A Level Gaze

A Level Gaze

"What effect must it have on a nation if it learns no foreign languages? Probably much the same as that which a total withdrawal from society has upon an individual."
--G.C. Lichtenberg

Saturday, November 15, 2003

Thanks, Mr. Brooks, but No Thanks

David Brooks has kindly come up with a strategy for democrats that will make everything better in Washington. It does involve us having our burnt and bloody asses handed to us, but he seems to think civility is worth the price.

Howard Dean is liberal aggression, and none of us have ever taken that on until today. But now I am relaunching my campaign around one simple slogan: Stop the War.

I don't mean the war in Iraq. I mean the war at home. I mean the partisan war between Republicans and Democrats that rages every day in Washington and produces behavior that would be unacceptable in any other arena of life. I mean the war that poisons our airwaves, clogs up our best-seller lists and stagnates our politics.

I've lived at the front: it's in Washington, D.C. This is World War I. Each party has its trench works. Each party has its heavy artillery. Anybody who dares wander from the predictable party lines and do something unorthodox gets his head blown off.

***

I'm opting out of the game of tit for tat. I'm going to get us out of the trenches.

If I do nothing else in the Oval Office, I will free people to build new coalitions, explore new ideas and talk to one another for the first time in a decade.

This is an evenly divided country. That is the political fact of our time. It is about time we had a president who understands that, who has a strategy for governing in such circumstances. Howard Dean and George Bush do not. They just want to pound away and pound away and ram things through. More artillery, more troops, more screaming and more hatred.

As for me, I say no more war. I'm for movement. I'm for progress, and if you are, too, come along with me.

Unilateral disarmament: we play nice, the other side goes for the jugular, stomps on our collective corpse repeatedly and wins. Color me unconvinced.

Republicans have lied to us repeatedly. They lied about what they would do with our money. They lied about how they would treat the environment. They lied about why they led us to war. When we questioned whether going to war was a good idea or not--let alone whether the reasons were fictitious--they angrily branded us traitors.

What is the proper response to a barrage of lies? What is an authentic response to a barrage of lies that one is certain are a flimsy veil covering naked, exclusionary self-interest? What kind of response will the audience believe? Let's explore a few hypothetical situations:

Your best friend lies to someone else about your personal life and you find out. How do you react?

Your teenager lies about his/her drinking. How do you react?

Your boss lies about your job security, and a pink slip arrives out of the blue. How do you react?

Your mayor lies, saying he'll fix the roads, but doesn't. How do you react?

Your spouse lies about cheating on you and spending all your money. How do you react?

The one common element of any authentic response to all of these situations is that you get angry.

However you choose to react afterwards is infinitely variable, but the first thing you do is get angry. Not getting angry is just not an authentic response.

If we don't get angry, independents may well conclude that there may be something to the republicans' message.

Dean is doing well because people believe him. He isn't taking being kicked in the teeth. He's fighting back. That's what one does when one is kicked in the teeth.

If we react calmly to the other side's lies and calumny, independents aren't going to believe that they were lies. And, as republicans go on twisting facts, spreading hate and ignoring the hard realities of our situation, they're likely to pick up a lot of votes over Brooks' calm strategy of bland righteousness. Sounds an awful lot to me like Dukakis trying to maintain his dignity while the other side beat him to death with Willie Horton. Nice doesn't win elections.

Yes, Pollyanna, this might not be the best of all possible worlds, but it's the one we're in. Maybe if we, you know, get some of our people elected, we can actually do some good for the country.

Update: Jesse tells it like it is.

posted by David at 11/15/2003 11:07:00 AM ::

Monday, November 10, 2003

Why They Might Not Trust Us

A couple things:

In Iraq, they remember what we did to Mossadeq. They know we supported Saddam, both directly before the Gulf War, and implicitly, by allowing Shi'a and Kurdish uprisings to fail. They watched as we repeatedly raised Arab and Muslim hopes by attempting to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, only to experience complete political failure at every critical moment.

Iraqis study in history class what we did to Central and South America, what we did to the Phillipines, to Vietnam, to Panama. They read about how we gained dominion over our own country. We talked fast, shot often, and changed the rules at whim. While we told ourselves how noble and upright we were, Iraqis were learning about the treatment we reserve for countries that cross us.

