Sin of Omission?

Al Jazeera seems to be “on a roll” this morning when it comes to relations between the United States and the rest of the world. The latest “News” article has the subcategory “Occupied West Bank.” I would guess that most readers know that this refers to the territory between the Jordan River and the eastern boundary of Israel. It would not surprise me that many readers know about Israel’s attempts to occupy this territory. So it was that the Al Jazeera headline “Europe, Canada condemn Israeli plans for new West Bank settlement” came to my attention.

A Palestinian flag placed as a memorial for three Palestinians killed by Jewish settlers occupying West Bank territory near Ramallah (photograph by Zain Jaafar for Agence France-Presse)

Apparently, Israeli does not want Palestinians to settle anywhere west of the Jordan River. Put another way, they want the Palestinians to be “Jordan’s problem,” rather than theirs. Unless I am mistaken, however, I do not think that many (if any) Palestinians settled to the east of the Jordan. Does Israel think that problems of settlement will be resolved if the Palestinians “just went away?” That is a proposition that is at least absurd, and I would not blame any Palestinian to dismiss it as downright obscene!

Does Israel want to “get even” with the suffering of Jews in Europe during the last century? The Palestinians have every right to settle somewhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. By all rights, such settling should take place with “good neighbor” relations. This leaves me wondering whether or not “good neighbor” can be translated into Hebrew!

Make America Sick Again?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/21/supreme-court-trump-research-dei

A “Battle Cry” Against Political Backlash

From the current vantage point, there is little doubt that the presidential election of 2016 has inflicted the most damage to the very concept of a “United States of America” that has emerged since the country was torn apart by Civil War. Writing as one born shortly after the end of World War II, it would be fair to say that the better part of my life has experienced a series of advances in the social world as well as the scientific world. Like many, I saw the election of President Barack Obama as a sign that the country had finally chosen open-mindedness to social diversity over fundamental convictions of hate directed towards “otherness.”

What we learned in November of 2016 was that significant social progress must always be on guard against regression to nativist prejudices. Under the current circumstances the scientific world is now taking as much of a beating as the social world. It has been as if rationality could not see the backlash coming, just as no one could see that the dissolution of monarchy in Germany after World War I would ultimately lead to the rise of the Nazi Party and the outbreak of World War II.

In that global context it is probably more than a little immodest to cite music as a channel through which fundamental issues of human rights and liberties can be expressed. However, they were expressed through music in this country going all the way back to the days of the Declaration of Independence and advancing through the Civil War and the Great Depression. In other words the album Battle Cry, available in both physical and digital form since the beginning of this year, is based on an extensive foundation of music committed to basic human rights.

courtesy of Kate Smith Promotions.

The album was produced by Atlanta-based jazz vocalist Virginia Schenck, who was dubbed “VA” by a local disc jockey and chose to adopt the moniker. The album’s title is taken for Schenck’s only contribution as a composer, a song entitled “Hear My Battle Cry.” Nevertheless, none of the remaining selections are explicitly militant. Rather, they reflect examples of progress and change, sometimes just hoped for but other times achieved. In other words, each of the eight other tracks (which include the texts of both the Pledge of Allegiance and the Gettysburg Address) provide musical reflections on how we have advanced and where advance as not been achieved.

At the end of the day, this album neither heals nor takes up arms in defiance. Rather, VA offers up her selections as a foundation for reflection. To the extent that reflective practices are currently on the rocks, it is clear that any “new beginning” will require such a foundation as a prerequisite. The tracks of Battle Cry may encourage at least some of us to set about laying that foundation.

Politicized Jazz for Our Time from Mark Dresser

Mark Dresser (photograph by Jim Carmody, courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz)

According to my records, the album Ain’t Nothing But A Cyber Coup & You was released by Clean Feed this past October. By all rights, I should be apologizing (yet again) for procrastination and scheduling delays; but, by way of an excuse, this seems like the ideal recording to discuss in the wake of yesterday’s State of the Union address. The music is performed by Mark Dresser, an acoustic bass player whose sense of jazz tradition owes much to Charles Mingus, another bassist who refused to shy away from politically sensitive issues (most explicitly by taking on the segregationist governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus). On this album Dresser leads the Mark Dresser Seven, whose other members are Nicole Mitchell on different sizes of flute, Marty Ehrlich on clarinet, bass clarinet, and alto saxophone, Keir GoGwilt on violin, Michael Dessen on trombone, Joshua White on piano, and Jim Black on percussion.

In the notes for the accompanying booklet, Dresser acknowledges Mingus in his second paragraph for providing the inspiration “to engage with our current dystopian landscape from a place of hope and positive potential.” To a great extent that phrase reminded me of the title of the anthology of Esquire articles that took on an earlier dystopia, the highly troubling times of the Sixties. The title of that volume was Smiling Through the Apocalypse. Indeed, I would argue that one encounters more wistful smiles in Dresser’s tracks than I ever did in most of my Mingus recordings.

This is not to say that Dresser is trying to sugarcoat current conditions. As a case in point, consider the track “Let Them Eat Paper Towels.” That was Paul Krugman’s headline for a column he wrote for The New York Times, calling out President Donald Trump’s callous and clueless attitude when he visited Puerto Rico after the island had been devastated by Hurricane Maria. Dresser gives a figurative voice to the Puerto Rican population by drawing upon the melody of the island’s unofficial anthem, “Que Bonita Bandera” (what a beautiful flag).

