Je ne suis toujours pas Charlie

Of course, I entirely defend the right of these cheese-eating surrender monkeys to publish this cover or, indeed, any damned thing they wish. For those who, eschewing a study of French, have wisely dedicated themselves to learning the language of a relevant world power, it reads: "God Exists! He Drowned All the Neo-Nazis of Texas."

I'm not angry or disappointed because, I confess, my expectations are low. We've already discussed here the lack of moral consistency by the Gauloise-sucking "journalists" at Charlie Hebdo. And let's be honest, the Germans may have invented the word schadenfreude, but nobody does it better than the French. And I know, too, that Nazis are a bit of an uncomfortable subject for the French, given their legacy of well-earned national shame. Gazing upon this cover, they must have to wonder if a timely flood would have somehow stopped them handing over Jewish schoolchildren for annihilation in exchange for the Germans not burning down some museums. (Not that the French didn't then mount a fine resistance. Courageous cafe owners frequently over-charged German officers for espresso.* And many French housewives valiantly gave German soldiers painful venereal diseases in exchange for stockings and cabbages.)

But . . . here's the thing. You would think that if anyone would not want to rob the swastika of all of its meaning, it would be people who lived under the brutal occupation of actual Nazis. Calling all the victims in Houston -- a city that, for one thing, overwhelmingly votes Democrat -- "Nazis" would seem to me to do just that. And it's a glaring example of what's wrong with our own discourse here in recent months.

You see, people who don't believe that the military should enlist transgender service members aren't Nazis. They might be right. They might be wrong. They might be motivated by hate, or fear, or merely a concern for the marginal costs of issuing all those new nametags. But they aren't Nazis -- well at least they aren't Nazis just because they disagree with you about the intersection of gender identity and the armed forces. That guy who favors immigration amnesty for "dreamers?" I guess he might be a socialist, but his stance on that single issue offers you insufficient data to reach any such conclusion. And the small-town florist who doesn't want her great-great-granddaddy's statue ripped out of the courthouse square? It's not likely she's an actual fascist however troublesome you find that bronze fellow on the horse. But when you bandy about a word like "Nazi," even though it has the effect of rendering your opponents less than human -- always handy when you want to douse them with jars of your own urine or peacefully beat them into silence -- it also has the effect of sucking all the meaning from the word. And that's not good for anyone. (I mean, if nothing else, don't the folks who called George W. Bush a Nazi now wish they'd kept that epithet in reserve?)

More than six years ago, I wrote in this space about the Theory of Ubiquitous Polarity.** I wrote then from a place of personal frustration, calling for nuance. These days I see it underlying something far more dangerous. Because if you render every disagreement on any policy and procedure into a definitive identity for the person with whom you disagree, if you view everyone on the other side of anything as being a member of a class of the fundamentally evil, you leave yourself with nothing to do but go to war. That's what you do with actual Nazis. And by the looks of recent events, war is more or less where we're going.

* Thank you Trevanian.

** "A system under which an observer believes that all beliefs must necessarily be aligned in whatever manner the observer himself aligns them."

Construction

Let's establish at the outset that I am no fan of Ted Cruz. I think he's a buffoon and, as a key player on Team R, instrumental in the most dangerous intramural scrimmage ever played. But it turns out I am even less of a fan of sanctimony and race-baiting and the tyranny of orthodoxy -- equally so the left-handed variety as the right.

Race, certainly, and even ethnicity are, to a large degree, just social constructs. If you tell 50 people in a room to stand up and arrange themselves from darkest to lightest, you'll get some pretty funny looks* but you also get to observe an interesting phenomenon: Reduce someone's literal place to the single signifier of his skin color, and the light begins to dawn about how much more complex the concept of race really is. Just as interesting -- especially in the United States -- is to ask someone about his ethnicity and listen to the second order algebraic equation that follows. 

There's nothing wrong with this, so long as you let people do it for themselves. Our own idea of our race and ethnicity helps us to fix ourselves in the great, centuries-long parade of human kind. It gives us a context and place from which to view the world. It gives a list of foods we really like. 

Now, I cannot speak in detail to the race or ethnicity of Amy Louise Bardach, who recently posited that Ted Cruz doesn't get to call himself Hispanic because of his politics. But Bardach doesn't sound** especially Latino, and neither -- if that happens to be a married name -- does Amy Louise.*** So I am left to wonder: Where does she get the nerve?

