Guns Are The Enemy Of Liberty

I’m going to be posting a number of shorter (for me) posts on this over the next day or so; I take on board the injunction that general expressions of sorrow and disgust have their place — but are no substitute for specifics.

I’ll have some thoughts about actual measures to be advanced (more invitations to the community to continue to think together).  But here I’d like to start off making an obvious point:

An armed society may be a polite one.  But it’s not one that is free. It is not one in which a civic life in any meaningful sense of the term can take place.

Guns kill liberty.

That’s what philosopher Firman Debrander argued in this morning’s New York Times, and he is in my ever-humble opinion spot on.  It’s worth the time to read the whole thing, but here’s the core of his case:

…guns pose a monumental challenge to freedom, and particular, the liberty that is the hallmark of any democracy worthy of the name — that is, freedom of speech. Guns do communicate, after all, but in a way that is contrary to free speech aspirations: for, guns chasten speech.

This becomes clear if only you pry a little more deeply into the N.R.A.’s logic behind an armed society. An armed society is polite, by their thinking, precisely because guns would compel everyone to tamp down eccentric behavior, and refrain from actions that might seem threatening. The suggestion is that guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly — not make any sudden, unexpected moves — and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend.

As our Constitution provides, however, liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld our right to experiment in offensive language and ideas, and in some cases, offensive action and speech. Such experimentation is inherent to our freedom as such. But guns by their nature do not mix with this experiment — they don’t mix with taking offense. They are combustible ingredients in assembly and speech.

Exactly so.

Obviously so.

“Smile when you say that, mister,” is great fun from the back row of the movie theater; much less so at arms length, bellied up to the bar.

Gun nuts, the NRA’s official core and all their acolytes and enablers are the enemies of American freedom, of the liberty you and I and everyone should take as our right.  That would be the liberty to walk where we choose, wearing what we want (an “I Reserve The Right To Arm Bears” t-shirt included), to assemble peaceably in protest or at the doors of our kids’ schools every weekday morning.  As Debrander discusses, the openly armed asshole at one of the town meetings during the summer of Obamacare, did not shoot anyone — but no one challenged him; his views echoed in the silence; actual debate was suffocated because no one wanted to piss off a guy who could kill you.  If you can’t have such civil debate, if you can’t even comfortably, free of fear, assemble for politics, or shopping, or a night at the movies, or in kindergarten, you don’t have a democracy in any real sense of the term.  And in that context, tyranny wins.  Debrander again:

After all, a population of privately armed citizens is one that is increasingly fragmented, and vulnerable as a result. Private gun ownership invites retreat into extreme individualism — I heard numerous calls for homeschooling in the wake of the Newtown shootings — and nourishes the illusion that I can be my own police, or military, as the case may be….

As Michel Foucault pointed out in his detailed study of the mechanisms of power, nothing suits power so well as extreme individualism. In fact, he explains, political and corporate interests aim at nothing less than “individualization,” since it is far easier to manipulate a collection of discrete and increasingly independent individuals than a community. Guns undermine just that — community. Their pervasive, open presence would sow apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear, all emotions that are corrosive of community and civic cooperation. To that extent, then, guns give license to autocratic government.

Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism. It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite. And as the Occupy movement makes clear, also the demonstrators that precipitated regime change in Egypt and Myanmar last year, assembled masses don’t require guns to exercise and secure their freedom, and wield world-changing political force. Arendt and Foucault reveal that power does not lie in armed individuals, but in assembly — and everything conducive to that.

One last thought:  What does such philosophical high mindedness (Foucalt, forsooth!)  have to do with actual change in the way America understands and regulated guns?

Obviously, words don’t stop bullets.  We do need a new, powerful legal framework in which the nitty-gritty of guns and American life are reshaped.  There’s all the stuff we have and will talk about, from regulating the registration of firearms and the licensing of their owners, to restrictions on types of weapons, to insurance and its role in internalizing the social costs of civilian gun ownership and so on.  Others here have already started those lines of thought, and I promise I’ll do so as well.

But one of the biggest challenges we face is that over the last two decades or so, the NRA and its gun nut allies have captured much of the language of liberty as it applies to guns.  Framing regulation of guns as an infringement of gun rights has seen a drop in support for gun regulation from close to 80% to below 45% in Gallup’s polling of the question.  The ability to assert the “guns everywhere” position as a test of freedom has given the NRA and its running dogs* a huge rhetorical advantage.  We need to take it back.  Arguments like the one Debrander makes can help us do so.  We can amplify that one voice with our own…as in this small way, I hope to do here.

*you can take the China hand out of the business, but you can’t take the China out of the hand.

