168. Why I want to draw the red line with Benjamin Netanyahu.

"I don't want to do anything with Benjamin Netanyahu.  He does what his God wants.  That's the worst reason in the world to do something in foreign affairs or politics."

What do you mean 'his God wants'?  He never mentions God.  He never appeals to him. 

"No, but he's the head of the God party, the party that believes that the land in dispute over there is theirs because God gave it to them.  Question any decision, propose any compromise, soften any action, and there they are: God wants it this way.  Can you imagine any party more difficult to deal with at a negotiating table?  I mean outside of the Party of God on the other side — the party of a different God."

No Israeli premier, including members of the opposing party, has cut back settlements.  Can they all have been God-people?

"If they're not how do you explain their actions?  They're either God-people or afraid of God-people.  They serve them.  What's the negotiating-table difference?  If you act as a duck you should be dealt with as a duck."

I agree.  But this is one duck I have to stand alongside of.  If it's a matter of denying Iran nuclear weapons I'm right there.   I can't let a country that says it hates us, calls us "the Great Satan," wants to wipe out our closest ally, and whose culture weakens (by elevating martyrdom) all normal deterrence, I can't let that country have a weapon that can do such substantial damage.

"Yet you have stood by and watched them sponsor or approve of many terrorist acts."

Terrorist acts do not do substantial damage.  They do symbolic damage, image damage.  Add up the number of deaths they cause compared to what World War II caused and you'll see what I mean by "substantial."  5,000 died at Iwo Jima in five days, 19,000 at the Bulge in two weeks.  The Russians in two weeks lost 57,000 at the Battle of Kursk.  An A-bomb raises Iran's capability to that level.

"So to prevent that you will stand by Netanyahu doing just what all the God people in Israel are doing.  You'll be saying, 'God gave them that land.'  Talk about acting like a duck!"

I know all that, and I know worse.  They tricked me into standing beside them.  They arranged it so that I had no alternative.  By settling themselves, little by little, in the Occupied Territories, they were able to reach the point where removing them became a humanitarian outrage.  All of my arguments against those God-sanctioned settlements were negated by what they called "facts on the ground."   They moved so gradually I didn't see it.  Now I stand here a fool, obviously tricked.  Yet I have to stay here.

"I can't believe it.  You, a college-educated man, standing with creationists!  Even more unbelievable is the change in those who tricked you.  Aren't they the same people who scoffed at fundamentalists in the thirties and forties?  In my college days a Jew was somebody who came to your Midwest school from New York and shot down all the fundamentalists' arguments.  I can't believe that these are the people who tricked you into standing with fundamentalists.  I can't believe they're standing there.  How can they be related to the Jews I knew?"

It doesn't matter.  Their identity doesn't matter.  Their trickery doesn't matter.  Their history doesn't matter.  What matters is the prospect of death, in substantial numbers, for my countrymen and their friends when the big bomb, dropped on or smuggled into New York, heart of the Great Satan, by an Allah-serving martyr, goes off.  With that in front of me I've got to draw the red line with Benjamin Netanyahu.

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167. What Barack Obama learned from my urologist.

 
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The President must have the same urologist I have.  He believes in watchful waiting.

Let me tell you about "watchful waiting."  It's the greatest treatment ever to rise to the top of the options-list doctors give their patients.  You know, in those waiting-room brochures. 

For prostate malignancies "watchful waiting" used to be well below the aggressive treatments — prostatectomy, radiation therapy, hormone therapy.  My first urologist, as soon as he saw the biopsy results, wanted to do major surgery.  A later one wanted to chemically castrate me.  "We've got to go right at this thing."  That fit the temperament of most of his manly patients.  This is malignant, man.  We don't want to mess around.  "OK Doc, let's roll."

This was so common in my town and in the literature that I began to think urologists all had the same mentor.  Some Edmund Burke.  "All that is needed for the triumph of prostate cancer is for good urologists to do nothing."

Well, my present urologist, the one I share with Barack Obama, didn't follow him.  He advised something pretty close to nothing.  You just keep an eye on the tumor and not until you get a reliable sign that it's going lethal do you act.

