero?” Many hands went up. One intrepid young woman asked, “What is meant by the word optimal?”

“Very good,” the professor responded. “Imagine that you are in charge of the world. You are the king. You are the emperor. You have complete power. In this position, you have to decide how much pollution will exist in the world. What do you decide? Whatever you say is law. It will happen. What do you say? How much pollution will exist in the world?”

“Zero,” the student replied.

I remember thinking, How could this not be so? If I had the ultimate power to set the amount of pollution in the world, how could I not set it at zero? A world free of pollution! How is any other answer acceptable?

“Great,” said the professor. “Who agrees with her? A show of hands: Raise your hand if you think that the socially optimal amount of pollution in the world is zero.”

Every hand in the room went up.

The professor smiled a little bit. “Okay,” he began, “let’s say that you are the emperor, and you have declared that there should be absolutely no pollution in the world. One of your advisers comes to you and tells you that the world has been rid of almost all pollution. The only piece of trash left is one lonely bubblegum wrapper. This bubblegum wrapper is floating around somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. No one knows where it is.”

“You are the emperor,” the professor continued. “How many resources to you devote to finding that one bubblegum wrapper? You have everyone in the world at your command. How many teachers do you make cancel class so that they can travel to the Rocky Mountains to find that one wrapper? How many factories do you shut down so that the factory workers can travel to the Rocky Mountains to find the wrapper? How many doctors do you tell to stop healing the sick so that they can travel to the Rocky Mountains to find that one last piece of trash?”

The room went silent.

The professor concluded: “If you don’t want to send anyone to find that one last bubblegum wrapper, then you don’t think that the socially optimal level of pollution is zero.”

“Welcome,” said the professor, as he finished us off, “to microeconomics.”

The door to my young mind blew wide open.

Through the course of that semester I learned a new way to think about the world -- an approach to understanding the world that is rigorous, abstract, analytical. An approach that is unencumbered (when it chooses to be) by moral sentiments or questions of what ought. Instead, the focus is on what is.

Sure, it sounds nice to think of a world free of pollution. But is that really the world we want? When we really think about it, is that so? When we introduce a little realism into the situation -- when we introduce constraints into the maximization problem -- are we left with a utopian answer? Or are we left with the recognition that the pursuit of the perfect is the enemy of the good?

Let’s think about crime. Is the optimal number of murders per year in the United States equal to zero? If you were emperor, and you could set the numbers of murders per year, would you set the number at zero? Would you tell a bunch of teachers and doctors that instead of teaching and healing they had to stand in rooms and keep watch, breaking up a fight whenever one happens to start? If so, how many teachers and doctors would you assign to this task? How would you justify this to their students and their patients?

Indeed, the socially optimal amount of murder is not zero -- not when you factor in the constraint of enforcing and creating a world with zero murders. The pursuit of the perfect -- in this case, a world with no murders -- is the enemy of the good.

“Welcome to microeconomics.”

I bring this up because tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and with the airports full of people this week the public square is afire with debate (whether it knows it or not) about the socially optimal level of airline terrorism. The use of full-body imaging is second in controversy only to the extremely thorough pat-down procedure used on those who refuse to submit to the scanning.

As is often said, what is needed here is an intelligent conversation about the tradeoff between security and privacy. Perhaps a more instructive way of asking the question is to pose it this way: Over the next ten or twenty years, how many successful terrorist attacks should the United States choose to tolerate?

If you think the answer to that question is none, then you forfeit the right to complain about airport security measures.

Thoughts on the 2010 midterms

2010-11-07T14:20:00.000-05:00

Herewith are some thoughts on the 2010 midterms.

* It is deeply frustrating to watch President Obama blame his unpopularity and his party’s loses on a failure to communicate and to persuade. Sure, there were communications failures; for example, fewer than one in ten respondents in a recent poll knew that the president cut taxes for ninety-five percent of working families. But the president was not repudiated to the tune of sixty-plus House seats -- the biggest swing in a midterm election in more than seventy years -- because of a communications failure. Why was the president repudiated? Because Independents don’t like the president’s policies, so they voted Republican. To a first approximation, that explanation simply is the correct one.

* Rand Paul is a U.S. senator. That bums me out. A lot.

* What a shame about Russ Feingold. I doubt there is a single issue on which he and I agree, but he is exactly the kind of free-thinking person needed in the U.S. Senate. He was one of my favorite senators. A true man of conviction. That rare politician who was able to hold on to much of his integrity despite many years in high office.

* Will Mr. Feingold challenge President Obama in the 2012 presidential primary? That would be interesting.

* If Sarah Palin runs for president in 2012, propelled by the now-proven Tea Party, will Mayor Bloomberg, sensing on opening for someone who is neither an ignorant lunatic (Mrs. Palin) nor Barack Obama, run -- and win -- as a third-party candidate?

* If Mayor Bloomberg runs for president as a third-party candidate, will Joe Scarborough run as his vice president?

* The reversal of fortune for the Democratic Party is truly staggering. Do we remember the 2008 election? Two years ago, if I had told you that President Obama would be widely repudiated by Independent voters, by women, by Catholics, and by working-class voters in 2010, would you have thought me a fool? How did the Democrats get themselves into this mess? Would they have fared as poorly if Hillary Clinton were president? Would a President Hillary Clinton have known better than the waste her first fifteen months on a widely unpopular health care bill while the nation was screaming for Washington to pay attention to jobs and the economy? Maybe the presidency isn’t an entry-level job after all…?

* An Associated Press-Knowledge Networks released on October 30th finds that fifty-one percent of voters say that President Obama deserves to lose the 2012 race, while forty-seven percent support his reelection. Amazingly, forty-seven percent of Democrats want the president to be challenged in the primaries. Did you hear that, Mr. Feingold?

* I don’t know much at all about Marco Rubio, but he is looking good to me. A star may have been born in Florida on election night.

* Speaking of Senator-elect Rubio, he perfectly captured the thoughts of the decisive Independent voters yesterday when he offered the following interpretation of the midterm elections: “For too long, Washington has taken our country in the wrong direction, bigger government, reckless spending and run-away debt. And though I’m a proud Republican, here is the truth, both parties have been to blame. This election the American people said enough is enough. That message was loud and clear. We Republicans would be mistaken if we misread these results as simply an embrace of the Republican Party. This Election is a second chance. A second chance for Republicans to be what we said we were going to be.”

* The Tea Party has rescued the Republican Party from George W. Bush. The Republican brand is no longer what it was in 2008. For this, the Republicans owe the Tea Party a great deal.

* Speaking again of Mr. Rubio, I like his patriotism: America is “a place built on free enterprise, where the employee can become the employer. Where small businesses are started every day in a spare bedroom and where someone like me, the son of a bartender and maid, can become a United States senator.”

* Peggy Noonan writes in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal that in the 2010 midterms “negative ads became boring, unpersuasive. Forty years ago they were new, exciting in a sort of prurient way. Now voters take for granted that politicians are no good, and such ads are just more polluted water going over the waterfall.” Is Ms. Noonan correct? Will we see fewer negative ads in 2012? In 2020?

* Did the Republican (Tea Party) candidate for the U.S. Senate from Delaware really run a thirty-second TV ad which began with the following three sentences: “I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you”? Really? How much lower can our national debate go?

* The Tea Party has demonstrated that they can get candidates elected. Now these candidates need to govern. Will they be able to do so?

* The Tea Party ran as Washington outsiders. How long do you think it will take for them to be seduced and changed by Washington? Here’s a prediction: You should measure the time in months, not years.

* John Boehner, the next House speaker, will be pulled in two directions: one by established and more-moderate Republicans and the other by the Tea Party. The moderates will want Mr. Boehner to modify Obamacare, while the Tea Party will want him to repeal it. In which direction will he choose to go?

* In addition to Independent voters’ frustration with the president’s policies, the election was also about the country’s sense of decline. For example, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach when I saw that the American president is no longer Forbes magazine’s most powerful person in the world. This sense of decline is likely to increase over the next two years, and Mr. Obama is going to have to address this if he has a hope for 2012.

* Of course, it doesn’t help that time and again the president presents himself as an arrogant, elitist, out-of-touch, condescending, patronizing snob. During the 2008 campaign we learned that “it’s not surprising” that small-town voters who live in communities without a robust local economy “get bitter,” and that “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Nice job, Mr. Obama. Then came this gem from mid-October, 2010: “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country’s scared.” I mean seriously, what are we supposed to say to that? If only voters weren’t so “scared”, then “facts and science and argument” would be “winning the day” and voters would realize that they should vote Democrat in the 2010 midterms? I don’t know which is more shocking, that the president of the United States thinks such a thing or that he decided to say such a thing out loud.

* The Tea Party congressmen better not screw around with the debt ceiling.

* Watch how President Obama and Speaker Boehner negotiate the extension of the Bush tax cuts. That will give a lot of information as to how the next year will go.

* One of the best things the president could do is to hire some senior counselors who don’t share his worldview. Can you imagine the president, David Axelrod, and Valerie Jarrett ever disagreeing? Get someone in there who isn’t a Hyde Park Democrat.

* Can you believe that people are still confused as to who President Obama is and what he believes? He has been president for two years now! Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton and Mr. Reagan were not shrouded in mystery. The president needs to define himself, his vision for his party, and his vision for the country.

* What will Obama 2.0 look like? Will the next year find Mr. Obama as a foreign-policy president? How will the Republicans handle it if Mr. Obama reduces them to irrelevancy by ignoring domestic affairs? How will the public respond to an increased focus on foreign affairs?

* The Republicans will be tempted to do nothing but thwart Mr. Obama for the next two years. I hope they don’t succumb to this temptation. There is too much work to be done. A prediction: I will be disappointed. By both parties. Again.

Bob Woodward blowing the whistle on Obama's Wars

2010-10-17T18:23:00.003-04:00

“Practically speaking, the 30,000 was a way for Obama to save face and demonstrate that he was not just kowtowing to the military.”
-Bob Woodward in The Washington Post, September 2010

“And somebody asked me the other night, well, are you blowing the whistle? And the answer is yes.”
-Bob Woodward on Charlie Rose, October 2010

Bob Woodward has blown the whistle many times in his career. Most notable was his first, when he and his partner Carl Bernstein published articles in The Washington Post suggesting that the Nixon White House was attempting to cover up the involvement of senior government officials in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. This whistle blowing led to the resignation of President Nixon.

In the years since, Mr. Woodward has authored fifteen works of non-fiction, and has cemented his position as the best investigative journalist alive today. He is deeply respected in both journalistic and political circles.

His most recent book is Obama’s Wars, an account of the deliberations in the White House over the Afghanistan War. (You may click here to be directed to a three-part condensed version of the book which appeared in The Post in late September.) Mr. Woodward went on Charlie Rose about two weeks ago to discuss his book.

Their conversation is shocking. Mr. Woodward reports that the military intentionally misled the president, withheld information from him, and disobeyed the president on numerous occasions. The president had his vision for the conduct of the war, the military had their vision, and the military won. The picture painted of President Obama is of a man out of his depth, too weak to engage these senior generals and admirals -- a commander in chief who is not in command.

Below are sections of the transcript of Mr. Woodward’s conversation with Charlie Rose. (You may click here for a link to the video.) The transcript was taken off the Charlie Rose website. I think you will agree that the facts Mr. Woodward reports are deeply disturbing.

*****

BOB WOODWARD: And it’s -- part of the war is between the White House and the military. The military is just so locked in here in a way. Two examples -- General Jones, the national security adviser, goes to Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the number-one military man in the country, and says “You’re telling us you want 40,000 troops, there’s no flexibility. The president pushes you and says give us an option, give us choice, it doesn’t happen.”

And he said to Admiral Mullen “if we told you we want you to guard two Quonset huts in Afghanistan, it would still be 40,000 troops.” And Mullen kind of laughs and says “Yes, 40,000, just blocks of granite.”

Now, the military’s job, particularly the defense secretary, his job is to be the window into the world of choice for a president. And [Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates just locked down -- 40,000. He kept saying -- he proposed some alternatives, but, you know it was still 40,000.

CHARLIE ROSE: OK, but you are saying, then, that the military refused to give the president of the United States, who they work for, options when he asked for them?

MR. WOODWARD: Not asked for them, insisted. Said --

MR. ROSE: And what was -- why did they refuse?

MR. WOODWARD: Because they believed this is the way to do it, they had the right answer.

Now it’s the president’s job to decide what’s the -- where does this war fit in the overall national strategy? How does it compare to domestic goals that he has, and so forth? And they just said no.

*****

MR. WOODWARD: But here’s the question I ask. In any contest -- politics, sports, war -- you need the will to win. And it’s not clear that [President Obama] has this will to win.

You know, in his campaign he was marvelous, “Yes, we can. Yes, we can.” That gave him a psychological edge. In this there’s a distance from it because he’s so smart, he’s so cerebral, he realizes it’s not going well. This is a mess.

MR. ROSE: So you are prepared to say that this president may not have what it takes to be a wartime president?

MR. WOODWARD: He’s got to prove that. He gets an incomplete at the end of this, because some of the most difficult and important decisions are yet to come.

*****

MR. WOODWARD: Gates, who’s done a good job by all accounts as secretary of defense, he met -- I recount this very interesting meeting. Obama calls him in and says “I want you to stay the whole term, four years.” This was the end of last year.

And Gates is shocked, because he’s only agreed to stay for one year. He wants out. And Gates -- the president presses him, and Gates tells others “The president sounds like a rug merchant negotiating on this.” They agree on one more year.

So he’s going to leave some time next year. You know in any organization when you have the leader with one foot or one and a half feet out the door, it’s disorienting. Where are we going? What are we doing with this war?

*****

MR. WOODWARD: Let me just give you an example. General Jones, national security adviser, former marine commandant, decides as they’re going through last year’s strategy review of how many troops to recommend, he goes through all of his analysis, has all of these meetings, has all the intelligence, knows the military people, and in his computer writes out “I think we should send only 20,000 troops.”

Guess what. He never gives that to the president. He never gives the president that recommendation.

MR. ROSE: Are you stunned by that?

MR. WOODWARD: I am.

MR. ROSE: And why wouldn’t he do it?

MR. WOODWARD: I pressed, I asked.

MR. ROSE: And what did he say?

MR. WOODWARD: There’s not an answer. Now, look, that’s -- you know --

MR. ROSE: I now know why.

MR. WOODWARD: That’s only one of the things that goes on in this White House. You have the president verbatim pressing Gates. I want another option, you owe me another option. Gates says “Mr. President, I agree, we owe you another option.” It never came. It’s troubling.

MR. ROSE: Exactly right.

MR. WOODWARD: And somebody asked me the other night, well, are you blowing the whistle? And the answer is yes.

*****

MR. WOODWARD: Well, he did. He did. But here’s another problem with all of this. Joe Biden and the vice chairman of the joint chiefs, General Cartwright, developed a 20,000 troop option. Mullen saw this and said I’m not taking that over. General Cartwright --

MR. ROSE: Said to be his favorite general, Obama’s favorite general.

MR. WOODWARD: Obama’s favorite general said “I’m in not in the business of not providing options.” And he goes to the law which says as a member of the Joint Chiefs, which he is, the chairman is obligated to present the alternative military advice. Mullen won’t do it. I’m sorry --

MR. ROSE: What I’m asking you, how duds he not do it? He says it’s 40,000, that’s it?

MR. WOODWARD: That’s it.

MR. ROSE: That’s it.

MR. WOODWARD: “I’m not doing it.”

MR. ROSE: He basically says you’ve asked me for an option. I’m giving you the only option there is. You either take 40,000 or there’s no other option. That’s what you’re saying is the sum total of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs advice to the president of the United States?

MR. WOODWARD: That’s exactly right.

*****

MR. ROSE: What general misled the president and why is he still in office?

MR. WOODWARD: Admiral Mullen and General Petraeus.

MR. ROSE: Should they be fired for that?

MR. WOODWARD: Well --

MR. ROSE: You read the book here. Should they be fired if they misled the president of the United States?

MR. WOODWARD: That’s not my judgment.

Lunatics, everywhere

2010-09-27T10:25:00.002-04:00

I fired up my web browser a few days ago and navigated to the website of The Washington Post. The first thing I saw was the headline that Stephen Colbert had testified before Congress. Interesting, I thought. But then I was horrified: Mr. Colbert testified in character.

Said Mr. Colbert, who was testifying before a subcommittee examining whether illegal migrant workers take jobs away from Americans: “I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian.” Huh?

Mr. Colbert had some jabs for Congress itself, as well: “I trust both sides will work on this together in the best interests of the American people -- as you always do.” Referring to a piece of proposed legislation, Mr. Colbert addressed the committee: “Like most members of Congress, I haven’t read it.”

Mr. Colbert suggested entering the images from his colonoscopy into the Congressional record, and ended his testimony by saying “USA, number one.” He answered the questions put to him by the committee in character, sarcastically.

Well. At a time of over nine percent unemployment, the issue of whether migrant workers are taking American jobs surely deserves our respect and the somber attention of our government. The conditions of the workers and the issue of immigration reform generally are of dire seriousness.

If there is one place where these issues should not be the subject of a stand-up comedy routine, it is the U.S. House of Representatives. The House is our seat of democracy, and its purpose is as serious as they come. Mr. Colbert disrespected the House and the issues by testifying in the character he plays on his Comedy Central television show. If I were a member of the House, I would have demanded that Mr. Colbert leave the Capitol. If I were alone in that demand, then I would have walked out of the Capitol myself.

The leader of the House, Speaker Pelosi, disagrees. She called the performance “great” and “appropriate.” Both her assessment of the incident and the incident itself are examples of the degree to which sheer lunacy has infected our politics.

The disease is not restricted to Democrats. Take another speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich has a reputation for being something of a lunatic. This reputation was largely earned during the nineties, when he was in power, and when he led the effort to impeach President Clinton for lying about sleeping with a staffer while he himself was covertly sleeping with a staffer.

But what’s past is past, right? Over the last five or six years I have found myself liking Mr. Gingrich, and pleased with the role he has found for himself in the public square. But now that he is considering a presidential run, the lunacy has taken over.

Mr. Gingrich has taken to warning Americans in speeches of a “creeping sharia” -- the idea that some Muslims are, well ... why don’t I let Mr. Gingrich speak for himself: “In a deliberately dishonest campaign exploiting our belief in religious liberty, radical Islamists are actively engaged in a public relations campaign to try and browbeat and guilt Americans (and other Western countries) to accept the imposition of sharia in certain communities, no matter how deeply sharia law is in conflict with the protections afforded by the civil law and the democratic values undergirding our constitutional system.”

As evidence of this vast conspiracy, Mr. Gingrich cites a whacky court ruling that was overturned on appeal and a couple schoolyard disturbances among school-aged children. He argues that “sharia honor killings -- in which Muslim women are murdered by their husbands, brothers or other male family members for dishonoring their family -- are also on the rise in America.” He cites an essay in Marie Claire as his source. I read the essay. It gives no evidence whatsoever that sharia honor killings are on the rise.

As shocking as this blatant fear-mongering is something Mr. Gingrich recently said about President Obama -- that “the most accurate, predictive model” for the behavior of the president is found in “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” What if the president “is so outside our comprehension” because he is truly a Kenyan, anti-colonialist, and we Americans are not? Wow.

Mr. Gingrich sounds like a lunatic. And I am beginning to fear that he is one, as well.

Thinking of the two House speakers might make you believe that the lunacy infection afflicts people who have served in public office. And it does. But not only them.

Where to start with the others? These days, there are so many examples of lunacy in our politics and so many lunatics in public life that it is hard to now where to start. How about the most colorful? Christine O'Donnell is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from the state of Delaware. Twelve years ago she argued that “evolution is a myth”, and offered as evidence this question: “Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?”

But wait, it gets better: “I dabbled into witchcraft,” Ms. O'Donnell said on television in 1999. “One of my first dates with a witch was on a Satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that... We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a Satanic altar.”

THEY SAY THAT life is stranger than fiction, but seriously: If I told you that an actor testified in character before the greatest democratic body in the West, and in so doing mocked not only the seat of democracy but also the serious issue of migrant workers and immigration, would you believe me? And would you believe that the leader of that great democratic body would approve of the comedian’s performance?

If I told you that a man who once was third in line for the presidency claimed that the current president -- a textbook liberal, who is in fact quite easy to understand -- is “so outside our comprehension” that one must turn to a “Kenyan, anti-colonialist” model of behavior to understand him? If I told you that the same former speaker of the House was drumming up nonsense about an orchestrated plan to impose Islamic law in the United States, would you believe that, either?

If I told you that one of the two major political parties nominated a woman for one of only one-hundred seats in the U.S. Senate who claimed to have “dabbled in witchcraft” and to have eaten a picnic on a “Satanic altar”, would you think I was pulling your leg?

The lunacy in our politics has reached an incredible high. If it weren’t so disturbing, it would be damn funny. But disturbing, it is.

Forgetting Iraq

2010-09-07T08:32:00.006-04:00

Do you find it odd how little attention was paid to the end of our combat operations in Iraq? In his address to the nation last Tuesday night from the Oval Office, President Obama called the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom an “historic moment”, a “milestone”, and said of the war itself: “Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility.”

The president was right to do so. The end of the war is surely a moment that will be marked by history and a milestone in the life of this nation. And whether you supported the war or opposed, it cannot be said that the war itself was not a remarkable chapter in our history, and certainly in Iraq’s.

The reaction in the public square to the end of the war bears no resemblance to the beginning. Have we forgotten already the intensity of the debate in the years after 9/11? Have we forgotten the intense conversations (many of which descended into arguments) that we had with our coworkers, our neighbors, our family, the other students in the dorm or the other residents in the retirement home, about whether we should invade Iraq? Have we forgotten the difference of opinion on the morality and legality of preemptive war? Have we forgotten the days when we would sit in front of our television and watch the green hue of night-vision technology capture the bombing of Iraqi structures, the overthrow of among the most evil dictators in the world? Have we forgotten the protests in the streets? Have we forgotten the anti-war rallies? Have we forgotten “No Blood For Oil”?