Dresser describes the title track as “an attempt to give acerbic levity to our national realty-horror-show of corruption, malice, xenophobia and class warfare.” As in “Let Them Eat Paper Towels,” he does this by incorporating well-chosen tunes. His “primary sources” come from the Great American Song Book: “I’m Just a Lucky So and So” and “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” This is one of the most intense tracks on the album, complete with a wild piano introduction from White that prepares the listener for the madness to follow.

While there are only six compositions on this recording, they are “interlaced” (Dresser’s word choice) with bass improvisations. These are performed on the McLagan Tines, invented by luthier Kent McLagen. As Dresser describes it, the instrument consists of “a set of seven graduated steel rods attached to a secondary bridge that touches the bass bridge, activating the resonant cavity of the bass.” This makes for some other-worldly melodic lines that, at least to my ear, seem to arise from the ability to set some of the more remote upper harmonics into resonance.

Listening to Ain’t Nothing But A Cyber Coup & You may not change your reaction to either the State of the Union Address or the conduct of the Senate over the last week, but it may still give some reassuring strokes to your personal attitude!

Google Responds with Half a Loaf

Readers may recall Tuesday's post documenting an account in which a post to an anti-Semitic blog received a page rank second only to a Wikipedia article. According to an article by Barbara Ortutay in the Business Report section of this mornings San Francisco Chronicle, Google plans to do something about this. They will deploy a new process under which those reviewing search results will see a flag classifying the article as "upsetting-offensive." Such a flag will also be taken into account in recalculating the ranking of the article.

It would appear that Google has also recognized that such flagging cannot, at least at present, be automated. So the search for articles that need to be flagged will be assigned to human being known as "quality raters." Admirable as this may be, all quality raters will be contractors. In other words Google does not see the work they do as significant enough to assign it to full-time staff. Mind you, we all know about how contractors have become "the new labor force;" but were quality of results is concerned, one would have thought that this would have been a core priority. If it does not, then just what is important to Google these days?

Newt Gingrich Takes Glenn Beck to the Next Level

I rather like the way in which our vernacular has now coined a phrase for reacting to the truly bizarre:  “You can’t make this shit up!”  Sadly, where Middle East policy is concerned, Newt Gingrich has demonstrated that you can make it up.  His declarations over the past couple of days have run the gamut from half-truths through specious deductions to flat-out misinterpretations of the historical record.  He has escalated confusion to a point where Al Jazeera English is one of the few news media with the patience to tease out a version of the current state of affairs that is more accurate than Gingrich’s fantasies.  Unfortunately, when it comes to dispelling confusion, the logic of Gingrich and his followers dictates that anyone who gets the news from Al Jazeera must be a terrorist.

Of course Gingrich is not interested in accuracy or logical consistency.  His only priority is to build up a base of voters;  and, as a pioneer of postmodern politics, he knows that one wins arguments in the eyes of those voters through rhetoric, rather than logic.  As I follow his words and his actions, I am reminded of the state of affairs about a year ago when Glenn Beck seemed to be the darling of conservative Republic thinking.  When he gave his Restoring Honor rally in Washington, I summarized my thoughts as follows:

The bottom line is that, whether it is a matter of fact-checking or the sort of semantic analysis that I have exercised here, Beck's claims are in sore need of valid warrants. Beck's rhetoric is neither more nor less than the 21st-century incarnation of the Big Lie, which Wikipedia describes as "a propaganda technique which entered mass consciousness with Adolf Hitler's 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf." In the simplest of terms, the principle is that people will believe anything, if you say it loud enough and long enough; and Beck has certainly demonstrated that he can be very good when it comes to being both loud in volume and long in duration.

This is not the first time a conservative Republican has tried to win votes through demagoguery.  After all, Sarah Palin was one of the speakers invited to Beck’s rally.  The real question is whether or not we have enough voters who, even though they may know demagoguery when they see it, have decided that they want it.  After all, last night Mitt Romney took a very confrontational stance in calling out Gingrich’s distortions;  but will it win Romney any percentage points in the polls?  Enquiring minds want to know!

CHUTZPAH for Those who Don't Understand CHUTZPAH

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) first brought itself to public attention through guerrilla tactics, such as throwing paint at expensive fur coats (while they were being worn). These days they seem to appreciate that such tactics can alienate potential supporters. So they are now taking approaches that have less to do with causing damage and more to do with spreading the word, particularly to those who need to hear it most. Last night two individuals, acting entirely on their own behalf, decided to take the word to the rich and mighty by intruding on one of their more elite playgrounds, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden in New York. Here is how Associated Press National Writer Ben Walker related the story:

Sadie the Scottie was fully expected to reach the purple podium at America's top dog show. She did, after two intruders turned the center ring at Westminster into their own platform.

The heavily favored Scottish terrier won best in show Tuesday night and seemed to be an easy choice. Her team waited quite a while for this victory — it took a little longer, too, because of a startling protest inspired by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Shortly before judge Elliott Weiss picked Sadie, a pair of well-dressed women walked into the big ring at Madison Square Garden and held signs over their heads that said "Mutts Rule" and "Breeders Kill Shelter Dogs' Chances," the latter a slogan popularized by PETA.

