64. Why the Viet Nam Hawks Weren't So Dumb

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To all us right-thinking lovers of reason the reflex anti-communists, the kind that supported Joe McCarthy, were dumbheads, but how about the senators and Congressmen who drew on those dumbheads for support? They were of the postwar generation John Gaddis (recognized "dean of Cold War studies," and teaching at Ohio U.) credits with a very reasonable aim, to apply the great lesson of World War II: stop aggression early. They needed the bumper hawks so that they could avoid the catastrophic mistake of their predecessors, letting the Nazis get strong before they could be stopped. If only, they thought, they could have had American bumpers plastered with 'get them fascists' when Hitler sent his soldiers into the Rhineland.

So Barry Goldwater and those bumper hawks were working for peace. Yes, peace. Not in the way of the mild but in the way of the stern: through credible threat. "When we make war on you we don't stop until we've crushed you." That was the way of the Romans, and it accounts, say the stern, for the longest periods of peace the world has ever had. (At the moment, in 2011, they would say that way accounts for the long peacefulness of the two countries most thoroughly crushed in World War II.)

It's a respectable way. Ask historians. If you define peace as time without blood-spilling (not cold) war then, they'll tell you, the stern way has the advantage over the gentle way. Examine the periods during which people lived in peace and see what gave it to them. Count up the days. Severity wins.

To make it win, though, you have to have credibility. If you don't have a track record of successful severity, something approaching the Roman, or the Spartan (or the British, at times), nobody will believe your stern threats, the ones that keep them from spilling blood.

So there's the rationale for throwing your all into Viet Nam. You're doing it for your track record, which gives you credibility, which gives you enemies who fear you, and neutrals who respect you. How can you hold back?

You wouldn't, readers, be university people if you weren't ready with a dozen reasons but our interest now is clarity, and I think we've made a gain there. What looked like a war between dumbheads, armies of the night, comes into focus as a reasonable conflict. All the thinking politicians who made use of an unthinking base (and what thinking politician doesn't?) to avoid the mistakes their predecessors made were thinking reasonably. Acting to meet a threat on time is reasonable, and acting to maintain credible threats is reasonable. (Remember, "reasonable" does not mean "right.") On the other hand, all the apparently mindless Yippies had their minds on a reasonable goal too, to avoid complicity in a crime.  Everybody was acting reasonably.  There's the sixties for you.

In the event, some of us wound up justifying Yippies and some of us wound up justifying Hawks.  I wound up on the Yippie side but my reasons are too long for here. Next post: Why the Yippies Were Almost Right.

63. Hawks and Yippies, 1968

To be "good," you have to be "a good citizen," and in a democracy that means being "engaged" in politics, and that means supporting a side. But you have to support a good side, and if one side is doing more good than another you have to support it. But sometimes the goodness is very hard to see, and in riots it can be impossible.

It was close to impossible, at least for me, in the student riots of 1968. I'd come back from East Asia ready to believe that anti-establishment riots by university students, the enlightened, the well taught (by people like me), were almost sure to be good. They might not be as good as the Korea University students, demanding that their government live up to the democratic ideals taught them by their American-studies professors, but still, they'd be good.

In the 1967 March on the Pentagon the university students, at least the ones I saw, looked pretty good. And I thought I saw them clearly. Then in 1968 I didn't know what I was seeing. There on the screen were the Yippies. There were our students, painted like savages. Soon on bookstands there would be Jerry Rubin's "Do It" and Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book." What the hell did all that have to do with ending the war in Viet Nam? How could it possibly serve the good cause?

Irrelevance, diffusion of force, childishness — that's what we all saw in those people. Yet we had to call the side they were on the "good" one. It had to be good. The other side was the uneducated, unenlightened one: get-them-commies, nail-that-coonskin-to-the-wall, get-your-heart-in-America-or-get-your-ass-out.

Well, if you have to be on a doubtful side you'll find a way to explain the bad in it. Some of my colleagues and I told ourselves that in all that incomprehensible behavior the students were making a comprehensible moral statement: "We refuse to be accomplices in a national crime." Avoiding complicity in a crime is as morally respectable a thing as you can do, right? Hadn't we just been calling for it in Germany? "Where were the good Germans?" Well, the good Americans, those Yippies, were saying, "We're bailing out, and we're calling your attention to this open hatch here in your heartless bomber." The obscenity we saw on a 19-year-old's forehead said, "I am not Curtis LeMay."