What led him to differ from his colleagues then, or what led so many of them to come over to his side since then, I don't know.  Maybe they saw so many people (like my brother) suffering so much from the aggressive treatment that they began to have doubts.  Maybe the experience of a few patients (like me, with seven years of normal life) was so happy that they thought it was a good gamble.  Whatever it was, the order on the list was reversed, no dire consequences followed, and my urologist (Eric Klein of the Cleveland Clinic) is getting praise from all over the country.

Now I want to praise Obama for the way he, ignoring the manly Republicans, has adopted "watchful waiting" as his approach to malignancies in world affairs.  Where George Bush, with nearly all of Congress behind him, wanted to roll in Iraq, Obama wanted to wait.  Where John McCain wants to roll in the Middle East Obama wants to wait.  To Bush Saddam Hussein was clearly malignant.  To John McCain Bashar al-Assad is clearly malignant. " When you've got a malignancy why mess around?"

Maybe by now the suffering caused by the roll into Iraq is changing some minds.  Maybe Congress and the electorate are ready to join the small, unmanly cohort (the French, those accordion players) who wanted to watch and wait in 2003.  They clearly seem less willing to roll against that evil monster Assad.

I use the word "evil" there because that's the word gung-ho spin-doctors use when they want to move a nation's citizens to roll with their client in international affairs.  It's the word George Bush's doctors used for the Iraqi and Iranian and North Korean malignancies.  It's the word Ronald Reagan's doctors used for the Soviet Union.  It makes watching and waiting much harder.  "This is evil, man."  But it's very effective with a religious electorate.  It makes the malignancy more "theological" — as Bush's speechwriter explained when he inserted it.

"Evil" is just one of those words that Republicans (and some Democrats — mainly out of the need to compete with them for votes) use to tap into American testosterone (see "holy testosterone" in Post #158).  And the users are nearly always vague with respect to specific action.  What do you do to stamp out evil?  What do you do to show you are not "soft on" communism?  that you are not surrendering in the "war on terrorism"?

Well, one thing about my urologist, he was not vague.  And he made sure you knew what he meant. "Watchful waiting" did not mean "gentle acting."  If the threat was lethal there would be no limit to his aggressiveness.  He was ready to cut, plant, and castrate.  All in substantive action.  Nothing symbolic. 

OK, here's where I see President Obama, listening to a physician who didn't just say "malignancy!" but asked right away, "How fast is it growing?  What can it do to change this patient's life, in comparison with the other options?  Is it a lethal threat?"  All are specific and precise questions whose parallels I see in the questions I think Obama is asking about the malignancies his countrymen urge him to treat around the world.

166. Changing the Culture at Penn State

How do you change a culture?  Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA, thinks you can do it by hurting people who are part of that culture. 

Was there "a culture of reverence for the football program" at Penn State?  Yes.  The NCAA executive committee's findings (or rather the findings of Louis Freeh, which Emmert and his committee followed) showed that it was "ingrained at all levels of the campus community." 

So the NCAA kept the football team out of bowl games for four years, reduced the number of scholarships that could be granted its players, turned 111 of its victories into losses, and fined the school 60 million dollars.  That hurts the students, the alumni, the fans, the players, the coaches, and, thinking of that 60 million, the professors, the librarians, the administrators, and anybody who has a stake in Penn State's reputation in any enterprise that requires money.  All of them.

This action has been subject to some very sharp criticism.  Gary Alan Fine, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, has compared the changing of wins to losses in the record book to the rewriting of history by the communists in Orwell's 1984.  Twenty-nine past chairs of the Penn State Faculty Senate have objected that the Freeh statement about the culture is plain false: not one of them had ever "been asked to change grades for athletes or approve of phantom courses or majors."

Those are big issues but next to culture-change they're small.  Culture-change is beginning to look like the great challenge of the 21st century.  Isn't it what we're trying to do in the Middle East?  Isn't it what Thomas Friedman and so many other editorialists wanted us to do in Iraq?  Now here's Emmert, having a go at Penn State.

And as an old culture-changer — that is, as a teacher, a supplier the arts and sciences to the undersupplied — I have to say that he has the wrong end of the stick.  You don't change culture by hurting people.  Hurting is what you do to change behavior.  You know, the way armies and police forces do.  To change culture you talk, point, sing, dance, and hold up for admiration — the way artists and profs do. 