Image: Édouard Manet, Mister Pertuiset, The Lion Hunter, 1881

Where Mike Huckabee Needs To Go

Mike Huckabee has never been what you might call my favorite person.  But it’s always depressing to see folks with influence plumb new depths.  By now, I’m sure you’ve heard he had to say about the Sandy Hook School shootings:

“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” Huckabee said on Fox News.”Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

In other words:  Twenty-eight deaths, including the murder of twenty kids, was the fault not of the shooter, nor of a gun lobby that portrays military weapons as household tools.  Rather, said Huckabee, it was your fault and mine for having failed to appease his angry god by public worship in school.

Saying so is to implicate not just America at large in the crime.  It also adds up to a claim that those involved in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in particular were complicit in this massacre, for the banishment of one deity or another occured in that particular school too.  Lost a kid?  Too bad.  Shoulda prayed harder; shoulda held up a cross; shoulda, coulda, sorry old chum.

I can’t begin to write the rage and disgust I feel for that sanctimonious shit.  (Whether the word “shit” in that sentence applies to the man or the thought I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.) I want to say that it seems to me that there is a special place in hell Mike Huckabee.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I can say that any more eloquently  than a howl and a “with a rusty pitchfork too!” kind of remark.  Fortunately, there are others who could and did describe exactly the appropriate fate for Mr. Huckabee — from one of whom, with your permission, I will now borrow.

Here’s one possibility that would satisfy my sense of justice:

The sides were crusted over with a mould/Plastered upon them by foul mists that rise,/And both with eyes and nose a contest hold./The bottom is so deep, in vain our eyes/Searched it till further up the bridge we went,/To where the arch o’erhangs what under lies./Ascended there, our eyes we downward bent,/And I saw people in such ordure drowned,/A very cesspool ’twas of excrement./And while I from above am searching round,/One with a head so filth-smeared I picked out,/I knew not if ’twas lay, or tonsure-crowned./‘Why then so eager,’ asked he with a shout, ‘To stare at me of all the filthy crew?’/And I to him: ‘Because I scarce can doubt/That formerly thee dry of hair I knew…

But perhaps that’s not miserable enough.  How’s this?

Then we descended from the bridge’s head,/Where with the eighth bank is its junction wrought/And full beneath me was the Bolgia spread,/And I perceived that hideously ’twas fraught/With serpents; and such monstrous forms they bore,/Even now my blood is curdled at the thought./Henceforth let sandy Libya boast no more!/Though she breed hydra, snake that crawls or flies,/Twy-headed, or fine-speckled, no such store/Of plagues, nor near so cruel, she supplies,/ Though joined to all the land of Ethiop,/And that which by the Red Sea waters lies./’Midst this fell throng and dismal, without hope/A naked people ran, aghast with fear—/No covert for them and no heliotrope/Their hands were bound by serpents at their rear,/Which in their reins for head and tail did get/A holding-place: in front they knotted were./And lo! to one who on our side was set/A serpent darted forward, him to bite/At where the neck is by the shoulders met./Nor O nor I did any ever write/More quickly than he kindled, burst in flame,/And crumbled all to ashes./And when quite He on the earth a wasted heap became/He on the earth a wasted heap became,/The ashes of themselves together rolled,/Resuming suddenly their former frame.

(Dante, Inferno, Canto XVIII, lines 106-121 and Canto XXIV, lines 79-106)

The translation’s a little old-fashioned, I know — but that’s what Gutenberg.org had on hand.

In any event, if I were a believer, I’d be hoping that Dante’s description of the torments of the damned is spot on.  And if it were then I would suggest to Mike Huckabee that he be afraid.  Very, very afraid.

Image: Pieter Huys, The Last Judgement, between 1555 and c. 1560

I Believe The Word You’re Looking For Is “Boy.”

Soonergrunt and I saw this at about the same time*, but here’s that survivor of adversity Josh Romney commenting on the nature and character of the President of the United States (via TPM):

“I don’t know if you guys saw the debate last week,” Josh Romney said, as the crowd cheered and applauded. “I take a lot of pride in that, because — I don’t know if you noticed, but I was — me and my brothers were responsible for my dad doing so well…

“So as a father, he learned how to debate an obstinate child. We had a lot of fun, we had a lot of fun watching the debate.”

Seriously, once again, I find myself in the odd position of wanting to thank a member of the opposing team.  Really, Josh, I appreciate this insight, this glimpse inside the real views of Team Romney.

The President of the United States — the one who steered the country through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the one who passed the most significant health care reform in two generations, the one who saved the auto industry (in which your own family once took pride, as I recall), the one who steered a very delicate course that ended with the fall of more than one dictator and the transformation of autocratic Arab regimes into something much closer to one their own people recognize as legitimate, the guy who got Bin Laden and all the rest — that great American is to you “an obstinate child.”