I had seen some Curtis LeMay types during my own service. They loved what they were doing. War was their life, what they had trained for. But to keep it up they had to have an enemy. With the Axis gone they didn't need much of an excuse to turn somebody into an enemy, and the communists were giving them plenty of excuses. Those career war guys were dangerous and the bumper hawks made them more dangerous (great heavens, they could push us through Viet Nam right into a war with the Chinese). So the Yippies were onto something, it was rational, they were good, and we were good in supporting them.

That took some seeing, but we eventually saw it or came up with it. What we peace profs were incapable of seeing in 1968 was that the other irrational ones, the bumper hawks, might have been onto something too. You could make a case for their rationality. Next post: Why the Viet Nam Hawks Weren't So Dumb.

62. The March on the Pentagon

In America the students' great cause was ending the Viet Nam war. What did drugs and beards and obscenities on the forehead have to do with it? Don't ask me. I was in East Asia getting steamed up over the Korean students' struggle to topple Syngman Rhee.

Very little of that Abbie Hoffman kind of side play had appeared, though, in the March on the Pentagon, at least in the part I saw. The leader of the OU group, senior Elaine Herrald, dressed straight and ran a pretty tight bus. Write down the schedule, show up on time, don't wander off at the potty stops.

Exuberance she left to her lieutenants, one of whom showed me what "counter-cultural" meant, at least at the time, with them. He got up and led a cheer. Only not a real cheer. It was a parody cheer, sending up the jocks and the school-spirit sophomores — the "establishment" they were against. Here's the way it went: "Gimme a G." "G. "Gimme an L." "L!" "Gimme an R." "R!" "Gimme a B." "B!" "Gimme a P" "P!" "Gimme an L." "F!" "F!" "Whaddya got?" And everybody turned themselves purple trying to pronounce GLRBPF.

In Washington we were turned over to leaders equally firm but much more knowledgeable than Elaine. They were veterans of the civil rights marches. "Eight abreast, men on the outside. Take off necklaces and bracelets, anything a hostile spectator might snatch. Hold hands. Don't respond to heckling. Keep going."

The immaturity I saw was touching. The demonstrators I was with knew little history. Those geezers on crutches falling in behind us at the reflecting pool. Who were they? The banner said, "Abraham Lincoln Brigade." What's that? They knew nothing of the Spanish Civil War. They used the word "fascist" with hardly an idea of its roots in Italy and Germany. It had become one of their words for "bad guys."

At the Pentagon, after the march across the bridge — serious, serious — I still couldn't be sure I wasn't seeing a mock. Some students knelt in the parking lot. Zen-looking. They were trying to levitate the Pentagon. They said.

The troops looked dead serious. The face I looked into, though as boyish as that of the students I was with, looked determined to follow orders. His bayonet was across his chest, as with others down the line. The orders would have come from his commanding officer, probably a captain. I, ready to cross the line he was ordered to defend, was a commander in the Naval Reserve, the equivalent of a lieutenant-colonel. I was tempted to do some mischief, showing him my ID card. Messing with his head. A surge of returning maturity stopped me.

I didn't have to cross the line; I found a way around it, and reached a grassy place, with small trees. Standing there I saw solders in the parking lot being formed into some kind of phalanx. They then marched toward the grassy place which, I saw, was filled with students who, like me, had found a way around, or broken through. The soldiers were in close order, taking tiny steps, their bayoneted rifles back across their chests. They marched in those bitty shuffling steps, the students having plenty of time to give way before them — the reason for the shuffle, I suppose — all the way to where I was. There they did a right flank, then another right flank, and shuffled back to the lot. The students resumed their position.

What was that about? I pictured the captain, thumbing through his tactics book. What the hell fits this situation? Ask the colonel, up on the roof. "Try the double-close-order sortie."

"Aye, aye," or whatever they say in the Army.

"Shit, that didn't work. Got any other ideas, major?" What a time to be an Army officer!

I made it to the steps of the Pentagon but didn't stay. It was impressive, the way people were sitting there silently in the half-dark, waiting to be arrested. It was too big a thing for me, though, and I had to get back to the bus.

61. The Student March that Brought Down Syngman Rhee.

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One of Hitler's gifts to the 20th century (and Lord knows how many later centuries) is greater confidence in the use of the word "evil." We may once, facing the mixed-up moral world, have been at a loss to find a reference for that word, but no more. Hitler nailed it, and at the same time nailed "good" as its opposite.

I think of that clarity now when I remember my response to the first two riots (or law-breaking demonstrations) I knew anything about. In the first, that at Newport in 1960 (see preceding Post), the students were to me clearly Yahoos, with no cause but their own pleasure. In the second, that at Korea University in the same year, the students were clearly true-blue soldiers in the fight for justice and democracy, the most noble political cause university people can have.

