Har nof residents hold no grudge: “We are not a vengeful people, we are not a culture of blood for blood, we are faithful...our answer...is to strengthen our faith and our religious practice.”
Residents of the Har Nof Jerusalem neighborhood which was the site of Tuesday’s horrific terror attack woke up this morning to the grim reality that the brutal slaying of four men in the Kehillat Bnei Torah synagogue was no nightmare.
But the mood in Har Nof, which is predominantly a haredi neighborhood, was one of sadness and mourning, not of anger and revenge, and residents and worshippers at the synagogue were almost fatalistic in their views on the attack perpetrated just 24 hours earlier. Men went to back to pray in the Kehillat Bnei Torah synagogue, which has now been cleaned and restored, and parents took their young children to school passing by the scene of Tuesdays attack. Haim, a resident of the neighborhood who lives one street away from the synagogue and studies there every day, said that the threat of terrorism now felt closer and more real although acknowledged that all of Jerusalem’s residents have been suffering from a lack of security for several months. “This reality isn’t new, but when such an incident happens so close to you, and to people you know, it creates a different feeling,” he said speaking outside of the Bnei Torah synagogue. “But we are people of faith here, we know that if such a thing is decreed against us, God forbid, then it doesn’t matter where you are, you could be in New York, it doesn’t matter,” said Haim, describing how one of the terrorists ran past a friend of his, leaving him unharmed, as he went to shoot at the police officers who arrived at the scene. “We are not a vengeful people, we are not a culture of blood for blood, we are faithful Jews, our answer to such events is to strengthen our faith and our religious practice,” continued Haim. “We are not like our Muslim cousins for whom revenge is something natural and if someone is killed then they need to kill someone else in return, we believe that God guides this world and it is he who will avenge us.” Yisroel, another neighborhood resident who lives across the road from Kehillat Bnei Torah and prays at the synagogue regularly, said he knew the four Jewish victims of the attack and described them all as very special people. He said it was hard to express the sadness and loss the community felt, noting that he studies with one of the sons of Rabbi Moshe Twersky, who was one of the four worshipers killed. “There’s no anger here, it’s not the way we feel. We believe that we don’t understand everything, and we believe everything happens is from God. Who can we be angry at? It’s hard to blame people,” said Yisroel. Tzahi, another resident and frequent worshiper at Kehilat Bnei Yisrael said it was hard to come to terms with what had happened but said that people were nevertheless continuing with their lives. “Unfortunately what happened was not in our control, it was decreed from above, but we’re continuing to pray, continuing to live, despite the wishes of our enemies,” said Tzahi as he left the synagogue after the morning prayer service on Wednesday. He said that it was frightening to think about how the two terrorists were able to carry about their attack in such a normal, residential area but that the only answer was to carry on with life. “They want us to be scared, they want us to be shocked, they want us to leave, they don’t want us here, but we will endure and live on here. We will continue to practice our faith, to pray, this is our answer,” he continued, but said that as a Jew “As Jews we believe in coexistence, man was created in the image of God, we do not go wild or murder. We have to protect the lives of every man. Our enemies regrettably have chosen only the kind of thing we saw here yesterday.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell unveiled his party’s long-awaited plan on immigration on Wednesday, telling reporters, “We must make America somewhere no one wants to live.”
Appearing with House Speaker John Boehner, McConnell said that, in contrast to President Obama’s “Band-Aid fixes,” the Republican plan would address “the root cause of immigration, which is that the United States is, for the most part, habitable.”
“For years, immigrants have looked to America as a place where their standard of living was bound to improve,” McConnell said. “We’re going to change that.”
Boehner said that the Republicans’ plan would reduce or eliminate “immigration magnets,” such as the social safety net, public education, clean air, and drinkable water.
The Speaker added that the plan would also include the repeal of Obamacare, calling healthcare “catnip for immigrants.”
Attempting, perhaps, to tamp down excitement about the plan, McConnell warned that turning America into a dystopian hellhole that repels immigrants “won’t happen overnight.”
“Our crumbling infrastructure and soaring gun violence are a good start, but much work still needs to be done,” he said. “When Americans start leaving the country, we’ll know that we’re on the right track.”