The crowd of 15,000 gasped at the sudden protest, booed the women and then cheered as a half-dozen security guards ushered them away without incident.

PETA members Dana Sylvester and Hope Round were charged with criminal trespass, police said. They acted on their own, the organization said, but it supported them.

To make my own position clear, with the exception of a couple of turtles and hamsters that I had as a kid, every pet that my wife and I have had has been adopted. I feel there are strong ethical grounds for protesting the use of animals for show purposes; but I appreciate the tact behind PETA's "official" reaction to this incident. At the same time it takes a lot of chutzpah to barnstorm a place like Madison Square Garden. In support for their mustering the chutzpah to do so, I wish to present this week's Chutzpah of the Week award to Sylvester and Round. It means far more to me than any thoughts about whether Sadie deserved to have her party spoiled.

Presence of Malice?

Chief U. S. District Judge Vaughan Walker has introduced a new twist in the dispute here in California over the legitimacy of same-sex marriage. Here is how Bob Egelko reported the matter for this morning's San Francisco Chronicle:

A federal judge has ordered sponsors of California's Proposition 8 to release campaign strategy documents that opponents believe could show that backers of the same-sex marriage ban were motivated by prejudice against gays.

Plaintiffs in a federal suit seeking to overturn Prop. 8 - two same-sex couples, a gay-rights organization and the city of San Francisco - contend that the measure's real purpose was to strip a historically persecuted minority group of rights held by the majority.

If the courts find that the ballot measure was motivated by discrimination, they could strike it down without having to decide whether gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry.

"The intent or purpose of Prop. 8 is central to this litigation," Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker declared Thursday in requiring backers of the November 2008 measure to give the opposing side their internal campaign communications.

Backers' argument

A day earlier, Prop 8's sponsors told Walker in a court filing that their opponents' claim of anti-gay motivation is legally irrelevant.

In a final round of arguments seeking to uphold the measure without a trial, defenders of the ballot measure said California voters were entitled to amend their Constitution to preserve the traditional, male-female definition of marriage for numerous reasons - including a belief that "extending marriage to same-sex couples carries a risk of weakening the institution of marriage."

Because there is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage, it wouldn't matter if the plaintiffs could show that Prop. 8 "was also accompanied by irrational attitudes such as animus," or prejudice against lesbians and gays, said attorney Charles Cooper.

The bottom line is that Walker ruled against Cooper's argument, and this can have implications far beyond the scope of Proposition 8 and gay rights. California has a reputation for being overly enthusiastic (to put it politely) when it comes to proposing initiatives to be settled on state ballots. Walker decided that Proposition 8 was a clear example in which such an initiative was being used for discrimination, if not more the more extreme practice of hate speech; and he concluded that this was an abuse of the right of citizens to propose such initiatives.

The reaction from the Proposition 8 camp has been "fascinating" (as in Spock raising his eyebrow) in an ironic sort of way. Another of their lawyers, Andrew Pugno, declared:

This will make any citizen group think twice before attempting a ballot initiative.

Indeed, it will, Mr. Pugno; and those of us who believe in "liberty and justice for all" should take that as a good thing! Injecting even the slightest hint of hate speech in something as serious as a ballot initiative is tantamount to shouting "Fire!" in a crowded room, the classical example of "free speech" not protected by the First Amendment. Walker's ruling amounts to declaring that Proposition 8 should never have gone on the ballot in the first place (which would have spared us all a truly ugly advertising campaign, which really did test the boundaries of legitimate free speech); and, if all goes as Pugno anticipates, those who try to use the ballot box in the future for discriminatory practices will be obliged to think twice (or perhaps just once, for the more reflective and prescient).

The Latest Decision on Prayer in School

School prayer came to the Supreme Court again yesterday; and, even if it involved a rather narrow issue of practice, it deserves to be examined in terms of its possible implications. Here is how Associated Press Writer Jesse J. Holland reported the story:

Coach Marcus Borden used to bow his head and drop to one knee when his football team prayed. But the Supreme Court on Monday ended the practice when it refused to hear the high school coach's appeal of a school district ban on employees joining a student-led prayer.

The decision on the case from New Jersey could add another restriction on prayer in schools, advocates said.

"We've become so politically correct in terms of how we deal with religion that it's being pretty severely limited in schools right now, and individuals suffer," said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties organization that focuses on First Amendment and religious freedom issues.

But Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said some parents had complained about Borden leading prayers before the East Brunswick, N.J., school district ordered him to stop and banned all staff members from joining in student-led prayer.

"The bottom line is people in positions of authority, like a coach, have to be extremely careful about trying to promote their ideas, or implying that if you don't pray, you may not play," Lynn said.

Lynn's point is well taken, and it seems to have had the appropriate persuasive effect on the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, another one of his remarks is a bit more disquieting:

Coaches are not supposed to be promoting religion; that's up to students and parents and pastors.

Whether or not he realized it, this sentence carries the strong connotation that "students and parents and pastors" may promote their religion in a public school system, which is a far more serious issue of separation of church and state than a football coach with strong religious convictions. On the surface it appears to endorse student-led prayer as long as it is strictly a student activity; but this raises the same problem of authority brought before the Supreme Court. It just happens to be the authority of all the students on the team and may therefore be just as influential in determining who gets to play. Were any of the team members Muslim or Jewish (or, for that matter, Catholic); and, if they were on the team, did they spend any time off the bench?