The public reaction to the end of the war bears no resemblance to the last decade. Have we forgotten how central the Iraq war was to our public life? Have we forgotten the 2006 Congressional elections? Have we forgotten that Nancy Pelosi stated that ending the war was her highest priority as House speaker? Have we forgotten the heated disagreement over President Bush’s decision to surge the troops in 2007? Have we forgotten the heart-wrenching experience of opening our daily paper and seeing reports of dozens of American soldiers killed, day after day after day? Have we forgotten the caskets of fallen soldiers arriving back home in the middle of the night? Have we forgotten the charges that President Bush was a war criminal, on par with Saddam?

Have we forgotten that Iraq was the central issue in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries? Have we forgotten that President Obama’s opinion, voiced when he was a state senator in Illinois, that we should not invade Iraq provided the initial condition for his presidency? Have we forgotten the degree to which her support of the invasion was a stumbling block for Mrs. Clinton’s quest for the Democratic nomination?

Have we forgotten all this?

President Obama was the anti-war candidate, but once he assumed the presidency he took Hillary Clinton and made her secretary of state. And he took a friend of John McCain’s and made him the national security advisor. And he kept President Bush’s secretary of defense as his own. And he copied President Bush’s strategy of surging forces in Iraq and used it in Afghanistan. And he put President Bush’s general from the Iraq troop surge, David Petraeus, and placed him in charge of the Afghanistan troop surge.

The president’s supporters were upset (to varying degrees) about each and every one of these actions. But even if these wounds have started to scab over, why didn’t the president’s announcement of the end of the Iraq war stir any of the feelings of anger and disappointment over these very controversial decisions?

I really am shocked by the lack of reaction to this enormous event. It was so little-noticed that many of the people I talk to didn’t even realize it had happened.

If you had asked me during the 2002 runup to war or during the dark days of 2006 or during the presidential primaries of 2008 what the end of the war would be like, I would have predicted three things: a massive sigh of relief, a heated rehash of the old arguments, and an even more heated conversation as to whether the war -- which resulted in an unchecked Iran well on its way to a nuclear weapon, over four-thousand American soldiers dead, one-hundred thousand Iraqis dead, millions of Iraqis in exile, three-quarters of a billion dollars in monetary cost, an emboldened al Qaeda, the Iraqi people liberated, and a country with democratic institutions in the heart of the Middle East -- was worth it.

Instead, we got none of these three. The public square wasn’t interested. The nation paid no heed.

Why? Three possible answers stand out.

Perhaps the reason is found in the observation that a person is more likely to follow a police car to a crime scene than a limo to a wedding. In other words, the chaos of Iraq in 2006 was simply more interesting to us than the success of Iraq in 2010.

David Brooks lays out the facts quite nicely: “This year Iraq will have the 12th-fastest-growing economy in the world, and it is expected to grow at a 7 percent annual clip for the next several years. […] Unemployment, though still 15 percent, is down from stratospheric levels. Oil production is back around prewar levels, and there are some who say Iraq may be able to rival Saudi production. […] 833,000 Iraqis had phones before the invasion. Now more than 1.3 million have landlines and some 20 million have cellphones. Before the invasion, 4,500 Iraqis had Internet service. Now, more than 1.7 million do. In the most recent Gallup poll, 69 percent of Iraqis rated their personal finances positively, up from 36 percent in March 2007. Baghdad residents say the markets are vibrant again, with new electronics, clothing and even liquor stores. […] Electricity production is up by 40 percent over pre-invasion levels. […] Violence is down 90 percent from pre-surge days. […] Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle East on the Index of Political Freedom from The Economist’s Intelligence Unit. […] Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis say they want a democracy, while only 19 percent want an Islamic state.”

Maybe a successful Iraq does not command the attention in the same way as an Iraq on the brink of failure?

Perhaps also the reason is that America has fallen on hard times, and the public square is naturally more concerned with the economic plight of our own citizens than with the plight of Iraqis.

Or perhaps the public citizens of the United States are bad at focusing the nation on the issues that require attention, and the private citizens of the United States have an unhealthly disinterest in public affairs. (After all, the prior hypothesis is a description, not a justification.)

In any event, the lack of attention paid to the end of combat operations in Iraq is as shameful as it is puzzling. Our lack of interest in assessing the costs and benefits of this war is a slap in the face to the memory of the fallen, both American and Iraqi. It suggests that the seriousness of our actions in Iraq does not match the seriousness which we bring to our collective life.

Build the mosque

2010-08-16T11:20:00.006-04:00

After graduating from college I found myself working in Lower Manhattan, taking the 4/5 train from my apartment and hopping off at Fulton Street. Every morning as I ascended from the depths I would see the site of the World Trade Center. I can honestly say that each time I see the site I register at least some emotion. The emotion changes depending on the day, but there is always something -- a testament to the rather obvious fact that this land is more than just a couple of blocks on a crowded island. This land instead contains a life of its own; a spirit. It is part battlefield and part killing field -- an odd and terrible mix of the most brutal form of ideological hatred inflicted on the most unsuspecting of people.

I met a fireman in a bar in Greenwich Village three or four years after the attacks. We got to talking, and after an hour or so he pulled out his mobile phone. He asked me to scroll through his contacts. “A lot of names,” he said. Yes indeed, I replied. He then told me that one-third of the names belonged to firemen who died on 9/11 -- heroes who, as Mayor Bloomberg recently pointed out, lost their lives running into the fire in the desperate attempt to save any lives they could, regardless of religion.

September the 11th happened to the nation, for sure. But it happened to New Yorkers in a different way. And it happened to fireman and their families, and especially the victims and their families, in another way still. And so when thinking about the mosque proposed to be built in Lower Manhattan we simply must listen carefully to “the sensitivities of the families of the victims,” as suggested properly by Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the proposed mosque, named Park51 after the street address of the building in question, is called a “moderate”. His supposed moderation speaks volumes about those to whom he is being compared. The imam has said that, “In the most direct sense, Osama Bin Laden is made in the USA.” Shortly after 9/11, the imam went on 60 Minutes and said: “I wouldn't say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.” Rauf in a recent interview refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization, replying instead that “terrorism is a very complex question.”

So it is safe to say that Rauf is not my kind of moderate. But it is not as if he just appeared on the scene. Rauf has been the imam of a mosque in Tribeca, just ten blocks north of the proposed “Ground Zero mosque”, Park51, for nearly thirty years. And his intentions seem decent. Newsweek summarizes: Rauf “bought the building at 45-51 Park Place two years ago for $5 million, and together with Khan and Feisal sketched out a plan. They would demolish the existing building and put in its place a deluxe, multipurpose center big enough to house a swimming pool, a gym, exhibition space, conference rooms, day care, a senior center, and a 500-seat auditorium. It would accommodate all the downtown workers -- lawyers and laborers -- who wanted to pray on Fridays; it would have an interfaith board and interfaith programming; and it would present to the world a moderate, peace-loving, diverse, ordinary Islam.”

The northern border of the World Trade Center site is Vesey Street, and the site is bordered on the east by Church Street. The mosque, when built, will be a few buildings west of Church and two blocks north of Vesey. If you are standing in front of the building where the mosque will be built you cannot see the World Trade Center site. So it is a bit of a stretch to say that the mosque is being built at Ground Zero.

TO BE HONEST, I’m not really sure what the opponents of the mosque wish for the government to do. Of course I can sympathize with their feelings, at least to some extent. But what action do they want the government to take? If you take them at their word then you must believe that some would be fine with the government creatively interpreting zoning laws to forbid the mosque, or even declaring the building which will be converted into the proposed mosque to be a landmark, thus preventing its demolition and subsequent reconstruction as a mosque.

I hope that the fireman I met in the Village would not support such measures.

The thought of our government abusing zoning and landmarking laws to violate both the letter and spirit of the Constitution is simply appalling. The government cannot disallow a mosque to be built in Lower Manhattan because it is a mosque, regardless of the feelings of the 9/11 victims’ families or the majority of the citizens of New York and of the United States. Period.

So I pray that we agree that the government cannot take action to prohibit this. The second question often asked is whether Rauf and his associates should built the mosque there. I don’t really know how to think about this question, but I think we must keep in mind, again, that Rauf has been leading a mosque in Manhattan just ten blocks north of Park Place for decades.

The more appropriate question -- and the question which I think most actually have in their minds when they ask the should question -- is whether I like the idea of having this mosque in that location. At the risk of never being able to run for political office, I must say that I do. Now, I would oppose a mosque being built where the 9/11 rubble now rests. I would oppose a mosque being built over a site thought to be the final resting place for the atomized remains of victims and first responders.

But I do not oppose a mosque being built in a building that most recently housed a Burlington Coat Factory -- a building from which you cannot even see the World Trade Center site.

The issue, really, boils down to this: Should mosques be allowed in Lower Manhattan at all? My answer is yes. Let’s show the world what tolerance really means. Let’s show the world what pluralism really means. Let’s show the world that America adheres to her principles even when the going gets tough. Let’s show the world that people of all faiths are welcome here. Let’s show the world what a free society looks like.

Perhaps most importantly, let’s show the world that the United States does not hold all Muslims accountable for the actions of those villains who brought down the towers. Let’s show the world that the United States does not hold the Muslim religion collectively responsible for the actions of a few. Let’s show the world the best face of America.

Let the mosque be built.

I WASN’T PLANNING to write on this topic at all until President Obama weighed in on Friday night. His defense of the mosque was passionate and heartfelt. This passage resonated with me in particular: The United States is “shaped by every language and every culture, drawn from every end of this Earth. And that diversity can bring difficult debates. This is not unique to our time. Past eras have seen controversies about the construction of synagogues or Catholic churches. But time and again, the American people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues, and stay true to our core values, and emerge stronger for it. So it must be -- and will be -- today.”

Hear hear, Mr. President.

Of course, the president being himself, Mr. Obama had to find a way to completely walk back his strong support for the mosque, replacing political courage with political cowardice. On Saturday, after digesting the onslaught of criticism by prominent Republicans, the president said that he was not commenting the night before “on the wisdom” of building the mosque, but instead on the legal right of Rauf to build.

At best this was a dramatic change in tone. In reality, it was a retraction.

It seems as if the president actually seeks out opportunities to enrage Republicans and demoralize Democrats. Mr. Obama needs to realize that leading does not mean having it both ways all of the time. Leaders must take stands. Leaders must make choices. Leaders can’t please everyone. Leaders have to lead.

After reading Mr. Obama’s Friday night remarks I was looking forward to penning an essay in praise of his surprising and welcome display of courage and leadership.

But then came Saturday.

On strip clubs

2010-07-26T10:48:00.002-04:00

I should like to begin by stated without equivocation that both the act of dancing naked for money and the act of paying to see someone dance naked for money are immoral, and violations of the natural law. If there is doubt in your mind on the former point simply ask yourself if you would like your daughter to strip for money. If there is doubt on the latter, refer to the former.

There, it has been said. Now may I continue?

Morality is binary: things are either wrong or they are not. But morality also exists in shades of grey: while it is immoral for me to steal a stick of gum from you, surely it is much worse for me to strike you in your face or to burn down your house. And so the relevant question on strip clubs is not whether the activity centered on them is immoral, but rather the degree of the immorality.

Contemporary Christianity does a terrible job of putting in perspective such “sins of the flesh.” At the end of Mere Christianity’s chapter on sexual morality, C. S. Lewis, perhaps the most effective Christian apologist of the twentieth century, writes the following: “I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred.”

It may surprise you to read that Lewis considered the pleasures “of putting other people in the wrong,” of “patronizing,” and of “back-biting” to be more sinful than unchastity. And you may even disagree. But I do not.

I have been making a regular habit of attending bachelor parties, and often (though not always) these all-male outings involve trips to strip clubs. The reactions of my friends to strip clubs stretch the gamut. One friend sat in the parking lot for the duration of our stay in a club, refusing to enter at all (and cutting the duration of the stay considerably shorter than most would have liked). Other friends have paid for many “lap dances” and all the rest.

I emailed a buddy from college last week and asked for his thoughts on strip clubs. He wrote: “In the right situation and with the right group they can be very fun. The last time I was at one (bachelor party in October) I had a hard time enjoying myself... I found myself feeling bad for the girls.” I imagine that his is the modal view, at least among people I know. Sitting at a table and having a drink is absolutely the most common activity at these clubs -- not exactly ignoring the girls, but not engaging with them either.

But should we find ourselves “feeling bad for the girls”? I imagine much of the bad feeling stems from the historic and unjust reality of women as lesser members of society than men. Those men who today feel bad for strippers view the stripping (perhaps subconsciously) as yet another example of the abuse and exploitation inflicted on women by men for centuries.

But the times, they are a-changin’. A recent cover essay from The Atlantic reports that “earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same.” In addition, “women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s. Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees.” The essay goes on to ask: “What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?” Under the headline “CEO Pay Breaks Glass Ceiling”, Bloomberg News reported in May that “sixteen women heading companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index averaged earnings of $14.2 million in their latest fiscal years, 43 percent more than the male average, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News from proxy filings.”

Please don’t misunderstand: I am not claiming that all is well in the cause of gender equality. But I did get acquainted last weekend with a stripper, and while buying her a drink she told me that she was a fourth-year medical student who intended to specialize in anesthesiology and who was stripping to pay her tuition.

So there was she: beautiful, nine months away from her medical degree, and a handful of years away from hundred-thousand-dollar salaries. And there was I, giving her money and buying her a drink. Now let me ask you: Who do you think had the power in this relationship? Who was exploiting whom? Who gained the most from our transaction? Who was being used?

Did you know that there are different kinds of strip clubs? Most, apparently, do not allow the girls to be completely naked, only topless. And since strip clubs are legal businesses most do not allow prostitution. And while we’re on the subject, it is worth noting that strippers are not prostitutes, at least demographically -- strippers do not share the degree of widespread drug addiction, history of sexual abuse, and early entry into the “profession” with their prostitute cousins.

In the past six years I have spent considerably less than six hours total in strip clubs, but I was surprised last weekend to see that some of the strippers were considerably overweight. I asked one of my friends (something more a regular than me) whether this was a function of a lack of skinny girls. No, my friend told me, apparently some guys like heavier women. So strip clubs do not perfectly fit their stereotype of perpetuating the stereotype that female beauty is the same as an unhealthy absence of body weight.

Can married men hang out in strip clubs? And what can they do while in one? Here we have considerably more disagreement. A friend and I were discussing this. He is very married, and I am very much not. Though he is not a lawyer, he was trying to draw distinctions: of course married men can hang out in strips clubs, and of course they can purchase lap dances -- provided, of course, that they do not touch the girls during the dance. If touching is involved, then we have entered a gray area. Would you ever tell your wife? I asked him. “Of course not,” he replied. I walked away from the conversation thinking that those three words contained the meat of his true opinion.

But it is his opinion. I did notice that both he and most of the married guys stayed away from the strippers. I asked one why, and he told me that while he didn’t see it as a big deal and while his wife certainly wouldn’t be happy but wouldn’t be much upset at all, he did not want to be judged by the other guys there. (I suspect this is the modal view among married men.) At the same time, the father of a friend reportedly told his married son that “strip clubs are the key to a healthy marriage.” Whatever.

At the end of the day, the whole thing seems pretty harmless to me. Truth be told, these clubs seem a lot less scandalous after you have ever entered one than before. (Perhaps the most scandalous feature of the club from last weekend was the ten-dollar ATM fee? I kid, I kid.) Sure, treating the beautiful gift of sexuality as a commodity is sinful, and that is exactly what happens in strip clubs. But it also happens in fashion magazines, in television, and in movies. Shall we cease to look at those?

The Lord says that “everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Even if I did not know this to be true I would accept it on faith.

But make no mistake about it: strip clubs are an effect of the fallen state of man -- not a cause.

Staying or going in Afghanistan

2010-07-06T05:08:00.005-04:00

I suppose I should begin where many others have left off: with the sacking of General McChrystal. I happily join the chorus of voices in praise of President Obama’s decision to remove the general from command.

At the time the story broke my preference was for the president not to allow the general to resign -- I hoped that Mr. Obama would fire him. But the days between now and then have made clear that President Obama successfully reinforced that the generals do not run the military, and that the president is in command, and perhaps it was proper for the president to allow General McChrystal to leave with some measure of his dignity intact. (In an act of striking generosity, the president has intervened to allow General McChrystal to retire from the army as a four-star general, despite the general having held his fourth star for less than the two years required to hold that rank in retirement.)

A happy accident of the whole affair is the refocused attention in the public square on the question of Afghanistan. Faithful readers of this space will recall my inability to penetrate the fog of the president’s strategy for the war, announced at the West Point Military Academy last December.

In his West Point speech, the president declared that “the security of our allies, and the common security of the world” were “at stake” in Afghanistan. High stakes, indeed. At the same time, the president said: “After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home.” Later in the speech, the president specified that we will “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”

The natural question, asked by many, is, If the stakes are so high, then why are we committing to a deadline? If “the common security of the world” is “at stake” in Afghanistan, then shouldn’t we stay until we have achieved victory? A corollary question: If more troops are needed in July of 2011, should not they be sent?

In the time since the speech many of our government’s leaders have only added to the confusion surrounding the president’s strategy, giving their opinions on what this deadline actually means and providing further evidence -- though no additional data were needed -- in support of the opinion that the president’s war council is a dysfunctional mess.

Vice President Biden is quoted as having said “In July of 2011, you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, responding to a question about the vice president’s quote, seemingly contradicted Mr. Biden: “That absolutely has not been decided.” Instead, Dr. Gates calls the July 2011 date “a starting point” for withdraw -- whatever that means. In his confirmation hearing to assume command of the war from General McChrystal, the revered General David Petraeus -- the commander credited with turning around the fortunes of the war in Iraq; he took command in Afghanistan on Sunday, Independence Day -- had this to say of the president’s Afghanistan strategy: “There will be an assessment at the end of this year after which undoubtedly we'll make certain tweaks, refinements, perhaps some significant changes.” Among the “significant changes” may be the abandonment of the July 2011 deadline. At the same time, the White House chief of staff has said that “everybody” -- including Dr. Gates, General Petraeus, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – “agreed on that date,” which is “not changing.”

The president himself only a few days ago expressed exasperation with the absolutely predictable and reasonable and appropriate public focus on his deadline: “There has been a lot of obsession around this whole issue of when do we leave,” said the president. The July 2011 deadline was intended to “begin a process of transition,” but “that doesn’t mean we suddenly turn off the lights and let the door close behind us.” Good grief.

All this leaves one wondering why a little clarity is so much to ask. Why has the president not clearly expressed his intentions and wishes regarding our future involvement in the Afghanistan war?

WHERE WE ARE now is a place we don’t want to be. Eleven months ago General McChrystal’s report warning of “mission failure” in Afghanistan was leaked. It does not seem that much has improved since then. The Economist magazine’s cover story recently reports: “In an escalating war, with insurgency-related violence up by 87% in the six months to March, NATO’s losses are also climbing. On June 7th-8th, 12 soldiers were killed, including five Americans by a roadside bomb: the deadliest 24-hour period this year.”

The New York Times summarizes the current situation in Afghanistan: “At the moment, every aspect of the war in Afghanistan is going badly: the military’s campaign in the strategic city of Kandahar has met with widespread resistance from the Afghan public; President Hamid Karzai is proving erratic and unpredictable; and the Taliban are resisting more tenaciously than ever.”

One-hundred and four months in, the war in Afghanistan is the longest in American history, and we are spinning our wheels.

Do not be confused by much of the chatter: it is very much in our interest to win this war. There is of course the reputation of the United States and our military to consider. And our terrorist enemies would be energized and emboldened by an American retreat. The ethnic minorities in Afghanistan are terrified in their certainty that an American retreat would result in rape and slaughter.

What is most terrifying is that the power vacuum our exit would leave in Afghanistan would significantly increase the chance that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would fall into the hands of terrorists. Does anyone imagine that terrorists wouldn’t use nuclear weapons if they had them? Of course, once back in power, the Taliban of Afghanistan may not succeed in working with the Taliban of Pakistan to secure control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, but the very possibility of their success justifies our continued commitment to the region.

SO THE QUESTION of relevance is not the often asked, Why are we there? Why we are there is clear as day. Instead, the important question is: Can we win?

Many answer that we cannot win militarily. I am no expert in military history or strategy, but I can’t imagine that we can’t win. If we put an additional one-hundred thousand soldiers in Afghanistan and remained in the country long enough -- estimates vary, but ten years seems to be the most common length of time one encounters as to how long is long enough -- I expect that we would win. After all, many thought that Iraq was hopeless.

And the generals know what they are doing. If General Petraeus thinks we can win in two or three or four more years with only an additional ten thousand or so soldiers, then who better to believe? If he believes that we can win in that time without additional soldiers, then I take his word in good faith.

But can we win given the political constraints? The war is increasingly unpopular, particularly among the president’s core base of supporters. One hundred and sixty two members of the U.S. House of Representatives -- including Speaker Pelosi -- voted last week in support of a resolution requiring that Congress be presented with a timetable for withdraw. The anti-war left, so enamored with the president during the campaign, is furious. Even some influential conservatives are calling for an end to the war.

After his political capital was spent and the Iraq war was declared a failure by all, President George W. Bush refused to quit. He overruled the advice of General Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, the Army chief of staff, the secretary of defense, and dozens and dozens of others; he found his general, the same David Petraeus whom President Obama just put in charge of Afghanistan, and through the sheer force of his will he overcame the political constraints and salvaged the war.

Does President Obama have the strength to do the same in Afghanistan? Will he stand up to his political base and lead? Will he do what he thinks is right, even if it is terribly unpopular? Can he make the hard decisions and remain steadfast?

Does the president believe in this war at all? He famously called Afghanistan “the good war” during the campaign -- was this just a political move, or is he really committed to our effort in Afghanistan?

Indeed, we must ask if any president could overpower the anti-war Democrats in Congress and convince the American people that we should continue (and possible escalate) our commitment in Afghanistan.

These are the questions that need answers.

If the president pledges to do what it takes to win in Afghanistan, a pledge which must include a willingness to send more soldiers to Afghanistan if they are needed, then I will support his decision. If the president is not willing or not able to persuade the nation to commit to doing what it takes to win in Afghanistan, then I will respect his decision to leave.

But Mr. Obama needs to come down on one side or the other. He needed to do so when he took office. He needs to do so now even more. The Afghan people deserve to know where he stands. The Afghan government deserves to know. The American people deserve to know. Most of all, the soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines fighting and dying in a foreign land deserve to know.