Though both of my responses were equally sure, my love for the fighters for justice and democracy went much deeper than my dislike of the Yahoos. I came home looking for a student leader to hug.  So too would you, university friend, if you had heard what I heard.

Try listening to this. A Korean professor of American Studies is explaining, over coffee, the political situation in 1960. "Syngman Rhee's way of governing is to declare martial law, round up the assembly members opposed to him, and make them vote his way. That's what he did in 1952, to defeat a motion for parliamentary government. He did the same kind of thing in March, 1960, to get himself re-elected. And nobody was doing anything about it.

"Except the students. You know what they did, the students of my university, my students? With the streets and housetops full of soldiers they organized a march, here to the Blue House, three miles, to try to pull the townspeople into some kind of fight. Fight all right. The soldiers let them have it. From the rooftops. When they reached the square. Two hundred [142, later] of them were killed, 2000 [1500, later] wounded. Our students they were, and students from the other universities, who joined the march on the way.

"Well, we had a faculty meeting to decide whether we should march.  But too many professors were afraid for their jobs, and maybe their lives, for us to make a decision. Still, when we came out each individual faced a choice. Turn one way and you were on a streetcar heading for your house. Turn the other way and you were heading for the government buildings. Some students had gathered around that path, waiting to see and, hopefully, help.

"Most profs went home but enough of us turned toward town to excite the students, who gathered around offering aid. 'Do you need a jacket? Water? A hat?' More students came running up, with some running right back toward the dormitories, carrying the news.

"There on the grass we made our banners, two of them. (A student had suddenly appeared with, surprise, cloth, paint, and poles.) On the first banner we wrote this: [My informant —  whose name, alas, I cannot now dredge up — put words, in Korean, on a card I still have.] It says, 'Make up for the bloodshed of our students.' On the second banner we wrote, 'Syngman Rhee, step down.'

"By now there were a lot of students, falling in behind us and cheering as we moved through the campus toward the streets. It was a rare thing in Korea. University teachers here are highly respected but aloof. They don't do this kind of thing. Ordinary students were amazed, as you could hear in the shouts from our margins to those in the buildings. 'The professors are marching! The professors are marching!'

"But it really was a student march. They poured in from all parts the campus, gathering behind their leaders. These leaders had been through it before — yes, all those dead, all those wounded, many by hostile (hired?) people on the sidewalks — and they knew what they were doing. They knew what we were worth to them. You could see that as we got to the campus exit onto the city streets. There we could see figures on rooftops. There the sidewalks were filling up. Just before we got to them, at some leader's sign (I suppose), the students formed ranks around us, front and sides, to protect us.

"There was little cheering from the students. It was too tense. And from the streets and windows, at first there was near silence. Surprise, I think. But you could hear individual voices. 'The professors are marching. The professors!'"

If I there had been any pretense to objectivity before it would have broken down here.  I get worked up as I think about it now and my source then, for all his Asian reserve, broke at this point into open confession. He had gotten a Ph.D. in American Studies at some Midwestern university. Drawing on material at the USIS, and on talks by Fulbrighters like me,  he had for eight years or more been teaching students the values of critical inquiry, open discussion, and democratic government. And he'd seen those values trampled on, and trampled on. And he'd done nothing about it. Now here were his students, not only putting their lives on the line for those values but putting them on the line for him.  It was the high point of his teaching life, maybe his life. He confessed it and said, "I looked at those students between me and the crowd and I said, 'I don't care if I die. I will finish this march with them.'"

The rest of his story was wonder. The streets began to cheer. "The students! The professors! Go! Go! Yea! Yea!" People came out of the doors with sandwiches. An elderly man broke through to give my colleague a Coke. There were more and more of them, the closer they got to the government house. The figures on the rooftops melted away. In the square there was unity, expressing itself in a roar. From streets and houses.

They stood for a while, presenting their message, then went their ways. My friend went to a noodle shop with some colleagues. "We went home not sure whether we'd have jobs the next day. Or a home." Next day, 26 April, a student came bursting in. "We won. We won. Rhee is resigning. We won."

If you react to that story as I did you can imagine the kind of shape I was in when, back in the States before the year was out, I joined the March on the Pentagon.  Next Post.

60. Memories of the Newport Jazz Festival Riots of 1960

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When will we ever have a riot like the one that closed down the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960? I mean a riot like, when it's over things are clear. At Newport you had students just drunk, just partying, throwing rocks at the police just to make trouble. Rich kids' trouble. They'd come into town in MGs and BMWs (you saw dozens of them down by the beach — I was there) and their clothes (when they kept them on) were the latest Bermuda fashion. Moralists like me could express pure disapproval.