Really?

Oh — and I forgot to mention.  That president, our president, your president, like it or not, happens to be the first African-American to hold that office, which among many other things means he has to deal with a level of identity pressure unlike anything a born-rich, never-has-to-wonder-about-your-children’s-children’s-material-well-being guy like yourself.  And with all of that you’re going to call that man “an obstinate child.”  Just a brat arguing with Daddy-knows-best at the dinner table.  A servant, perhaps, a member of the lower orders, who should, by rights, know his place?

As I said, the word you are looking for is “boy.”  Really, you just said it.

IOW:  we approach asymptotically the point at which the entire GOP shouts as one: Ni-CLANG!

Oh. One more thing. Again, thanks Josh.  A significant portion of your dad’s polling boost has come from increased enthusiasm on your side, and a depressed drop on ours.  Stuff like this makes me and mine take notice, and it only does us good when you stir the pot this way.

Speaking out of snark for just one minute, despite all the evidence to date, Josh Romney’s remark reminds me once again that there is simply no bottom over there — no reservoir of shame nor self awareness that can puncture the single conviction that I can be sure the Romney clan possesses:  that theirs is the divine right to rule.  Such faith is, of course, singularly disqualifying its possessors from the reward they seek.

Let us make it so.

*Soonergrunt twittered on it first, but I got to Starbucks WiFi before he did, so there!

.Image: Jan Mitjans, Portrait of Maria of Orange with Hendrik van Zuijlestein and a servant,  c. 1665

Better Press Corps (Time edition)/Odds and Ends.

A couple of things.

As Zander points out, Ta-Nehisi Coates has already gutted  Tucker Carlson.  In my view, the prematurely bow-tied young fogey has finally and irrevocably crossed the SchwarzDrudgechild boundary.  He has descended into a region where the ordinary laws of space and time break down.  He will experience nothing but an infinite loop of right-wing fantasy world affirmation, while those of us safely beyond the event horizon will enjoy the blessed tranquility of something approximating real life.

Not going to bother with FdB either, who (a) never claimed to be a journalist and hence doesn’t belong in this post and (b) whose latest effort to troll this and other blogs seems to me simply sad.  Mistermix deals with that last and oddly jumbled cry for help more gently than I would, and I think it best just to leave it lie, but for this:  in the past, I’ve achieved world-competitive pinnacles of high dudgeon when right wing folks assert as facts claims like : “Bloggers are insecure, as a species. I find that if you scratch at the perfectly calculated pose of preemptive superiority, you find people who are unable to look you in the face while they tell you you’re wrong.”  This is McArdle-worthy — akin to her habit  of saying her (unnamed) liberal friends are all (x).  Freddy is better than that by far, usually.  Here’s hoping he finds a better analytical groove soon.

Nope, the reason I’m chiming up when I should be doing almost anything else is to deal with the latest bit of truthiness from Time’s website, a Michael Scherer bit of wisdom on lying in politics telling us…wait for it…that both sides do it.

Most of the article is a rehash of stuff a lot of folks have already been covering about the role of party affiliation (and leader-influence) on whether or not mere factual argument penetrates somebody’s body of assumptions and agreed narratives.  Nothing wrong with that, for the most part, other than it’s old enough to grow whiskers.

But as he attempts to find equivalence Scherer surrenders to his default village instinct (an example of the pathology he goes on to describe, perhaps?)  He offers one notable Romney lie — the claim regularly repeated that Obama’s administration has gutted welfare-to-work rules, and he says, almost bluntly enough to satisfy even partisan me, that “The ad was unmistakably deceptive.” (It was false, and not merely misleading, but still, this is a pretty clear evaluation.”

But then he goes on to put forward two alleged Obama falsehoods.  Here’s the first:

“Nobody accused Mr. Romney of being a felon,” he said. In fact, one of the President’s senior strategists, Stephanie Cutter, told reporters a month earlier that Romney was misrepresenting himself either to the American people or to securities regulators—“which is a felony,” she said.  Cutter’s was a conditional accusation but an accusation nonetheless.

So, on the one hand you have a piece of information publicly and widely disseminated that is false (the welfare/work stuff) and on the other you have someone saying that if Romney did (x) that’s a felony, and thus Obama lied when he said that his folks hadn’t called Romney a felon.  I’m not going into the weeds of parsing how what Obama said is in fact accurate (if politically clever in the mode of the great and vicious LBJ).  But if you can’t see the consequential difference in the two statements you’re in the wrong line of work.