The real bottom line is that the only place for religion in a public school is in a social studies curriculum for comparative non-judgmental analysis of religious beliefs and practices. The promotion of any religion is no more the domain of "students and parents and pastors" than it is subject to the authority of teachers and coaches. My guess is that Lynn did not realize the dangerous connotation of his sentence; but it is the sort of proposition that can have ugly repercussions, particularly in communities that take their religious beliefs very seriously outside the walls of any public institutions.

Worthy Chutzpah from Sean Penn

I have never been particularly big on the Academy Awards. However, by happy accident, my wife and I managed to catch Sean Penn's acceptance speech (having just finished watching Taking Chance, recorded Saturday night on our VTR). The London Telegraph provided one of the better accounts of this event:

Stars on their way to the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles had to pass a group of Christian demonstrators outside who protested against gay marriage and attacked the memory of the late Heath Ledger, a favourite target of militant anti-gay protesters since his role in Brokeback Mountain.

Penn won the best actor award for Milk, in which he played politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

The actor opened his acceptance speech with the words: "You commie, homo-loving sons of guns," to laughter from the audience.

Referring to the protest, he said: "For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone."

If the Academy's annual Awards ceremony seems to be calculated to be so banal as to avoid any hint of chutzpah, Sean Penn is the sort of guy who can be counted on to shake their tree. Given those protesters on the street, he definitely picked the right setting in which to do so. Given his reputation, I figured it would only be a matter of time before he received a Chutzpah of the Week award. I realize there is always a risk of granting this award so early in the week, but think how good it will look alongside his new Oscar!

One Small Step for Civility

With all the (deserved) attention being paid to Barack Obama's victory speech, I was glad to see Tim Dickinson take note of John McCain's concession speech in his National Affairs blog for Rolling Stone. As Dickinson put it, "that concession speech was all class;" and I think one of the reasons is that, left to his own devices, McCain believes in the value of civility and takes his belief seriously enough to put it into practice. Realizing that he had nothing left to lose, he knew he could tell his political campaign "handlers" where to go; and I assume he did just that. The ironic result may well be that McCain's speech may have been the closest to "words from the heart" that we experienced in the entire campaign, because he was willing to put aside all trappings of suasive oratory (regardless of the objective of the suasion) to let us all know how he has come to terms with the outcome of the election.

Having said all that, however, I should also recognize that "Kristy from Louisiana" reminded Dickinson about those McCain supporters on the other side of the podium who booed just about every reference to the Democrats. It seemed as if McCain was the only one at that massive gathering willing to honor the phrase "loyal opposition;" and this led me to wonder if the general level of civility at Democrat gatherings was significantly higher than among the Republicans or if this distinction was just a bias of my own perception. On the other hand an observation less susceptible to bias showed up in Seth Bornstein's Associated Press report on the high voter turnout. He interviewed Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate at American University, who observed that party membership seemed to correlate with turnout level:

Breakdown by party voting also shows that Republican turnout rates are down quite a bit, while Democratic turnout rates are up, Gans said.

Republican states, such as Wyoming and South Dakota, saw turnout drop. "I think they were discouraged," Gans said.

Bearing in mind Obama's injunction to put aside cynicism, I still have to wonder if the motto of today's Republican party, as reflected by both civility in public gatherings and participating in the electoral process, is "I believe in democracy, as long as things get done my way!" This could well be the party that is already laying out plans for Sarah Palin to stand in the next Presidential election. If such is the case, then Obama would to well not to discard all cynicism and start watching his back, even before Inauguration Day!

Another Narrative Genre

Colm Tóibín has a fascinating piece in the latest New York Review of Books, which explores parallels between James Baldwin and Barack Obama. Tóibín's "home turf" is in fiction; and thus his investigation has more to do with text analysis than with politics and ideologies. I am not sure I agree with his conclusions; but, as should be clear from many of my own posts (as recently as yesterday), I sympathize with his method and appreciated the opportunity to see him exercise it. Nevertheless, regardless of where that matter led him, I found in his study a new light to throw on that claim by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek that "We don't have a narrative," which seems to have gotten under my skin.

I am still willing to grant Žižek's point within the limited domain of ideological narratives; but last Wednesday I tried to push the point further by arguing that we had abandoned all forms of "sensemaking narratives" (not just the ideological ones) in favor of narratives of the supernatural, most likely because a predominant preference for faith over rationality is still with us. Tóibín reminded me that there is at least one other narrative genre that is still going strong (even to the point that it has its own cable channel), which is the "narrative of identity," usually cast in the form of a "life story," either autobiography or biography composed by a third party. Just about all of the texts, from both Baldwin and Obama, that Tóibín examines are narratives of identity; but he seems to have missed a critical difference in the motives of the two authors of those texts. Baldwin was primarily interested in his "aesthetic identity," probably first for the sake of focusing his own creative priorities but possibly to provide context for those reading his fiction and essays. Obama, on the other hand, seems to have been interested in his "political identity," probably from the time he first started to work on Dreams from My Father and definitely through the whole process of writing The Audacity of Hope. From this point of view, a literary comparison with John McCain's "narrative of identity," Faith of My Fathers, would probably serve us more in our efforts to make sense of the current Presidential campaign than any study of Baldwin (although I suspect that Baldwin would not be surprised at the extent to which Sarah Palin has roused the rabble to the point that they cannot tolerate McCain's recognition of Obama's basic decency as a human being).