In closing, the two congressional leaders expressed pride in the immigration plan, noting that Republicans had been working to make it possible for the past thirty years.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
From the rubble of the 2014 election, a conversation has started about the future of the Democratic Party. Senator Elizabeth Warren is central to that conversation.
This week, we learned that Warren will be joining the Senate Democratic leadership as strategic policy adviser to the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. In this role — created specifically for her — she will help craft the party’s policies and priorities as well as serve as a liaison to progressive groups.
While there is some skepticism about the idea of a "liaison" to base Democratic voters, there is largely agreement that it is a good thing for the Democratic Party to follow her political footsteps. After all, she's adored by big swaths of the Democratic electorate and the public at large. On the campaign trail this fall, she was welcomed with open arms in Kentucky, West Virginia, Michigan, and other reddish-purple states, drawing overflow crowds cheering on her message of tougher Wall Street regulation and kinder policies for working people.
But what is it that works about her? What is her special sauce? Other Democratic and progressive candidates ask me all the time how they can capture the intangible "it," that Warren magic. Below, I've dissected her tactics and her policies, which are one and the same, to help candidates better understand how to tread her path.
Take, for example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB); the idea that students should be able to borrow money for school at the same interest rate as banks can borrow money from the federal government; and the idea of adding basic banking — check-cashing, bill-paying, and small loans — to post office locations.
These proposals have a number of things in common. What’s Warren’s formula?
1. Propose big ideas. All of these proposals are big ideas, ambitious in scope, and intended to grapple with large-scale problems. These ideas are not nibbling around the edges. Sixty-eight million vulnerable Americans don't have access to reliable, affordable banking services. Forty million Americans owe a collective $1.2 trillion in student loans. Many lives would be made better if these ideas were brought to life.
2. Be bold. A bold idea has an edge, an in-your-face attitude. A bold idea takes on a villain. The post office proposal, for example, would largely dismantle the scurrilous payday-lending industry, which is part of the larger institutional and structural system that keeps poor people poor. The CFPB was built to challenge credit agencies and swindlers. Implicit in the student-borrowing proposal is a subtle critique of the banking industry.
3. Adopt ideas from elsewhere. You don't need to conceive of an idea from thin air. Borrow! (Attribute, but borrow!) Warren's background as an academic may be what makes her so successful at this, because academics feel very comfortable borrowing and building on others' ideas — in fact, it's how the community moves its collective body of work forward.
The post office proposal is not new. In fact, nearly every developed nation in Europe and West Asia operates a postal banking system. But when Warren chose to embrace it, the proposal instantly became more serious, salient, and gained widespread attention because her position on the Senate Banking Committee gives her the ability to help make it happen.
Similarly, the idea of a government agency to protect consumers had floated around since the 1970s, and is even arguably rooted in the work of turn-of-the-century progressives like Florence Kelley. But it took Warren's tireless advocacy to bring it to life.
4. Put muscle behind the idea. Warren becomes an advocate for her ideas and knows how to organize. She pushed relentlessly for the creation of the CFPB, fought to give it teeth, and built a large grassroots coalition to push for it when insiders thought it couldn't be done. When she proposes new policy, she blogs about it. She speaks passionately about it on the Senate floor. She recruits colleagues to co-sponsor legislation. When Warren proposes an idea, you know she will keep pushing to make it a reality.
5. Act within the scope of your expertise. Warren is not proposing big ideas to address the climate crisis (although I don't think anyone would complain if she did). She sticks to what she knows. She's an expert in banking. She sits on the Banking Committee. She has carved out this area as her niche, and so her ideas have the gravitas of her expertise behind them. This gives them instant credibility.
6. Propose stuff that is popular. Polling shows that the proposal to add banking services to post offices is hugely popular. So is the proposal to allow students to borrow money at the same interest rate as banks. Propose ideas that you think people will like! There is a weird conventional wisdom in the Beltway that popular is bad. Popular is good. Be popular.
7. Be brave. After Senate Republicans refused to confirm her as the permanent head of the CFPB, Warren ran for Senate and defeated Scott Brown, one of their own. Zephyr Teachout won comparisons to Warren when she ran a gutsy primary campaign against Andrew Cuomo for New York governor. People like courage. They gravitate towards it.