But the really egregious statement comes a little later:

One of the most galling Obama deceptions, embedded in two television ads, asserts that Romney backed a bill outlawing “all abortion even in cases of rape and incest.” This is not true. Romney has consistently maintained, since becoming a pro-life politician in 2005, that he supports exceptions for rape and incest and to protect the life of the mother.

“This is not true.”

Sure you want to pick that hill to die on Michael?

Consider:

In March of 2012, Romney explained to radio host Tommy Tucker that his current positions were the same as “the last time.” He offered the same to Sean Hannity in a November 2011 interview: “I have the same positions today I had four years ago where you know I’m a conservative guy.”

…From an Aug. 8, 2007 ABC News article:

Appearing Monday on “Good Morning America,” Romney was asked by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos if he supports the Republican Party’s 2004 platform on abortion rights, which states, “We support a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution and we endorse legislation to make it clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”
Romney replied, “You know, I do support the Republican platform, and I support that being part of the Republican platform and I’m pro-life.”

…Here’s a post from Peter J. Smith at LifeSiteNews:

Romney made the choice to abandon his earlier rejection of the human life amendment as he poured money and energy into winning the Ames caucus in Iowa, where Republican voters run strongly social conservative.
“I do support the Republican platform and I do support that big part of the Republican platform, and I am pro-life,” Romney said during an August 6 Republican debate, when asked whether he affirmed the human life amendment, a key part of the 2004 Republican pro-life platform that was written by his pro-life advisor James Bopp,Jr..

The human life amendment intends to change the US Constitution by expanding 14th Amendment protections – such as due process and equal protection clauses – to include unborn children. Such an amendment would ban abortions nationwide and repeal the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

I have a suggestion.   Michael?  Anytime you feel tempted to use the words “consistent” and “Romney” in the same sentence, lie down until the feeling passes.

In that vein, I should note that Jason Linkins, the HuffPo writer who assembled the record quoted just above also dug up this bit of High Romneyism:

However the Associated Press reports that Romney later qualified his support for a human life amendment. According to the AP, Romney said his advisor Bopp had told him “there are a wide range of possible human life amendments” ranging from a total ban on abortion to an amendment that let states make the decision. On top of that, getting both houses of Congress and 38 out of 50 states to support a constitutional amendment, Bopp told him, “is just not realistic.”

What does Romney really think about abortion?  Who the f**k knows.  If I were to guess I’d say his deepest wish is that talk of abortion would go away — he’s running for office for Pete’s sake.  But Romney’s waffle doesn’t get Scherer off the hook:  He claimed the Obama campaign lied because Romney has since 2005 maintained a single and clearly articulated position on an issue — but that statement is easily and clearly shown to be that which drops from the south end of a north facing horse.

To steal the phrase from Brad DeLong, why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?

Image:  Giovanni Bellini, Four Allegories: Falsehood (or Wisdom), c. 1490.

Blunt Clarity (From A Source Not Often Cited In This Space)

Via Ed Kilgore, I came across this from frequent blogosphere object of scorn, William Saletan.  He first makes clear exactly what it was the US Embassy in Egypt said in its tweets and other communication through the critical period leading up to and during the attack on the compound:

When you read the tweets alongside the initial statement, the message is clear. Free speech is a universal right. The Muslim-baiting movie is an abuse of that right. The embassy rejects the movie but defends free speech and condemns the invasion of its compound….

He then lines that up against Romney’s disastrous and deeply corrupt performance, stating at one point:

Romney’s description of the embassy’s initial statement—“sympathizing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt, instead of condemning their actions”—was blatantly false…

And at another:

At a news conference Wednesday morning, Romney escalated his assault: “The administration was wrong to stand by a statement sympathizing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt, instead of condemning their actions. It’s never too early for the United States government to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values.”

Until, the ground prepared, Saletan offers this blunt exegesis of that sorry text:

At his press conference, Romney accused Obama of “having that embassy reiterate a statement effectively apologizing for the right of free speech.” Romney claimed that the embassy had said, in his paraphrase, “We stand by our comments that suggest that there’s something wrong with the right of free speech.” This, too, was a Romney lie. The embassy had declared five times in writing that free speech was a universal right.
What made Romney’s statement and press conference disturbing, however, was his repeated use of the words sympathize and apology to conflate three issues the Cairo embassy had carefully separated: bigotry, free speech, and violence. The embassy had stipulated that expressions of bigotry, while wrong, were protected by freedom of speech and didn’t warrant retaliatory violence. Romney, by accusing the embassy of “sympathizing with those who had breached” the compound, equated moral criticism of the Mohammed movie with support for violence. In so doing, Romney embraced the illiberal Islamist mindset that led to the embassy invasion: To declare a movie offensive is to authorize its suppression….