Please note, this is a departure from my usual (well-informed and entirely justified) partisanship; presidents and congresses of both parties perpetuated this.

They know we do what's good for us, and f*ck everyone else. We've killed tens of thousands of Iraqis over the years, and a lot of them hate us. There is no end in sight to the resistance to our attempts to enforce our will on the country. This is what our government has gotten us into, and, short of crawling out with our tail between our legs (to let the Iraqis shoot it out for themselves) this is what we've got to get out of.

Why would we expect them to trust us? I detect a genuine bafflement on the part of the neocons that the Iraqis by and large do not accede to our superior culture and technology. "Why aren't they cheering?"

Let's be realistic: we've got leagues to go before the average Arab trusts any appendage of the United States. We should have accounted for this upon going into Iraq, but it's no less essential now. We need to be implementing simple programs, with definite, concrete goals. We need to instill security, to reconstitute the Iraqi army in the form of a police force, and back it up where necessary. We need to stick to our non-gun guns long enough and consistently enough that it has a chance to sink into the heads of our deeply skeptical audience. And we need to do it in the face of continuing attacks.

posted by David at 11/10/2003 09:56:00 PM ::

Thursday, November 06, 2003

For All the People

Something that's popped into my head during the back-and-forth of the Dean Confederate Flag imbroglio: Why do we assume that racism is the only dimension to people with these stickers on their pickups?

Many of these people are bigots. Most, if not all, have idealized antebellum southern culture to an extent that it no longer reflects historical realities. But they're also people and fellow-citizens. They're voters. A vote is a vote is a vote, and we want more of them than our opponents get.

Democrats are the party that publicly acknowledges racism's existence and devastating legacy. Republicans openly pander to bigots with things like the Southern Strategy and coded allusions to "tradition" and Confederate symbols, all the while denying that racism has any meaningful impact on society whatever.

It's the republicans who have been cynical here, not Howard Dean. Pandering to working-class southern whites' bigotry while sponsoring policies positively harmful to their wallets, their schools, their environment, and their families, republicans reduce their constituents to the meanest bit in the bundle. Dean, however clumsily, raised the possibility that, although we may be unable to persuade bigots to give up their racial prejudices, we may find at least some common ground and work together on issues of mutual interest.

Democrats' attacks on Dean are yet another example of liberal orthodoxy gone too far. The reason republicans are able to win this constituency on only one issue (and one that costs no money, to boot) is that too many democrats have written them off as subhumans incapable of redemption and unworthy of attention. They've got nowhere else to go and take what they're offered.

Yes, the word "confederate" pushes a red-hot button. Yes, any and every racist statement and action must be vigorously opposed. Yes, persons of good conscience loathe the beliefs of a lot of the people to whom Dean was referring. But they are more than racists; they work, pay taxes, have children, are in the armed forces, pay doctor bills, and plan to retire someday. Maybe if we get their attention by representing their other interests, they might someday listen to what we have to say in other areas as well.

posted by David at 11/06/2003 11:35:00 AM ::

Monday, November 03, 2003

The sublimest of ironies:

After 227 (or 222, depending on whom you ask) years, American democracy is ultimately destroyed by government contracts related to voting itself.

posted by David at 11/03/2003 11:53:00 PM ::

Fine-Grained Favoritism

All this talk about draft boards lately has got me thinking: why is the the draft so far devolved that it needs 2,000 local bureaucracies to handle it? Although I realize the seriousness of decisions regarding the draft, it seems as though it's possible that the bureaucracy evolved specifically to protect the sons of privilege. How are draft boards appointed? Are they party-selected appointees? I've never heard of draft board elections, and none are proposed here, so it's worth looking into. Think I will. Sure would explain how so many of our well-born leaders somehow managed to escape military service.

posted by David at 11/03/2003 10:27:00 PM ::

Shorter William Safire

Donald Rumsfeld speaks English, and people here believe everything he says. John Abizaid speaks Arabic, so therefore the Iraqis will believe everything he says.

After our own Colonel Pith, d^2

posted by David at 11/03/2003 02:14:00 PM ::

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