And what support we had! The music community was right with us, mad as hell about losing their festival. And to whom? Not to people worked up by the music. Not to people so eager for it that they'd fight to get tickets. No. To people who didn't know crap about the music. Or anything. I believe it was Whitney Balliett, jazz critic of the New Yorker, who called them "Yahoos." Yes, Swift's name for unregenerate mankind. Gulliver found them in trees, throwing excrement. Perfect.

And the intellectual community? Oh, they were with us. They had to be. The whole thing started in downtown Newport when a fight broke out between two fraternities. Intellectuals can't be seen close to fraternities. They run with the music community. Whitney Balliett.

So we were at the center of a solid moral, esthetic, and intellectual front with a clear view of the opponents we faced. They were the uneducated; we were the educated. They were the immature; we were the mature.

That was 1960. In a few years nothing was clear. What looked like the same youth, throwing the same rock at the same policeman, could not really be the same youth, the one we disapproved of. He had a cause. First civil rights, then ending the war in Viet Nam. We approved of those causes. We were, by and large, doing nothing to further them. How could we disapprove of this youth who was, at least, doing something? Who was "more moral"? Could you call somebody less mature and educated than you were when he was more moral?

Then there was the view of policemen. In 1960 the young people were looking at officials with no history. A few years later they were looking at officials with a history of "brutality," variously earned but surely named. That let the young refocus our attention, and quickly. The issue after a riot (or an act of "civil disobedience"; it all came under "lawbreaking") became the performance of the authorities. "Yes, we broke the law but you didn't punish us right." Well, sometimes the police punished right and sometimes they didn't. Oi. There were enough complications without adding that one.

The recent riots in England roused my memory of these sixties' complications. The riots' origin in a protest over police action against a minority immediately raised a banner like one I honored in the sixties. The subsequent mindless behavior raised the same doubts. The authorities' reaction raised the same question about punishment.

All this makes me realize how lucky I am, in a sad sort of old-age way. The chances of life seem to have put me far closer to significant riots (or acts of disobedience) than a moralist has any right to expect. After the Newport riots I was in the student march on the Pentagon in 1967 and I was on the campus of Ohio University in 1968. I knew all about the bombing of the ROTC building and the storming of the President's house and the coming of the National Guard and the closing of the University. And I was in Seoul, South Korea, close enough to the fall of Syngman Rhee to be inspired — no, thrilled — by an account of the march that brought him down.

At the same time I was lucky to be assigned to teach two authors not often found in one professor's course assignments, Herman Melville and John Milton. Nowhere else could I have stumbled on such well-timed wisdom about the riotous human being. In the next post or two I will, as I recall the riots and street actions I have witnessed, try to make something of my luck.

59. "Proper"

An LRB blogger says, "I live about halfway between the site of the Olympics and the closest proper looting spree that I heard of, in Bethnal Green."

By this time we're used to the British use of "proper" (short for "what can properly be called a") but in some contexts, jeez.

58. "Consigned"

 

"The educated and affluent enjoy relatively strong, stable families. Everyone else is more likely to be consigned to unstable, unworkable ones." W. Bradford Wilcox, associate professor of sociology, U. of Virginia, quoted in NYT 8-17-11.

"Consigned to," like freight to a shipper, like an embezzler to Sing Sing, like a soldier to a triage row.  "Who put me in this lousy situation? Certainly not me."

If you deal with forces, as sociologists do, you can make a correction. "Son, you should be asking, 'What put me in this relationship?'" Deprivation, culture, heritage, oppression, anything but education and affluence will do.

"Consigned" is one of those removal-words, the thing removed always being personal responsibility. It does for us what "fate" did for Greeks and "predestination" did for Christians. Except that it does add something personal. There's always a hand in sight, signing the commitment papers, the bill of lading, the diagnosis — all visible in the Latin root, consignare, to put one's seal to.

Not that a writer can't obscure it, as Wilcox does, with that impersonal passive. Somebody's signing the sentence that sends you to a life of dysfunction, but who? Maybe the educated? No, if you name them you've got to argue, out in the light. Better the dark suggestion. Some kind of — could it be — conspiracy?

No, suggestions of conspiracy are inappropriate in science. Keep people out. "Consigned" will do for that. It gives you the impersonal force, it lets you see a system at work, but it gives it a hand, signing. Something you can blame, however faintly, and be superior to.