Exactly so.  And to my mind Saletan here has expressed as well as anyone yet exactly why Romney’s statements over the last couple of days were more than just grandstanding — a case of shoot first and aim later as our President put it last night.  And it’s certainly more than the Smirk, no matter how bizarrely revealing it was to see Romney grin at the thought of having politicized (successfully, he seem to have thought) the deaths of four Americans.

What Romney’s words actually mean, Saletan says (and I agree) is something profoundly un-, even anti-American.

Which is to say that Romney’s behavior over the last couple of days disqualifies him from the job he seeks both because he’s shown he lacks the basic temperament and analytical habits to do the job, and because what instincts he does have are at war with the values of a small “l” liberal polity.

Or, as Saletan concludes:

I don’t know where you were born, Mr. Romney (just kidding!), but where I come from, there’s nothing more American than recognizing the idiocy of a man’s views and, at the same time, his right to express them. If you can’t tell the difference between those two things, the main threat to our values right now isn’t President Obama, the Egyptians, the Libyans, or our diplomats in Cairo. It’s you.

Yup.  Go read the whole thing. (Or at least that rump I haven’t already lifted…;)

Image: Circle of Rembrandt, Bust of a laughing young man, c. 1629-1630

(Democratic) Party Like It’s 1936!

Two days now after President Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, and the conventional wisdom among pundits has now pretty much set the narrative: OK, not great, overshadowed by Clinton and Michelle Obama.* [Warning, or perhaps merely, alert: both of those are Sully links.]

One frequent strand of criticism is that in the midst of the predicament that continues to bedevil the United States now in its fourth year or so of too damn many people out of work, Obama went small, talking incremental solutions in times that demand transformative policy.

David Brooks, for one, had a terrible sad immediately after Obama finished despite the obvious howling enthusiasm of those in the hall.** His first reaction, delivered with the kind of grey pallor you get when you’re still trying to grab your senses after being whacked in the gut, was swiftly echoed in the column he posted shortly thereafter:

But what I was mostly looking for were big proposals, big as health care was four years ago…At its base, this is a party with a protective agenda, not a change agenda — dedicated to defending government in all its forms…Worse, the speech was dominated by unexplained goals that were often worthy, but also familiar, modest and incommensurate with the problems at hand….The country that exists is not on the right track. It has a completely dysfunctional political system. What was there in this speech that will make us think the next few years will be any different? America will only be governable again if there is a leader who breaks the mold and reframes the debate. Romney is unlikely to do that, and Obama’s speech didn’t offer much either.

Leave aside the nonsense and the sleight of hand on display here and throughout this particular column.  Brooks has a genuine sense of disappointment because, as in the passage quoted above, he knows that Romney and the current Republican party is hopeless — and he loathes his fantasy of what Democrats actually aim to do (that “protective agenda” and “defending government in all its forms” BS).  In particular, he feels that in these terribly parlous times, we need audacity above all else — and that President Obama’s speech lacked the necessary vision to accompany what he concedes is this President’s impressive character. (Again, leave aside the question of what “audacity” got is into during the previous administraton

Well, all that — the general sense of disappointment at the lack of orgasmic moments in the speech plus Brooks (and others) seizing on the “too small for the times” meme made me think.   Is there any historical reference for what someone in such circumstance might say that would shed light on what Obama was trying — and in my view, successfully — to convey.

Why, yes there is.  Remember how so many speakers termed the Bush collapse and its consequences the most disastrous since the Great Depression?  Well, y’all may recall that we had a President elected to deal with the mess the Republicans had left him back then, and four years later, he had to make the case for re-election in times of economic hardship.  To be clear — Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal (or New Deals) had a major impact on the economy in his first term, during which unemployment fell from 25% to just over 14%.  You may note, however, that as the campaign in 1936 took place, that still represented a load of misery.  So what did he say to the 1936 Democratic National Convention?

This, from the amazing finish to FDR’s speech:

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

The brave and clear platform adopted by this Convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that Government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.

But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them.

For more than three years we have fought for them. This Convention, in every word and deed, has pledged that that fight will go on.

The defeats and victories of these years have given to us as a people a new understanding of our Government and of ourselves. Never since the early days of the New England town meeting have the affairs of Government been so widely discussed and so clearly appreciated. It has been brought home to us that the only effective guide for the safety of this most worldly of worlds, the greatest guide of all, is moral principle.

We do not see faith, hope and charity as unattainable ideals, but we use them as stout supports of a Nation fighting the fight for freedom in a modern civilization.

Faith— in the soundness of democracy in the midst of dictatorships.

