“You Can’t Handle the Truth”

It’s one of Jack Nicholson’s great scenes. In A Few Good Men (which was released in 1992 and set, eerily, at Guantanamo) Col. Nathan Jessup (Nicholson) responds to the Navy prosecutor’s (Tom Cruise) demand for “the truth” about the torture and murder of a Marine private. “You can’t handle the truth,” Jessup sneers, raging against those who “sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then question the manner in which I provide it.” Like we do with the CIA. We do not want to see what some do to protect us from others who would do far worse. We look the other way because we are afraid. But also, I think, because we are ashamed.

The dominant American myth is that we are different, special and by implication better than other nations. That is the basis of American exceptionalism. America is the city on a hill, the first new nation, conceived in liberty, dedicated to equality.

But our myths contain potent contradictions that we prefer not to confront:

• Slavery in the land of liberty and the legacy of inequality that endures long after emancipation.
• The frontier, which was not a vast and empty open space waiting to be settled by yeoman farmers, but the home of millions of native peoples.
• And now torture.

America, at first alone, insisted on accountability at Nuremburg after World War II. It's hard to imagine that we would not demand accountability now, were the crimes reported yesterday not our own.

Obama’s Burden

In a recent interview with Terry Gross, Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker’s legal writer, said Barack Obama had “transformed” the federal courts. “They are very different in one way,” he noted. “Diversity.” Ideologically, however, “President Obama has been rather cautious” – particularly in contrast to the Republicans’ aggressive nominations of conservative judges – but his appointments of women, gays and minorities have been unprecedented.

This tells much about Obama – about why he was such an inspiring candidate and why he has been, in some ways, a disappointing president. We elected him for who he was, rather than for what he was going to do, which we really didn’t know. He represented the America we hoped to become – black and white at ease in one body, articulate and compassionate. His Philadelphia speech on race in the summer of 2008 was one of the finest I have ever heard. His candidacy appealed, in Lincoln’s phrase, “to the better angels of our nature.”

But while Obama’s persona was unthreatening to many – which is the only way our first black president could be elected – it was, in itself, threatening to others. And when he actually had to govern, he opened himself to partisan attack (and, as Senator Schumer recently demonstrated, to second-guessing).

His policies have been cautious – the idea that Obama is a “socialist” is laughable, his portrayal as a dictator absurd – but his commitment to diversity has been unwavering, which ultimately, I believe, will be his greatest legacy.

Tom and John

Conceived in the language of John Locke (1632-1704), America has turned increasingly to the principles of Thomas Hobbes (1578-1679). Locke wrote that in the original state of nature, all humans were equal – and guided by reason, they “voluntarily entered into civil society for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and . . . property.”

For Hobbes, however, our natural state was a "war of all against all,” in which humans lived in “continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man [was] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Locke was the Founding Fathers' favorite philosopher: his emphasis on liberty and the social contract was the intellectual foundation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But Hobbes has never been far from the surface – admonishing us that without order, liberty and the social contract cannot exist.

We can deal in the abstract with the messiness of democracy, but once the bombing starts in Baghdad or the protests break out in Ferguson, our first instinct is to restore order before all else. Only when we have imposed external control, can we permit internal liberties to be exercised. We need Hobbes before Locke.

That seems logical – so why isn’t it working? Maybe it’s because those who patrol the skies of Mesopotamia and the streets of Missouri have little understanding of the lives and communities they are charged with controlling. Locke understood, as Hobbes did not, that you cannot long impose order on people who are excluded from the social contract.

There But for History

In the mid-1920s, the Ku Klux Klan reached its apex of influence in Maine, even capturing the governor’s office in 1924. The targets of the Klansmen's ire were not so much African-Americans, of which there were relatively few, but Catholics and immigrants, particularly of the French-Canadian variety, who had come streaming across the northern border to work in the state’s textile, paper and lumber mills. Many did not speak English, which did not stop them from taking American jobs. Earlier this month, Paul LePage defeated Mike Michaud to win re-election as Maine’s governor. During the campaign LePage hammered away at illegal immigration, taking particular umbrage at the placement with host families of eight children who had fled from Central America. Michaud was more silent on the issue, but it’s worth considering that both men descend from French-Canadian families that were the objects of the Klan protests not that many generations ago.

In fact, whatever you may think of LePage as governor, he has a singularly compelling biography. The eldest of 18 children of an abusive French-speaking millworker, he left home at the age of 11, after his father had shattered his nose, and lived for several years on the streets of Lewiston, finding work where he could. He failed his first college admission test because of poor English skills, and only passed after a benefactor persuaded Husson College to give him the test in French – interesting in light of today’s “English-only” movement.