We profs mainly talk and point.  And we have no doubt we can change a culture.  We do it all the time.  Small-town culture, fundamentalist religious culture, xenophobic Midwest culture, redneck Appalachian culture, he-man culture, more cultures than you can shake a stick at, they all send their products into our classrooms.  There's a lot of resistance there sometimes, but we're eager to, we've got to, overcome it.  Change the fundamentalist culture and you can teach evolution, change the he-man culture and you can teach poetry.  We get right at it (it's slow work) and after a while we have what we need, students assimilated into the academic culture. 

"If you're saying that that is what Emmert ought to be doing I think you have missed something.  He may be a prof but he has taken a policeman's job.  He presides over an organization that's supposed to check for violation of rules and punish violators — that is, hurt them.  That's what he's doing." 

In which case I think you've exposed the real problem here: confusion.  Emmert is trying to use his police powers to do a prof's (or a priest's, or a parent's) job.  Doesn't he see that powers, starting with the big ones named in our Constitution, should be separate?  that Americans are surprised and offended when they are not?  Look at that report he relies on.  Freeh finds "a striking lack of empathy" for the victims.  What's a judge doing talking about empathy?  That's child-psychologist talk.  Parent talk.  "I'll handle the feelings," says the mother. "You law people just tell me what he did."

That's being offended.  Here's being surprised.  The infractions committee of Emmert's own organization didn't take up the Penn State case.  The reason?  According to some former members, "because it involved a cover-up of criminal activity rather than a violation of traditional NCAA bylaws."  It wasn't in their domain.  But (surprise!) there was Emmert, imposing penalties.

By now I think we all have a pretty good idea of the division of labor.  Architects design, builders build, realtors sell.  In America that gets an early boost in our schooling, when we learn about the organization of our government.  We each play our part and avoid playing somebody else's part and we get the benefits of an ordered society.

"Ah," says my friend, "but underneath this division we are all human beings, and that's what Emmert and Freeh, when they look at what was done to those children, can't resist being.  You want to keep them in their compartments, rational and cold.  I prefer having them out as caring, feeling human beings.  I join Emmert and Freeh."

I do too.  In my heart.  What heart can resist the call to do something, to protect childhood innocence and goodness from adult evil?  But my mind holds me back.  It consults adult experience and says, "Calculate the risks."  Here the evil is a culture and what's done to it is a hurtful act against individuals, justified by the fact of evil.  But "evil," like the on-the-spot word, "bad," is not a fact word; it's a judgment word, and subjective.  Use it to justify a hurtful action and there's no place to stop.  If you're not hurting ghetto-dwellers and Roma and Inuit and anybody else whose culture you judge to be "bad" you're helpless before those who do.

How different from punishing people for their behavior.  Before you can do that you have meet all kinds of conditions, set up, usually by governments, for their protection.  Definition of the crime, rules of evidence, guarantees of process.  You can probably find most of these conditions in the books that both Freeh and Emmert have, up to this point, had to follow.  Punish them for their culture, though, and where are the books you follow?

So there's the first risk, making yourself the tolerator, if not the companion, of bigots and kooks, high-handed culture-punishers.  The second risk is that you'll make an intolerable mess.  If you sweep aside all distinctions between assigned jobs what happens to our ordered society?  What happens to order itself, to reason?  Reason says, "Keep things straight."  Humane feelings say, "Make things good."  Follow the latter at the expense of the former and you're going to wind with everything crooked, a mess.

"So, do you say to Mark Emmert. 'Do nothing'?  'Look at an attack on innocence and goodness and do nothing'?  You, my friend, are concerned about risk, and say that punishment for bad culture risks the loss of reason.  I say that failure to punish risks the triumph of evil.  Edmund Burke said, 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.'"

Yes I do say to Emmert, "Do nothing" — though I'd put it as, "Mind your own business."  Looking at Iraq, and now Syria, I have to say that.  And I'd like to add this to Burke: "All that is necessary to make a mess (in international affairs called a 'quagmire') is for good people, every time they see evil, to think they have to do something."

165. Phone-sex comedy

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In Stephen Holden's review of For a Good Time, . . . Call, a "fizzy, potty-mouthed comedy" about two nice girls who do phone sex for fun and profit, he says that "the fantasies in which they collaborate with their male clients have little to do with who they really are" (NYT 9-1-12).