Hope—renewed because we know so well the progress we have made.

Charity— in the true spirit of that grand old word. For charity literally translated from the original means love, the love that understands, that does not merely share the wealth of the giver, but in true sympathy and wisdom helps men to help themselves.

We seek not merely to make Government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.

We are poor indeed if this Nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.

In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.

It is a sobering thing, my friends, to be a servant of this great cause. We try in our daily work to remember that the cause belongs not to us, but to the people. The standard is not in the hands of you and me alone. It is carried by America. We seek daily to profit from experience, to learn to do better as our task proceeds.

Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.

I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.

I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war. [full text here]

Altered for changes in idiom, the oratorical style of the speakers, and the fact that the economic royalists that vex us so no longer concede even political freedom to those who have won it so recently and at such cost, and this maps onto to President Barack Obama’ s understanding of the task before us almost eerily perfectly.  Here’s his last few sentences:

If you reject the notion that this nation’s promise is reserved for the few, your voice must be heard in this election.

If you reject the notion that our government is forever beholden to the highest bidder, you need to stand up in this election.

If you believe that new plants and factories can dot our landscape, that new energy can power our future, that new schools can provide ladders of opportunity to this nation of dreamers, if you believe in a country where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same rules, then I need you to vote this November.

America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that now. Yes, our path is harder, but it leads to a better place.Yes, our road is longer, but we travel it together.

We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind.  We pull each other up.  We draw strength from our victories. And we learn from our mistakes. But we keep our eyes fixed on that distant horizon knowing that providence is with us and that we are surely blessed to be citizens of the greatest nation on earth.

Thank you, God bless you and God bless these United States.

Throughout his address, Roosevelt offered no grander vision than Obama’s, at least in part for the same reason:  he knew what needed to be done because he’d been doing it, even if the job wasn’t finished yet.  He understood, as does President Obama, and President Clinton, and Joe Biden and many, many others, that what’s in play this election is not change, but freedom — the question of whether that much abused word must be construed only in it’s narrowest sense, or in a way that actually enables members of a free society to act freely.  The alternative, as both Roosevelt and Obama warned, is that the opposing forces — those that in both 1936 and 2012 had presided over the disaster it was left to Democratic presidents to repair — get to reverse the unfinished business of creating a society both more just and materially successful?

The question answers itself — or should, and will, if we get the job done between now and November 6.

One last thought:  I usually ascribe to Brooks malign motives.  Here, while the usual writing to a preordained conclusion (Obama is too small for the office), I think this is less a rational act of dishonesty and much more a fundamental inability to hear what was being said.  If I’m right in the parallel I see between FDR and BHO, then there really is a radical claim being made, a demand that the economic oligarchs recognize and act on responsibility to society, and not just shareholders or individual self interest.  That’s the vision.  It’s not about policy; it’s about the template of human relations and obligations from which policy will flow.  And little Brooks — small in mind and emotional range — doesn’t seem able to process that thought.  Which is, in this one instance, more sad than evil.

*Not me, BTW.  Like a lot of folks, I thought the speech started at relatively low volume, and it may be that Obama took a moment to find the music in the words on the page.  But I thought the speech was intricately constructed and that on the night, it built beautifully to an unexpected climax:  that the choice isn’t simply between vampires and competent, if fallible, human beings, but between Hobbesian wolves and citizens, members of common enterprise, what the founders might have called our commonwealth. That is, Obama’s use of the word “citizens” over and over again seemed to me a moral exhortation, a call to do not simply what is necessary or rational or in some limited interest, but what is right for the polis of which he reminded us we are all members, citizens.  Damn fine speech writing and delivery if you ask me, which  you didn’t.  See Fallows for an interesting assessment of the speech, complete w. two reader emails that describe pretty much the speech I saw.

**That last section of the speech really was a grand example of using a sense of dynamics (in the musical  sense) to lead your audience to the emotional conclusion you want them to reach.  A textbook demonstration of applause surfing, as I think someone said on the night.

Images:  Titian, The Marquis of Vasto addressing his troops, 1540-1541.

Hendrik Gerritsz. Pot, The Miser, 1640s

Do You Feel Lucky (Enough To Mess With A Nun)? Well, Do Ya’ Punk?

Before we get all whipped up into that necessary frenzy that will carry us across the finish line 60 days hence…here’s a look back at what was to me the most moving speech from last night that wasn’t by an ex-President:

Oh! Does she bring it — joyfully and hard — to the very core or the matter.