GENERAL TOM MIDDENDORP, the Dutch commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province, likens walking through Uruzgan to “walking through the Old Testament.” Defeating the insurgency and stabilizing the region are tasks not quite biblical in scope, but enormous nonetheless. And the worst consequences of defeat would rival the plagues of Exodus.

In our democratic republic the president does not have unlimited power to do as he wishes. If the political environment is such that he is unable to convince the country and the Congress of the necessity of winning in Afghanistan, or if he is unwilling to do so because his judgment is that the costs of victory outweigh the benefits, then we must leave. And we must be prepared to lie in the bed we have made.

But before the consequences of our decision are felt, the decision itself must be made. The president needs to articulate publicly his decision, and if it is not yet made, then he needs to make it. Quickly.

Oprah Winfrey's pound of lettuce

2010-06-20T17:37:00.006-04:00

Among the first times I visited Chicago a friend with whom I was staying pointed to Oprah Winfrey’s apartment building -- an elegant building on the shore of Lake Michigan. Ms. Winfrey, my friend reported, occupied the entire top floor.

Her influence is vast. During the Mad Cow scare of the mid-nineties Ms. Winfrey mentioned on the air that she was afraid to eat hamburgers. She was sued by Texas cattleman who claimed that her comment cost the industry twelve-million dollars.

Vanity Fair writes that “Oprah Winfrey arguably has more influence on the culture than any university president, politician, or religious leader, except perhaps the Pope.” This assertion is nicely supported by Ms. Winfrey’s influence on book sales: Three months before Ms. Winfrey selected Anna Karenina for her book club 11,648 copies of the novel were sold. Three months after the selection, 643,122 copies were sold -- an increase of 5,421 percent. Ms. Winfrey’s selection of The Measure of a Man increased sales of that book from three months before selection to three months after by 181,863 percent.

Her influence extends to politics. During the 2008 presidential primaries Ms. Winfrey decided to endorse President Obama. She had never before endorsed a candidate for office. The Pew Research Center found that a staggering twenty-three percent of Democrats said that Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement would make them more likely to vote in the primaries for Mr. Obama. University of Maryland economists Craig Garthwaite and Timothy J. Moore estimate that Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement resulted in an additional one-million votes for Mr. Obama in the presidential primaries.

Mr. Obama earned 278,966 more votes in the primaries than Hillary Clinton, causing Drs. Garthwaite and Moore to conclude that their results “suggest that Oprah’s endorsement was responsible for the difference in the popular vote” between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama.

Whether Ms. Winfrey actually delivered the Democratic primaries to Mr. Obama isn’t the point, so we shouldn’t get bogged down in it. Suffice it to say that Ms. Winfrey is extremely powerful and influential. She may or may not be the most influential person in the country, but surely she is among the most influential.

The powerful and influential lead public lives that bring the rest of us to fantasize. What would it feel like to have Ms. Winfrey’s power? What would it feel like to have Ms. Winfrey’s reach, her influence, her lifestyle? What would it feel like to have two and one-half billion dollars?

People like Ms. Winfrey -- even people with orders of magnitude less influence than her -- exist in our minds almost as the other, as apart, as distant -- as leading lives fundamentally different than yours or mine.

We wonder if living the life of a billionaire or a celebrity or a member of the cultural elite -- in her case, all three -- would somehow shield us from the day-to-day concerns we face. Of course, Ms. Winfrey doesn't have to worry about putting food on the table or paying the electric bill. But is that as far as the benefits of her unique lifestyle extend? We ponder questions like these.

Which is why a brief videoclip from one of Ms. Winfrey’s recent shows gave me such pause.

In the clip Ms. Winfrey decided to share an “epiphany” she had with her audience. She received a phone call from someone who wanted her to do something. She decided against the request. “There’s still anxiety when I have to say no to someone,” Ms. Winfrey began. “So I got off the phone, and I did not eat a pound of potato chips. I ate a pound of lettuce. But it’s the same thing. I’ve switched the drug from potato chips to lettuce.”

Ms. Winfrey continued, her voice shaking with emotion: “What I was really feeling is every time I have ever been beaten by my grandmother. [...] Where you not only got a whipping, but at the end of the whipping you weren’t even allowed to say, That hurt. So I was whipped. [...] And then [my grandmother said] ‘Take that pout out of your lips. You better not act like you’re upset. You better shut your mouth and not remind me that I just whipped you.’ My little-girl’s mind still feels that if I don’t do what you say and I don’t make you feel okay by operating the way you want me to operate I am somehow going to be destroyed. Now as powerful, quote, as I am in the world, that feeling is still there. And that’s what the eating the lettuce or the chips or the lasagna and all of it is really all about.”

We all have scars. Sure, some are worse than others, but to some degree everyone is broken by life. And it is as cliché as it is true to point out that Ms. Winfrey’s power and influence do not shield her from the pain of her childhood, anymore than they could keep her company at night or console her when she is sad. What strikes me about Ms. Winfrey is not that she is still human.

I am not surprised by her humanity. Instead, I am surprised by how human she is. More to the point, I am surprised by her apparent inability to hide from her humanity.

After all, if Oprah Winfrey cannot disappoint a business associate without feeling like her grandmother is going to hit her -- if saying no to a business proposition causes Ms. Winfrey to eat a pound of lettuce in order to regain some sense of self-control -- then in what situation could anyone ever transcend their past -- under what circumstances could anyone ever hide from themselves?

I suspect that much of our fantasy about celebrity and power stem from our desire to have a space where we are more than ordinary. The influential put their pants on one leg at a time, to be sure -- the powerful and famous still have to suffer the common cold. But in addition they have a sphere of influence -- they have a world apart from our own, a world where they are important, where they matter -- a world which people like you and me suspect offers them an escape from life, from themselves.

We suspect that when they walk down the red carpet or make a million-dollar deal or have their record go platinum that the world melts away, that they are left with nothing but their power and celebrity, that they become nothing more than their public image.

Ms. Winfrey’s pound of lettuce demonstrates that we are wrong, and confirms the truth that all people, from the powerful and influential to the most ordinary among us, most surely bring their humanity to all the situations of their lives. That none of us can escape even for a moment from the tragic reality that we are broken people desperately seeking to be made whole.

Rand Paul's libertarianism

2010-05-31T14:40:00.006-04:00

Rand Paul has managed to do what is nearly impossible: cause an explicit discussion of political philosophy in the public square.

Dr. Paul, an ophthalmologist trained at Duke University and the son of presidential contender Rep. Ron Paul, is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky. Dr. Paul is also a libertarian. And his libertarianism has compelled him on several occasions to say that he does not believe the federal government has the right to outlaw discrimination in private businesses. Under this worldview, if a diner or a drug store or a clothing retailer or whatever wants to refuse service to blacks because they are black, then the federal government has no authority to stop them.

Predictably, many have flipped at these comments.

In thinking about issues like these I like to turn to abstract principles. I like principles which can be extended to their logical conclusions. And I like for the logical conclusions to make sense.

Let’s give principled thinking a shot with respect to this question. To do so, we’ll start where the libertarians start: by putting our feet in the shoes of a business owner. In search of our principle, we’ll look through the business owner’s eyes and see how the world appears under two different assumptions.

Assume for the moment that the specific title of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- the title which outlaws discrimination in businesses which serve the public (and which exempts private clubs) -- is rooted in sound political philosophy. If so, then the principle we are espousing is simple: if you are the owner of a business, and if you serve the public, then you can’t discriminate.

Fine, you might say. Agreement with this principle is probably a universal knee-jerk among liberals, and a largely universal knee-jerk among conservatives. But what, I ask you, about ladies’ night at your local bar? Ladies’ nights explicitly discriminate on the basis of sex. What about the women’s-only fitness center you own? What about the fact that the women’s restroom in your restaurant has a nice, comfortable couch, while the men’s restroom is nothing more than some stalls and a sink?

The logical extension of the political-philosophic principle we just established is that such practices should be illegal. Sorry, but you are no longer allowed to offer drink specials to ladies on Thursday nights.

During a rather heated dinner discussion of this subject last weekend (the correlation between contention in the conversation and wine bottles opened was strongly positive) some of my friends took the view that this is how it should be -- no more ladies’ nights, no more women’s-only fitness centers.

But there is something deeply unpalatable to me about the federal government telling the owner of a bar that he can’t offer drink specials to women. It is his bar. He owns the bar, just like you own the shirt you are wearing and the cup of coffee you are drinking. If once in a while he wants to charge women a couple bucks less than men for a vodka tonic then what right whatsoever does the government have to stop him?

That said, let’s take the other side of the argument. Suppose that in fact the government has no right to tell the owner of the bar that he can’t have a ladies’ night. The logical extension of this principle is that the government has no right to tell any business owner whom he can and cannot serve. So we are left with a world where a black man walks into a drug store to buy a soda and is turned away because of the color of his skin.

I have some friends (though not many) who believe that this is how it should be -- the business owner owns the business, and just as you can do whatever you want with your shirts and your car and your coffee, so too can he do whatever he wants with his business. Period.

But there is something deeply and obviously unpalatable and tragic about this world as well.

So what to do? We started our exercise in abstract and logical reasoning where the libertarians start: from the perspective of a business owner trying to run his business. And we are in search of a principle: either businesses can discriminate, or they cannot -- either the government can tell you what you can and cannot do with your business, or it cannot. But both principles create worlds in which we don’t want to live. What to do?

Political philosophies are rooted in assumptions and in frameworks. And if the framework of a particular philosophy leads you to conclusions which are obviously at odds with how society should be, then you must throw out the framework and look for a better one.

Using the libertarian framework, we assumed two mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive principles: either businesses can discriminate on race, or they can’t. Either way, we were left with a world we didn’t like. What to do? My answer to this dilemma is to abandon the framework.

In this case, the framework is an excessive, radical emphasis on the individual. The whole system is postulated around the business owner, the citizen, the man. Ayn Rand, a hero of libertarians, writes that the individual must exist “for his own sake.”

What utter nonsense.

Sure, I am an individual. But my friends and family are not my backdrop -- they are people, and they are every bit as valuable and important as me. Indeed, society is not just the backdrop against which I live my life. Instead, I am in a relationship with society. I have responsibilities to my community and to society at large. I am not independent of it, and it is not independent of me.

Rand writes that the individual exists “neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.” Nonsense. This sentiment is deeply offensive to my Catholicism, which teaches that God himself became a man sacrificed to save the world. Saint John’s gospel writes, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” The Lord was self-sacrificing and generous and giving. We are called to imitate his life, the most deeply human life ever lived.

We are called, as the Jesuits would say, to live for others.

But I do not believe that you have to be Catholic to be intellectually offended by this radical individualism. Instead, you must recognize merely that the social contract to which we are all bound requires us to sacrifice some freedom for the good of the community.

There are absolute rights which no government can ever take from us. We have the right to life. We have the right to worship in our own manner, and the right not to worship at all. We have the right to think, and to our own beliefs. There are rights upon which the government cannot infringe. But surely one of those rights is not to be able to turn away blacks from your lunch counter.

Aristotle wrote that politics is citizens deliberating the question, “How ought we to order our life together?” What does a just and moral society look like, and how can we best approximate it? Note that the emphasis is not on the individual: politics is not a proscription against collective action. Politics does not center on me. Politics is not viewed through the eyes of one person. Politics is instead a gathering of the community to debate the public face of their city.

And so we must ask: Does the society we want to live in allow the owner of a bar to charge women less than men every so often? Does the society we want to live in allow the owner of a bar to refuse service to blacks because they are black?

Looking at these questions through the eyes of a radical individualist reduces these two questions to one: Does the government have the right to tell me what to do with my bar? Looking at these questions in a more thoughtful manner -- thinking about justice and morality and about the nature of the society we create together -- allows us to take into consideration history and motive and culture and aspiration. To my mind, the latter is a much better framework.

THE UNITED STATES came to the public square and in 1964 decided that the proper moral ordering of our collective life prohibits racial discrimination. The United States decided that justice demanded this of us.

The United States was right. A casualty of this revelation is that libertarianism is wrong, not only in its conclusions, but metaphysically as well -- wrong in the rather strange place it chooses to begin.

Newsweek, the iPad, & journalism's future

2010-05-10T10:29:00.003-04:00

Some are harrowing the arrival of the iPad as a watershed moment in the history of media technology. I believe that The Washington Post Company’s ground-shaking announcement last week that they are putting the deeply-unprofitable Newsweek magazine up for sale is a watershed moment in journalism. The two events are not unrelated.

Ben Bradlee, currently a vice president at large of The Washington Post, is a legend in the news business. Executive editor of the newspaper for twenty-three years, Mr. Bradlee oversaw the newspaper’s coverage -- i.e., Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s work -- of the Watergate scandal and fought the government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers. Jason Robards’ portrayal of Mr. Bradlee in the film “All The President’s Men” won him an Academy Award.

Mr. Bradlee began his career at Newsweek, and during his time there he negotiated in 1961 the sale of Newsweek to The Washington Post Company. The president of The Post Company at that time was the legendary Phil Graham. Mr. Graham’s wife was Katherine, the daughter of Eugene Meyer, the man who bought The Washington Post in a public auction in 1933. After Mr. Graham’s death, Katherine took charge of both publications. It was she who lured Mr. Bradlee from Newsweek to The Washington Post, where his legend was made.

Shortly after her husband’s death Katherine Graham had the opportunity to sell Newsweek for one-hundred million dollars. Newsweek had been purchased by her husband for fifteen million. But instead of selling she chose to grow the magazine, turning it into the key player in journalism that it is today.

I tell the story of these publications and persons to illustrate the deep personal connections involved here. The people who run these publications are literally a family. They have a deep sense of public mission. They have shaped the life of our country in ways that senators and congressmen only dream of. They have a sense of civic responsibility. It isn’t all about dollars and cents and profit and loss. Katherine Graham didn’t sell Newsweek for over six times what her husband paid for it -- she was more interested in engaging in and advancing the conversation in the public square.

Katherine and Phil had a son, Donald. Donald is currently the chairman of The Washington Post Company. He used to work for Newsweek. And he is the man who this week put the magazine up for sale. Donald Graham was asked if putting for sale the magazine bought by his father was difficult. “Yes,” he replied. “It was a hard decision for me, but it’s a lot harder for the people who work here.”

I don’t know Donald Graham, but given his family I suspect that he had no other choice but to sell Newsweek. And if The Washington Post Company, run by a Graham, can’t find a way to keep Newsweek going, then the current state of business in journalism has hit a point such that all people interested in the health of our democracy should bolt upright in their chairs and take note.

We’ve all heard the stories. In 2009, The Post Company’s magazine division, which includes Newsweek, lost 29.3-million dollars. In 2008, the division lost 16.1 million. Mr. Graham said that 2009 was the worst year for advertising since the Great Depression. The Philadelphia Enquirer was just sold. U.S. News & World Report, one of the formerly big-three newsweeklies, is now a monthly. Major newspapers, such as The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have shut their doors. Mass layoffs are common. Even the giants are in trouble.

And now comes the news that The Post Company cannot find a way to justify keeping Newsweek in the family.

Jon Meacham is the editor of Newsweek, and one of my favorite people in the public square. Since the announcement of the sale of his magazine, Mr. Meacham has said “You get what you pay for”.

He is talking to people like me.

I have a routine. Every morning I visit the websites of The Washington Post and The New York Times, open a browser, and flag every article I want to read that day. Sometimes I get through them, sometimes I don’t. If I do get through them, chances are I flag some others to read as well. On Sundays I go to Newsweek’s website, where I read most of that week’s edition. The total amount of money I give these publications: zero dollars.

Many are fond of saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch. There isn’t, and when Mr. Meacham tells me that “you get what you pay for,” what he means is that after Newsweek and The Post and The Times have shut down, the quality of the news I will have left to read will equal the price I have been willing to pay: zero.

Enter the iPad. Some big names in journalism have argued recently that this device will save newspapers.

Rupert Murdoch is a mogul in a time when there aren’t that many moguls left. He owns, among others, The Times of London, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal, though he is probably best known in America as the man behind Fox News Channel.

Last week Mr. Murdoch embraced the iPad: “I got a glimpse of the future last weekend with the Apple iPad. It is a wonderful thing,” he said. “If you have less newspapers and more of these […] it may well be the saving of the newspaper industry.”

Michael Gerson is not a mogul, but he is a columnist for The Washington Post. Last week he expressed the sense of salvation many are experiencing due to the iPad: “I’ve worried in print before about how the expectation of free content on the Internet undermines the quality of that content. Who will pay the investigative reporters, the journalists in foreign bureaus, the editors and fact-checkers who distinguish reliable information from Internet rumor and conspiracy theory? But the iPad provides me the first reason to hope. The very elegance of this technology might help to solve a serious challenge for the post-page and post-print information industry. I won’t pay a monthly fee for a newspaper subscription on my Kindle because the interface is awkward, the experience flat and pale. I would be willing to pay a monthly fee for access to a great newspaper […] on the vivid, touchable, multimedia iPad.”

It is hard to argue with the journalistic instincts of men like Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Gerson, but I fear that I must do so. The idea that the iPad is so beautiful that people who have so far been unwilling to pony up for a magazine subscription will do so for the joy of reading the magazine on their iPad seems, to me, a stretch.

There are people like you and me out there. It’s hard to put a number on us, but a reasonable estimate is twenty million or so. We read the newspaper fairly regularly. We know the names of the major columnists. We watch a Sunday morning news program most weekends. We email newspaper articles to our friends. We can name off the top of our heads four or five Supreme Court justices, and ten or fifteen U.S. senators. We can tell you which debate is burning this week in the public square.

And we are not willing to pay for the news. I have spent my entire adult life in the academy and in government, so I get lots of stuff for free. But if I hadn’t, then I wouldn’t have paid for access to The Times columnists during that failed experiment. I won’t pay for an online subscription to Mr. Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. If Mr. Meacham made me pay for online access to Newsweek, then I would start reading Time.

That is, until this week. The sale of Newsweek has put some fear in me. It’s time for people like you and me to pay for what we consume. A one-year subscription to Newsweek costs forty dollars. I spend more than forty dollars per month on coffee.

Today, I get much more quality journalism than I pay for. But for that to continue to be true, I need to start paying more than zero -- iPad or not.

Sex abuse in the Church

2010-04-18T17:35:00.005-04:00

While I was growing up the priests serving my parish were Benedictine monks. One year the principal of the parish elementary school left unexpectedly, and one of the monks, Barnabas Senecal -- now the abbot of Saint Benedict’s Abbey; Atchison, Kansas -- stepped in to take her place. I was in fifth grade, ten or eleven years old, and I was given my first detention. This required me to meet with the principal, then-Father, now-Abbot Senecal.

I was terrified. Abbot Senecal is a big hulk of man -- at least, that’s how he exists in my mind’s eye. He has a deep, deep voice. Being a fifth-grader, I didn’t realize that this detention would be the first of many. I thought that I might have gotten myself into some real trouble. I didn’t know what to expect from the meeting.

The secretary showed me into the principal’s office, and the very first thing Abbot Senecal did was to put his arm around my shoulder and give me a big squeeze. The very first thing he told me was not to be afraid. I then sat down on the couch, and he asked me what I had done. I can’t recall for the life of me what it was -- talking during class, though, is probably a good guess. After I told him the story, he said that it sounded to him like I had a bad week, and that I should try not to have another one. Then he dismissed me.

Our conversation couldn’t have lasted longer than ten or fifteen minutes, but it has remained with me all these years because of the way that the abbot related to me. The air in his office was saturated with his generosity. Undoubtedly seeing that I was scared, the most important thing to him during that conversation was that I felt safe and comfortable and unafraid. All other concerns -- including the discussion of my bad behavior -- were a distant second. He was a priest and I was a child, and at the expense of our principal-student relationship he wanted our encounter to be pastoral. He taught me more about being a Christian in that brief conversation than I would learn from dozens of homilies. He modeled priesthood.

This was not the last time that a Catholic priest showed me how much compassion one person can give to another within the mundane experience of daily life -- not the last time, but surely it was the first. It was one of the most important experiences of my childhood.

MY ENCOUNTER WITH the abbot has been much on my mind of late, as have my other childhood encounters with priests, as the public square has been filled for the second time in eight years with talk of children abused at the hands of priests. By now we all know the egregious stories, perhaps most notably the vicious monster in Wisconsin who abused and raped up to two-hundred deaf children between 1950 and 1974.

I think of the only priest I have met who abused a boy. He took my mother and two younger brothers, and others, on a trip to Europe. He served some thirty months in jail for touching the genitals of, if memory serves, a fifteen-year-old boy, while the two shared a bed. My youngest brother was fifteen when he went on that trip.

My mother, for reasons passing understanding, sent the former priest a card after he was sent to jail. He wrote back. I was home visiting and read his reply. It was written in flowery handwriting, and was filled with the language of religion. It was written with the tone of a man who had something to teach others.

I was then and am now surprised by the reaction I had to the card. Reading the former priest’s reply placed within me a violent urge towards him. Who is he to talk of the Lord? Who is he to talk of prayer? Who is this man, and how does he feel comfortable writing to my mother at all, about anything -- ever?

As a Catholic, then, these news stories are very personal to me.

The Church claims to be a divine institution. The pope is called the Vicar of Christ -- Christ’s substitute, if you will, until the second coming. Similarly, all priests act in persona Christi, changing the substance of cracker and wine into Christ’s flesh and blood, as Christ himself did; absolving the faithful of their sins, as Christ himself did.

But the Church is situated in a human, fallen world, and run by human, fallible clerics. Simply put, reading the paper makes me wonder if the Church is up to the task set out for her by Christ.

I AM COMFORTED by the statistics.

George Weigel, the noted Catholic and public intellectual, writes: “In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother... Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years -- some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests -- a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).”

Newsweek reports that “back in 2002 -- when the last Catholic sex-abuse scandal was making headlines -- a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 64 percent of those queried thought Catholic priests ‘frequently’ abused children.” In response to this poll, Newsweek writes that “experts say there’s simply no data to support the claim at all. [...] ‘We don't see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else,’ said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”

Newsweek cites the widely-respected John Jay Report, which finds that roughly four percent of the 110,000 Catholic priests active between 1950 and 1992 were guilty of some type of sexual misconduct, ranging from “sexual talk” to rape. “Experts disagree on the rate of sexual abuse among the general American male population,” writes Newsweek, “but [Mr.] Allen says a conservative estimate is one in 10. Margaret Leland Smith, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says her review of the numbers indicates it's closer to one in 5. But in either case, the rate of abuse by Catholic priests is not higher than these national estimates.”