It’s a true story and, somehow, this morning it seemed worth telling.

One Veteran's Reflection

As a veteran reflecting on Veterans Day 2014, I just want to say: “You’re welcome for my service.” Well, perhaps one thing more: It seems that the further we remove ourselves personally from the wars we fight, the more we heap superficial honors on the men and women we send to fight them. We applaud them as they double-time through airports. We invite them to the head of the line. We are forever thanking them for their service. We owe them that much, but we owe them and our country more.

Today, “only 5% of Americans have a direct tie to our military.” For a country built on the ideal of the citizen-soldier – who like Cincinnatus, after serving Rome, returned to his plough – that’s a disgrace, as are the wars we increasingly send them to fight.

The growing separation of our military from the rest of us, along with the increasing use of private armies like Blackwater to pursue off-the-books wars, is an alarming trend. It allows us to pay lip service to sacrifice without thinking much about what sacrifice means. It creates a military separated from the people it serves, forgetting James Madison’s admonition that “a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” It equates honor and service with military duty only, which undervalues all who serve in different ways and overlooks the obligation we all owe to the greater community.

It is time for universal service for all Americans.

Wilderness. Who Needs It?

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. Fifty years ago Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, making the United States the world's first country to designate wilderness areas for permanent protection. (The law came only two months after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, two momentous pieces of legislation that would have been impossible without forceful federal leadership.) The world’s population then was 3.2 billion. Today it is 7.2 billion. Humans have spent millennia carving civilization out of the wilderness, and there is unrelenting pressure to open what’s left of our wild places to drilling, lumbering and farming, to be less concerned about protecting animals that would eat us if they had half a chance and more about the needs of people.

As I walk in the national park, where, it is true, my chances of being eaten by a bear are slim, I think of Thoreau’s words, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Most people will never visit the wilderness, perhaps have no interest in doing so. Yet we need those places, even if only in our imaginations, where we set aside our impulse to dominate and reflect on living in harmony, not just with nature, but with each other – which seems a tonic in these post-election days.

The Perils of Post-Apocalyptic Travel

Lately, things haven't been going my way. I was on the first leg of my three-leg journey home when the last leg got cancelled. This caused me to be thrown off the middle leg and rerouted to a different airport on another day. I learned all this on the runway from my cell phone. Inside, the customer service agent seemed disinterested in customers and in service, but I managed to scrounge the last (middle) seat on the last flight out.

The man on my left is reading The Watchtower (“Is Satan Real?”), when he suddenly starts sneezing wildly. My god, I think, he has Ebola! If his temperature hits 103, I’m as good as dead. It's one thing for ISIS to sneak infected people onto cross-country flights, but Jehovah’s Witnesses? I have always listened politely when they come to the door, and my reward is a plague that even Job never got?

I turn toward the man on my right, whose head is buried in Mickey Mouse-sized earphones. He is furiously texting, furtively covering up his iPhone whenever the stewardess approaches. My god, I think, this jihadi is trying to bring down the plane!

This morning I woke up with a sore throat. I thought of quarantining myself for 21 days, but I decided instead not to sit in middle seats any more. That way I won’t have to worry about ISIS and Ebola at the same time. Then I turned to this morning's post-election news. Now I have something to worry about.

Oh, No

With elections just days away, the Party of No is licking its chops in anticipation of controlling both houses of Congress, as GOP candidates vow to dismantle a bloated federal government that provides its members the best health care our taxes can buy, lavish perks, and personal access to America’s richest people and most powerful organizations. For that we should be grateful. Unfortunately, that’s not where Republicans are looking to cut, as Speaker Boehner made plain when he touted the 46 bills he has ready for Senate approval – most of which are aimed at deregulating energy production, defanging environmental protection, and destroying Obamacare. And so we will have to learn again – as we do every 30 years or so – that we need clean air and clean water, workplace safety and consumer protection, public education and public health, and that corporate America is not in business to provide them.

As for the bloated part, the federal government now employs a staggering 2.7 million people – which turns out to be a 50% decrease from its all-time high of 5.3 million in the seventh year of (dare I write it?) Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Do we need a government that is cumbersome, inefficient and inert? We do not, any more than we need a government that taps our phones and reads our mail. What we need is a government – as the often-maligned but more-often-prescient Paul Krugman wrote this week – that will reinvest once again in the public infrastructure on which our private enterprise depends.