The cautious reader, however, is the one who recognizes that, particularly in the political domain, identity can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand a sense of identity that we do understand will carry far more weight than any number of policy statements, which often never leave the lofty heights of abstraction and address the real problems on the ground. Unfortunately, politics has a long history of fabricated narratives of identity, skillfully crafted fictions designed for no other reason than to attract public support. For example, Suetonius (and later Robert Graves) provided us with some nice examples of Julius Caesar's talent for such fabrication; but today we know that Suetonius himself was not above such fabrication for his own political purposes! Determining whether or not a narrative of identity is authentic is no easy matter. The good news is that the news media seem to be rediscovering the extent to which fact-checking is part of the job. The bad news is that political strategy now seems to have embraced the postmodern principle that, if the facts do not serve your ends, you can always fabricate the identity you want through rhetoric! If we are aware of this hazard, we may recognize that even a writer like Baldwin may have been doing the same thing with his rhetoric, even if his motives were aesthetic, rather than political.

Scare quotes?

I can't quite figure out whether or not the quotation marks in the headline for the Al Jazeera report of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic are scare quotes or, for that matter, why they are there at all:

'War criminal' Karadzic arrested

As their report makes clear, the man is, at the very least, a fugitive from a UN-approved international judiciary body:

The former Bosnian Serb leader was indicted on genocide charges in 1995 by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, and topped the its most-wanted list for more than a decade.

It is almost as if the quote marks are questioning the legitimacy of the indictment or the authority of the United Nations to arrest the man. As one of the few remaining sources of reliable journalism, Al Jazeera would have done better to compose a more objective headline!

"My pop's bigger than your pop!"

The most memorable political cartoon from my youth illustrated two enormous hydrogen bombs, one with an American flag and the other with a USSR flag, facing each other while standing on the surface of a too-small planet earth, each shouting at the other, "My pop's bigger than your pop!" Mad Magazine took this over the top in their own "article" about Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), with a series of hyperbolic images demonstrating that, by the time the fourth such missile was launched, there would be precious left of the surface of the earth to target. It was this wave of nostalgia that overwhelmed me when I saw the first images of Iran's missile test, now accompanied by follow-up reports provided by the BBC. At a time when the G8 still cannot get its act together on the economic necessity of sustaining the planet at all, we now have to put up with a new planet-destroying pissing contest, primarily between Israel and Iran but with the United States apparently only too eager to rush to support Israel. Little is gained from reproducing the rhetoric behind this pissing contest. I suspect that any reader who has been following the news regularly could invent "official statements" for all three parties with little more than a moment's thought. More disconcerting is that portion of the BBC report that spills over into the impact of this event on the Presidential campaign:

Describing Iran as a "great threat", the Democratic challenger, Barack Obama, called for tougher sanctions while his Republican rival, John McCain, said the test demonstrated the need for effective missile defence.

McCain's reaction should not surprise anyone; but, if we needed any evidence for taking Obama's AIPAC speech seriously, this will certainly contribute to it. Perhaps this is what he meant when he talked to his AIPAC audience about "tough and principled diplomacy;" but, now that he no longer needs to be audacious to capture the nomination, I fear that he has also decided that he no longer needs to be principled. As the old joke goes, we are up to our eyeballs in alligators; and it seems that Obama is as interested as McCain in breeding more of those alligators!

Obama Faces AIPAC

When I just wrote that, as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama would have to worry about communicative actions within his party as much as those with the rest of the world, I forgot to recognize that lobbying figures very strongly where those "internal" communicative actions are concerned. I am sure that, between now and the Convention, the press will be providing us with no end of reports about Obama's relations with the lobbyists who beat a path to his Senate Office door; but today we had our first opportunity to see him in action in the face of one of Washington's most powerful lobbying organizations. Today was his day to address the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC); and, if differentiation is to be his calling card, this could have been the perfect scene for differentiating himself from John McCain, who gave his address on Monday. I say "could have" because, on the basis of the report just released by Al Jazeera English (based on their wire sources), Obama seems to have failed to "carpe the diem" (a turn of phrase, which, if I am not mistaken, I picked up from The Sopranos). While I had been hoping that "the Obama audacity" would be strong enough to confront "the confluence of mishegoss and chutzpah" that seemed to prevail during McCain's speech, my hopes seem to have been disappointed:

Barack Obama, the US Democratic presumptive presidential nominee, has pledged to safeguard Israel's security if elected president in November.

Obama also described the US bond with the Jewish state as "unbreakable today, unbreakable tomorrow, unbreakable for ever" and said he spoke as a "true friend" of Israel.

Hours after securing his party's nomination, Obama told the influential annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (Aipac) on Wednesday that rumours and suggestions he is unfriendly to Israel and to Jewish interests are unfounded.

Obama, the first African-American to win the presidential nomination for a major US political party, said that Jerusalem must remain the "undivided" capital of Israel in a speech to the powerful US-Israel lobby group.

"Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided," the Illinois senator said.