And given the state of affairs in the Church in America today -- six instances of child abuse in 2009 -- it can be credibly argued that the Church is a safer place for children than public schools, pediatricians’ offices, the Boy Scouts, and Protestant congregations. The overwhelming, almost total majority of priest-child encounters are like the one I had with the abbot.

BUT IT STILL remains the case that the Church failed on a fundamental level. Zero instances of child abuse is both a necessary and achievable goal. And while I do believe that Pope Benedict has gotten a bad rap from what can best be described as an overt attempt to attack him, it is true that some bishops deserve to spend tonight in prison for their tolerance of child abuse, and not in their mansions.

I am reminded of a story. Napoleon is arguing about something or other with a French cardinal. After some time, Napoleon loses his temper and exclaims, “But your eminence, you do understand that with one command I could destroy the Church!” The cardinal looks down at the floor, exhales deeply, looks Napoleon in the eye, and says wearily, “Your majesty, the priests and bishops of the Church have tried for centuries to destroy her. They have not met with success. You will not, either.”

Christ chose to build his church on the rock that was Saint Peter, the first pope. During his last supper, the Lord foresaw that Peter would deny his discipleship after Christ was taken captive. And so Peter did, denying three times on the night before Christ’s death that he followed the Lord.

Peter’s was an act of cowardice. It was an act of betrayal. And yet he was the man whom Christ selected to lead the Church. And the Church survived, and thrived, in spite of Peter’s failings.

Likewise, some in the Church in our time have acted with cowardice. Some have betrayed the Lord. And yet I have faith that the Church will recover, emerging from this shameful episode more faithful, with more freedom -- in greater service to God and man, and child.

Yes, we did...

2010-03-28T20:36:00.001-04:00

The great liberal project of the past hundred-or-so years has been the construction of a social safety net -- the creation of a welfare state. The dramatic actions of Franklin Roosevelt to get the unemployed back to work began the project. Social Security followed, and today the elderly no longer live out their last days in tenement housing, starving, without food and clothing. Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps and aid to needy families and unemployment insurance and transfers to the disabled and all the rest -- the great liberal project sought to ensure, to some degree, equality of outcome -- that no one, whether through bad luck or bad decisions or the accident of birth, would be too damaged by life.

Many have noted that the passage of health-care reform feels like the completion of this project. It does. And it simply must be said that the passage of health-care reform is an enormous legislative victory for President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and the Democratic Party.

I am of the opinion that in a nation as rich as ours everyone should have access to reasonable medical care. Whether that was the case before the bill was signed is arguable, but that it is the case now is not. Currently, eighty-three percent of Americans have health insurance. When the bill is completely phased in, an estimated ninety-five percent of Americans will be covered.

With that said, I am puzzled by the media coverage of this event. Gail Collins of The New York Times humorously summarizes the point: “There we were, minding our own business, when all of a sudden, whammo, health care got reformed. Really, it was quite a shock. I guess it was because of the new president, Barack Obama, who is so much more decisive and take-chargey than the old president, Barack Obama.”

Before, the president was weak. Now, he is strong. Before, the president was aloof and uninvolved. Now, he is a trench warrior, full of passion. Before, the president was Jimmy Carter. Now, he is Lyndon Johnson. Before, the president was a failed legislative strategist. Now, he is the best in the business.

Could so much have changed in a handful of days?

Of course not. Everything that was true before about the president and his staff remains true now. Which is why I believe that the health-care bill, while being a major legislative success, was a complete and total failure of political leadership.

History remembers that FDR passed Social Security in 1935 with a House vote of 372 to 77. Eighteen House Republicans opposed the bill, while 77 supported it. Social Security passed the Senate with a vote of 77 to 6. History remembers that LBJ passed Medicare in the House with almost half of the Republican members voting for it. Medicare passed the Senate with 13 of the 27 Republicans, and a total vote of 68 to 21.

History will remember that BHO passed the universal-coverage bill without a single Republican vote. In addition, the president lost thirty-four Democrats, for a final vote of 219 to 212. History will remember that the bill passed the Senate 60 to 39, again without a single Republican.

The central promise of the Obama movement was the elevation of our politics from petty partisanship. Mr. Obama assured the nation that he would be able to bridge the partisan divide, to bring Republicans and Democrats together, to change the focus of government from beating the other party to helping the American people.

Could the president have failed more dramatically at bringing about his central campaign promise? Arithmetically, no. He could not have received less support for his health-care bill.

Some will quickly point out that the Republicans were obstructionist. Fine. I disagree that they were at first and agree they were by the end, but this is neither here nor there. Mr. Obama did not claim that he would be the first post-partisan president provided that the Republicans would stop playing politics. There was no proviso in Mr. Obama’s promise. I thought at the time that it was a ridiculous promise to make. But regardless, it was made. And it is simply the case that the president utterly failed on this margin.

Further, even if most Republicans agreed to obstruct, a strong president should have been able to turn at least a handful in the House and a couple of senators his way. The president couldn’t even do that.

The bill was also a political failure because the cost of passage was much, much higher than it should have been. This should not have taken over one year. The president had sixty senators and sixty percent of the House for twelve months. This should not have taken over a year. During that year the president’s image was irreparably damaged. As was the image of the Congress. The costs are much higher than they needed to be.

And had five or ten House seats gone the other way in the 2008 election there would have been no chance for a health-care bill. In the 2008 election, had the Democrats held fifty-eight Senate seats and not sixty there would have been no chance for a health-care bill. LBJ and FDR used their political skills to get members of the other party to vote for their bills. BHO did not. He could not. He failed as a political leader.

The media and Democrats are arguing that passing a bill without a single Republican vote, and losing thirty-four Democratic members of the House in the process, is a political accomplishment for the president? It seems to me that instead of calling this an accomplishment, we should call it good fortune. Go back to November 2008 and change two Senate races or a handful of House races and you have a totally different outcome. (Arguably, take away Scott Brown’s win and the health-care bill doesn’t pass.) Where’s the political skill in getting members of your own party to fall in line?

The bill is a legislative accomplishment, to be sure. It is a policy accomplishment. But it is not a political accomplishment. The president is the same in-over-his-head political novice making amateur mistakes as he was before.

WAS SIGNING THIS bill the act of a responsible president?

If the majority of the American people oppose a bill of this magnitude, should it have been signed? Isn’t there an unwritten obligation on the part of a president to hold off on sweeping social change unless some significant fraction of the opposition party agrees? In other words, is it responsible to sign into law a massive new entitlement program when all you have is a seven-vote margin? Is this the way big social change should happen in America?

Debt held by the public is a staggering eight-trillion dollars. Recent CBO estimates state that the 2010 federal deficit with be 1.5-trillion dollars, and the 2011 deficit will be 1.3-trillion. Further, the CBO estimates that we are on course to reach 20.3-trillion dollars of public debt by the end of 2020.

So sure, we all like health care. But is it responsible to add another trillion-dollar entitlement to what George F. Will calls “the rickety structure of America’s Ponzi welfare state”?

What makes matters worse is that, from a policy perspective, universal coverage could have been achieved in a much less costly manner. Indeed, this bill does very little to address costs. Despite the rhetoric from the president and the Democrats, it is simply unimaginable that this bill won’t dramatically add to our national debt.

Signing this bill was fiscally reckless. At some point in the near future we are simply going to have to dramatically increase tax revenue. Income taxes will go up for sure. Some are even talking of a value-added tax. And the higher these taxes go the further a certain vision of America will fade into memory.

MOST OF ALL, though, this whole goddam display was disgusting. Dana Milbank summarizes: “It all began 14 long months ago, when Ted Kennedy was still alive and everybody, Republicans and Democrats alike, seemed to agree that the nation’s health-care system needed change. Then came the town hall meetings, the death panels, the granny killing, the images of Nazi concentration camps, the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, Joe Wilson’s ‘You lie!’ moment, the middle-of-the-night and Christmas Eve votes, the Massachusetts special election, the Stupak Amendment, the Slaughter Plan, the filibusters, the supermajorities, the deeming and passing.” And of course we all know what has been happening this week.

One cannot help but think that the only sane members of Congress are those who have chosen not to run for reelection.

William F. Buckley Jr. once remarked that all good people would leave politics alone if only politics would leave them alone. Sadly, it seems that the great lesson from the Obama presidency has been that good people should leave politics alone -- period.

Bishops in the Capitol

2010-03-16T08:48:00.003-04:00

The last rumor I heard on the subject was that Speaker Pelosi has 201 of the 216 votes needed to pass the health-care legislation. Two-hundred and one is a devastating-defeat-for-Obama away from 216. Much influence is being brought by many to keep 201 from becoming 202.

Lisa Miller, the excellent Newsweek columnist, writes in last week’s issue of one such group bearing considerable influence: “They see themselves as crusaders for human rights -- protectors of the innocent, the voiceless, and the powerless. […] They are among the most important voices on a crucial political question: will abortion finally scuttle health-care reform?”

Ms. Miller is writing of the Roman Catholic bishops.

“I spoke last week to Rep. Bart Stupak, the Catholic Democrat from Michigan who, at the 11th hour, attached an amendment to the House health-care bill restricting the use of government funds to any health-care plan that includes abortion,” Ms. Miller reports. “The bishops, he says, were “very, very, very engaged” in the framing of the amendment. Through last summer and fall, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops “was working with my staff.” But as the House headed toward a vote, “I asked them to come by, to make sure we were on the same page. After that first meeting, I said, ‘I’m not moving forward until you know what I’m doing.’ We had to coordinate forces. They’d ask us about members. I’d say, ‘I’ve talked to this one but not to that one.’” The bishops, in other words, were counting votes.”

Doubtless many are bothered by the revelation that a member of the House of Representatives would allow the bishops to be “very, very, very engaged” in the writing of an amendment to a piece of federal legislation. Equally troublesome for many must be the thought of Rep. Stupak “not moving forward until” the bishops knew what he was doing. Those troubled would argue (a) that Catholic morality has no place in the legislative process because not everyone in the United States is Catholic, and (b) that religion more generally is a private matter with no role to play in public debate.

I am not among them.

Aristotle thought of politics as citizens gathering in the public square in an effort to answer the question, “How ought we to order our life together?” Take note of the word ought, which implies not that moral considerations are part of the decision process, but that they are the decision process.

“How ought we to order our life together?” What does a just society look like? How should we allocate our scare resources to bring about the best possible approximation of that society? How should we balance the competing values of freedom and equality? How ought we to balance the competing values of liberty of the self and the rights of others? What kind of a nation should we be? To what values should our nation commit? How should our laws best bring about the national character we choose to take on?

These are fundamentally moral questions. And in answering moral questions you bring the entirety of your capabilities and life experience to bear. You use reason and knowledge to assess the situation and uncover the facts, and you use reason, personal conviction, and lived experience to interpret those facts and to form an opinion. Furthermore, your assessment of the facts and the opinion you reach are colored and shaped in countless ways by culture, which informs politics, which informs the set of policies you are asked to choose from, and which is informed by many things, most fundamentally religion -- in a very real sense, religion simply cannot be removed from the public square.

One citizen might believe so strongly in freedom that he rejects any role for the government to take his money and with it to buy food for the hungry. Another might believe so strongly in equality of outcome that he believes the government should take three-quarters of every dollar over one-hundred-thousand earned by any citizen and give it to the poor. Still others might be in between these two citizens.

But why does the first citizen believe so strongly in freedom? Why does the second citizen believe so strongly in equality? Why do the others believe something in between?

I’m not sure those questions can be definitively answered for any man. But I am sure that the answers don’t matter.

I recall a television interview with George W. Bush while he was president. The reporter asked Mr. Bush if his faith informed his decisions as president. Mr. Bush answered that it is impossible to separate his faith from himself, and consequently it was necessarily the case that every decision he made as president -- indeed, as a man -- was informed to some degree by his faith. The reporter, demonstrating tragic ignorance, asked if the president might be better off not basing his decisions on a moral vision shared by only a subset of the American people. Mr. Bush, demonstrating his tragic inability to articulate, was unable to respond that this question was based on a nonexistent premise: that such compartmentalization was possible.

It isn’t. And isn’t this the point? Even if we knew that the second citizen was basing his belief on the twenty-fifth chapter of Saint Matthew’s Gospel, would it matter? Can we reasonably ask the second citizen to shove his religion aside and to answer the question as if he were a non-believer?

Of course we can’t. But many think we should, and many think that he should be able to do just that.

This is, after all, the heart of the matter: The bishops shouldn’t be informing public policy because public policy should not be based on considerations specific to Catholic morality.

Nonsense.

Public policy should be the outcome of the deliberation of citizens in their attempt to answer the question, “How ought we to order our life together?” Forget for the moment that no one can compartmentalize their morality from their moral judgments and consider that differing moral judgments are nothing to be afraid of, for the beauty of public life is the clashing of differences.

The Catholic applies his morality to the question of the proper ordering of public life. As does the Jew and the Muslim and the Protestant and the atheist and the secular humanist and the agnostic. As does the rich person who only looks out for himself. As does the bleeding heart who is a redistributionist. As does the socialist and the capitalist and the communist and the apathetic. As does the pharmaceutical-company lobbyist and the tobacco lobbyist and the guy who thinks, for reasons passing understanding, that we should abolish the Fed. And in the clamor of competing visions for America -- in the clamor of competing moral judgments and moral priorities -- comes the outcome of politics, which is law.

So let the bishops go to the Capitol, if they so choose. The public square, to borrow from the late Father Neuhaus, should not be naked.

Lower the drinking age

2010-03-02T09:18:00.002-05:00

I am not a soldier, but were I returning from battle I imagine that high on my to-do list of at-home activities would be to open a beer and reconnect with friends and family. I am not a homeowner, but were I to purchase a home I imagine that I would like to christen it with a toast. I do work for a living, and I can tell you that after a stressful day few things hit the spot like sharing a drink with friends and colleagues.

Few among you would disagree with these statements. But there are a significant number of soldiers who cannot pull a beer out of the backyard cooler after returning home from war. There are a significant number of men and women who sign a mortgage and buy a home but who cannot toast their accomplishment. There are hardworking men and women all across America who put in a day, pay their taxes, yet who cannot enjoy a happy hour with their coworkers.

Insanity? It sure is, and it all began under the watch of President Reagan.

The story of this specific tyranny begins in 1982, when Reagan established a commission to deal with the problem of drunk-driving fatalities. The president’s commission quickly formulated dozens of recommendations to curb drunk driving, one of which was increasing the legal drinking age to twenty-one years. In 1984 President Reagan signed this recommendation into law.

But wait: Current-day Republicans, Tea Partiers, I ask you: Is it not the case that Reagan, that champion of Constitutionalism, that ardent defender of local government and states’ rights and freedom -- is it not the case that Reagan would have read the Bill of Rights, specifically the last right listed, which specifically states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” and having read it, would have opposed any government encroachment on the rights of the states to determine their legal drinking age?

Indeed, Reagan did know the Constitution. And we must give him credit (tongue-in-cheek): He did not attempt to pass an unconstitutional law. Instead, he gave the states a choice: Raise your legal drinking age to twenty-one years or forfeit all of your federal highway money. Surprise surprise, by 1987 every state in the union had complied.

As to the blatant paternalism and big-government flavor of the decree -- well, I leave it to the nimbler minds of today’s Republican Party to square that circle. But I digress...

Why might we want a drinking age of twenty-one? Such arguments are numerous, and include paternal concerns about the effects of alcohol on the brains of teenagers and the problem of eighteen-year-old high school seniors being able to legally purchase alcohol for younger high school students. The most convincing argument against lowering the drinking age to eighteen, though, is the reason the age was raised to twenty-one in the first place, and is found in the statistics on drunk-driving fatalities.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the ratio of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities to 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) has dropped from around 1.2 in 1984 to 0.45 in 2007 -- a large decrease. In addition, drunk-driving fatalities of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds have dropped by thirteen percent over the same period. So we see that there is a significant public-safety argument against lowering the drinking age back to eighteen. And if lowering the drinking age to eighteen would cause more deaths, then why would we even consider it?

It’s not as simple as it sounds.

Richard Posner is a graduate of two Ivy League schools and the author of dozens of books on social science, jurisprudence, and legal philosophy. He is extremely influential in the emerging field of law and economics, and many economists believe and hope that he will win the Nobel Prize. He has taught at the University of Chicago Law School for decades, and by none other than President Reagan was appointed in 1981 a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, serving as chief judge during the Clinton years.

Judge Posner reports on his widely-read blog (joint with Nobel laureate and professor Gary Becker) that in the year 2000 there were 1.4 million arrests for and two-thousand innocent victims of drunk driving. I list Judge Posner’s resume in great detail above to brace you for what the judge concludes from those statistics, and to encourage you to think about his conclusion: From those facts, “it follows that most drunk driving is harmless.”

Indeed, some estimates of the probability of being caught driving drunk equal two percent. This would imply that seventy million incidents of drunk driving occurred in the year 2000, while only two thousand innocent people lost their lives. But even if we take the most conservative assumption and postulate that every single time a person drove drunk he was arrested, it is still the case that 99.9 percent of drunk-driving incidents do not result in an innocent person losing her life.

Fine fine, you might say. But is it the case that lowering the drinking age will cause more deaths on the road? I’d be shocked if it didn’t. But if that is the sum and substance of your argument then you must be careful about the premise you are implicitly accepting: that laws should minimize the number of lives lost.

In his column this past week, Charles Krauthammer writes, “In 1974, the speed limit was lowered to 55 mph to conserve oil. That also led to a dramatic drop in traffic fatalities -- approximately 3,000 lives every year. This didn't stop us, after the oil crisis, from raising the speed limit back to 65 and beyond -- knowing that thousands of Americans would die as a result.”

Indeed, if we wanted to minimize traffic fatalities -- drunk-driving and otherwise -- then we would simply outlaw driving.

Obviously such a suggestion is silly. But the seeming silliness evaporates quickly when one is charged with determining the acceptable rate of exchange between fatalities and driving characteristics. My suggestion is that we have erred a bit too much on the side of caution. After all, I’m sure drunk-driving fatalities would decrease even more if we increased the drinking age to twenty-five years. Should we do that? What about thirty years? Forty? You see the point.

In addition, it must be pointed out that having a few drinks in your backyard is simply not the same thing as having fourteen drinks and then taking your car out on the interstate for a drive. Equating the two is simply poor reasoning -- it is akin to outlawing the playing of baseball because every so often a gangster beats someone to death with a baseball bat.

And then of course there is the all-important balance between the rights which man gives up to live in society and the liberty which he still enjoys while being a member of society.

It makes sense that to be a member of society I have to give up my freedom to rob your house, not to pay taxes, to start forest fires, not to yell fire in a movie theater, and the like. But to have a beer?

It is unpalatable that our government has determined that an eighteen-year-old is responsible enough to vote for president, to be drafted, fight, and die in a war, to enter into a legal contract, to get married, and so on, but somehow is not responsible enough to purchase and consume alcohol. In addition to being unpalatable, it is an injustice to those under the age of twenty-one.

There are twenty-year-old men who our government deems responsible enough to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan but who our government does not deem responsible enough to drink a beer upon returning home. That is indefensible. There are homeowners whom the government deems responsible enough to enter into a mortgage contract but who the government does not deem responsible enough to have a drink in the quiet of their living rooms. This just doesn’t make sense.

Perhaps there is a correlation between the idiocy of a prohibition and the degree to which the prohibition is respected? If so, then that would explain what everyone who has ever been to college (to say nothing of high school) already knows: the proscription of late-teenage drinking is seldom a binding constraint.

To that act of civil disobedience, I raise my glass.

Modeling the masses

2010-02-14T08:55:00.008-05:00

The contrast between the behavior and character of individuals and the behavior and character of groups of people has long been of interest to thinking men. The American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau argued that “the mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.” Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and philologist, writes: “Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.”

Gustave Le Bon, a nineteenth-century French writer, took these sentiments a step further, suggesting that crowds sink to a lower level than their lowest member: “In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.” Crowds, writes Le Bon, are “always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual.”

It is this type of thinking which often explains dark chapters in history. Many people would think differently of five men getting together on the Upper West Side to kill a grocery store clerk than of five soldiers in Hitler’s army killing a Jewish man. The soldiers in Hitler’s army, all would say, committed a crime for which there is no excuse. But the possibility that those soldiers were influenced heavily by a mob mentality is offered as an explanation -- not an excuse, but an explanation. With the grocery-clerk killers, to no mob behavior can an appeal be made. The French Revolution and Robespierre’s utterly terrifying Reign of Terror are thought by some to have resulted in the murder without trial of forty thousand people -- yet for some reason many blame the mob for the slaughter, and not the individuals who participated in it. Indeed, history is replete with examples.

Reflecting on this topic leads naturally to two questions: Why do groups of people look so different across countries and time? And how can a group of individuals be so different from the individuals who make up the group?

An interesting way to think about these questions is to use the abstract theory of collective behavior based on threshold models, advanced initially by, among others, the Nobel laureate and economist Thomas Schelling and the sociologist Mark Granovetter.

Let’s begin by unpacking the phrase “abstract theory of collective behavior based on threshold models.” Collective behavior refers simply to the behavior of groups -- nations, cities, towns, the girls behind the counter at the coffeehouse, white kids from the suburbs, and Catholics all count as groups. Abstract theory means that we will not attempt a literal, historical, or narrative description of collective behavior, but instead take the approach used prominently by economists and think about an abstraction.

But what is a threshold? We assume that the cost or benefit an individual incurs from an action is determined by the number of others already taking the action. In this way, every individual has a threshold which must be reached before he will act with the group.

Professor Granovetter uses the example of a riot to illustrate the theory, which we will follow very closely in building our model. Let’s have in our model five-thousand people in downtown Chicago. The Cubs have just won the World Series. Will there be a riot?

First, let’s name the people in our model. For simplicity, we will call them persons 0, 1, 2, 3, ... , 4998, 4999; they are each assigned a unique number, and that number is their name. Assume that each of the five-thousand people has a threshold for joining a riot, which is equal to their name. So person 3 requires three people to be rioting before he will join in the riot. Person 4998 won’t join the riot until four-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-eight people are rioting.