57. Obama to voters: “You deserve better.”

No they don’t, Barack. They deserve exactly what they’re getting. They voted for these people. They instructed them to do what they're doing. Nobody from Heaven came down and made them sign a pledge never, never to raise taxes. Nobody from Mars said, "Give no ground on Social Security." These are citizens in a democracy, brother. Citizens in a democracy always get the government they deserve.

I hear spite in your voice. I hear, "Me, me. I didn't vote for those clunks. I'm not a dimwit Johnny-one-note. Why do I have to suffer?" Now I'm sure you know the answer to that. In a democracy the minority always has to suffer what the majority imposes. You know that if it doesn't, if it rebels, it can end democracy. In my opinion it's your desire not to end democracy that keeps you suffering.

Yes, I won't start blowing up things, but am I not allowed a few howls? May not a man of self-control "give a loose to his soul" as Robert Frost's woodchopper did? I howl — at night, to you, to my friends — but in my howling am I doing anything more than whacking a few blocks of oak, releasing a little soul-pressure?

I think you are doing more. Frost was alone, feeling

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

That's a wonderful release, but it's private. You are in a room, with others, and they hear your howling. You encourage them to howl too. You could make a chorus, howling to each other. And you know what that makes you?

I'm afraid to guess.

It makes you a lot like the dimwits you're howling about. Don't we say that the reason they're so dim, or maybe just the reason they stay dim, is that they talk almost entirely to each other — you know, on blogs and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube — and listen to the same voices on radio and television? It's the whole world to them. We say the dim "live in an echo-chamber." Well, I think you bright fellows, howling in your little room, are living in the same kind of place. And you're doing what they're doing. You're dimming yourselves.

And what would we be doing if we stayed bright?

You'd be waiting patiently for each chance to change those speakers. To break into their conversations or draw them into yours. To bring in what light you can.

56. "Intolerant"

Can we use the word "intolerant" to describe British Prime Minister David Cameron? Six months before the recent riots he said, "Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives. We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values" (New Yorker, 7-4-11).

So, if he won't tolerate he will be intolerant, right?

Technically that's right, but humanly it isn't. Today's human beings hear "intolerant" and think "bigot," one who "is intolerant of those who differ with him." That's not fair to Cameron. He doesn't care if you differ with him. He just wants you to differ with him — or the government, or the society, or the culture — inside the traditional democratic frame, the one supported by what he calls "our values."

And you're right with him, I believe. You have to be. You said (in Post #42) that "democracy depends on a certain character, and character is developed over time, in a tradition." You and Cameron believe in the superiority of your tradition — which, some would observe, is singularly a male, Protestant, European tradition. They suggest that you are prejudiced against other traditions.

Ugh, "superiority." Categorical assertion of it is the stupidest thing anybody, European or non-European, can do in these times. It throws us right back into the old culture wars, cultural relativism vs. cultural absolutism, that mess. No, friend, never say "superior" unless you add "in such and such a way, for this or that purpose." One culture is superior (meaning, usually, in the way it trains its children) in commercial enterprises, bookkeeping, city skills. Another is superior in woodcraft, farming, country skills. Somebody asks, "Why are you encouraging young people to adopt the values of this culture?" You answer. "Simply because that's the way (the commercial, say) to get ahead now. It's a better fit for their needs." That's all you have to say. It says "superior" but in a way that's easy to accept. It doesn't express an attitude; it states a fact.

Oh man, you sound modest but I see what you are doing. You are writing Cameron's next speech for him: "My dear fellow citizens. What do we all need? A functioning democracy. What culture, what values, are best fitted to that need? This one, now prevailing in England. Turn to it, children. Learn the craft. This is the way for all of us to get ahead."

That's easy. That's exhortation. It's the speech after that that counts. If we all need a functioning democracy then, in our name, he'll be justified in breaking down those segregated communities and interfering with those separate lives. "Acquire these values or else." Will he say, "No more concessions to your native language"? "No more social services for your radicals"? Whatever he says it's going to be heard as, "Our way or the highway." The word "intolerant" is sure to come back into play.

55. Reading the Bible: A Sermon

Preached to a recognizable American political/religious group, 13 Aug 2011:

 

Brothers and sisters, I heard last night that you are angry. The television man said that you hollered at your Congressman for letting the debt ceiling be raised. Is that right? Are you as angry as the New York Times reporter — the one the television man gets his news from (8-12-11) — says you are? Are you? Are you? [great roar, "Yes!"]