You can’t lead a good life, you can’t lead a good society, if you live only for yourself.  She quoted Matthew 24:40 — “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me…”* and while the committedly Jewish atheist in my might counter with the more direct Hillel aphorism,** if I were Paul Ryan, and if I had that last residue of conscience left in me, I would be quaking in my boots just now.  Sister Simone ripped away the cloak of sanctity with which the GOP has shrouded so much of its viciousness over the last years — the venom directed at GLBT folk, the terror in the face of women claiming agency, the desperate drive to dismember any claims on either self-interest or conscience that the poor may have on the society as a whole.

Best part?  When she reminded Paul Ryan that the bishops…the bishops! and not “merely” some nuns!…had condemned his budget as immoral.  1A:  stating proudly that her version of a pro-life commitment extend to those who are in fact living among us.

A truly great speech, and one is rocking me into the right mood for what’s to come.

*I grabbed the King James version, which is not what I think she quoted last night.  But I do love the music.

**”If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am only for myself, who am I?  If not now, when?”

Unreal Americans

Just to pile on the Sununu meltdown– as one must, in this case:

John Sununu does us all a favor.  He comes ever closer to the moment when some prominent Republican just up and says it.  Not Ni-Clang! exactly — but the underlying conviction that lies behind that word.

As everyone reading this no doubt knows by now, Mr. Sununu, former governor of one of the whitest states in the union, former chief of staff to Bush the First and now one of Mitt Romney’s official surrogates, said this today (via TPM):

John Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire and a leading Romney surrogate, told reporters that Obama’s recent defense of public infrastructure shows he “doesn’t understand how America works.”

“I wish this president would learn how to be an American,” Sununu said later.

I’m white.  Have been all my life.  Haven’t had to put up with the daily tests that attend being nonwhite in America.  So I’m not going to go on long about this.  But I can tell you that you don’t need to be African-American to ask yourself what you are hearing when John Sununu tells you that Barack Obama, President of the United States, born here, educated here, married here, raising two kids here, the whole run — doesn’t know how to be an American.

I think I can guess:  hell — I don’t need to guess.  As I said, I’m a white guy, but I hear Sununu loud and clear, and what I pick up is a prominent Republican saying pretty damn clearly that African Americans aren’t real Americans.  They need to learn how to pass…

One could say that I’m being overly particular here.  To Republicans, as we’ve seen over several administrations now, Democrats aren’t real Americans.  When on occasion some Democrat manages to dupe the electorate into sending someone with a “D” after their name into high office, that’s simply an error to be corrected, by restricting the franchise to the right people — real Americans — if need be.

But just because a result is over-determined, that doesn’t mean that the most grotesque explanation isn’t true.  As here, IMHO.

Is John Sununu — surrogate to Republican presidential nominee-presumptive Mitt Romney — a racist?

A simple yes or no is not quite the right way to respond to that form of the question.  Rather ask:  Did John Sununu just say some racist shit, dog whistling to that portion of the electorate that responds to such filth?

I stand within a tradition that weighs works, not any inner manifestation of piety.  By that standard?

Now the question answers itself.

Image:  Jan Steen, A Class with a Sleeping Schoolmaster, 1672.

 

First:  a must see.  Seriously, put this one on your bucket list:

This is what’s left of ancient Mycenae, as you follow the ancient way, travelling east until you come to the Lion Gate.

Play with the name of the family whose home this was:  the Atreidae, (not to mention House Atreides…).  Think Agamemnon, passing beneath those two stone beasts, home from ten years of war, with hours left to live.  Remember the blood Cassandra saw before it was spilt, and it’s impossible (at least it was for me) not to think of the horror and terror of war as it touches every sphere of human fellowship….

I stopped at the top of the citadel for as long as my 12 year old traveling companion would let me, looking down on the Plain of Argos west to the mountains, south to the sea.  The myths of battle flow from here, the call to glory, and as well, always — if your mind is set to the right resonance — the bitter truths that the original singer-writer slipped past his hero-drunk audiences.*

All which is to say a couple of things.  First, and less, I’ve been on the road with my family, trying to remember what this thing called Vay-Kay-Shun might be, taking off without showing Mistermix’s courtesy in saying see-you-in-a-bit.

Second, and more, I came to Mycenae right around the time the ‘tubes were all snarled up in reactions to the Supreme Court decision upholding the Obama administration’s health care reform law.  I was utterly unsurprised by the flood of wingnut tears, of course, and I’ve grown accustomed to the radical destructiveness of what now passes for acceptable rhetoric on the right.  But perhaps because of time spent in a country so thoroughly and brutally conscious of the costs of violence unto their children’s’ children’s’ generations, this and this tripped my disgust reflex in a way that I haven’t been able to shake.  Y’all saw these, I’m sure — ABL blogged them here, and even from my distance from reliable internet, I’m guessing this was a pretty well discussed issue.   But anyway, money quotes:

When a gang of criminals subvert legitimate government offices and seize all power to themselves without the real consent of the governed their every act and edict is of itself illegal and is outside the bounds of the Rule of Law. In such cases submission is treason. Treason against the Constitution and the valid legitimate government of the nation to which we have pledged our allegiance for years. To resist by all means that are right in the eyes of God is not rebellion or insurrection, it is patriotic resistance to invasion.  (Mississippi Tea Party Chairman Roy Nicholson, emphasis in the original.)