But what about person 0? Well, person 0 is a troublemaker. He’ll start a riot anytime he is in a crowd. Put a few beers in him, and he is really rowdy. (I grew up with many of these guys!)

What will happen in our model? Where will our model come to rest? (A fancy way to ask this question is to inquire about the model’s equilibrium.)

Person 0 will riot for sure. Since person 1 only requires one person to riot before he’ll join in, he will riot as well. Now there are two people rioting. Since there are two people rioting, person 2 will riot. Now there are three people rioting. Since there are three people rioting, person 3 will riot. Now there are four people writing, so person 4 will riot. This will continue until all five-thousand people are rioting. Equilibrium in our model is an all-out riot, with downtown Chicago destroyed.

(Statistically-minded readers will note that I’m using a uniform probability distribution defined over threshold values. This is not necessary for an equilibrium outcome to exist. Assume that y(t) equals the proportion of the crowd who is rioting at period t. Let z be thresholds, and let F[z] by the cumulative distribution function defined over thresholds. Suppose y(t = 0) is known. Then the difference equation y(t + 1) = F[y(t)] describes the process. Equilibrium occurs when F[y] = y.)

Now, let’s perturb our model a very little bit. Suppose that person 2 now has a threshold of three -- it will now take three people to riot before person 2 will riot. Everything else in the model is identical. What is the equilibrium outcome?

Person 0 will riot. So will his buddy, person 1. So now there are two people rioting. Will person 2 riot? Nope. He needs three people to riot before he’ll join in. Will person 3 riot? Nope; he needs three as well. What about person 4? No, as he still needs four.

The equilibrium in our new model is that two drunk guys will try to tip over a car on the street, while the rest of the crowd politely and respectfully has a good time.

These two outcomes are dramatically different. In the first model, downtown Chicago is destroyed and academic elites all over the country are sipping espressos and discussing with their colleagues how little baseball fans have progressed since humanity’s time as monkeys. In the second model, a couple of drunk guys are arrested for acting like idiots, and no one in Chicago, let alone in the country, takes notice.

Further, because we built the model, we know for sure that everything about the two crowds was identical except for one person. (Equivalently, everything is identical except for the probability density function over thresholds.)

I was explaining this model to a doctoral student of German languages and literature over dinner this week. Unaccustomed to abstract reasoning, she dismissively and humorously argued that I had not demonstrated anything. She argued that the threshold model does not explain why the French Revolution occurred in France and not Britain. She argued that the threshold model does not explain Nietzsche’s observation that “Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.”

What theoretical models do and do not explain is much more complicated than she made it out to be. Some economists and abstract social theorists view these models as stripped-down versions of reality. Others view these models as prisms through which to view the world. Still others view models as a set of tools used to investigate reality.

I am not an enormous fan of any of these conceptions. Instead, I think of economic theory and the models it employs as being an alternative universe which economists can explore at great depth and from which analogies/lessons/parables can be drawn and applied to our world.

So in the first alternate universe we created, we saw that all five-thousand people rioted and Chicago was burned to the ground, even though the average person in the crowd required a whopping two-thousand five-hundred people to riot before he would join in. Our model plays out Thoreau’s belief that “the mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.” In our model, as Le Bon said, “it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.”

In addition, in comparing our first model to our second, we see that two groups of people which are essentially identical can have dramatically different outcomes. Indeed, in our model, everything is identical between the two groups -- location, reason for gathering, and 99.98 percent of the people in the groups -- except for one person out of five-thousand. Change that one person just a tiny bit, and instead of Chicago going up in flames we have two guys trying to tip over a car. We know in reality that different groups of similar people sometimes behave in very different ways. Our theory illustrates this reality to an extreme.

That said, I must say that yes, my friend the German scholar is correct. Our models do not show why the French Revolution happened in France and not in Britain. Our models do not provide a definitive answer as to why crowds so often seem so unlike individuals.

But though we did not answer the questions, we provided a fascinating way to think about them. And by discovering with certainty what happens in the universe we created and controlled, we have much to say about what happens in reality.

On Mr. Obama's first SOTU

2010-01-31T15:57:00.007-05:00

The president spoke over seven-thousand words during his state of the union address on Wednesday night. Despite having spent (wasted?) his entire first year on health care reform, the president did not broach that subject until after his three-thousandth word.

Parenthetically, the first thing to note of the health care section of the speech is that the president used the phrase “health insurance reform,” and not “health care reform.” Is Mr. Obama setting his sights lower than his campaign promise? It is one thing to reform health care, but quite another to reform health insurance.

Arguing that “the longer it [health care reform] was debated, the more skeptical people became,” the president said: “I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people.”

This statement has been heralded by many as an example of the president admitting that he is in part to blame for the failure of his first-year effort to pass health care reform. Others have a different take. Writes George F. Will: “his faux contrition actually blames the public: The problem is not the legislation’s substance but the presentation of it to slow learners.”

The Wednesday before last, Mr. Obama sat for an interview with George Stephanopoulos. Mr. Stephanopoulos pointed out to the president that the American people “want your health care plan to go away. It’s just not popular; the majority are opposed.” Mr. Obama responded: “Well, here's what I know is that when they actually find out what’s in the proposals for insurance reform,” the people like it.

Mr. Will is obviously correct: Here the president flat-out said that the problem is not with the legislation but with the fact that the people don’t know what is in the legislation.

But I differ with Mr. Will, and with the president. The problem is both with “the legislation’s substance” and with “the presentation of it to slow learners.”

What is in the bills will do more harm than good. This is a problem of substance. But no one knows what is in the bills. This is a problem of communication.

The problem runs deeper. Can we reasonably expect that the American people will digest complex public policy proposals? Do we really think that the American people have taken a good, fair look at the health care bills, and, under reasoned and informed judgment, come to the conclusion that they oppose the bills?

Of course this has not happened.

Even if the American people did know enough about health care institutions, economics, and statistics, how could they find the time to understand (a) the state of the problem, (b) the menu of solutions, and (c) to decide which is the best solution? The American people have jobs and friends and families and recreation to occupy their time. Why should they -- and why would we think that they should -- spend their time thinking through complex issues of public policy?

To argue that the overwhelming rejection of the Democrat’s health care proposals is a reflection of the American people’s dissatisfaction with the substance of the legislation strikes me as silly. In order to be dissatisfied with the substance of the legislation, the American people must first understand the substance of the legislation.

What we are seeing is a general distrust of government and an aversion to big government becoming bigger. What we are seeing is a general skepticism of the ability of the folks who ran the bank bailout to run anything larger than a lemonade stand. And good luck to the president if he attempts to change these views.

By the by, the way not to change them is exactly the way our amateur president tried to change them: As a consequence of seriously misreading his election victory, Mr. Obama tried to force on a deeply skeptical public massive legislative proposals on issues ranging from stimulus to health care to cap-and-trade (and, according to this morning’s Times, education). This so-called big bang theory of governing was thought to shock the country out of its skepticism by delivering big changes quickly.

That did not happen. The American people simply are not buying what the president is selling.

I WAS SHOCKED while watching the speech to hear more than once the chamber’s sarcastic, belittling laughter towards the president. This was shameful. It was without class.

The president is the head of state, and not just the head of government. Charles de Gaulle famously held une certaine idée de la France, and in some sense a nation’s head of state is to embody this. The head of state is the public representative of the government, and to some degree, of the nation. The head of state is in some fashion the personification of the spirit of the nation, of its values and character.

I dare say that many Americans voted for Mr. Obama because they liked the idea of him as president. They liked him. They liked what Obama-as-president said about them, and about the country.

Contrast that with the head of government, whose job it is to make sure the social-security checks get mailed and the potholes on the interstate get filled.

To treat the head of state as Mr. Obama was treated was without decorum. It was without dignity. Brian Williams of NBC News said that neither he nor any of his colleagues in the newsroom had ever seen the president treated that way. It should never happen again.

I was also shocked to see the president call out the Supreme Court. Said Mr. Obama: “With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that, I believe, will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”

The poor justices, honored guests all, with no role in the legislative process, were just sitting there, unable to respond. (Justice Alito mouthed a response, which has been the subject of much discussion since.) In addition to being incorrect, this was just rude. The president is more than welcome to opine on the Court’s decisions, but not to do so in that forum.

Prefacing his statement with “with all due deference” does not give him license to abandon deference. And to the Supreme Court from the president of the United Sates enormous deference is owed.

Mr. Obama needs to get a handle on his self-satisfaction. Soon. It is hard for a president while giving a state of the union address to say anything for which a reasonable and natural reaction is: Who does that guy think he is? Somehow, Mr. Obama managed to pull that off.

THE SUBSTANCE OF the speech was thoroughly unimpressive, due in large part to its dizzying array of internal contradictions.

Mr. Gerson of The Washington Post lays this out nicely: “The president took credit for the stimulus package, demanded another one -- and called for budget restraint. After a year of delaying other legislative priorities in his single-minded pursuit of health reform, Obama challenged Congress on fiscal reform and other matters: ‘How long should we wait?’ Obama attributed the hated bank bailout to his predecessor -- then insisted it had saved the economy, which he chalked up to his own everlasting credit. There were policy proposals along the whole ideological rainbow: tax increases and tax cuts, new spending and a budget freeze, cap-and-trade and oil exploration.

“[...] He showed Reagan-like optimism about America's future, and Carter-like worry about America's ‘deficit of trust’ and ‘deep and corrosive doubts.’ He urged our politics to get beyond ‘the same tired battles,’ while repeatedly returning to those battles in his self-excusing blame of the past.”

In addition to the contradictions, after the speech the nation was still left wondering thirty-thousand feet questions -- Who is the president? What is the president’s underlying political philosophy? -- and ground-level questions: What does he want to accomplish in his remaining three years? What are his priorities for the next year? What does he want to do about his health care reform?

Six years ago Mr. Obama was an unknown Illinois state legislator, and surely this plays some role in the confusion surrounding him. But he has been president for twenty-five percent of his term. This opaqueness is bad politics and results in bad -- or, in the case of the president’s first year, no -- policy.

The speech succeeded in showing that the president is still alive and kicking. The speech succeeded in that it showed the president still has energy. These are good things for him.

But two facts remain after the speech: health care reform is on life support in the intensive-care ward and the unemployment situation in the country is very, very poor. Add to that a third fact: the president did not in his state of the union address offer any clear, concrete, comprehensible, specific plan for dealing with those two situations.

Vague statements and base-emotional appeals about “hope” and “change” and “unity” and “transformation,” combined with speeches crafted to make everyone from the center right to the far left think he was one of them, combined with aspirations, not plans, about public policy -- this combination helped take Mr. Obama from a first-term senator in his mid-forties to the White House. Happy talk and well-delivered speeches can go a long way in a campaign. And when a two-year long presidential campaign makes up one-third of your national political career, it is understandable why you might misinterpret your success in that mode.

But the state of the union is not a campaign speech.

The U.S. Constitution mandates that the president of the United States “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” Right now, the American people want to know which “measures” the president believes to be “necessary and expedient,” and why.

It is time for the president to get serious.

On Dr. King

2010-01-18T09:09:00.001-05:00

The book of Deuteronomy tells us that since his death “no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.” But despite having led the Hebrews out of Egypt and to the shores of the river Jordan, Moses never stepped foot in the promised land:

“Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, the headland of Pisgah which faces Jericho, and the Lord showed him all the land […] The Lord then said to him, ‘This is the land which I swore to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that I would give to their descendants. I have let you feast your eyes upon it, but you shall not cross over.’”

Moses died thereafter, having been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. Tradition tells us that God himself buried Israel’s greatest prophet.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose life we remember today, is no Moses. But he is one of the giants of the twentieth century, and of American history. He is one of the greatest Americans to have ever lived.

In Montgomery, Alabama, at the time of Dr. King, a white passenger who boarded a bus sat in the front. A black passenger sat in the back. Whites would fill the bus from the front, blacks from the back, eventually meeting in the middle. But if a white passenger boarded a full bus, she could legally demand that a black passenger surrender her seat. One black passenger, Rosa Parks, on December 1st, 1955, refused, was arrested, and was found guilty.

This was a spark which lit a fire, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott followed, an act of non-violent resistance, led by Dr. King. The boycott lasted over one year. Dr. King’s house was bombed as a result of his leadership. He was arrested. The outcome of the boycott was a federal court ruling ending segregated busing. Dr. King was twenty-seven years old when his leadership resulted in this dramatic civil-rights victory. He was now a national figure.

Shortly thereafter, Dr. King, a Baptist minister, co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This organization, which Dr. King led until his death, provided a forum and infrastructure for Dr. King to spread his message of non-violent resistance to the terrible racism which at that time plagued the United States.

Dr. King represented the S.C.L.C. at the March on Washington in 1963 -- one of the defining Civil Rights events in American history. It was during the March on Washington, standing on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, that Dr. King delivered one of the most important speeches in the life of his country: “I Have A Dream.” So familiar is this speech that many Americans can recite its most famous sections from memory. I quote part of it here at length, unapologetically:

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. [...]

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today! [...]

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

When many Americans think of Dr. King, they think of “I Have A Dream.” As do I. But it is of a lesser speech of his over which my thoughts most often linger.

Dr. King was thirty-nine years old when he flew to Memphis in support of a strike organized by black sanitation workers. Evan Thomas writes in Newsweek that an anonymous caller to Eastern Airlines issued the following threat: “Your airline brought Martin Luther King to Memphis, and when he comes again a bomb will go off, and he will be assassinated.”

Mr. Thomas continues: “King was scheduled to speak that night at the Mason Temple at the headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, but he begged off, asking his No. 2, Ralph Abernathy, to stand in his place. The night was thunderstormy, with tornado warnings, and the crowd at the enormous Temple auditorium was disappointingly small. From a pay phone in the vestibule, Abernathy implored King to come, to keep faith with the sanitation workers who had turned out on the cold, wet night. King’s entrance caused an ‘eerie bedlam,’ wrote [historian and King biographer Taylor] Branch. ‘Cheers from the floor echoed around the thousands of empty seats above, and the whole structure rattled from the pounding elements of wind, thunder, and rain.’ King came to the microphone at about 9:30, just as the storm was cresting, and launched into a rambling, rather unremarkable speech, until he came to the ending.”

Dr. King mentioned the threats against his life. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now,” said Dr. King next, “because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

The next day, Dr. King was assassinated.

When I consider the words Dr. King proclaimed not even twenty-four hours before his death I am filled with a mix of dread and awe. Did he know what was going to happen? If so, how? Did the Lord, as the Scriptures tell us was done with Moses, literally take Dr. King to the mountaintop, show him the promised land, and tell him that he would never step foot in it? Perhaps it wasn’t so direct: Did Dr. King simply have the sense that his days were numbered, but not necessarily numbered at less than one? What was the source of those tragically prophetic words?

It is a mystery. But if, as some would say, it was a mere coincidence, then it was surely a powerfully strange and unlikely coincidence.

THE PROMISED LAND sought by Moses was a physical place. The promised land sought by Dr. King was anything but. In a very real sense, though, what they sought was the same: A worthy home. A place of justice. A land pleasing to the Lord. A place to rest. A place of community and acceptance and brotherhood. Shelter.

Like Moses before him, Dr. King never made it to the promised land. And the sad reality is that the fate shared by these two prophets is also shared by their followers. The promised land -- the land we seek; the land of our hearts’ desire -- is believed to exist, but on the other side of eternity. We catch glimpses in this world -- we see, from time to time, the view from the mountaintop. And we have faith that “we, as a people, will get to the promised land” one day. We have faith that we will leave Saint Augustine’s City of Man and, having journeyed a great distance, will reach his City of God.

Events like the assassination of Dr. King show us how far we have to travel before we reach the promised land. But events like the life of Dr. King show us how close we are. Therein lies another great mystery: The lives of God’s children in a world so broken, so hostile to them.

2009

2010-01-05T14:22:00.004-05:00

When launching his often excellent journal, First Things, the late Richard John Neuhaus argued in its first issue that “public life includes much more than politics. Public life means, first of all, ‘culture.’ […] Culture is the cognitive, moral, aesthetic, and emotive air that we breathe.” Politics, so argued, “is, in largest part, an expression of culture.”

Father Neuhaus was, of course, correct. Despite all the attention paid by some to the federal government, it is simply the case that culture is what animates American life, among many things defining the limits, capabilities, and ambitions of politics. Our politics is determined by culture, and not vice-versa.

That said, when reflecting on the year 2009, I do believe that the most important thing I saw was political: the inability of President Obama to pass his health care bill.

The year began with the inauguration of Mr. Obama, and many silly things were said of it. Some claimed that the president achieved an enormous victory over his opponent, John McCain. In reality, of the last ten presidents, Mr. Obama ranks seventh in the number of electoral votes -- six of the past ten presidents won more electoral votes than he did. Mr. Obama won fifty-three percent of the popular vote; in 2004, George W. Bush won fifty-one percent. Some claimed that the country under George W. Bush was terribly divided, and that Mr. Obama had an unprecedented task ahead of him of unifying a fractured country. In reality, the United States was much more divided during the Civil War era, as recently as from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, and at other times as well. Some claimed that President Obama, relative to past presidents, inherited an unprecedented mess. This also is simply inaccurate.

I believe that much of the hype surrounding the inauguration of the president was a function of the historic illiteracy of the American people, and of the juvenile belief held by so many that everything which is happening now is happening for the first time. But in addition much of the hype surely was a function of the enormous goodwill felt towards the president, and the genuine hope shared even by millions of Senator McCain’s supporters that the president would succeed in the lofty goals which he defined for himself in his campaign.

The opinion-poll numbers demonstrate this nicely. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken in April 2009 finds the president’s job approval at sixty-one percent. Considering that the president won the election with fifty-three percent of the popular vote, this number is very high. Fifty-five percent approved of the president’s handling of the economy; fifty-six percent of his handling of foreign policy -- both approval ratings are higher than his share of the popular vote in the November election. Take care to note that these are job-approval ratings, and not personal-favorability ratings.

So it is quite safe to say that during the winter and spring of last year the president enjoyed a lot of goodwill and good feelings from the American people. Even many who did not vote for him in the election approved of his job performance. America wanted him to succeed.

Fast forward to the NBC/WSJ poll from last month, December 2009. Thirty-three percent of respondents stated that the country is on the right track -- an eight percentage point decrease from February. The president’s job approval fell from sixty-one percent in April to forty-seven percent in December. Forty-two percent of respondents approved of his handling of the economy; forty-nine percent approved of his handling of foreign policy; and forty-six percent approved of his handling of Afghanistan. These numbers demonstrate the serious fall taken by the president in the eyes of the public.

Moreover, Congress’ approval rating stood at twenty-two percent. A hair over one-third of respondents felt that this Congress was one of the worst.

And despite all of Candidate Obama’s happy talk about uniting the country, ending partisan division in the Congress, and ushering in a new era in American life, only twelve percent of respondents thought that there was unity between Republicans and Democrats in Congress. A staggering eighty-one percent thought that there was division.

The president spent his first year attempting to get a health care reform bill signed into law. At the time of this writing, he has yet to do so. And though the likelihood that he will eventually sign something is reasonably high (though certainly not certain), it is the case that the president will not get anything close to what his supporters had hoped for during his campaign.

This reality is amazing considering the makeup of the U.S. Congress: there are sixty members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, and roughly fifty-nine percent of House members (256 representatives of 435 total) are Democrats. Controlling sixty percent of both houses of Congress should guarantee at least the delivery of one major campaign promise for any first-year president.

Given the president’s personal popularity last winter and spring, the makeup of the U.S. Congress, and the widespread demand that the president do something, it is simply incomprehensible that he cannot get his signature legislative goal accomplished, and that he has managed to infuriate liberals and moderates and conservatives in the process.

In talking to people about this it seems that there are basically three competing theories: (a) that the president largely is to blame, (b) that the Democrats in Congress largely are to blame, and (c) that the United State is nearly ungovernable.

Surely there is truth to (a) and (b). Regarding (a), the president is a political novice, and he is acting like one. Would you take a guy in his mid-forties who was a part-time law school lecturer and an Illinois state senator and make him the CEO of your company? Of course not. Even if he was really good at delivering a speech? Nope. Is the job of CEO of your company less demanding and requiring of skill than running the federal government? Of course. Those three questions illustrate the point. Regarding (b), Congress is simply a mess. Enough said.

But we began with the suggestion that culture determines the limits, ambitions, and capabilities of politics. It does. And our Beck/O’Reilly/Olbermann/Maddow culture does not allow enough room for reasonable discourse. Our American Idol culture does not allow enough space to consider that things which are not superficial do often matter. Our entitlement culture finds no fault with wanting simultaneously more from government and lower taxes. Our political culture is so littered with powerful special interests and the need of politicians to raise money from them that far too often the needs of the nation are subordinated to the needs of our elected officials. Our soundbite culture does not allow for complexity. Our partisan political culture focuses on beating the other party and not on creating sound public policy. Our culture of hysteria allows for all the crazy talk of death panels we saw last summer. And our culture of immediate gratification discounts the future so dramatically that we only care about the present, disallowing our society to deal with long-term problems, like health care.

So I think, in large part, (c), and culture is largely to blame for the inability of politics to function. If, over the last year, this president, with strong Congressional majorities, in this political climate, with the goodwill the president enjoyed in the winter and spring, cannot deliver on his signature campaign promise -- regardless of the merits of the health care legislation -- then the likely candidate is a systematic problem. The president and the Democrats are to blame in part, but it seems that American culture makes it nearly impossible for our politics to deal with abstract, complex, long-term, enormous, non-immediate issues.

That the U.S. government cannot function outside of an emergency is what stands out the most from last year. My guess is that this reality will stand out for years to come, as our entitlements become impossible to fix, as our roads and bridges and sewer systems and power grids grow older and less functional, as our national debt grows, as the education we provide our children continues to fail to noticeably improve, as we continue to ignore immigration issues -- as we continue to stand still.

As we continue to stand still, holding this reality in our hands, having created the future we will inhabit.

Christmas audacity

2009-12-21T09:16:00.005-05:00

Imagine that you are at a dinner party. As often happens, you do not know everyone at the table. Dessert and coffee are served, everyone is relaxed, and a guest at the table whom you don’t know lets out a little yawn and announces that he is actually a tree.

What would you make of this?

Among your first thoughts would be that the gentleman must be making a joke. Perhaps you would even laugh. He takes a sip of his coffee, and matter-of-factly assures you that he is deadly serious. He is a tree.