In that case, watch out, brothers and sisters. Take a minute to read your Bible. Do you know what it says about anger? Do you? Do you? [silence] It says (James 1:19), "be slow to get angry." It says (Proverbs, 14: 29), "Those with a hasty temper will make mistakes." It says — listen carefully, brothers and sisters —it says that "your anger can never make things right in God's sight" (James again).

Do you want to do right in God's sight? I wonder. Who are you angry at? Your Congressman, of course, because he didn't fight hard enough to hold down spending. Maybe at those senators who won't hold down spending your Congressman's way. But most likely you're angry at President Obama, who's behind all those Democrat spenders. Is that right? Is that right? [great roar, "Yes!"]

What does it mean, "to do right in God's sight"? Have you asked yourself that? Have you looked into your Bible? Really looked into it? Paid attention? Close attention? Have you? Have you? [silence]

Sure you have. You've just forgotten. Doing right in God's sight is doing what Joseph did in Egypt. He got the message from God that seven lean years were coming, preceded by seven fat years. And what was he supposed to do during those fat years? Lay up! Lay up! Food of the field, food in the cities, corn like the sand of the sea, into the granaries "against the seven years of famine, that the land perish not."

That's what you do in fat years, lay up. Our fat years were the 80s and 90s. What were you doing then? About the deficit. About Social Security. About all the entitlements that are killing us now. Did you think twice about a trillion-dollar war? It would have been easy then for a President to reduce spending. Plenty of money, jobs easy, no recession. Did you read your Bible thinking fat years in Egypt had no connection with fat years in the United States? Did you think God's message had nothing to do with you? Did you expect him to communicate in some other way? Great Heavens, brothers and sisters, you stand in front of the world holding up the Bible. When in God's name are you going to look into it? Are you going to rely on me, just me, or some preacher on television, to tell you what's in it?

Well, since that's the way it is, I'm going to tell you. I'm no Jeremiah or Isaiah, I'm a frail reed, but I've got their message, and they give me strength to deliver it. It's this: you have sinned in the eyes of the Lord, sinned to high heaven. You sinned then in your profligacy and you sin now in trying to blame somebody else.

Now you might have missed the first sin but I don't see how in the world, if you had read your Bible, you could have missed the second. The Bible is full of scorn for those who try to shift the blame. There's Adam, a worm squirming under God's gaze: "This woman whom thou gavest to be with me, SHE gave me of the tree, and I did eat." There's Aaron, claiming that the "mischievous" people made him make a graven image. "They gave me the gold and out came this calf." What do you know, out came that calf. There's Saul, trying to blame "the people" for denying God "the best of the sheep and of the oxen" on his sacrificial altar. And finally there's Pontius Pilate washing his hands to show that the blame for Christ's death falls on "the multitude."

You (help me, Jeremiah) are Adam and Aaron and Saul and Pontius Pilate. Why? Because you are trying to avoid the personal responsibility you're always out there making so much of.

And you know this. You know in your heart that you are guilty, and it's a burden to you. I can see it in the way you try to lighten that burden. You'd see it too if you would just go back and look at the way the Israelites tried to lighten their burden of guilt. They put "all their iniquities" on a goat (called "the scapegoat") and sent him "into the wilderness."

That's what you are doing. Your choice of goat varies but I see that your goats do have one thing in common: they all work in Washington. That's where the sin is. Not where you live.

And you know what? I believe that you love virtue and hate sin. And you have an intense desire to show that, to others and to yourself. That's why you are so strict about frugality and austerity and discipline, today's great virtues.

The thing is, your timing is terrible. And that changes everything. You want frugality just when imposition of it will damage the budding prosperity that you also want. Twenty years ago you could have had it, and been happy with your President. Now you can't have it unless your President, that goat, commits a lot of the sins you hate.

I have searched the Bible, brothers and sisters, for comparisons to what you are now, people who have betrayed the ideals of their religion, neglected their Holy Scripture, and acted like the pleasure-loving heathens they scorn. And who in their hearts know this.

That leaves you feeling guilty, doesn't it?  You're not as good as your grandfather.  Well, you'll show him, and his demanding spirit.  You may not have practiced the old virtues for a while but by God you'll come out for them now.  Twice as loudly.  You'll give these unfrugal Democrats the beating of their lives.

Of course it's the beating you should have been giving yourselves in the 80s and 90s.  Only with what psychologists call "compensatory exaggeration." You're the watchdog who, missing the stranger until he gets to the door, barks the place down. "See, I'm just as good at watching as I ever was."