This kind of reductive, aggressive, third-party imposition of identity is beyond offensive. It is the worst variety of the Theory of Ubiquitous Polarity. It is just another stripe of telling people what they are allowed to believe and, in the hands of a powerful institution like The New York Times, or the federal government, or the Central Committee, or the Gestapo****, or any other tyrant, it's damned dangerous.

My wife is white (well, really this kind of amazing cafe con leche color) but clearly Latina. ("Latino" versus "Hispanic" is another discussion.) My boys are white (well, one's sort of tanish-white and the other is a little more beige) and medio-latino. I'm white (well, OK, sorta ruddy, blotchy, freckly white) and half Irish, half German (albeit I was raised in an entirely Czech family, and so identify there as well). None of that changes depending on how any of us vote, anymore than it does if one of my sons suddenly decided he didn't like beans and rice.***** And no editorial writer gets to tell us - or Ted Cruz, for that matter - otherwise.

Doubt me? Here's a simple exercise. Imagine a Wall Street Journal editorial positing that Barack Obama is not really black.

But maybe, before you try that thought experiment, you'd better put on a hard hat.

* I know because I have done exactly that, rather to make this very point to a classroom full of folks who were -- because of another social construct -- largely inclined to do as I asked.

** Como el único gringo en una familia de 150 cubanos, y como residente de 25 años de una de las ciudades más latino en los Estados Unidos, me siento que puedo hablar con experiencia, si no con la autoridad perfecta, sobre el tema. Pero cualquiera que sea mi conjeturo, yo soy de ninguna manera que sugieren que podría o debería imponer una etnia a la Sra Bardach, ni privarlo de su derecho a reclamar lo que uno - o los - ella afirma . De esa manera, somos muy diferentes.

*** And in any event, if it seems offensive to you that I'd speculate at all about her ethnicity, maybe go ahead and check your irony meter for full function.

**** What good is to have Godwin's Law if we cannot break it from time to time?

***** Consider it an argument ad absurdim.

Can we talk?

We can be assured that it won’t be forgotten, when America’s first black president takes the oath to begin his second term, that not quite 50 years will have passed since Martin Luther King Jr. stood not far away and described a dream world in which a man might be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. Every television talking head with a minute of airtime to fill can be counted on to relate one man and moment to the other.

For me, those 50 years are more or less all my life. I was three when King gave his speech, and accordingly unaware of it. But I was old enough by the time he was gunned down five years later to perceive not only the shocking crime, but to have an inkling of what King’s death might mean. I was old enough, a month later, to try to reconcile some context when Bobby Kennedy fell to another assassin’s hand. Not yet nine years old, it seemed to me that chaos reigned, that our nation was in jeopardy, that social studies class had it all terribly wrong. That was an impression only reinforced by what I saw at home.

At 14, my sister was radicalized beyond anything sensible for her age. She was enraptured and enthralled by what seemed to be the romance and thrill of a counter-culture offering not only the promise of a world to change but – vastly more important – the opportunity to shock and anger our parents. Every evening newscast, every muddy image of helicopter gunships, every campus conflagration had its echo in our home: in my sister’s angry denunciations, in my parents’ comminatory pronouncements, and in doors slammed by all parties. Two years later, when national guardsmen killed four Americans and wounded nine others on a college campus not 30 minutes from our house, those shots ricocheted around our kitchen table, leaving casualties of our own. Those wounds never healed.

There could be no resolution because my parents and my sister had no common language in which to reach one, no means to discuss the seething national conflicts that reflected and recapitulated their own. Every angry exchange about Nixon or Vietnam or hippies or civil rights was really a proxy for something else, something more prosaic, personal and small, and therefore infinitely more powerful. I came eventually to understand that it was a conflict they never wished to resolve. They had no common cause. At bottom, their mutual disdain was the only understanding they had, or wanted to have, of one another.

As for the nation, it is true that we find ourselves, 50 years on, having twice made president a man who, the summer King shared his dream, could not have shared a water fountain or a lunch counter with many of his countrymen. That would seem to be progress, and so I suppose it is. But if the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners now play together, no one can claim this is a nation unified. Our divisions are as deep as they ever were. What is worse, division has become our default, our reflex, the entire contour of our relationship with one another.

Our discourse no longer comprises intercourse, because our different opinions never get close enough even to contest with one another. Instead we pick our side of an issue, then plow broadening swathes of parallel rhetoric across from each other, like ever-expanding twin superhighways highways on either bank of a deeply run river, with never a single lane of bridge to link them. Should a fact inconveniently interpose itself, and by any means threaten to detour one course of conviction even a few degrees toward the opposing course, that fact is hastily dynamited or buried so that there will be no turning. One is not judged by the content of one's character, rather one is condemned by the color of one's beliefs or, indeed, by any single belief. 