Perhaps your next thought would be that the gentleman was speaking metaphorically. He says that he is a tree, but what he means is that he is like a tree. Perhaps by announcing “I am a tree” the man is intending to communicate that he is sturdy, that he is constant, that he is wise and weathered. You ask him if he is speaking metaphorically, he takes another sip of his coffee, and he says that he is speaking quite literally. He means that he is a tree.

You would feel forced to conclude that the man is either a liar or a loon. You would probably tell your friends the next day that the gentleman was among the strangest people whom you have ever met in your life.

Keeping that story in mind, consider the beautiful words which open the holy gospel according to Saint John:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.

What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race;

the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

The evangelist continues: “He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. […] And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth.”

There is much ambiguity in the bible, and in the Christian faith. But there is no ambiguity about the meaning of those words, nor about the following profession of faith: Jesus of Nazareth, born approximately two-thousand years ago at the first Christmas, who was put to death thirty or so years after he was born, was and is God.

That profession is so commonly known that it has lost its power. But reflect this Christmas on what that profession is literally saying -- reflect this Christmas on what the Church and Christians believe actually happened at Christmas.

Recall how skeptical you would be if the gentleman at the table claimed literally to be a tree. Jesus took that bet and raised it. He claimed to be God. Again: He claimed to be God. He claimed to be the being which created the universe. Despite having been born to Mary at a fixed point in time, Jesus claimed to have existed for all of time. He claimed to be the creator of time. Despite being a man who ate food and drank wine and needed sleep, Jesus claimed to be the being which sustains the universe. He claimed to be the author of all that exists.

Jesus did not claim to be like God. Jesus’ claim was not metaphorical: He was not saying that he is powerful as God is powerful, or that he is wise as God is wise, or that he holds truth as God holds truth. He meant quite literally that he is God. Just like you are Jessica or Jimmy or Matt, Jesus meant that he is God.

So does his Church. Saint John writes, “All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life.”

This is some claim.

An appropriate reaction to Jesus’ claim to be God is deep skepticism. Indeed, in addition, if I tell you that I am a Christian, it is very appropriate for you to think that I am unintelligent and silly. To be a Christian is to believe that a guy who died in his early thirties in Palestine two-thousand years ago was the creator of all that exists in the universe.

To be a Christian is to believe that a guy who was born to Mary at the first Christmas, who had a childhood, who had to learn how to talk and how to walk and how to feed himself, who worked as a carpenter in his dad’s shop, was also the eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present God -- the same God who made promises with Abraham, who told Noah to build an ark, who delivered the Hebrews from Egypt, who cut a deal with David.

How could a reasonable person believe such a bizarre and daring claim? How could an intelligent person accept this enormous story?

One answer to that question was popularized by the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis. Writing in Mere Christianity, Lewis asserts that Jesus was either “a lunatic -- on the level of a man who says he is a poached egg -- or” a fiendish, horrible liar -- in Lewis’ words, “the Devil of Hell.” And if Jesus was neither insane nor a liar, then “however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem,” we simply must believe that Jesus of Nazareth was and is exactly who he claimed to be: the Son of God, one in being with the Father, the creator of the universe.

During Christmastime, we celebrate and affirm that God became a human being and walked among us. We remember that although “the world came to be through him,” “the world did not know him,” to the point that no one would give him and his mother a room on the night of his birth. We remember that God was, for a time, a little baby, resting in a manger.

I have been trying all week, and I cannot think of a more outrageous and intrepid claim. The gentleman from our story above claimed to be a tree. That is crazy. But it is not nearly as bold as a man claiming to be the eternal being which created all trees, all life, the entire universe.

Do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was God? Do you believe the Christmas story -- do you believe that God became a man and was born to Mary? If yes, then why? If no, then what do you think of those who do? If yes, then how? If no, then what must be said about those who will fill churches on Christmas Eve night?

These questions illustrate the audacity of the Christmas story. It is the most audacious story ever told. It is a story that has changed the world.

Afghanistan surge contradictions

2009-12-07T05:45:00.004-05:00

It was with a remarkable sense of déjà vu that I watched President Obama begin his speech on Tuesday at the West Point Military Academy. In announcing his decision to surge thirty-thousand additional troops into Afghanistan, the sixth sentence of the president’s address was: “On September 11th, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly three-thousand people.”

Recalling “why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place,” the president took us back to September 11th, that dramatic inflection point in American history. He was correct to do so. He was correct to link our war in Afghanistan to the larger, vital, long-term fight against a ruthless and slippery enemy. He was correct to remind the eighteen-year-old cadets that all this started when they were ten-years old, on that beautiful fall day when the world learned that wars are no longer fought by armies and announced by declaration -- on that crisp and clear morning when airplanes shattered both the World Trade Centers and our collective sense of security.

After a deplorably ungraceful assault on our country’s decision to invade Iraq, the president nicely summarized the problems in Afghanistan: the leadership of al Qaeda has established a safe haven along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border; Afghanistan’s government is very corrupt, the economy is weak, the drug trade is strong, the security forces are undeveloped; the Taliban is regaining strength throughout the country, and attacking Pakistan. “In short: The status quo,” reported the president, “is not sustainable.”

Mr. Obama defined our goals in Afghanistan as follows: “We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.”

These goals sound both reasonable and achievable. But perhaps not achievable by July 2011 -- the date which the president set for the beginning of our withdrawal from Afghanistan.

This is a gaping inconsistency in the president’s speech. He said: “I have determined that it is in our vital national interest” to surge in Afghanistan; and, “I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak”; and, perhaps most boldly, “what's at stake is the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”

At the same time, the president said: “After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home.” Late in the speech, the president specified that we will “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.” But in the very next sentence, the president said: “Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.”

This circle simply cannot be squared.

I say circle, but I should say circles -- there are two contradictions here.

The first deals with the seriousness of the threat. If “the common security of the world” is really at stake, then how can we commit to an arbitrary start-date for withdrawal? Shouldn’t we instead leave when “the common security of the world” has been established, and not one day before? If Afghanistan and Pakistan “is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda,” and if from there “new attacks are being plotted,” then how is it within driving distance of responsible to commit to a date-certain for the beginning of our withdrawal? How can we cap the resources which we will provide for such an important goal?

If the outcome of the Afghanistan war is as serious as the president claims, then we must win. Period. If the “common security of the world” hangs in the balance, then should the situation in July 2011 call for additional troops in order to win, they need to be sent. Period.

Alternatively, if the outcome is less serious, then perhaps limiting our resources makes sense. But why then are we surging thirty-thousand soldiers -- many of whom will die in Afghanistan -- at all? Why not simply train the Afghan security forces, launch targeted strikes against the Taliban and al Qaeda, and minimize the body count?

The second inconsistency is related to the first. How can we guarantee a July 2011 withdrawal date, while at the same time “taking into account conditions on the ground”? As Senator McCain repeatedly has said in the days after the president’s speech, it is either one or the other. We will either begin to leave when the calendar rolls into July 2011, or we will leave when the conditions on the ground merit it. Both standards cannot apply.

What to make of these stunning contradictions? Tina Brown of the excellent Daily Beast asks, “Does Obama create confusion on purpose?” Her answer is sobering: “I have come to the conclusion that the real reason this gifted communicator has become so bad at communicating is that he doesn’t really believe a word that he is saying.”

Of course, her answer is literally correct. How could Mr. Obama believe such contradictory things?

But that question is not the end of the matter. The question of fundamental importance is, Which sides has the president chosen?

“It is fatal to enter a war without the will to win it,” remarked General MacArthur. Without the will to win it, not without the will to last another eighteen months. So if the president has the will to win the war -- where win is defined as the president defined it: reversing the Taliban’s momentum and getting the Afghan security forces in good enough shape to take over from us -- and if the president believes that the result of the war is as important as he says, then it is conceivable that he ordered the surge because he thinks it will work, and set the arbitrary date of July 2011 either to appease anti-war Democrats, or to motivate the Afghan government, or both, without having any intention of sticking to it.

But if the president is serious about beginning to withdrawal in July 2011 regardless of the situation on the ground, then his decision to surge is shameful. If the president does not believe that the outcome of the war is of paramount importance, then he should not be ordering young men to their deaths.

What is the president’s actual opinion of the importance of Afghanistan to our security? Between a date-certain and a conditions-based withdrawal strategy, which does the president actually support? It is simply impossible to say. And since it is impossible to say, it is impossible to assess the strategy.

One thing, though, is certain: The president has more than doubled the number of soldiers in Afghanistan. This is now his war. He is the decider.

The sun sets on E Street

2009-11-23T05:25:00.004-05:00

During a strong performance of “Badlands” in Milwaukee last Sunday, Mr. Springsteen declares defiance against a hostile world: “I believe in the love that you gave me / I believe in the faith that can save me / I believe in the hope / and I pray that some day / It may raise me above these / Badlands!”

It is fortunate for me that I am standing next to the Springsteen Obi-Wan to my Luke Skywalker -- something like a priest celebrating Mass with a cardinal. Milliseconds before Mr. Springsteen finishes the word faith, Obi-Wan takes his clenched fist and energetically pops his fingers outward, in perfect synchronization with a brief, bright flash of light:

There is ritual in the performance of Bruce Springsteen and the legendary E Street Band.

In Wings for Wheels, a 2005 documentary on the making of the album Born to Run, Mr. Springsteen sheepishly suggests that his music is sacramental. It is. From the “Badlands” flash anticipated and captured by Obi-Wan to the audience-solo on the first verse of “Hungry Heart” to the guitar toss on “Sunny Day” to the fist pumps on “Born to Run” to the “Badlands” chant to the very frequent audience call-and-response -- and more, Mr. Springsteen uses action and performance and participation ceremoniously, ritualistically, as a sacrament: as a means to communicate grace and fellowship.

The performance of Mr. Springsteen and his mighty E Street Band is transcendent. I still recall the moment that confirmed in my mind this often repeated fact. I was having a bad day during a bad year. I was tired. I was in pain -- physically, psychologically, spiritually. As a young man, I was as weary as the world that was bearing down on me.

I flipped on the television and caught a majestic performance of the band at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, in 1975. The first song was “Thunder Road” -- just the Boss and Roy Bittan, whose piano defined this desperately hopeful display. Sitting there, I was captivated by the promise of the performance: the simultaneous understanding that life is cruel and harsh and that hoping is not futile, even if your hopes are in vain -- the understanding that the fight and the dream are heroic in and of themselves.

I was lifted away for those minutes, connected to something larger than myself and my troubles. I was at peace.

TONIGHT IN MILWAUKEE Mr. Springsteen and his band will perform the album Born to Run as part of their show. The fourth song on the album is “Backstreets,” a haunting poem about friendship and betrayal. I have never heard it live, and am more than a little excited.

Reviewing the album decades ago, Rolling Stone writes that “Backstreets” “begins with music so stately, so heartbreaking, that it might be the prelude to a rock & roll version of The Iliad.” Rolling Stone is correct, and transcendence sets in:

“One soft infested summer me and Terry became friends / Trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in”. I am thinking of friends near and far -- of those friendships that are not incidental, but are a bond shared with someone you need to make it through the worst of days, through the worst of life: “With a love so hard and filled with defeat / Running for our lives at night on them backstreets”.

Initially there is hope; at the beginning, before the betrayal -- before the fall -- the backstreets will still be hard, but can be endured -- not conquered, but survived -- not alone, but together: “Huddled in our cars waiting for the bells that ring / … We swore we'd live forever on the backstreets we take it together”.

The betrayal occurs: The performance of the mighty E Street Band picks up, gaining urgency and intensity: “…running into the darkness / Some hurt bad some really dying at night sometimes it seemed / You could hear the whole damn city crying blame it on the lies that killed us / Blame it on the truth that ran us down…”. The music washes over me, and I think of the times I have disappointed others. I think of the fragility of human relationships, of my relationships. My mind’s eye sweeps over faces and places and circumstances, my life, the very existence of man in community in a fallen world.

The band moves from a betrayal between friends to the world’s betrayal of us all: “Remember all the movies, Terry, we'd go see / Trying to learn how to walk like heroes we thought we had to be / And after all this time to find we're just like all the rest / Stranded in the park and forced to confess / To hiding on the backstreets…”. Perhaps the world does not allow heroes? Perhaps our dreams are impossible to realize? If so, then our dreams betray us, as does the world. To exist is to be betrayed.

The faces of the great E Street Band members are deadly serious. Roy Bittan’s piano slows to a stately grace. Max Weinberg’s drums sound with purpose. Mr. Springsteen sings as a man in pain, soulful, damaged and broken. He is joined by Stevie Van Zandt at the center microphone, chanting over and over and over and over “hiding on the backstreets,” the Catholic is reminded of the Litany of the Saints, except the call is not for grace but for survival; not for reverence, but out of desperation.

The music caries the performance to its conclusion, and the audience is enthralled. The mighty E Street Band has delivered, and our souls are returned to our bodies, apparently never having left the Milwaukee arena.

LIFE MOVES US from despair to hope and back again in the blink of an eye, and so does the performance of the E Street Band: “Born to Run” is the next song played, and though it occupies the same world as “Backstreets,” it is a song of promise, not grief. “Jungleland” ends the album a few songs later -- some of this opera’s lines are so familiar that the audience’s singing sounds as loud in my ear as Mr. Springsteen’s.

Born to Run having finished, the concert continues.

The band’s performance is transcendent and sacramental, but these guys are also “the greatest bar band in all the land,” and they know how to fucking rock. The learned long ago how to make their concerts a great deal of fun -- when they were coming up on the Jersey shore forty years ago, boring shows meant no money and no food to eat.

The audience is having a blast, and so am I. Someone from the crowd passes Mr. Springsteen a four-foot cardboard Christmas tree, complete with lights, and the band launches into a performance of “Santa Clause Is Coming To Town.” The Boss crowd surfs during “Hungry Heart”, “Darlington County” is great fun, and “Loose Ends” is so good that I ask my friend Chris why Mr. Springsteen chose to leave his best songs off his albums.

“Sparks fly on E Street” tonight -- every night. I catch my friend Jon’s elated expression when Mr. Springsteen sings the phrase “hardworking man”; I dance with Jon’s girlfriend Laura during “Rosalita”; I watch Laura’s teenage brother try to drink three-hundred beers in five hours; I crack jokes and share laughs with my buddy Chris; I drink beer and sing until my voice breaks.

Part of the reason we all have so much fun is that the mighty E Street Band is having so much fun. During the lighter songs they are all smiles, darting around the stage to play near each other, sharing in the magic they are together creating. You see yourself and your friends in the band, and a real fellowship -- a real community -- is formed.

THESE GUYS HAVE known each other and played music together since they were kids, and it shows. A fantastic performance of the anthem “No Surrender” -- Mr. Springsteen reminds of the words Shakespeare wrote for Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt, singing purposefully, “Blood brothers in the stormy night with a vow to defend / No retreat, yeah, no surrender” -- closes the main set, and on a giant screen behind the band pictures of them, together, from decades ago, simultaneously shows that their friendships are iconic and ordinary.

And real. Consider the moving tribute Mr. Springsteen gave at the funeral of E Street Band member Dan Federici:

“I watched Danny fight and conquer some tough addictions. I watched him struggle to put his life together and in the last decade when the band reunited, thrive… I watched him fight his cancer without complaint and with great courage and spirit. […] He never gave up right to the end.

“A few weeks back we ended up onstage in Indianapolis for what would be the last time. Before we went on I asked him what he wanted to play and he said, “Sandy.” He wanted to strap on the accordion and revisit the boardwalk of our youth during the summer nights when we'd walk along the boards with all the time in the world. […]

“After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.”

I am getting old enough now to understand what it means to accompany people through the highs and lows of life, and everything in between -- to watch people grow and change, to be separated by time and space while still being present, to witness and participate in the milestones of another’s life, to be a companion.

Watching the mighty E Street Band perform -- this band of great friends -- makes me consider what my friends and my friendships will be like in my sixties, with forty and fifty years of relationship behind us. I realize how special the relationships between the band members are, and how I hope to be as lucky in my friendships as they are in theirs.

Mr. Springsteen writes of his friends, of life, of friendship itself: “I'll keep movin' through the dark with you in my heart / My blood brother”. Watching him and his buddies stand “side by side, each one fightin' for the other” on that Milwaukee stage makes me wonder if he understands just how fortunate he is. I’m sure he does.

FOUR OR FIVE years ago Mr. Springsteen inducted Jackson Browne into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with these words:

“Now I always thought that in our fall from Eden, besides the strains of physicality and the bearing of earthly burdens, our real earthly task was that an unbridgeable gap […] was opened up in our ability to truly love one another. And so our job here on earth, the way we regain our divinity, our sacredness […] is by reconstructing love and creating love out of the broken pieces that we've been given. That's all we have of human promise. That's the way we prove ourselves in the eyes of God and facilitate our own redemption.”

The performance of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band conveys the realities of our broken world, the difficulties and consequent rewards of life and relationships; the need to live with purpose, and to direct ourselves towards recovering that which was lost in the fall; the message that there is heroism in fighting and dreaming, in everyday struggles, in having fun; the recognition that life is often romantic and enormous; and the promise of redemption.

As I watch the band depart the stage in Milwaukee, I know that the sun is setting on E Street. This will most surely be their last tour. I will probably never see them perform together again. But the message of their performance will live on -- indeed, it is as old as humanity itself, and every man to proclaim a message of deliverance from our broken and weary world has turned to dust, for from dust he came.

E pluribus pluribus

2009-11-09T05:08:00.001-05:00

A friend of mine, a macroeconomist, writes to tell me an interesting anecdote about his life: “Family, friends, and acquaintances often ask me what I do. I can’t even tell them one percent of the truth.”

My friend’s Ivy League education and impressive resume surely rule out the possibility that his inability is a function of poorly developed communications skills. What, then, is to blame?

The answer is the specialization of his training. In order to communicate what he actually does -- i.e., in order to say something more specific than “I study macroeconomics” -- my friend would have to provide so much background knowledge that it would probably take days for his friends and family to understand even the topic of his research.

What is perhaps even more interesting than this is that I myself have studied a little economics, and I doubt that I would understand more than fifty percent of what my friend is doing. I could probably understand the topic of his research, but once he started talking to me about the quantitative methods he was using to answer his research questions -- well, he might as well be speaking another language. (Indeed, by many reasonable definitions of language, he is.)

My mind’s eye holds a romantic picture of the academy: Brilliant men and women, deep thinkers, great writers, sitting in comfortable chairs in oak-paneled rooms with pastoral scenes on the walls, steaming cups of coffee in hand, wearing tweed and khaki, appropriately removed from the silliness of day-to-day public life to facilitate both an understanding of the public square and a healthy disinterest of it, discussing with each other the most important issues in history and society, in philosophy and science and mathematics, in art and literature:

An historian is discussing Tolstoy’s view of leadership with a physicist; an economist is explaining on-the-margin decision theory to a poet, and thus why the optimal amount of crime cannot be zero; an English literature professor and a biologist are discussing the relationship between Sophocles and Arthur Miller; and an astronomer and political theorist are alternating between discussions of special relativity and the limits of democracy.

I believe that there was a time when this scene was an accurate description of a university’s faculty club. But no longer. My experience of the academy is less steaming coffee and tweed than Italian espresso and denim, but those things are largely peripheral. What is not peripheral is the specialization of academic knowledge.

An economist and an historian can’t have an intelligent conversation these days. How is an historian supposed to understand dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium models with i.i.d. technology shocks? How can an economist acquire the background knowledge to intelligently discuss the lives of the wives of bricklayers in Nassau County between 1710 and 1715?

What’s worse is that economists cannot talk to economists and political scientists cannot talk to political scientists. Academic research these days ignores the big picture, and focuses instead on knowing more and more about less and less. Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor, for example, writes last April in The New York Times: “A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.”

And if a PhD labor economist cannot understand what a PhD macroeconomist is doing, and if two theology professors cannot discuss their research due to a lack of shared knowledge, then how on earth is my friend supposed to explain his research to his parents?

THIS PHENOMENON OF increased specialization exists outside of the academy, as well. Browse through your correspondence and have a look at some of your friends’ email signatures. A good buddy of mine from college is, apparently, a “Securities Operations Specialist” in the “Trust Technology & Support Services - Physical Processing” department of his corporation. I have no clue what he does for a living. My younger brother is an “Account Controller Assc. 1.” Again, not a clue. I have many friends who are “Analysts.” What is that?

Here’s a little economics for you: Firms produce goods and services. A good is your toaster, and a service is management consulting. For most of American history the economy was heavily dominated by goods production: basically, people went to work at factories and made stuff. It was consequently very easy to understand the jobs held by your friends: they made stuff at factories. You could empathize with your friends’ workdays. You could relate to your family and neighbors in a more complete way.

These days the economy is increasingly services-heavy. And in a services economy, it is much harder for you to know what your friends are doing.

I have friends who are doctors, and I know what they do: heal sick people. I have friends who are lawyers, and I know what they do: leech off society. (Kidding, kidding -- save your emails.) I have friends who are accountants, and I know what they do: accounting. But what does my “Account Controller Assc. 1” brother do? What does an “Analyst” do? What is a “Securities Operations Specialist”?

And when we don’t know what our friends and family do for a living, we lose a shared experience. When our buddies vanish into their jobs, we understand them less as people. When we cannot relate to the nine-to-five of our neighbors, we lose community.

APART FROM OUR professional lives, technology has facilitated a specialization of culture and entertainment. I remember when the television series Friends debuted. The day after the series premier my school was abuzz: Who was prettier, Jennifer Aniston or Courtney Cox? And how awesome was that theme song? On Friday mornings in the late 1990s coworkers would discuss the previous night’s episode of E.R. When Seinfeld introduced “Yada, yada”, it took about one day for the phrase to enter the vernacular.

Today people still watch teevee shows, but the sense of community is greatly diminished. Technology allows us to watch The Office whenever we can find the time during the week -- chances are your coworkers haven’t seen last night’s episode until sometime later in the month. There isn’t nearly as much lunchroom discussion. DVR, Netflix, Hulu, and the like -- all these technologies remove the communal nature of entertainment.