And:

If government can mandate that I pay for something I don’t want, then what is beyond its power? If the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday paves the way for unprecedented intrusion into personal decisions, then has the Republic all but ceased to exist? If so, then is armed rebellion today justified? (Michigan former GOP spokesman Matthew Davis.)

So much prologue to the obvious point:  Mr. Nicholson and Mr. Davis are gutless fools.  There’s a certain vicious pleasure in the hope that they — and only they — might actually get to experience the reality of armed insurrection against the established authority of the government of the United States of America.  Plenty of folks — and not just our Confederate friends — have tried that one on, and it hasn’t worked out well for them from the Whiskey Rebellion** forward.

But I can’t take any joy at imagining the comeuppance that delusional keyboard commandos would face if ever they — or more likely, the fools they “inspired” — actually took violent action.  Not with Mycenae so present before me.  Wars are not Homeric poems, which is something Homer himself clearly understood, if Odysseus’s conversations with the heroes who preceded him into Hades offer any hint.  They wreck people, and not simply those who are obviously war’s casualties. I’m not going to belabor that thought in this forum, because so many here know this as well or better than I.

So: idiots will be with us always, and two otherwise utterly inconsequential folks like Messrs. Nicholson and Davis — barely public figures at all — aren’t worth the spit it would take to express my true opinion.

No: what matters is that this kind of talk can’t take place without the tacit permission of actual leaders — informal ones, like Limbaugh, and the actual political actors on the right, figures like Boehner, McConnell, Cohen, Ryan, McCain, whoever.  First among them, of course, is the man who would be president, Mitt Romney.

Leaders shape the frame of argument.  They delineate the forms of dissent and opposition.  They define, both by what they say and by what they fail to rule out, whether we have a small “r” republican approach to government, or rule by the manipulators of the manipulated mob.  When they stay silent they are the cowards of the headline, passive bystanders as their followers betray the basic principles of (small “d”) democratic politics.

Greece is a good place from which to think about this.  You don’t have to go back to Agamemnon or to Plato; living memory — the civil war, the colonels, very recent memory indeed offer regular reminders of the fragility of government by consent of the governed.  Words matter here, and have for millennia.

So it is in this place, with that history in mind, that I am reminded once again that the habit of dismissing crap like that spewed by Nicholson and Davis as wingnuts being wingnuts is not acceptable.  The speakers themselves may not count for much, but for a nominally civil society to allow such speech to pass without massive retaliation, actual leadership from those who would lead from that side…well, that’s how individuals get hurt, and democracies die.  It’s happened before, not many miles from where I sit as I write this.

That’s enough.  I’ve committed once more the sin of belaboring the obvious. Catch y’all stateside soon enough.

*I know that this is an anachronistic reading.  Sue me.

**It’s interesting (at least to me) to discover in the course of writing this post that there exists a libertarian alternate history that imagines a leader in the Whiskey Rebellion persuading the federal militia not to attack them, instead turning around to march on the capital, capture and execute George Washington for treason (sic!) and then swap out the Constitution for what would become a The North American Confederacy (sic!!).  Who knew it was Washington, and not Lincoln, from whom all our troubles flow…

 

Folk Song Army

A few days late, but I was moved by this event. Murderous Pam Geller hero Anders Behring Breivik has gone on record as hating a children’s song that celebrates multi-cultural tolerance and mutual good will, taking the suggestion that getting along with each other as clear evidence of the  Communist plot to upend society or some such.

Once this view became known, Norwegians responded thusly:

I know, as those of you familiar with the work this post title references, that it takes a lot more than singing to overcome the many evils that attend the ideal of a civil society.  But it never hurts — and often  helps — to perform acts to remind ourselves and the enemies of civil society that we are here, and we are not alone.  The Norwegians kicked ass here, in my humble opinion.

(Oh — and yes, I’ve noticed (as no one else has, or should) that I’ve been even more conspicuous by my absence here the last few weeks.  My day job still owns me more or less totally, and some family and fortunately minor health stuff have consumed all the free mental space left over.  But I’m not dead yet, and hope to rejoin the conversation in fits and starts as we engage the merry month of May.  Cheers all!)