Partying in Pyongyang

When it comes to quarantines, maybe Chris Christie should take lessons from Kim Jong-un. Citing the Ebola crisis, North Korea’s supreme leader banned all tourists and closed his country’s borders. This came as something of a surprise to North Korea’s 25 million inhabitants, who had no idea the borders were ever open. “If I’d known this,” said an anonymous man in a non-descript gray leisure suit, “I’d be so outta here [그래서 여기에 중].” Since North Korea is not on my bucket list – there never seemed much to do there except hard labor – I checked it out.

Until this week, the country attracted about 6,000 tourists annually, slightly fewer than New York’s 54.3 million. It allowed most of them to leave. According to The Lonely Planet, many stay at the Hyangsan Hotel, “a 15-storey pyramidal building with a fake waterfall attended by plastic deer in the lobby.” Sightseeing highlights include visits to the DMZ and the Tomb of Tan'gun, long thought the country’s mythical founder – until archeologists unearthed his bones and “North Korean historians made the incredible discovery that Tan'gun was in fact a member of the Kim clan.” After hours, “karaoke and pool will remain your guide's preferred evening activities for you.” And if your room has a television, be careful. Several party officials were recently shot for watching South Korean soap operas.

Perhaps closing the country is a wily plan to make visiting more desirable – like Bernie Madoff making people beg to invest in his Ponzi scheme.

Affirming Life

I am tired of bad news, about the way it has come to define our world and our relationships with each other, about the numbing relentlessness of headlines depicting war and disease and disaster that make us feel helpless in a hostile world. I don’t even know how to react anymore. When a French oil executive’s private jet clips a snowplow driven by a drunk Russian worker and crashes on a Moscow runway, absurdity trumps tragedy. When ISIS films its beheadings of innocent people, our horror deadens our humanity. When we dress Ebola health workers head-to-toe in Hazmat, and then learn that one flew round-trip from Dallas to Cleveland, while another turns up on a cruise ship off Belize, misfortune turns into farce. Our tendency, or mine anyway, is to stick my head in the sand, to withdraw to a safe place where I can keep the bad news at bay.

In the 1970s, New York’s Central Park was considered too dangerous to enter after dark, and so when the sun set we ceded it to gangs and criminals. A friend of mine, a man of unimpressive physique and noncombative ways, refused to comply, saying simply, “That’s our park.”

To retreat from the world is to give in to the forces that seem so threatening to us. Those forces are real and dangerous, but they are not the whole story. We need to publish other stories, the ones that affirm the only world – and the only lives – we have.

“First they came . . .”

For those who wonder what World War III might look like, I think we’re in it. To us who grew up in the early Cold War years, when air-raid drills involved ducking under wooden desks, World War III meant nuclear Armageddon, depicted in books like On the Beach, Nevil Shute’s bestseller about the world’s last survivors awaiting the radioactive cloud in south Australia, and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, which describes the “second death” – that of the future of mankind. Now, as the veneer of civilization erodes in many parts of the world, world war looks less like a game of nuclear chicken between superpowers armed to the teeth, and more like the state of terror Thomas Hobbes described long ago, with “no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

It’s a world in which violence seems arbitrary and unpitying – calculated to break any sense of common humanity. It comes in the personalized form of a videoed beheading, the random slaughter of a suicide bomb, the sudden swoop of a drone. Its aim is to scare us to the sidelines of relative safety, to watch in horror as the unlucky suffer, and then go about our business, having forgotten the words of Martin Niemöller, “Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”

A Necessary Tension

“We had a wonderful discussion about what makes everyone in the world unique, interesting and exciting. Everyone agreed that it is our differences that make the world so fun!” This message came in an email from my granddaughter’s teacher. Callie is in pre-kindergarten at a Quaker school, and I hope this message, so innocent and hopeful, stays with her as she grows into a world that seems intent on obliterating it.

There is an inevitable tension between individualism and community, between the urge to assert our uniqueness and our need to fit in with the group. It’s a healthy tension mostly – until the forces of orthodoxy overwhelm our differences. We see that most terribly now in the murderous brutality of ISIS, but it exists in the enforced conformity of totalitarian societies and the subliminal messages of consumer advertising, in reflexive patriotism and political correctness, in ethnic intolerance and the willful destruction of art.

The health of human communities depends on diversity as much as the natural world does. It is as destructive to crush differences among peoples as it is to eradicate species in nature. Whenever we stifle a voice of dissent, we extinguish a piece of life.

In Excellent Sheep, his new book on the state of higher education in America, William Deresiewicz quotes novelist/philosopher Rebecca Goldstein: “I place my faith in fiction, in its power to make vividly present how different the world feels to each of us.”

That, I think, is what politics must learn from art.