In the recent past, if you wanted to know what was happening in the world you had three, half-hour news shows to pick from and a newspaper to read. Today, you can simply match your ideological bent to one of thousands of blogs. There are cable news shows hosted by conservative idiots (Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly) and by unthinking, angry, humorless liberals (Mr. Olbermann and Ms. Maddow) and by people who aren’t lunatics (Mr. Smith and Mr. Baier). If all you care about is gardening, then you no longer have to risk accidentally reading an article about politics while thumbing through your local newspaper: instead, you can simply have Google News pull all the gardening articles off the web that you can handle.

This past weekend found me in Mr. Springsteen’s audience at Madison Square Garden. The Garden was filled with people of all ages, races, creeds, and occupations -- a cornucopia of life and diversity. As I watched that iconic man and his iconic band play their iconic music, I found myself wondering who will replace them. Which bands of today will provide the cultural cohesion of Mr. Springsteen, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and The Rolling Stones? In the recent past, if you wanted some music, you went to the local record store and bought what they had -- you turned on your radio and listened to the Top Forty. Today, you browse My Space and find the niche music you are interested in. (And the moment more than thirty people discover “your” band, you lose interest, by definition.) Sure, there are many more bands and people are able to find music which more precisely fits their exact tastes. But how many of those bands can sell out a stadium? And how much is lost by the fact that the answer to my preceding question is none?

The net effect of all this, of course, is a decreased sense of community. Citizens used to have to come to the public square for culture, entertainment, and news. Today, they can isolate themselves in a corner of the square, unaware of the events in the wider community, and, most tragically, unaware of others’ interpretation of those events.

THE GREAT SEVENTEENTH century poet John Donne is famous for many reasons, including his coining of the phrase “no man is an island.” Donne’s observation is correct, and can easily be explained by another famous observation: Aristotle’s, that Man is a social animal.

As long as there are people, there will be communities. But the strength and depth and magnitude of those communities are vanishing -- rapidly. Our professional lives, the news and culture and entertainment which we take in -- and more -- are segmenting and specializing and individualizing. This greatly diminishes our ability to relate to each other, to empathize, to find common ground, to form friendships, to live in fellowship with others.

The Great Seal of the United States features the beautiful phrase e pluribus unum. These words are an aspiration, an imperative, and a narrative. We would be wise to note that as a description those words are becoming increasingly incorrect.

Let Mary Jane dance, legally

2009-10-26T05:28:00.001-04:00

Marijuana had long existed in the Eastern world before it was brought to the West, whereupon it was used -- much like today -- for medicinal and recreational purposes. Fortune magazine reports that marijuana remained listed in a standard desk reference of pharmaceuticals until 1942, though it was in the early twentieth century that the first state laws against marijuana -- a drug which, at that time, had come to be associated with African Americans and migrant workers -- began to appear. In the late 1930s, over the objections of the American Medical Association, marijuana was outlawed by the federal government, and the associated silliness began.

Let us fast-forward to today. Writing in Parade magazine that “America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace,” Senator James Webb reports that “according to data supplied to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, those imprisoned for drug offenses rose from 10% of the inmate population to approximately 33% between 1984 and 2002. […] Justice statistics also show that 47.5% of all the drug arrests in our country in 2007 were for marijuana offenses. Additionally, nearly 60% of the people in state prisons serving time for a drug offense had no history of violence or of any significant selling activity. Indeed, four out of five drug arrests were for possession of illegal substances, while only one out of five was for sales. Three-quarters of the drug offenders in our state prisons were there for nonviolent or purely drug offenses. […] This all comes at a very high price to taxpayers: Local, state, and federal spending on corrections adds up to about $68 billion a year.”

The late William F. Buckley Jr. writes in 2004 in National Review that approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests are made every year, with eighty-seven percent involving “nothing more than mere possession of small amounts of marijuana. This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10-15 billion per year in direct expenditures alone.”

Well. That doubtless leaves you a bit breathless.

Sixty-eight billion dollars per year on corrections; 150-billion dollars per year on police and courts; three-quarters of drug offenders in state prison are there for nonviolent drug crimes; 47.5 percent of drug arrests are for marijuana offenses.

Does this make sense?

To some, the answer is yes. And we must take them seriously. No one would argue that for most people most of the time smoking marijuana is a desirable activity. Marijuana does alter one’s state of mind, and at least anecdotally induces a certain apathy. Whether marijuana is a so-called gateway drug is a subject of considerable dispute, but surely no one would argue that not using marijuana causes a higher likelihood of using heroin or cocaine than does using marijuana. And let us not forget that marijuana is smoked, and as such does damage to the lungs and esophagus and other places, much like tobacco cigarettes.

Then there is the moral argument: That our laws should encourage a virtuous citizenry; that society is worse off when vice goes uncriminalized. Some argue that the laws of a nation reflect its character, and that in decriminalizing marijuana we would in effect be endorsing its use. Still others argue that marijuana is a fringe drug used by those who wish to remove themselves from society, and that to decriminalize it would be to encourage that culture.

These arguments are sensible, and are made by sensible people. But their persuasiveness pales in comparison to the counterarguments.

First and foremost, we must ask whether the government has any right whatever to tell you that you cannot smoke a marijuana cigarette. In a free society, government must have a good reason to make something illegal -- it is not the case, as many mistakenly believe, that the burden of proof falls on the citizen to demonstrate to the government that his desires are permissible. Allow your mind to linger here for a moment; to brush this argument off lightly is to lower ever so slightly your defenses against totalitarian statism.

A loose correlation with future heroin use -- post hoc ergo propter hoc, we must remember, is a dangerous and seductive fallacy -- and an association with a counterculture are hardly reason enough to outlaw this particular intoxicant. By decriminalizing marijuana, would the government be tacitly endorsing its use? Perhaps. But by that logic the government tacitly endorses sexual promiscuity among the unmarried, not going to church on Sunday, drinking alcohol to excess, smoking cigarettes to the point of self-induced lung cancer, glutinous over-consumption of food, spending more money per year than one earns, entering into a bad marriage, drinking the hopebama kool-aid, missing the opportunity to see Mr. Springsteen live, mixing whiskey with Coke, putting sugar in coffee, drinking light beer, and splitting infinitives -- all shameful activities, many more shameful than smoking a joint, none of which are prohibited by the government.

More than that, outlawing marijuana has been completely ineffective. As a student in prep school I used to undertake dangerous missions into unsafe neighborhoods in order to procure my intoxicant of choice. Those friends of mine who chose instead to use marijuana never did anything of the sort. I know many people who had smoked a joint before they had a beer. I have been asking abstainers for over a decade now why they have abstained, and to my memory not one of them has done so because of marijuana’s illegality. The drug is ubiquitous, and its prohibition is unpersuasive.

It is simply the case that laws must be practical. Outlawing the possession of a plant which you can grow in your dorm room is about as practical as making it illegal not to put on deodorant after your morning shower.

And speaking of practicality. We have too many cases for too few judges, at both the state and federal level. We have a prison system which is dramatically overcrowded, an enormous expense to both the state and federal governments, and which is, as Senator Webb writes, “a national disgrace.” We spend tens of billions of dollars per year arresting people for smoking pot, prosecuting people for smoking pot, and punishing people for smoking pot, which in many cases involves imprisoning people for smoking pot.

At the same time, we have a healthcare system which is in need of serious repair, are fighting two expensive wars, have many states with budget crisis, are falling behind the rest of the world in educating our children, have an enormous federal budget deficit, and are facing the enormous costs associated with the upcoming retirement of the baby boomers. So we must ask: Is spending billions and billions of dollars per year to stop folks from unwinding at the end of the day with a joint really the best use of that money?

What’s more, the government will not just recover all the money currently spent on arrests, prosecutions, punishment, and imprisonment, but also the government can actually generate revenue by decriminalization. Fortune magazine writes: “Assuming a national consumer market for marijuana of about $13 billion annually, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron has estimated that legalization could be expected to bring state and federal governments about $7 billion annually in additional tax revenue.”

I HAVE BEEN thinking about this this week not only because the criminalization of marijuana has been a pet peeve of mine for years now. In a strangely under-discussed action, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced on Monday that the Department of Justice has radically altered the so-called war on drugs: specifically, that federal prosecutors will no longer go after caregivers and patients who use marijuana for medicinal purposes in the fourteen states whose laws currently allow the prescription and use of medical marijuana. This new policy is in shocking contrast to the Bush administration, which, according to The Washington Post, conducted two hundred raids against users and providers of medical marijuana in California alone.

Leaving aside for the moment the constitutionality of the executive branch deciding which federal laws it will and will not attempt to enforce, respecting the wishes of the fourteen states which permit medical marijuana seems much harder to oppose than the criminalization of marijuana for recreational use.

To put it simply, many doctors and patients who suffer from chronic pain, cancer, chemotherapy, and wasting diseases like HIV/AIDS are quite convinced that there is simply no federally-legal substitute for marijuana’s effectiveness at mitigating pain, stimulating the appetite, and controlling crippling nausea. It is simply inhumane not to allow the use of marijuana to ease the suffering of so many.

Anecdotes abound of such tales: the man taking chemotherapy who found no relief in the anti-nausea drugs which his oncologist prescribed, but whose nausea was cured by marijuana; the teenage boy being treated for leukemia, wasting away from lack of nourishment, whose appetite was stimulated only by marijuana; the woman suffering from Glaucoma whose extreme pain was only taken away by smoking a joint.

Given its efficacy as a medicine, for what possible reason could the government withhold it from the sick and suffering?

The answer, of course, is that the increased demand for the drug must be met with an increased supply; that marijuana is already the principle cash cow for many illegal drug cartels; and that the level of violence associated with these cartels is increasing in America. So by allowing marijuana for legitimate medical use, we will see more of what we see in California: “legitimate medical use” being defined as the pain caused by a stubbed toe and the nausea caused by lunch at Taco Bell, the consequent increase in demand, the increased flow of money into the pockets of the cartels, and the increased level of violence in our streets.

The answer to that, of course, is to put the cartels out of business by legalizing their currently illegal product for everyone, not just the sick. Is there a black market for chewing gum? No. Same logic with marijuana.

IT IS VERY well known that President Clinton claimed not to have inhaled smoke from the marijuana cigarette he was smoking. President Obama, illustrating directly some change I can believe in, when asked if he inhaled answered: “I did. It’s not something I’m proud of. It was a mistake as a young man. ... But I never understood that line. The point was to inhale. That was the point.”

The point, clearly, is to inhale, which is something I have never done. But I have also never defiled a glass of black label by mixing it with Coke. Both are bad for you. Both should be legal.

Gotham, in spring

2009-10-12T08:02:00.002-04:00

I exit the gift shop of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, holding a bag containing a wedding present for some friends. Walking a half block, I make a right on Madison Avenue, passing by the residence of the archbishop of New York.

I catch a glimpse of a group idling in the entryway. Spotted looking through the window, a man approaches and opens the door. Do you know the archbishop? he asks. I’ve met him several times, I respond. I lived in Milwaukee while his excellency was archbishop there. Would I like to say hello? Absolutely. And there follows a pleasant conversation with the present occupant of among the very powerful and influential offices in America.

Only in New York.

Lunch follows. I head to a diner on Fifty-First Street whose burgers have often been voted as being the best in New York -- meaning, of course, that they are among the best in the world. I grab a seat at the counter, order a cheeseburger with bacon, and have a cup of coffee while I’m waiting. The woman sitting next to me is typical-New York. Wearing a windbreaker and sweatpants, she looks to be no stranger of cosmetic surgery. She orders chicken, but wants to make sure that her chicken breasts are of an appropriate size: She has the kitchen bring out three before they are cooked. She asks for a Diet Coke, and spots the waiter pouring the contents of the can into a glass. No! she exclaims. The waiter brings her the glass and the can. She declares this unacceptable, and asks for a new, unopened can, and can you please discard this sacriliged, one-twentieth-emptied can of Diet Coke, which in your Neanderthalsism you attempted to pour into a glass -- with ice? After ordering one-half of an apple pie (and asking that the pie be cut in front of her) she leaves, doubtless on a collision course with her next victim.

Bemused by this wonderful New York spectacle, I polish off my cheeseburger -- how do they make them so perfect? Am I eating Plato’s form of a cheeseburger? -- and head back out into the glorious city.

It is an absolutely beautiful day, the air crisp and clean, the ambient noises of the great metropolis gelling together, creating an auditory backdrop of activity and energy and vitality and humanity. I am meeting a friend on the Upper East Side, and in going to his office make a two-block detour to see an old apartment of mine. Perhaps I’m getting older or perhaps the neighborhood is changing? Regardless, I see at least five packs of supermodel-attractive twenty-somethings on my walk. (Since I am in New York, they very well may be actual supermodels.) Why do they travel in these small herds? And -- what’s that? Is a group of them walking into my old building?

I continue my walk, somewhat star-struck, and suddenly my olfactory nerve begins to vibrate. I walk inside a closet-sized bakery and cannot help but buy a black-and-white cookie. It is so good that I buy a box of them to share with my office.

Leaving my friend’s office, I cut down Seventy-Ninth Street from Second Avenue to Park. Heading south on that beautiful, tree-lined avenue I realize that I am staring at the late William F. Buckley Jr.’s old place. I pause for a moment and gaze at the front door. How often had the great man come bustling through that door into a waiting car, his arms filled with papers, folders, and letters? How many legendary Buckley dinners were held in that salon? How many cabinet secretaries and senators and brilliant writers and movers and shakers? How much life was lived behind that door? How much erudition and seriousness and reasonableness could be found in Mr. Buckley’s parlor? How much greatness, facilitated by this great city -- this august power center?

I continue down Park and cut over to Lexington, jump on a train, and hop out in the Village -- I am meeting a friend at New York University, situated around the singular Washington Square Park. Walking to my friend’s office, I notice that across the hall is the office of a guy with whom I went to college: Do literally all roads lead to Rome? We have an espresso and leave, walking to dinner at a place I frequent on Tenth Street and University Avenue.

A member of my dinner party is arriving from New Jersey, though I of course would not mention that to anyone in the restaurant. He is ten minutes late: We order drinks. He is twenty minutes late: We reorder drinks. He is thirty minutes late: We order an appetizer (and more drinks). Twenty minutes after that, he arrives.

I am ravenous, and my defenses are sufficiently weakened by hunger that I allow the waitress to talk me into ordering risotto with mushrooms and asparagus. Proving decisively that New York is fallible, my risotto leaves something to be desired.

Dinner concludes, and it is back down University to the legendary Bleecker Street. Cutting down Bleecker to Thompson, I cannot help but think of all the history in this amazing, tiny section of this greatest city: It was in these coffee houses that Alan Ginsberg would read poetry; it was to here that Bob Dylan found a home, having made a pilgrimage to New York to see Woody Guthrie; it was here that Mr. Springsteen performed his legendary string of concerts at The Bottom Line.

Walking past cultural landmark after cultural landmark (one trips over them in New York, particularly in Greenwich Village), we quickly arrive at The Back Fence. I believe it to be the greatest little bar in all the world -- as a fact. It is Brooklyn Brewery lagers for hours, great music and great company. Having arrived with some friends and left with more, upon spilling back out onto Bleecker I see that the sun set several hours before on the great city.

I AWAKE, SHOWER, and realize that I desperately need coffee. I am meeting some friends for brunch in two hours in a section of Manhattan improperly referred to by Columbia graduates as the west village. It is in fact Greenwich Village, west of Sixth Avenue.

I am staying in Midtown, and walking out the front door am greeted by a street fair on Lexington Avenue. All sorts of “street meat” to sample, t-shirts to buy, beads and trinkets and jewelry, and some probably-very-good food to eat. But I need none of this. Down into the bowels of the city I go, onto the number six train. (New York having, of course, the best system of public transportation in the country, it is silly not to use it.)

I emerge in the Village, and being to walk west. Another glorious day, and the little streets of the Village -- intersecting at odd angles, running diagonal, stopping and starting in their beautiful chaos -- are filled. Passing tobacco shops and coffee houses and tiny restaurants, each of which would put all the restaurants of most cities to shame, I am in a sea of life. I walk past bars which are not yet open, and I wonder about the life lived there just a few hours ago. Chess shops and bodegas and record stores and music shops -- one after the other, with apartment buildings interspersed. It is a village.

I have some time to kill, so I stroll about, taking an indirect route to the restaurant. I pass a beautiful piece of art. It is probably six feet tall, and it is a sketch of Manhattan. So what? The sketch is done entirely in pencil, and consists only of vertical lines: very cool. I ask about its price, and though that I would buy it on the spot if it wouldn’t be such a pain to carry around. Instead, I depart.

I stumble onto Bedford Avenue, and see a large group of Asian tourists taking photographs of a building. This is odd, I think to myself. I look at the building -- it looks vaguely familiar. Then I see that I am on the corner of Bedford and Grove. I call a friend, and it is confirmed: the tourists are taking photos of Monica and Rachel’s apartment. I move on, bewildered, but only slightly so. There are not many cities where the buildings have a life of their own.

Brunch is delicious. I have a spinach omelet, some perfect bread, orange juice, and coffee. I am meeting a friend’s girlfriend, and she proves positively delightful. The others are all known to me. We finish eating and return to the street, walking towards a bar near Sixth Avenue.

We pass the hours, as Mr. Springsteen so poetically put it, “drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain,” watching the veritable cornucopia of personalities and ethnicities and ages and purposes walk past our sidewalk table. The people are as varied as the umbrellas (or lack thereof) which they use to shield themselves from the falling rain. I marvel silently to myself at the great city: How does one place facilitate so many different people with different ambitions and histories?

There is some talk of TALF and TARP and internal politics at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (where three at our table work), but the afternoon is mostly pleasant, and before long it is time for dinner.

I decide that I do not want to leave the Village (west of Sixth). In most cities, this would pose a problem of variety, but not in Manhattan. My dining companions run through a string of choices. You don’t want to walk more than four blocks? No problem. Do you want French? Asian fusion? Expensive Italian? Cheaper Italian? Steak? Pizza? A burger? A diner? And on, and on. I chose to remedy the bad risotto from the night before by again trying risotto. The event of having two sub-par dinners in two nights might, like the collision of matter and antimatter, be enough to make Manhattan explode. Fortunately and unsurprisingly, tonight’s risotto is excellent.

I AWAKE, SHOWER, and realize that I desperately need coffee. Unlike yesterday’s afternoon showers, this morning is bright and sunny. I grab some coffee from a street vendor on my walk to the cathedral.

Mass is celebrated by Monsignor Ritchie, the cathedral rector. Departing the cathedral, I walk across Fifth Avenue and into Rockefeller Center. Matt Lauer and Ann Curry are doing an outdoor segment for the Today Show -- something about cooking, as Mario Batali is milling about. I continue on and come to an outdoor pavilion: it seems that the Today Show has set up a big-screen teevee with stadium seating for some sporting event. As I walk towards it, Meredith Viera is walking towards me. We shake hands and talk for a few seconds. She seems quite pleasant.

I hop on a subway, and emerge on the corner of Seventy-Seventh Street and Lexington. I want breakfast, and pop into a bagel shop. I decide to eat my breakfast in Central Park, and as I cross the avenues of the Upper East Side I am struck by their beauty: wide as rivers, taxi cabs with triangular advertisements affixed to their roofs look like sailboats speeding towards the horizon, lined by buildings as far as the eye can see, these avenues are urban trophies.

I enter Central Park -- the greatest park in the greatest city -- and as I walk into its expanse I feel the city melting away. I sit on a bench in this oasis of nature, watching three squirrels play on the trunk of a tree. Kids are throwing Frisbees in the grass in front of me, wealthy women taking in some exercise while their husbands run the world, professional dog walkers stroll past, six or seven leashes in hand.

I exhale, and marvel at it all. New York City: Gotham, in spring.

Olympian narcissism

2009-10-05T05:46:00.001-04:00

Many have commented on President Obama’s Olympian-sized failure to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. I shall not comment, except to say that yes, I agree that it is obvious (a) that the president should not have gone back on his statement that he was too busy with healthcare to lobby in person for Chicago in Copenhagen and (b) that the amateurism of this White House was on full display when they sent the president to Copenhagen without knowing that Chicago would at least make it past the first round of voting.

What is most appalling to me is not the president’s failure, the president changing his mind, or the White House not doing its homework. I nearly fell out of my chair when I read an editorial in Saturday’s New York Times wherein that which is appalling is stated: that the White House might “have a tad too much confidence in Mr. Obama’s hortatory powers.” If The Times is calling the president out on this, then there must be something to it.

That said, The Times editorial board, unable to fully remove its partisan blinders, got the spirit of the problem correct, but not its magnitude. Instead of having “a tad too much confidence,” this White House and this president believe that the magic of Mr. Obama can cure any ill -- that the power of the president’s personality and personal history can solve any problem, untie any knot, heal any wound, cure any illness, assuage any despair, move any mountain.

Consider the president’s speech to the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen. Clocking in at a brief 1,126 words, the speech is organized into fourteen paragraphs. The first paragraph starts off just fine:

“I come here today as a passionate supporter of the Olympic and Paralympic Games; as a strong believer in the movement they represent; and as a proud Chicagoan. But above all, I come as a faithful representative of the American people, and we look forward to welcoming the world to the shores of Lake Michigan and the heartland of our nation in 2016.”

Then the wheels start to come off the wagon.

In the second paragraph, the president reminds the committee that his “own father from the African continent” came to America to seek “something better.” In the third paragraph, the president urges the committee “to choose Chicago for the same reason I chose Chicago nearly 25 years ago,” and reminds the committee that the first lady is from Chicago as well.

Paragraph four finds the president repeating his nauseatingly-familiar biography: “You see, growing up, my family moved around a lot. I was born in Hawaii. I lived in Indonesia for a time. I never really had roots in any one place or culture or ethnic group.” In paragraph five, the president -- never missing an opportunity to remind the world of his romantic, vagabond existence -- reports that in Chicago “I finally found a home.”

Paragraph nine finds Mr. Obama reminding the committee that “I ran for President because I believed deeply that at this defining moment, the United States of America has a responsibility” to help bring nations together. In paragraph eleven, the president reports: “Nearly one year ago, on a clear November night, people from every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of their televisions to watch the results of the U.S. Presidential election.”

What follows in the three concluding paragraphs is largely irrelevant -- the committee members present must have been unable to concentrate, suffocating so severely under the weight of the president’s ego and narcissism.

It’s all about him. In the face of everything -- every problem, every policy issue, every everything -- the president’s solution is to talk about himself.