Obama drew a standing ovation ahead of addressing the gathering of one of US politics' most influential lobbying groups, and also addressed perceived suspicion of him in some sectors of the Jewish community.

"As president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel's security," Obama said.

Obama, who also said he would approve $30 billion in aid to Israel over the next 10 years, said he was not opposed to holding talks with "appropriate" Iranian leaders using "tough and principled diplomacy".

Needless to say, I was not the only one disappointed:

However Hamas reacted angrily to Obama's speech, with Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the organisation, telling AFP on Wednesday that it was "evidence of the hostility of the American administration to Arabs and Muslims".

Thus, if the world is anticipating that Obama will bring about major changes in the communicative actions that take place between the White House and the rest of the world, then he has gotten himself off to a bad start where Hamas is concerned; and Hamas is probably one of the best examples of a legitimate representative body that, as I put it, has been "intransigently shunned by the Bush Administration." Put another way, Obama's first day as presumptive nominee turned out to be a good day for business-as-usual, which means it was a bad day for audacity!

Do we Want a "Global Candidate?"

To say that the news has been flooded with reports, analyses, and transcripts of Barack Obama's speech in St. Paul last night might be called a classic case of British understatement, were it not for the fact that the one-hour news broadcast on BBC America last night was there with live coverage. Thus, it may be that the wisest place for stepping back and taking a deep breath will be the Web site for Al Jazeera English, whose coverage of St. Paul (including a transcript and a profile dwelling more on issues than on personality traits) was certainly as good as any of the "usual" sources. However, in their bid to challenge the BBC as the leading global news service, Al Jazeera commissioned a report of global opinion of the Presidential candidates; and, coincidentally, the results were published yesterday (which could well mean around the time that the polls for the final round of primaries were just opening). Here are the "bottom line" results:

In a survey of 22 countries, published on Tuesday, 80 per cent of people polled who said they were aware of the three main candidates - Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain - said they were following the election "closely".

Clinton, the former first lady and early favourite for the Democratic nomination who is under increasing pressure to concede defeat, emerged as the most recognisable candidate with 92 per cent of respondents indicating they were "aware" of her.

But it was Obama who was the preferred of all three candidates, with more than half of those who said they were aware of the candidates saying they would most like to see him as the next president

…

McCain, the all but certain Republican nominee, was both the least recognisable and least popular candidate.

Sixty-two per cent of respondents said they were aware of him, while only 15 per cent of people who recognised the three candidates said they would like to see him in the White House.

Now, to be fair, these results were not based on person-in-the-street inquiries:

Nearly 23,000 "broad elites" and "opinion leaders" were interviewed by Ipsos for the survey on behalf of Al Jazeera.

Thus, it would be a stretch to call the results representative of global opinion; but then there is so much diversity of worldviews that the very concept of "global opinion" is all but meaningless. Of greater significance is the problem, which I recently discussed, of the extent of the damage done by the Bush Administration to the reputation of the United States in the world community. This damage will only be repaired when the United States begins to improve the communicative actions through which it engages with the rest of the world, dispensing with faith-based "commandments" in favor of the recognition that opinions will always differ and differences may not always be settled but can always be negotiated. There is thus a good chance that those who will so engage with the next Administration were either part of that sample of 23,000 or were fairly represented by it. Thus, while the results may not be representative of the "world at large," they may still provide a valid representation of the sorts of people the next President is likely to encounter in the global arena (particularly those bent out of shape by the current President).

From this point of view, I feel at least a little bit encouraged by the course of events over the last couple of days. Obama has made it a point to differentiate his position when it comes to trying to open dialogs with those who have been intransigently shunned by the Bush Administration. The Al Jazeera report shows signs that Obama's position has been recognized by, at the very least, the Ipsos sample space and taken as a positive sign. However, now that Obama seems to have progressed from would-be nominee to presumptive nominee, he is also going to have to worry about communicative actions within the Democratic Party. Platform Committees are not always as big on differentiation as candidates are. Whatever powers of appeal Obama has exercised on both the electorate and the superdelegates will now have to be exercised on the general machinery of the Democratic Party to make sure that their "political perspective" does not undermine the strongest assets he may bring to meeting the challenges of the many crises that now face the United States, both domestically and globally. If those assets are undermined, then it will not take much for the election of 2008 to devolve into the fiasco of 2004; and both Americans and the world will see that, in the face of so many crises, our political system can do little more than dither.

Superstitious about Language

Paul Reynolds, world affairs correspondent for the BBC, has written a useful think piece for the BBC News Web site on the role of foreign policy in the coming Presidential election, contrasting the current position statements being delivered by John McCain and Barack Obama. He structured the piece in terms of McCain speeches directed to attack Obama and Obama responses that, in turn, attack McCain. Unfortunately, one of the Obama quotes invoked a haunting memory from my high school history days:

The American people are going to look at the evidence. We don't get a sense that this has been a wise foreign policy or a smart foreign policy or a tough foreign policy.

The memory was of a Democratic candidate who lost a Presidential election. The candidate was Al Smith; and he gave a famous (at least still in my high school days) speech attacking the policy of Prohibition. He is best known for the first sentence of that speech (to the extent that more people remember the sentence than remember that the speech was about Prohibition):

Let's look at the record.