Defining a Nation

It turns out there really is an independence movement in the Shetland Islands. In response to Friday’s post, a reader sent me a Wall Street Journal article on the efforts of the Shetlands, Orkneys and Outer Hebrides, those beautifully wild islands in the North Sea, to hold their own referendum on secession from Scotland. The parliamentarians in Edinburgh, perhaps with an eye to the islanders’ claims to waters rich in fish and oil, denied the request. Which raises a question: Is there an ideal size and composition of a country and what’s the best way to achieve it?

These days, some very bad guys are expanding their borders by naked force. Vladimir Putin feigns innocence as he moves baldly into eastern Europe; ISIS uses terror to extend its caliphate in Mesopotamia. The Scots, by contrast, voted peacefully on independence, lost and went back to work. But secession movements have rarely been so civilized and have almost never been decided by vote. The United States fought the deadliest war in its history to keep the union intact (and force an end to slavery); the bloody “troubles” in Northern Island has been “the longest major campaign in the history of the British Army.”

Nationalism arose to combat the sectarian violence of warring tribes, but it rarely honored the unique cultures of its people, demanding instead capitulation to a centralized state. Whatever your position on last week’s referendum, it was an extraordinary effort to accommodate peacefully the conflicting demands of nationalism and diversity.

What’s Up With the Dow?

The Dow-Jones Industrial Average opens today in near-record territory, which seems pretty amazing when you consider the mood of the country and the news of the world: Ebola and AIDS ravage much of Africa. Douglas McAuthur McCain became the first American to die fighting for the ISIS caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Russian troops are in Ukraine, Israeli tanks are in Gaza, California is in a state of emergency, and the Dow keeps going up. If that’s a sign of hope amid the rubble, it seems lost on most Americans, who are in a national funk: 60% believe America is in decline; 71% think we're on the wrong track; 76% think their children will be poorer than their parents. Unemployment is worse than we thought. Yet yesterday the S&P 500 closed above $2,000 for the first time ever.

Am I missing something? Does the surging market represent underlying optimism or complete insanity? Do those who insist America is finished or the world is ending believe they can take it with them?

Naturally, we need someone to blame for all these horrors, and this week, by chance, is “National Impeach Obama Week.” Charges include:

● “Governing by dictatorial fiat”

● “Waging illegal wars”

● “Supporting Al Qaeda and other Jihadist terrorists”

● “Forgery of identification documents”

● “Overall radical and subversive anti-American background”

The president may be ruining America, but not the markets. When Obama entered office, the Dow stood at 7,949 (down from 10,588 at the start of the Bush presidency). Today it opens at 17,107.

Isis of Hope

The news is overloaded with photographs of people forced to kneel to be executed, stories of mutilated bodies hanging from lampposts, reports of public humiliation like the recent spectacle of captured Ukrainian soldiers paraded through streets filled with bloodthirsty crowds. The world seems poised on a new age of savagery in which indiscriminate mass killings make a mockery of individual lives, while we look on horrified, powerless and afraid. Yet, little of this is new. Totalitarian regimes and insurgent fanatics have been using these tactics for millennia. They do it to get rid of people they don’t like. They do it to incite the barbaric passions of their base. They do it to scare the rest of us into silence. The Romans had their crucifixions, the Jim Crow South its lynching parties. Hitler vilified the Jews, Stalin held show trials and built gulags. Today ISIS practices undiluted cruelty. It works. We are cowed.

And yet, no matter how thorough, how brutal or how massive the slaughter, the human spirit finds a way to endure. Hitler killed 20 million people, Stalin 40 million, Mao 70 million, but it was never enough. The spark of opposition survived – in a religion that went underground, in a culture that would not be crushed, in art that subverted the state, in the courage of a few who would not be silent.

We think of Isis as a brutal jihadi army. But we should remember that she is also the Egyptian goddess of nature and rebirth. Of hope.

Nourishing Mother

According to my correspondence from progressive groups and the Democratic Party (of which I get a lot), a sinister syndicate has established a shadow empire in America's heartland. Its name is Koch Industries. Its capital is Wichita, Kansas. And it is characterized by malevolent values, hostile intentions and unlimited resources. While I haven’t yet tired of beating on this straw man, I do think that having an “enemies list” with only one entry may oversimplify the American political landscape – and I urge my radical-chic, tree-hugging, eastern-elite, limousine-liberal fellow travelers to expand their search for corporate scoundrels. For example, here’s a $32-billion corporation whose massive timber operations, according to a Sierra Cub report, “are destroying [Argentina’s] Ibera Wetlands and displacing thousands of farmers.” The corporation’s two wholly-owned subsidiaries have planted a “pine tree monoculture [that] threatens the region's biodiversity and . . . forces people off the land.” Its other natural-resources plays include “dairies in New Zealand, farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, industrial agriculture in the Brazilian cerrado, and vineyards in California.” It may seem odd to buy 10,000 acres in a drought-stricken state to plant a water-intensive wine crop – unless, as some point out, you’re really after “a well-timed water play in light of the region’s worsening groundwater shortage.”