That sound you hear? That din? It's not the debate of men of good will. It’s all slamming doors. Or maybe it’s thunder. But no matter. Because no one’s listening anyway.

Three score and ten

Updated below

I like NPR. Always have. The folks who put the news and commentary and comedy together on National Public Radio really understand their medium. More than once I've sat listening in my driveway, waiting for a story to finish. I like PBS television, too, if not quite as much. "Frontline" is weekly investigative reporting of a kind rare anywhere else, and I am a complete sucker for those Ken Burns histories on the Civl War, Baseball or the Brooklyn Bridge.

It's just fine with me that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got about $420 million in federal funding last year. I consider it money well spent.

Maybe you don't agree. If you don't, you've got most of the Republicans in Congress to keep you company. Certainly men and women of goodwill can disagree about whether this level of spending -- or any spending at all -- is prudent. I've heard very lively debate of  this very topic on, as it happens, NPR.

So I have no cavil with you if you want to cut or eliminate federal spending on public radio -- just so long as you are not one of the at least 70 Americans who answered a recent poll with their belief that that spending amounts to $1.8 trillion dollars. Yes, trillion. In a poll of more than 1,000 respondents, seven percent said they believed that funding for public broadcasting accounted for more than 50 percent of the all federal spending. For a federal government that spent about $3.6 trillion last year, that would be $1.8 trillion dollars.

I just want to go on record saying that if public broadcasting got almost two trillion tax dollars last year, then I'm more than a little disappointed in the tote bag I got from Channel 2.

As bad as that is, it may be worse that the median response to the poll evidenced the belief that public broadcasting was getting 5 percent of the federal budget -- $178 billion -- more than 400 times what it really gets.

But let's be clear: this isn't a post about public broadcasting.

We discussed not long ago how people love to not know. These poll numbers demonstrate something worse, I think. It's a variety of debate by demonization that has become the sad and destructive norm for our America. It's not enough simply to oppose spending 1.17 percent of the federal budget on public broadcasting,* which would be a perfectly reasonable position to take, even if I happen to disagree. It's not enough even to massively politicize the argument by suggesting that this1.17 percent is being spent to promote  some wildly liberal agenda. (This is bunk, as any regular listener to public channels knows, but it's at least garden variety partisan bunk.)

No. Instead, folks have to be convinced -- or convince themselves -- that the public funding of broadcasting is a huge, dangerous, overarching threat to the very financial viability of this once great nation!!! When the discussion starts there, where can it meaningfully hope to go?

I'm not immune from this sort of thing, I am forced to confess. I realize that Sarah Palin is not actually an evil succubus sent from Hell to seduce America's Right into slavering know-nothingness and poor grammar.  I concede that while Bill Maher is undeniably a pseudo-intellectual, frat-boy bigot, he probably is not really a skin-covered demon cyborg transported from space to corrupt the Left until it is dissolute and ineffectual. But I have said as much about both of them.

Hyperbole, after all, can be entertaining. But it is a lousy to basis for policy-making. Worse still is unconscious, unknowing hyperbole, engaged in by credulous fools who are content to leave unexamined any assumption, however nonsensical, so long as it supports their desired outcome. That sort of thing is downright dangerous. And I'd estimate that 48.63 percent of all Americans are doing it 82.37 percent of the time.

Or thereabouts.








*420,000,000 divided by 3,600,000,000,000 = 1.166666.

UPDATE: This is why lawyers hire accountants, instead of becoming accountants.

As Just Me points out with perfect accuracy, I'm a dope. "Public broadcasting's budget is NOT 1.166666% of the budget. It is .0016666% of the budget. 420,000,000 divided by 3,600,000,000,000 = 1.1666666666666667e-4. The "e-4" means move the decimal over to the left 4 spots." 

Of course public broadcasting doesn't amount to one percent of federal spending. Writing it out in words makes that obvious: One percent of our national budget is a huge amount of money. But the numbers are so damned big I stumbled on it. Now, my position is going to be that my own innumeracy proves my underlying point above. I leave to less kind contributors than Just Me to say what else it proves.

[Sadly my commitment to fulsome free speech and something some like to call intellectual integrity prevented me from undertaking the first course of action I considered -- changing the initial post so it would be correct, deleting Just Me's comment, and then blocking that ISP from commenting in the future. Sigh.]