He then confronted the American people with evidence (choosing my words from Obama's text) to demonstrate that a Constitutional Amendment that had been motivated by what may be called a "War Against Sin" had actually led to a significant increase in violent crime, much of which was directly related to the trafficking of goods that had been declared constitutionally illegal.

My point is that, compelling as Smith's speech was, the American people didn't look at the evidence. They were more preoccupied with fear. Prohibition was escalated to Constitutional authority through the zealous efforts of Protestant evangelists, who knew precisely how to cultivate fears, not only of sin and hell-fire but also of those who did not embrace their particular breed of Christianity. Smith was victimized by those fears not only by opposing Prohibition but by being Catholic. (In 1884, long before Prohibition became a Constitutional Amendment, the Republicans had already classified the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.")

One lesson from Reynolds' analysis is that things have not changed very much. The Republicans still know how to cultivate fear of rebellion and have reaped considerable political gain from transforming their predecessors' "War Against Sin" into a "War Against Terror." Romanism, on the other hand, has been replaced by Islam, particularly as embodied by the new linguistic barbarism of our culture, "Islamofacism." (Invoking The New Oxford American Dictionary, Wikipedia uses a less extreme characterization than I do, calling the word a "controversial neologism!") Thus, Reynolds offers a simple example of McCain's skill at fear-mongering:

The McCain campaign circulated this comment: "We need change in America, but not the kind of change that wins kind words from Hamas, surrenders in Iraq and will hold unconditional talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad."

In one sentence, John McCain linked three American foreign policy fears - Hamas, Iraq and Iran - and tried to isolate Mr Obama as unreliable on all three.

However, if good slogans come in threes, then the Republicans have been very careful about manipulating the third element. I would suggest that the issue of rum has now evolved into the issue of race. This is particularly evident in a post written last week by Doug Feaver for his dot.comments blog for The Washington Post. The post is a reflection on a report that had recently appeared on the front page of the Post's print edition, summarized by Feaver in his first paragraph:

Kevin Merida wrote a front-page story earlier this week reporting that Sen. Barack Obama's "phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president."

The Web version of that story accumulated 3300 comments in the time between its appearance (last Monday) and the time of Feaver's post (last Thursday). Feaver used his post to reproduce what he felt was a representative sample, neither offering any critical observations nor trying to draw any conclusions.

Reading his selection reminded me of the sorts of calls placed to C-SPAN's Washington Journal (which I listen to on XM, rather than watch on television). While this program gets its share of "oddball calls," it has a high proportion of listeners who deserve attention; but, what I like most is that C-SPAN provides separate call-in numbers for Democrats, Republicans, and independents. This provides an approximation (which, of course may be disguised) of the background of any caller who chooses to make a comment about race, whether it involves Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, or racially divisive language in political advertising. The Washington Post made no effort to identify the backgrounds or persuasions of the authors of all those comments it received; but we have already been exposed to accusations (which may or may not be valid) of Republican involvement in cultivating fear of race.

My point is that the Republican rallying standard of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" may now very well have been transformed into "Race, Islamofacism, and Terrorism" (even if it is no longer alliterative); and this new standard draws just as much strength from cultivating fear as the old one did in 1884. If Obama really believes that this standard can be pulled down because "The American people are going to look at the evidence," then he may be lacking sufficient respect for how formidable the force of well-cultivated fear can be. I would suggest that he and his strategists set aside some time to examine what were the most critical factors in Smith's loss to Herbert Hoover in 1928 and make sure that they do not find themselves bitten once again by those same factors.

The Paradox of Fundamentalism

Several month ago Anthony Grafton wrote an "appreciation piece" about Clifford Geertz based heavily on Grafton's experience in co-teaching with Geertz at Princeton. Grafton was particularly impressed by the way Geertz could persuade his anthropology students to assimilate seriously the mindset of even the most alien of cultures for the sake of arriving at a better understanding of what made those cultures tick. I could not help but remember Grafton's words this morning while reading the reactions to Barry Yourgrau's latest blog post on The Huffington Post, "McCain's Elbows, John Hagee, and the San Antonio B'nai B'rith." Of greatest interest were the reactions provoked by the following paragraph from the original post:

Perhaps that flapping notion [referring to the way McCain carries his arms] holds some merit though--honest John is trying to flap away from the trouble he's in from not denouncing the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, who is a bonafide wacko, a medieval crank, anti-Catholic bigot and slaughter-monger, who happens to be grotesquely pro-Israel.

I had to wonder how Geertz would have reacted had one of his anthropology students used that kind of language or, for that matter, the turn of phrase in the comment by Querent about "most mentally disabled fundamentalists." Hopefully, he would have responded with a quiet reminder that cultures are to be interpreted, rather than evaluated, and that the methodology of interpretation involves the effort to assume "the native's point of view," however difficult that effort may be. Indeed, my recent attention to the work of John Dewey grew out of my reading the first two Parts of Geertz' collection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures; so it is no surprise that the language I have quoted reflects the very problems that Dewey argued could be resolved through works of art. This is, in Dewey's words, the language of "a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience," thus undermining all possibility "of complete and unhindered communication between man and man."

Ironically, one of my closest experiences with a fundamentalist took place at the St. Andrew's hospice that is practically right outside the wall around the Old City of Jerusalem. (Before the 1967 War it was about as close as you could get to the Old City while remaining within Israeli borders.) The fundamentalist in question was returning to the United States, along with the rest of his family, from missionary work in Asia; and Fate had ironically planted him at the very site where I had established my own accommodations. This experience gave me my first real sense of the extent to which the fundamentalist mindset is not pathological but fraught with paradox.