I have to stop at "who they really are."  Maybe some people know who other people really are, maybe they know who they themselves really are, and maybe, as a consequence, they're able to talk so confidently.  "Oh sure, there's the fantasizing us and the real us.  There's no connection."  So fizz on.  But other people will be troubled by the assumption of knowledge here, and want to take the director, Jamie Travis, into the seminar room — knowing well what they will hear when they come out: "Lighten up!  Lighten up!"

Then there are those who, right in the middle of a seminar, can't keep from fantasizing: "Suppose I were as smart as those people in New York and knew who everybody really was?  Suppose self-knowledge were a snap?  Suppose I knew for sure that 'adopting a pornographic mind-set' had no consequences in my real life?"

There in my fantasy is my good Episcopalian mother giving those young ladies a talking-to:  "What do you think the Collect for Purity is about?  'Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts.'  You must know hearts have thoughts.  Those are the things you're selling your customers.  So what do you think 'cleanse' means?  You shouldn't use words unless you know what they mean."

"And as for you, Stephen Holden, you with your 'prostitution without despoliation, without guilt.'  Guilt.  What would you want your daughter to feel after she did something like that?  Joy?  Shared over the Christmas dinner table?  Joy to the world."

Now there's Scott Fitzgerald in my fantasy, bringing more words to think about.  "I spoiled this city for myself."  Everybody thinks about 'spoiled' ('despoliation,' above) and sees that he spoiled Paris because he spoiled something in himself.  "The way Milton's Adam spoiled the Garden for himself," a seminarist breaks in.  "Did something to his responding mechanism."

And, can it be, there's the mythic Ernest Hemingway, speaking as a counselor.  "You lose it if you talk about it."  Lose what, telephone talker?

"Lose Love's Elysium," breaks in Thomas Carew, "the paradise of sensual delight.  Where shepherds initiated shepherdesses, on beds of asphodel."

"Lose discovery," adds John Donne, "lose the ability to say, and hear, what hands say, hands roving 'before, behind, between, above, below': 'O, my America, my Newfoundland.'

Yes, but nobody can speak confidently of the relation between thinking and doing — which, if you are what you do, is a relation between thinking and being.  Think one way, be another?  "Never," says Jesus.  "Think your brother a fool and you're a murderer."

"Think me anything you want," says the sergeant.  "As long as you don't do anything about it, like speak out loud, you're an OK soldier."

From a distance it looks like a wash.  But up close, really close, in introspection, the sergeant seems to have the edge.  Most of us believe that we can, inside, call somebody hateful names and still love them, still be good soldiers, still be loving people.  Think hate, be loving.  Think smut, be nice.

Think violence, be gentle.  Think ease, be industrious.  Think rebellion, be cooperative.  Think self, be team.

Does it work the other way?  Think Kike, not be anti-Semitic?  Think Buck, not be bigoted?  Not so well, I think.

The clincher for the free fantasists seems to be the novelist.  In order to render them he (or she} thinks as his characters think, to the point of horror.  The more intimately he shares the process, the horror, the better the novel.  He finishes and is the same jolly person.

"OK, so there you have it.  The customer is paying for a living part in a novel.  His live opposite plays her part, puts down the phone, and is the same nice girl."

So where does that leave Fitzgerald's word "spoil" and Hemingway's word "lose"?  Are they just play words?  No connection with real life, real people?  If those words are just play words, then an awful lot of thoughtful people have been awfully wrong for fifty years.

"And, as you certainly will point out next, the Book of Common Prayer, with its 'cleanse,' has been wrong for four hundred.  Bishop Cranmer is just another novelist."

I would go on to that, but it takes us too deep.  Jesus becomes another novelist, as does God, writing the Bible.  We talk about that and we're in over our heads in no time, explaining how there can be truth in fiction.  That's for the seminar.  Here I'll settle for what I think we can all agree on: that Jamie Travis's girls are playing parts in a very bad novel. 

"I certainly agree. Good novelists (or playwrights) recognize, as Fitzgerald and Hemingway do, that there's something inside us that can be 'spoiled' or 'lost.'  Bad novelists write as if there's no referent for those novelists' words, nothing deeper for their happy surface action to connect to."