The trouble is, that's a personal-virtue problem, with both you and the dog. And sometimes personal-virtue problems fit the nation's problems and sometimes they don't. Right now the fit is terrible. I mean to the point of your committing new and greater sins. If you bring the house down to save your virtue you've injured a lot of your brothers. The Bible has a lot to say about that, my friends, injury to brothers. Look into it, brothers and sisters. Look into it closely.

54. "The meaning of life"

"Don't say 'the meaning of life.' Say 'the purpose of life.' 'Meaning' is ambiguous. Sometimes it means 'signification' and sometimes it means 'purpose.' Applied to life it nearly always means 'purpose' but the other meaning creeps in and confuses things. There's enough confusion in discussions of the purpose of life without your adding to it."

My grandfather wasn't confused, and he talked about the "meaning of life" and he made very clear that it meant "urpose of life." He said it was to do God's will. Discussions with him were very short.

"And he could explain very clearly — maybe because he had a lot of help. Anybody who was in doubt about God's will could turn to the Bible, or the Catechism, or great poets like Dante and Milton."

I'm not in doubt about God's will; I'm in doubt about God. Take him away and you take his will out of the discussion. Yet thoughtful people keep talking and I want to listen to them. I hear the philosopher Philip Kitcher talk about a 'life without meaning' and the literary theorist Bruce Robbins talk about 'the malaise of meaninglessness' (both in the recent Joy of Secularism, Princeton UP) and I say, 'Yes, that's my life.' I need some help with it and they speak my language."

"I can see that, and I hope you'll forgive me for saying this harsh thing about it: it's the language of adolescence. In it the ambiguous word 'meaning' is used carelessly and the response to the removal of God is immature."

The carelessness I can see. Kitcher (or, more precisely, the people he's referring to) can't mean that life is without meaning. Not with reference to my life, or that of all the God-forsaken people I know. Dark clouds still mean rain, two fingers still mean a curve ball, a raised eyebrow from my spouse still means I'm talking too much. My life is full of that kind of meaning. He should have said what he meant: 'life without purpose." There's nothing in it to do what service to God did. But how is the response immature?

"It's emotional and unreasoned, as early responses to shock tend to be. Here it's the shock of God-loss. The mature response to that is not malaise but acceptance. The acceptance can be sad but it can't be indignant, as Camus was (Post #7), or complaining, as Shelley was. That’s childish and unrealistic. The adult looks at the astronomer's universe, or the geologist's earth, or the biologist's cell — all the things that are supposed to take away meaning — and says, "This is the way it is. I can't deny it." The teacher encouraging adulthood says, "Get used to it." The well-taught student says, "OK, we're 0-1 on their clean-up hitter and I'm signaling a high, inside fastball from a rookie pitcher. This next pitch is going to have a lot of meaning."

And you think that that is about all the meaning students can handle.

"No, I think that that is about all the meaning I can help them with in a discussion, or listening to one. For me ballpark meanings are enough; for others, maybe not."

53. Presidential Leadership

 

What this country needs is one President to feel our pain and another one to do something about it. There really isn't time for a man to do both, to respond promptly on television to the Standard and Poor downgrade of Treasury bonds and counter the forces that bring on such a thing.

The first President would satisfy what is apparently the current conception of presidential leadership: showing the country an exemplary way to think, feel, and live.

Oh how such a President would protect the second President from the kind of criticism Barack Obama is getting now on the Op-Ed pages of the country! He'd be johnny-on-the-spot with a response to the death of the 22 Navy Seals (not in Hawaii on vacation, speaking three days late); he'd be ready with something wise and comforting about the S & P downgrade and the crash that followed.  With Obama, says Maureen Dowd, "It's all been 'too little, too late.'"

In World War II the expression "too little, too late" was searingly used to describe what Britain sent to help the Norwegians and then the Greeks to hold off the Germans. The failure of leaders to do enough, on time, had the most dire material consequences. The failure before us now is a rhetorical failure, and it apparently will have dire political consequences. Calling it a failure of leadership will sound strange to those who remember "too little, too late" as it applied to what our leaders were doing then. It didn't matter what Roosevelt said or where he was. If he saw that we put enough troops on the shore of Africa on time that was leadership.

I don't want to deny the term "leader" to someone who bucks up the country. Roosevelt did a lot of that, beginning with "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." But that part of a President's job has, with television, grown so that it is in danger of crowding the other part, the part done out of sight, the part with material consequences, into just a corner of the American consciousness. For Maureen Dowd that corner is very small. President Obama "doesn’t lead, and he doesn’t understand why we don’t feel led." There's her idea of leadership. No matter what he does he can't be called a leader unless he speaks, on time and sufficiently.