Appealing again to a healthy sense of irony, that paradox lies in the discrepancies between the Old and New Testaments and the fundamentalist conviction that both texts are authoritative ("word of God") sources. The problem, of course, is the wide discrepancy of opinion about the Jews. Thus, this particular fundamentalist was very comfortable sitting in the living room of our hospice opining over the need for a State of Israel to occupy that territory that had been given by God to Abraham in the Book of Genesis, disregarding all the New Testament texts that condemned the Jews for their role in the Crucifixion. In a way this paradox is in the same league as the optical illusion of the Necker cube, which, due to the lack of any depth cues, can be seen in two inconsistent ways, each viewing the cube from a different perspective. You can see it from one perspective or another, but you cannot see it from both at the same time. So it is that a fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament sees today's Jews as God's chosen people, while an equally fundamentalist reading of the New Testament sees them as fated for eternal damnation.

Yourgrau's text is sort of an example of "thinking out of the box" by denying the significance of this paradox and attributing it to some kind of mental pathology. Perhaps he believes that all fundamentalists should be "deprogrammed" through techniques that have been applied to followers of cults deemed "irrational" or "destructive" by our societal norms. Without appearing to defend fundamentalists, however, I would argue that his approach basically denies the possibility of communication and, by denying the possibility of communication, also denies the possibility of establishing a platform of understanding upon which differences can be discussed. In other words he is no different from President George W. Bush attacking Barak Obama for wanting to meet with leaders of countries like Cuba or North Korea.

There is no easy way out of this mess. It does not take much study of history to appreciate that a mind in paradox, whether the mind of an individual or the "collective mind" of a culture, is a mind under great stress. Even the Necker cube annoys many viewers by challenging the assumption that there is only one way to interpret a visual stimulus. However, the one thing that history may teach us is that increasing the stress tends to provoke consequences that are even worse than those that gave rise to the stress. Not only did Yourgrau's language increase the stress on the fundamentalist mindset, but also it seems to have incited others to do the same through their comments. I am not so much worried about the consequences of a "fundamentalist backlash" as I am about the way in which this strategy reveals how intolerant many who purport to be "liberal" and "rational" really are; and that says a lot as we head towards an election that is more likely to be venomous than decisive.

Music for an Era?

Sometimes a piece of music becomes representative of a particular era. Beethoven's ninth symphony probably acquired an iconic status during the nineteenth century, due less to Beethoven's (many) merits than to the raising of public consciousness of Beethoven by Franz Liszt (with some assistance from Richard Wagner) within the context of what Isaiah Berlin called "the apotheosis of the Romantic Will." To some extent Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" is assuming a similar role for the twentieth century, having drawn upon the harrowing texts of Wilfred Owen, written from the trenches of the First World War and invoked to rededicate cathedrals destroyed in both England and Germany during the Second World War. We have not yet completed the first decade if the twenty-first century; and I find myself wondering whether or not Appomattox will play a similar role in representing its Zeitgeist. Ultimately, the opera is less about the conclusion of the Civil War than it is about the problem of discrimination that has yet to be resolved in relations between the races in the United States and looms with equal significance in just about every other part of the world. It is also interesting to note that while Beethoven's symphony stood as a celebration of the best of humanity, particularly as seen through the post-Enlightenment lenses of Romanticism, Philip Glass has followed Benjamin Britten's selection of the requiem structure as a framing of the time that Berlin would later call "the most terrible century in Western history." Through its flash-forwards Appomattox reminds us that we should mourn not only the blood shed during the Civil War but also the extent to which, in spite of Abraham Lincoln's address at Gettysburg, that blood was shed in vain and will continue to be shed, both literally in continuing acts of racial violence and figuratively in the growth of more insidious discriminatory practices.

Alliance Chutzpah

Once again I am faced with the question of whether or not it is too early in the week to announce the Chutzpah of the Week award. However, this one has the merit of a historical context, since it is a follow-up to an award given to Taro Aso last March, when he was Foreign Minister of Japan. The basis for the award was but one of a chain of absurdities that culminated in an election in Japan that resulted in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe losing control of the upper house of his country's parliament. Nevertheless, Abe has remained as Prime Minister; and the capacity of his judgments and policies seem to have followed in his wake. This week's award is based on a Reuters report of his current visit to India filed by George Nishiyama and Surojit Gupta:

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on Wednesday for a "broader Asia" partnership of democracies that would include India, the United States and Australia, but omit the region's superpower, China.

It is hard to view any proposal for a "broader Asia" that ignores China as anything but an arrogant absurdity. Certainly, one can hold up the standard of democracy as that reason for excluding China; but what is really at stake is a power play to counter the growth and domination of the Chinese economy. The absurdity of the vision stems from the fact that countries such as the United States, Australia, and India are as interested in cultivating China as both as customer and a partner as they are in facing the challenge of China as a competitor. To reduce such economic complexity to a competitive threat (which is likely fueled by a long-standing Japanese cultural tradition) is to trivialize it to a level that will likely do more harm than good, which may well be the best criterion for chutzpah this week!