I believe.

As of this morning, I have now been called both a “die hard liberal” and a reactionary in the same week. I confess that, on a certain level where my inner Mencken dwells, this rather pleases me.

But I also recognize that it is a signifier of a core weakness in the current public discourse – the widely held notion that by knowing any single belief a person holds, you can accurately predict his position on every other possible issue of human consideration. I call it “The Theory of Ubiquitous Polarity,” a system under which an observer believes that all beliefs must necessarily be aligned in whatever manner the observer himself aligns them.

Now, Ubiquitous Polarity is about as valid and useful a construct as phlogiston, but its proponents are equally as committed to it as any alchemist was to his own world view. So an intellectual conflict -- sort of a second hand cognitive dissonance -- arises in the breast of an adherent of Ubiquitous Polarity when he encounters someone who holds a belief with which the observer concurs and, simultaneously, a belief with which the observer disagrees. What follows is usually a resort to ad hominem attacks in which the person with "inconsistent" views is denounced as “a politician,” or one who seeks "to please everyone” or “to be all things to all people.” This exercise not only relieves the observer's cognitive dissonance, it spares him the exertion of actually considering another's opinions, or of even examining his own beliefs one at a time.

So, with a mischievous eye toward increasing such dissonance, without offering here the underpinnings of any of these contentions, and in the spirit of Walt Whitman,* let me set forth the following non-exhaustive list:

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate; God born fully a man to live a perfect life and die an atoning death, that sinful man might be reconciled to righteous God, and that this reconciliation occurs in each person by Grace alone through Faith alone in Christ alone.

I believe this faith is no accomplishment of mine, nothing for which I deserve credit, but rather a gift of a gracious God.

I believe there is nothing wrong with an occasional drink of whiskey, or an occasional cigar.

I believe there is no essential or meaningful difference between Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann.

I believe that human life begins at conception.

I believe the Earth is several billion years old and that the evolutionary process was pleasing to God, the creator of the universe.

I believe that enterprise, innovation, useful risk and hard work should be rewarded – for their own sake and because they are good for society as a whole – and that a free market economy is the best system for ensuring such rewards.

I believe that no one has the right – in pursuing such rewards – to jeopardize the health or well being of another, or to spoil the environment shared by all.

I believe that a civilized society can afford and ought to provide health care, education through high school, food security, and basic housing to every one of its members, as a human right.

I believe, with Thomas Paine, that that government is best which governs least.

I believe that, while taxes are not theft, the imposition of a dollar more than is necessary, or the waste or misdirection of a penny, is a crime against the people.

I believe that if you like your steak well-done and your coffee decaffeinated, you don't really like steak or coffee.

I believe the rights to life, to liberty and to pursue happiness and dignity come from God and belong to each individual who,  accordingly, has the right to defend those rights – even by force of arms – against anyone – any criminal, any institution, and even any government – that proposes to take them.

I believe the curve where a woman’s bottom meets her thigh is the most beautiful structure in nature.

I believe, with Robert Heinlein, that kids should be kept long on hugs and short on pocket money.

I believe our adversarial system of justice – while it can be brutal, flawed, indifferent and dangerous – works awfully well when the men and women engaged in it operate in good faith.

I believe in condign punishment for the guilty and that some crimes deserve death.

I believe it is better for a guilty man to go free than for the state to take the liberty of an innocent man.

I believe that “Casablanca” is a nearly perfect movie.

I believe in marriage, and that the fifth chapter of the Book of Ephesians offers a good manual for a successful one.

I believe God is perfectly sovereign, but that I am responsible for all my actions, and thus in desperate need of Grace.

I believe, with the ad writers, that life is too short to drink cheap beer.

I believe the best immigration policy is “high fences and wide gates,” wherein we vigorously protect our borders and sovereignty, but in which legal immigration – that brought everyone in my family here – is easy and attainable.

I believe that sometimes war is the answer, as it certainly was when my Dad went, and the question on the table was: “World slavery, yes or no?”

I believe we were right to go to war in Afghanistan and that we were wrong to go to war in Iraq.

I believe that has nothing whatsoever to do with the honor of the Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, Airmen and Coast Guardsmen who have fought there.

I believe, with Samuel Johnson, that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.

I believe the designated hitter is bad for baseball, and that what’s bad for baseball is bad for America.


*     Do I contradict myself?
       Very well then I contradict myself,
       (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
 
                           Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"