In my plan we'll have one President to make sure the country feels led and another to lead it. They'll both have time to do their jobs and they'll both be properly called "leaders."

52. An Idea Whose Time Has Come

The Economist recently had a story about a successfully secret strategy to market to Japanese old people: you make things easier for them — bigger print, old-fashioned vocabulary, lower shelves — without ever indicating that age is a factor. It's called "stealth marketing."

I have an idea for America. It's called "stealth manufacturing." You make the plastic enclosing your product weak enough for old people to be able to get to it. All you say about it is "easy to open." Watch your competitors stand in amazement while half the world flocks to your brand.

51. "Oppressive"

 

When should we help oppressed people and when should we tell them, "Get used to it"? The question can tie us in moral and practical knots but an understanding of the word "oppress" might loosen things up a little.

The root form in Late Latin, opprimere, meant "rape" (from Latin ob "against" plus premere "to press, push," then, in oppressare, "pressing against, crushing") and we wouldn't have any trouble if that's what we still meant. We'd rush to help whoever cried the word.

But the meanings have expanded and softened, on to what rulers do to their people and what humidity and heavy traffic do to everybody. Guilt and feelings of inadequacy are "oppressive." The word fits any constant or repetitious annoyance — as we might have expected it to start doing. Oppressare was a frequentative, a verb indicating repeated action, not as common with rapists as with rulers.

We can tell each other more with an expanded word. A friend complains of the "oppressive joviality" of an uncle. I see more haw-haw than a child can respond to. A homosexual finds an "oppressive conjugality" in his relationship. I see a full daily life and the sensibility responding to it. Wonderful for both friend and homosexual to be able to convey so much in one word.

Still, it's fundamentally a complaint word, meaning that it's unidirectional. We hear "I'm oppressed" but never "I oppress." And the complainer is always for freedom. Even in art criticism where, for example, a 36-meter steel wall can be found "oppressive," we hear a cry for it. We autonomous viewers ought not be subject to intimidation.

If in every cry for freedom we hear "Help, I'm being raped" our knot in the stomach tightens. We loosen it only by deciding if the complaint is justified. Sometimes it's easy (the Jews of Germany, the Syrians of Hama, the slaves of the South) but most of the time it's hard (the Muslims in Bosnia, the Albanians in Kosovo).

In domestic politics the word really gets hard. One side applies it to taxes, gun laws, and environmental controls, the other to what's done to deny mainstream benefits to those on the margin. Before an American audience it's always an advantage to be heard crying for freedom.

When bank executives complain of "oppressive tax and regulatory policies" they are crying for freedom. Staying close to the root meaning we wonder if they're really getting screwed or if they're just crying rape.  After the collapse of 2009 it looked like the latter.  Rape, however, was not far from what Ponzi schemes (Bernie Madoff) had done to trusting widows.

Our answers are colored, I think, by our knowledge of the people around us. If we have a friend who finds things like joviality in uncles oppressive we tend to say, "Get used to it." If we have a friend abused by a spouse I think we tend to say, "I'm here to help."

50. "Credibility." The United States.

  

"A government's credibility is founded on its commitment to pay its debts," says The Economist in a leader.  The credibility of the United States government is now being lost.  Where? Not, certainly, in its commitment to pay its debts. That's as firm as ever. It's being lost in our inability to follow through on that commitment. It's being lost because we're letting a group of quirky politicians take advantage of a quirk in the laws to interrupt the payment of a debt already recognized and for which payment has already been budgeted. Who would have believed that the credibility of the United States would be lost on a quirk?

 You think our debt ceiling is not a quirk? We're the only country to have one. (You can't count Denmark because its ceiling, three times the country's present debt, is meaningless. Ours could be a once-in-a millennium accident.)

How to deal with the people taking advantage of this quirk?  Make the issue our standing in the world, rather than our fiscal responsibility. Make it a belief in the United States of America, her power and her word.  "Haven't you, Republicans, always painted the loss of that as a disaster?" That should put the pressure on them. They can see blame coming, and they certainly don't want it here.

Nor do they want their leaders to lose out in competition with the "world leaders" quoted in yesterday's lNYT ("In World’s Eyes, Much Damage Is Already Done"), whose countries stand to gain in stature if that of the United States is lowered. It's a zero-sum world feast, this "quality or power of inspiring belief." Somebody's always ready to jump on a spill, or see one. How often did De Gaulle tell Europe that this incident or that "cast doubt on America's leadership"?

But we ought to be used to loss of credibility. Think back 75 years. In that span America has probably lost its credibility more times than it's lost its innocence.