8. Be independent. The day after that Warren joined Senate leadership, the press leaked that she planned to oppose President Barack Obama's choice for Treasury undersecretary, Wall Street investment banker Antonio Weiss. Speaking on background, one of her advisers told reporters that Warren had "growing concerns with the administration being loaded with so many appointees from Wall Street." This independent streak — opposing the Democratic president when it is ideologically and politically important to do so — ironically gives her more power by making others sweat for her support. It gives her more leverage. It's a game that conservative Democrats play well, and progressives often play poorly.
9. Be bipartisan, but not for its own sake. Warren’s independence has allowed her to forge bipartisan partnerships. She has worked with Senators John McCain and Angus King to introduce a new Glass-Steagall Act, and collaborated productively on other banking issues with unlikely bedfellows David Vitter and Tom Coburn. But as Warren herself cautioned in a Washington Post editorial just after the election, "Before leaders in Congress and the president get caught up in proving they can pass some new laws, everyone should take a skeptical look at whom those new laws will serve." In other words, avoid action for the sake of action. Avoid bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship. The point of bipartisan action, in the Warren playbook, is to advance meaningful policy — not just to do something, anything, no matter how empty or even harmful.
The road to 2016 starts today. Democrats in Congress have a choice. They can become less and less popular as they pursue tepid policies that seek to pacify everyone and please no one. Or they can tap deep into themselves — into the parts that are most courageous, most audacious, most good. They can pursue a road map that is both ideological and tactically advantageous. They will be surprised at the results.
The real reason Republicans oppose stem cell research is their fear that Democrats will use it to create a backbone.
***
Read Next: “The Party of Pablum”: John Nichols asks why voters embrace Mitch McConnell senators and Elizabeth Warren policies.
AN ITALIAN CATHOLIC has posted a petition online, addressed to the “Cardinals of the Roman Church,” requesting the removal of the phony-baloney Marxist “Pope Francis” from the papacy. The elegantly-worded petition states:
[I]t remains a theological truth of the divine law and ecclesiology, that no one who seeks to harm the Church in anything essential, such as Her fidelity to Christ’s Magisterium, can be in communion with Her …
Any such act by the Modernist cardinals to depose Francis is extremely unlikely (and the Cardinals do not have the authority to depose a pope.) In the meantime, Jorge Bergoglio is not, by virtue of his defection from the Faith, the pope. He is an impostor, who continues his revolutionary agenda at a breathtaking pace, with his wacky homilies denying the existence of God and extolling evolution and dictatorial decrees against Catholics such as the excommunication of anyone who receives sacraments from the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X. As a commenter at one blog put it, “all the kooks and idiots are crawling out of the woodwork to jump into the lap of this pope.” Here’sone example.
Alan: Often, conservative patriots hate half their fellows because their motivation is a toxic stew of vengeance, vindictiveness and retaliation with no significant admixture of mercy, compassion or forgiveness.
"Any Religion That Needs Fear To Thrive Is Bad Religion"
Pope Francis internally divisive, externationally inspirational
BY MICHAEL GERSON : NOVEMBER 19, 2014
Pope Francis’ American honeymoon is over (though the whole idea of a papal honeymoon smacks of Borgia-era excess).
At first, some political conservatives complained that Francis was showing insufficient respect for distinguished Catholic theologians such as Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. But now, more thoughtful Catholic writers wonder if the pope (who conspicuously marries cohabiting couples) is laying the groundwork for more substantive changes on the sacrament of marriage and access to the Eucharist for the divorced and remarried. This, argues Ross Douthat of the New York Times would “sow confusion among the church's orthodox adherents” and raise the (undesired) prospect of “schism.”
Alan: Orthodoxy has always ascribed inordinate centrality to itself. Like all institutions - especially old ones whose origins are obscured by the misty mutability of time - there are few who understand the original inspiration, fewer who believe it and fewer still who practice it. Most people practice religion in their own heterodox ways and those Catholics who think that "cafeteria Catholics" only occupy "the left side of the aisle" might wisely explore the essence of Jesus the Nazarene to see how they actually measure up. "The Thinking Housewife" is a case in point:
"The Thinking Housewife And The Normalization Of America's Only Divorced President"
The event occasioning these concerns was the recent Extraordinary Synod on the Family, which lived up to its billing. The pope invited participants to speak their mind “without fear,” which revealed a series of divisions between the theological left and right, as well as between the developed and the developing worlds. “Francis,” says journalist Christina Odone, “achieved miracles with his compassionate, off-the-cuff comments that detoxified the Catholic brand. He personifies optimism — but when he tries to turn this into policy he isn't in command of the procedures or the details. The result is confusion.”