What on earth does election night 2008 have to do with bringing the Olympics to Chicago? The IOC should choose Chicago, just like the president did? What on earth does the president’s decision to run for president have to do with bringing the Olympics to Chicago?

The president is in danger of becoming a parody of himself with all this. Except that it isn’t funny. It is deeply unsettling. And it is part of a pattern.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer writes this past Friday to explain French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s odd hostility towards Mr. Obama during their recent joint appearance at the United Nations. It turns out that Mr. Obama chose to forgo the opportunity to expose Iran’s secret nuclear facility at Qom during the U.N. Security Council meeting which he chaired.

“Why forgo the opportunity?” Dr. Krauthammer asks. “Because Obama wanted the Security Council meeting to be about his own dream of a nuclear-free world. The president, reports the New York Times citing ‘White House officials,’ did not want to ‘dilute’ his disarmament resolution ‘by diverting to Iran’ [...] and from Obama's star turn as planetary visionary: ‘The administration told the French,’ reports the Wall Street Journal, ‘that it didn't want to ‘spoil the image of success’ for Mr. Obama's debut at the U.N.’”

This is just surreal. The president was more concerned about “the image of success” for his debut at the United Nations than he was about using the opportunity to pressure Iran from developing nuclear weapons? Yes, answers the White House.

So shocking is this fact that Mr. Sarkozy was visibly agitated. Writes Dr. Krauthammer: “Image? Success? Sarkozy could hardly contain himself. At the council table, with Obama at the chair, he reminded Obama that ‘we live in a real world, not a virtual world.’”

In the “virtual world,” Mr. Obama’s magical celebrity can solve problems. In the “real world,” it cannot.

We see this presidency-of-personality in many other places. The mainstream media criticized opponents of the president’s recent speech to America’s schoolchildren, arguing that a president should be able to talk to kids in school. Fine. I agree. But what incited many opponents -- myself included -- was the president’s bizarre lesson plans, which included, among other things, instructions for teachers to “post in large print around the classroom notable quotes excerpted from President Obama’s speeches on education” before the speech and to have students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” This narcissism is dangerous, and has no place in America’s classrooms.

FOUR YEARS AGO the president was a 44-year-old in the tenth month of his first term in the Senate. Having never held down a full-time job for longer than a few years and having no significant government experience, Mr. Obama was forced to run a campaign of personality and promises.

This campaign worked brilliantly, taking down the Clinton political machine, and our American Idol-obsessed nation chose to elect Mr. Obama president because they liked the idea of him as president. His personality, so different from George W. Bush, and his vacuous talk of change won him the presidency. His words, his presence, his celebrity, his anti-macho, his interesting background, him -- these did the trick for candidate Obama.

But Mr. Obama is president now, and it’s time for all this to stop. Why? Because it is obviously ineffective: the first quarter of Mr. Obama’s presidency is almost over, and all he’s accomplished is passing an economic stimulus bill that has yet to stimulate the economy. The president is either (a) still following his campaign strategy of personality politics, hoping that it will work better during the next three quarters, or (b) he really does believe that his is the body around which the universe turns.

Both are bad. But let us hope it is the former.

Republican kooks, unsupervised, in control

2009-09-21T05:58:00.003-04:00

Robert Welch attended Harvard Law School and the United States Naval Academy, dropping out of both without graduation because of his opposition, it is believed, to the politics of his instructors. He later founded the Oxford Candy Company in Brooklyn, which did not survive the Great Depression. His brother’s candy company fortunately did, where Welch went to work inventing such staples as Sugar Daddies and Junior Mints. Retiring in 1956 with a sizeable fortune, Welch turned to political advocacy.

His creation, the John Birch Society, was a radical anti-communist organization. His opinions were stupid and libelous. From the pulpit of the John Birch Society, Welch claimed President Roosevelt knew of the attacks on Pearl Harbor before they were carried out, and that President Truman was used by the Communists “with his knowledge and acquiescence as the price he consciously paid for their making him president.”

Wild as those charges were, it was Welch’s attacks against President Eisenhower that proved to be a bridge too far for many in the political right. Welch wrote that Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” the United States government was “under operational control of the Communist party,” and that by the summer of 1961 the federal government was “50 - 70 percent” Communist-controlled. Welch claimed further that, “In my opinion the chances are very strong that Milton Eisenhower,” President Eisenhower’s brother, “is actually Dwight Eisenhower's superior and boss within the Communist Party.”

In a 2008 essay in Commentary, the late William F. Buckley Jr. writes that Welch’s “method of organization caused general alarm. The society comprised a series of cells, no more than twenty people per cell. It was said that its members were directed to run in secret for local offices and to harass school boards and librarians on the matter of the Communist nature of the textbooks and other materials they used.”

By the early months of 1962 the conservative movement -- Mr. Buckley was of course among its senior leadership -- had a problem: Many serious conservatives wanted Senator Barry Goldwater to run for president in 1964, due in no small part to Goldwater’s aggressive anti-Communism, but the only organization to call for Goldwater’s nomination was Welch’s John Birch Society. The conservative movement’s problem was how to “universalize a draft-Goldwater movement” while making it clear that neither the senator himself nor his supporters subscribed in any way to the John Birch Society’s reckless ridiculousness.

William Baroody was during that time the head of the American Enterprise Institute, a preeminent conservative think tank both then and now, and he telephoned Buckley that January to summon him to an emergency two-day meeting. The attendees, only five: Buckley, Baroody, and, describes Buckley in Commentary, “Russell Kirk, the philosopher and author of the seminal 1953 text The Conservative Mind, and public-relations man Jay Hall, who had represented General Motors in Washington,” and Senator Goldwater.

Neither Buckley nor Kirk knew the purpose of the meeting, but over breakfast on the first day Baroody was quite adamant on what the meeting was not: An effort to persuade Goldwater into running for president. After much resistance to this ground rule, Kirk relented: “Very well. So what do you have in mind for us?” Baroody’s response: “We’ll have to coast on that.”

Goldwater arrived a few hours later, and “Baroody brought up the John Birch Society. It was quickly obvious that this was the subject Goldwater wished counsel on.

“Kirk, unimpeded by his little professorial stutter,” writes Buckley, “greeted the subject with fervor. It was his opinion, he said emphatically, that Robert Welch was a man disconnected from reality. How could anyone reason, as Welch had done in The Politician, that President Eisenhower had been a secret agent of the Communists? This mischievous unreality was a great weight on the back of responsible conservative political thinking. The John Birch Society should be renounced by Goldwater and by everyone else -- Kirk turned his eyes on me -- with any influence on the conservative movement.”

Goldwater had a political problem with this proposed excommunication: “Every other person in Phoenix” -- Goldwater was the senator from Arizona – “is a member of the John Birch Society.” What to do?

It was agreed that Senator Goldwater would attack the opinions of the Society’s leader, Welch, without attacking the Society itself, or its members. Buckley would use National Review, his magazine, to be much harsher on Welch than Goldwater, a politician operating under constraints, could be. “What would Russell Kirk do? He was straightforward. ‘Me? I’ll just say, if anybody gets around to asking me, that the guy is loony and should be put away.’”

In National Review’s next issue, Mr. Buckley unleashed a 5,000-word attack, containing: “How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points…so far removed from common sense? That dilemma weighs on conservatives across America…The underlying problem is whether conservatives can continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republic and the entire Western world which is false, and, besides that, crucially different in practical emphasis from their own.”

In the next issue, Senator Goldwater published a letter, carefully claiming that Welch’s views are not shared by most in the John Birch Society, but calling nonetheless for Welch’s resignation.

Buckley concludes his Commentary reflection: “The wound we Palm Beach plotters delivered to the John Birch Society proved fatal over time. Barry Goldwater did not win the presidency, but he clarified the proper place of anti-Communism on the Right, with bright prospects to follow.”

I FIRST READ Mr. Buckley’s essay around the time it was published. I found it shocking then. I find it more shocking today.

All people of common sense in the late fifties and early sixties viewed Communism as a serious threat. Indeed, it was. The leaders of the Soviet Union had designs for world domination -- designs which directly threatened the welfare and survival of the United States. Further, the agents of Communism did engage in espionage, and did penetrate the American government and people. Suspicion and vigilance were warranted. On this level, the responsible members of the conservative movement agreed with the John Birch Society.

That said, suspicion and vigilance are far removed from crazy conspiracies and, simply, incorrectness. To suggest that Dwight Eisenhower -- formerly Supreme Allied Commander, five-star general, and president -- was conspiring against his country on behalf of the Communists was lunacy. It was irresponsible.

In reflecting on Mr. Buckley’s story, then, I find two things amazing. The first concerns Senator Goldwater. Here is a man who held high office. He was a strong anti-Communist. The voters of his home state were also strong anti-Communists. Instead of piggybacking on the idiocy of the John Birch Society, securing for himself an electoral advantage, Senator Goldwater instead tried to oust them from the conservative movement. Not only did Goldwater not use the John Birch Society as a political advantage by publicly supporting it; not only did Goldwater not use the Society as a political advantage by simply ignoring it and hoping that voters concluded he sympathized; but instead the senator took a political risk by attacking it. Goldwater proved through his actions that he was very concerned with the seriousness and purity of the conservative movement -- and that he thought public leaders had a responsibility to reasonableness.

The second amazing aspect is the story itself. The head of a think tank, two public intellectuals, a public relations man, and a U.S. senator, sitting in a room for two days, five leaders of the conservative political movement, decided on their own -- without opinion polls and message calendars and input from Congressional leaders and campaign consultants and focus groups and special interest lobbyists and all the clutter of politics today -- to excommunicate the John Birch Society from the political right. Why? Because the John Birch Society was irresponsible and inflammatory, its opinions completely divorced from both common sense and facts. Those were reasons enough for these five men to take it upon themselves to purge the Society from the conservative movement. And they won.

The story is amazing because the sensible and intelligent and reasonable members of the political right were able to overpower the lunatics. The story is amazing because the loudest and most shrill voices lost. The story is amazing because measure and facts and thoughtfulness won. The story is amazing because a handful of men had the courage to stand up to a powerful, grassroots, populist movement within their own political party and say Enough!

WHERE I'M GOING with this will already have been obvious to the careful reader, but to say it quite plainly I believe it is instructive to contrast Mr. Buckley’s story with our current politics -- specifically, with the insanity we all watched over the summer.

Instead of Senator Goldwater, quite concerned with the intellectual quality of the substance of the conservative movement, we have Senator Grassley of Iowa, who at a town hall meeting this summer stated to his constituents: “And from that standpoint, you have every right to fear. […] We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.”

Not only did Senator Grassley lack the fidelity to facts and the political courage to simply remain silent on the fiction that grandma’s plug will be pulled by the government, but instead Senator Grassley openly endorsed the lie. Why? Surely because he was looking for political advantage wherever he could find it. In the narrative of our story, Mr. Grassley is the anti-Goldwater.

And while we’re on the subject of so-called death panels, let us not forget that the phrase was popularized by Sarah Palin, a woman so grossly unqualified to be president that her nomination as vice president by Senator McCain was enough to make a good many moderates vote for President Obama. Ms. Palin continues to be as shrill and unintelligent as ever, and continues to be supported by one of the nominal heirs to the conservative political-intellectual tradition, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol. Where we once had Goldwater-Buckley, we now have Palin-Kristol.

And let us not forget the modern-day Birchers. The most outrageous of them are the “birthers,” those on the right who believe that the president was not born in the United States, and is thus Constitutionally unqualified to be president. This conspiracy is about on par with those who claimed that both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were illegitimate, but that fact does not dismiss the ignorance of the birthers, a group which willfully ignores facts.

We may add to the list all those who show up to rallies with racist signs attacking the president, those who compare the president to an animal, those who bring sings to public rallies comparing the president to Hitler, who hint that the president should be assassinated, those who spread fear of death panels, those whose signs suggest that the time has come to overthrow the government, and those who bring firearms to public political events.

WHERE IS TODAY'S Bill Buckley? Where is the conservative leader who will publicly oppose all this insanity? Where is the secret meeting of five key players in the Republican Party, plotting to excommunicate the lunatics from the political process?

The most prominent voices in the Republican Party today include Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh -- not a group of people with heavy intellectual equipment. And certainly not a group of people defined by reasonableness, intellectual integrity, and loyalty to facts.

(Did Mr. Limbaugh really call this week for segregated busing? Does Mr. O’Reilly really feel qualified to discuss the individual mandate without having a passing knowledge of the Constitution's commerce clause? Does Mr. Beck really cry on television?)

Where is 2009’s Bill Buckley? Where is the prominent conservative leader who has the courage to stand up and say: Enough! Do not compare the president to Hitler. Do not compare the president to an animal. Do not call for the overthrow of the government. This birther business is stupid. There are no death panels -- take five minutes and read the relevant section of the House bill before you speak. Ms. Palin, Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Beck -- please exit, stage left. Republican voters, do not bring a gun to a town hall meeting or a political rally. Do not intimate that the president should be assassinated. Stop the idiocy!

Republicans can beat the president on the substance of their arguments, and on the recklessly irresponsible course the president wants to take. Republicans do not need to resort to all this ridiculousness. And every Republican leader who does not publicly oppose this silliness is behaving irresponsibly.

Of course, I would be remiss if I did not point out that there are reasonable conservatives saying the things I have just suggested: Michael Gerson, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, and others come to mind. But they are not the leaders of the movement -- their influence is much less than the cable-news hosts and radio personalities. This is a cause for concern.

Christopher Buckley, WFB’s son, wrote in The Daily Beast that his father “once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best.”

As this summer has shown, William F. Buckley’s best was not good enough. The kooks are in control -- unsupervised. Let us hope this is not a permanent condition -- that somewhere in a room five men are plotting a return to reasonableness.

Mr. Obama's cult of personality

2009-09-07T05:52:00.009-04:00

When we first meet Winston Smith -- the protagonist in George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four -- he is ducking into his apartment building, “his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind. […] The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features.”

Winston makes his way up the stairs (the elevator seldom worked) to his apartment, seven stories up. “On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.”

Having finally arrived in his apartment, Winston looks out his window -- “even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. […] The black-mustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own.”

Some time in the future, Winston is being tortured by the agents of “the Party”, the group of people who run the state -- the group of people who serve Big Brother, the head of state. After a particular torture session, his torturer allows him to ask some questions. Winston’s second question: “Does Big Brother,” the man in the posters, “exist?”

“Of course he exists,” answers the torturer. “The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.”

“Does he exist in the same way as I exist? […] I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?”

“It is of no importance. He exists.”

“Will Big Brother ever die?”

“Of course not. How could he die? Next question.”

*****

Nineteen Eight-Four is a work of genius, and its ubiquitousness is a consequence of its quality. An unfortunate effect of being ubiquitous, however, is that the sheer terror of Orwell’s London -- the Party, the Ministries of Love and Peace, doublethink, thought crime, telescreens, Newspeak -- have become part of our political vocabulary, and have thus lost their ability to terrify.

One of the most terrifying components of Orwell’s London is the cult of personality surrounding Big Brother. Orwell knew that if the state was to supplant the family as the principle unit of society, then a cult of personality must form around a leader -- Orwell knew that the people living under the state must have an individual to worship as a hero.

It is easy to find examples of this phenomenon in history. Joseph Stalin created one of the most elaborate: towns throughout the former Soviet Union were named after him; statues of him were numerous, and depicted him to be much taller than he was in life; Stalin rewrote Soviet history to give himself a more important role; flattering pictures of Stalin were common throughout the Soviet empire. Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, styled himself as “supreme leader,” and it is believed in Iran that in late 1978, immediately before the revolution, Khomeini’s face could be seen in the full moon.

In our own world today we see the same. Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei also goes by the title “supreme leader.” North Korea’s probably-insane and certainly-murderous dictator Kim Jong Il styles himself as “dear leader.” The North Korean state-run media claims that Jong Il shoots three or four holes in one in a round of golf. His birthday is one of the most important holidays in North Korea, and it is believed in his country that he can control the weather.

But Stalin and Khomeini and Lenin and Mao and Tito and all the other lived while they were being deified. And Khamenei and the “dear leader” live today. Orwell took this a step further: Is Big Brother a living man, like me? Yes. Will Big Brother ever die? Of course not.

In this way, the power of the state is not dependent on the life and death of the leader. Orwell’s totalitarian government has found a way to maintain all the benefits of a cult of personality without any of the costs: by creating a fictional figurehead. Genius.

Leaving Orwell aside for the moment, I report that on Thursday afternoon I received an email from a friend with a YouTube link. The video is four-and-a-quarter minutes long, titled “I Pledge!” and opens with a large picture of President Obama’s face and a quote from Harry Truman describing the presidency as “the loneliest job in the world.” The quote disappears but the president’s face remains. New words appear, addressed to the president: “We’d like you to know you’re not alone!”

The president’s face is now gone, but a few words from a speech of his are emanating from my speakers, calling all Americans to be better citizens by working towards common goods. Now come the “pledges,” made by various Hollywood celebrities. (Almost all of whom I cannot identify, although Ashton Kutcher remains as annoying as ever.) The pledges are largely innocuous: “I pledge volunteer more of my time to help children battling serious illnesses”; “I pledge to smile more”; “I pledge to be a great mother”; and the like.

At three minutes and seventeen seconds, a rather strange man with many tattoos comes on the screen with this rather strange pledge: “I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama.” What’s that? I am startled. A couple more innocent pledges then come (“I pledge to never stop learning and growing”), but then, at three minutes and fifty-two seconds, Demi Moore pledges “to be a servant to our president.”

Enter Orwell.

The camera then zooms out and the screen becomes a checkerboard, with a celebrity occupying each cell. They chant in unison: “Because together we can, together we are, and together we will be the change that we seek.” The camera continues to zoom out, causing the screen to fill with increasingly smaller, simultaneously-chanting celebrities, until we discover that each cell is actually a pore in the giant face of President Obama. The screen then pauses, and the closing shot is of the president’s face in front of the U.S. Capitol dome and the White House -- notably, in Orwellian fashion, his face is the size of each building -- and the words BE THE CHANGE are sprawled across the bottom.

It is as if the creators of this video were trying to copy Orwell’s Big Brother posters, though surely they were not.

I received this email, watched the video, and was quite shocked. I simply could not believe that a person would pledge “to be a servant to” Barack Obama. Neither could I believe that a person would pledge “to be of service to” the president, and not, say, to be of service to the American people, or to the ideal of liberty, or to the policy goal of, say, better secondary education.

To be of service to an ideal can be noble, and serving a policy goal can be part of serving an ideal. But “to be a servant to the president”? I should like to think that one would pledge to be a servant to the Lord, and none other. “I pledge to be a servant to our president”? What is one to make of this terrifying and bizarre thing to say?

I fumed in confusion for a few moments, wrote a response to my friend, and was quite content to let this strange instance of the president’s personality cult pass me by. Then on Friday morning I opened up The New York Times and saw that the president has decided it necessary to give this week a speech to America’s schoolchildren, to be broadcast on CSPAN and the White House website into every participating classroom in America.

A White House spokesman said that the president’s speech is “about the value of education and the importance of staying in school as part of his effort to dramatically cut the dropout rate.” Harmless enough. But what provoked a great deal of outrage was the accompanying lesson plan. Teachers all across this country are instructed by the government to ask their students questions before the speech, so as to focus their minds, and before the speech to “post in large print around the classroom notable quotes excerpted from President Obama’s speeches on education.” After the speech the government-provided lesson plan calls for a number of activities. Among them: The students were to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president” and to discuss what “the president wants us to do.”

(The outrage was such that the instructors were changed from having the students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president” to having the students “write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals.”)

This is, again, terrifying, and positively Orwellian. Can you imagine the president giving a speech to all the nation’s third graders, and then, on instruction from the government, each third grade teacher standing up in front of her class and telling her students to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” Can you imagine each eighth grade teacher in America staying after school the day before the president’s speech in order to post, on instruction from the government, “in large print around the classroom notable quotes excerpted from President Obama’s speeches on education”? Can you imagine, on instruction from the government, the nation’s fourth grade teachers having their students discuss what “the president wants us to do.”

The outrage is in the framing. There is nothing wrong with teachers asking students to discuss how students can make sure they stay in school. And there is nothing wrong with teachers asking students to discuss the value of education. And there is nothing wrong with teachers asking students to write letters to themselves promising to stay in school and extolling the value of education. But why inject the personality? After all, the students are not “helping the president” by staying in school -- they are helping themselves. Why does everything have to come back to the president?

Of course, it must be said quite plainly that the president is not within driving distance of being Big Brother, and the United States is in no immediate danger of becoming a totalitarian state. But there is something deeper at work in the YouTube video and the president’s instructions to teachers than those who dismiss these concerns would have you believe.

Let’s face it: the cult of personality behind Barack Obama had a large role in propelling him to the presidency. On paper, on the day he was elected president, Mr. Obama was a forty-seven year old first-term U.S. senator with absolutely no executive experience, with virtually no national legislative experience, and with no military experience. His only significant government experience were his few years in the Senate, which began in 2005, shortly before he started running for president. Not only that, he had also never held a job outside government for longer than three years.

His campaign was largely about Barack Obama, the man. He was a celebrity, and he had a celebrity following. The president himself shares responsibility for this -- after all, we’re talking about a man who wrote an autobiography before his thirty-fifth birthday.

Folks were not electing a record of achievement, as they were with George W. Bush’s outstanding record as Texas governor -- with Mr. Obama, there was no record. Folks were not voting for a lifetime of experience, as they were with Senator McCain -- Mr. Obama had virtually no experience. Instead, the president was elected because people liked him. They liked the man. They liked how he looked at the world. They liked how he gave speeches. They liked the idea of Barack Obama, the man, being the symbol of the United States.

As such, can we blame the White House and the Department of Education for not recognizing a difference between having children write down how they can “help the president” and having children write down how they can “stay in school”? Can we blame obnoxious Hollywood celebrities for confusing being a servant of their neighbor with being a servant of Barack Obama?

To borrow three familiar words: Yes, we can. We can blame them. But we should also take a moment to understand from where their impulse came. Otherwise, we are just shouting.

We should take a moment, as well, to reflect on the need for vigilance. Orwell’s vision of the future is very different than the United States as we find it today, but it is by no means assured that we will not arrive there one day. And this week, it is certain that we saw the slightest glimpse of that dark and terribly cold world.