Who is this corporation that seems up to its global eyeballs in environmental skullduggery? Why, it’s Harvard University, my alma mater – my nourishing mother – which in April became the first American university to sign the UN’s Principles of Responsible Investment.

Ferguson, 2014. When Will We Ever Learn?

Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.

This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution.

To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.

The alternative is not blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness. It is the realization of common opportunities for all within a single society.

This alternative will require a commitment to national action – compassionate, massive and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will.

Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.

What white Americans have never fully understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. 

It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. . . .It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens – urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.

From: Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, February 29, 1968

“Any thoughts on how to share?”

So wrote a reader after Monday’s post. It’s a good question, and the first step is to stop addressing today’s issues with yesterday’s attitudes. Take, for example, water, which we are endlessly told is the oil of the 21^st century. It’s not. We are addicted to oil. We are dependent on water, which is finite and irreplaceable. Here are some ideas for thinking differently about it:

1. Plan in terms of watersheds rather than arbitrary lines on a map, so that water becomes the unifying, rather than the divisive, feature of a community.
2. Stop thinking of water as commodity – and of rivers as pipes to deliver that commodity. They are ecosystems that sustain all life.
3. Question grandiose plans to transfer water from one basin to another, such as China’s $79 billion project to reverse the Yangtze (based on Mao’s 1952 idea!); decades-old proposals to divert the Great Lakes into the Mississippi and send water to the arid West; Sitka, Alaska’s, aim to ship bulk water worldwide.
4. Consider all that rivers provide – drinking water, food, hygiene, transportation, irrigation, hydropower, baptism, recreation, tranquility, beauty – and build diverse coalitions to protect them.
5. Reform the tangle of conflicting rules and customs governing water use so that upstream dams – as we have built on the Colorado and Turkey intends to build on the Tigris and Euphrates – don’t deprive downstream states of water, and downstream dams don’t flood upstream communities.

We aren’t going to do all this tomorrow. We need to start today.

In Praise of Scalia

Amid all my copious research on Associate Justice of the United States Antonin Scalia, his remarkable decision in Texas v. Johnson (1989) stands out. For here, he was part of a 5-4 majority who upheld the right of every American to burn the American flag. This decision split the Supreme Court in unprecedented ways, with conservatives, liberals and moderates on both sides. When Congress hurriedly passed a law making it a federal crime to desecrate the flag, the same slim majority declared that unconstitutional as well. This was not a popular decision. It takes courage both to burn the flag in Texas and to declare it a fundamental right in Washington. Moreover, Scalia was upholding an activity he found repugnant: “Yes, if I were king, I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag. However, we have a First Amendment, which says that the right of free speech shall not be abridged. And it is addressed, in particular, to speech critical of the government. I mean, that was the main kind of speech that tyrants would seek to suppress. Burning the flag is a form of expression. . . . And burning [it] is a symbol that expresses an idea – I hate the government, the government is unjust, whatever.”

This is how the law should work. In Mosul the self-declared government crucified a man for eating before sunset during Ramadan and published videos of massacring “infidels.” Here the Supreme Court upholds our right to burn the flag. Glad I'm here.

The British Health Bureaucracy

“Just remember,” the oncologist told my friend Lee, “you are in charge of your own health. We work for you.” As Obamacare continues to be assailed in the courts and Congress, amid dark visions of rationed care, death panels and bureaucratic doctors – and along dishearteningly partisan lines – one physician’s words remind us that the issue, in the end, is not about politics but about human health and human dignity.

It’s perhaps worth noting that the doctor practices in Scotland, where as part of Britain’s national health system, he is a government employee. He also makes house calls and has given Lee his cell-phone number and told him to use it any time, night or day.

I have come to Glasgow to visit Lee, who has been my friend for 55 years. He has esophageal cancer, which is not a diagnosis you want anywhere, but better in Britain than many places I can think of – particularly if, like Lee, you are poor and live alone. The system isn’t perfect – when Lee had a stent inserted in his chest, he recovered in a hospital ward reminiscent of World War I movies – but it seems a far cry from the rants of American radio hosts. Those with cancer even receive a government stipend, public recognition that the disease carries enough indignities without piling poverty on top.

It’s hard to believe, I know, that this bureaucratic system treats Lee, not as a patient, but as a person. But it does.