This seems to be the main concern of Catholic traditionalists: confusion. Francis is cultivating debate within the church about an essential social institution — and the value of relationships outside it — even as that institution is under assault by the world (at least where the sexual revolution continues its relentless march). In the middle of an important cultural conflict, Francis sounds an uncertain trumpet.
The pope himself seems unconcerned, continuing his unpredictable riff. He embraces the Big Bang. He appears in selfies. He criticizes euthanasia. He invites Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, to perform at the Vatican. He cashiers opponents. He calls the Kingdom of God “a party” (which is precisely how the founder of the Christian faith referred to it). He is a man, by his own account, with no patience for “sourpusses.”
As a Protestant, I have no particular insight into the internal theological debates of Catholicism. But the participants seem to inhabit different universes. One side (understandably) wants to shore up the certainties of an institution under siege. Francis begins from a different point: a pastoral passion to meet people where they are — to recognize some good, even in their brokenness, and to call them to something better. That something better is not membership in a stable institution, or even the comforts of ethical religion; it is a relationship with Jesus, from which all else follows
Instead of being a participant in a cultural battle, Francis says, “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.” First you sew up the suffering (which, incidentally, includes all of us). “Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds.” The temptation, in his view, is to turn faith into ideology. “The faith passes,” he recently said, “through a distiller and becomes ideology. And ideology does not beckon (people). In ideologies there is not Jesus; in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. . . . The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements.”
The message seems simple. It actually highlights a complexity at the heart of Christianity. Its founder coupled a call for ethical heroism (don't even lust in your heart) with a disdain for institutional religion and self-righteous clericalism. And this has been disorienting to institutionalists from the start.
Francis has devoted serious attention to reforming the institutional expression — particularly the finances — of the Catholic Church. But he has chosen to emphasize the most subversive and challenging aspects of Christian faith. He really does view rigidity, clericalism and hypocrisy as just as (or more) damaging as sexual matters. Liberals want to incorporate this into their agenda. But the pope has his different agenda — which has nothing to do with our ideological debates. It is always revolutionary, and confusing to the faithful, when a religious leader believes that the Sabbath (including all the rules and institutions of religion) was made for man, and not the other way around.
Perhaps Francis is destined to be a divisive force within his church and an inspiration outside it (a theory that may be tested during his upcoming American visit). But I am inclined to defend his influence with all the zeal of a non-convert. While popes may or may not be infallible, this one is marvelously wise and human.
Prediction: Obama's executive order on immigration (to be announced later today) will so exacerbate the innate madness of The Republican Party that the GOP - reactionary by nature - will go off the deep end. Thus seduced by over-reach, the blindness of anger will transform The Party of Lincoln into its own destruction crew.
George Will: Obama the ‘Greatest Builder of the Republican Party’ Since Reagan
George Feldman
11/19/2014
George Will gave President Obama something of a backhanded compliment today when he called the president the greatest booster of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan.
Will and the Fox News panel were discussing the Democrats’ fortunes post-midterms, and he brought up how Obama wanted to be the “most consequential” president since Reagan. And Will admits he did that in one respect, because “he is the greatest builder of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan.”
Will pointed out that under Obama, there are a great deal fewer Democrats in the House and Senate (as well as in state governorships) and the Republicans control more state legislative chambers than at any time in its history. And the South in particular has some “appalling” numbers for Democrats under a president who promised sticking by him would work out.
It must be obvious by now that we are experiencing something greater than the routine frustrations of the business cycle and the normal political discontents of democracies. There is, as political scientist William Galston writes in a recent essay, a “shared fear that an epoch is coming to an end.” The “liberal democratic bargain” that wealthy societies embraced after World War II is failing, and this has spawned widespread anxiety and conflict.
In its essentials, the bargain is easily described. Governments derived their legitimacy from their ability to maintain steady economic growth. Though there might be periodic recessions, none would be so powerful as to expose most people to extreme instability or social disorder. Meanwhile, rising incomes would improve living standards and allow governments to redistribute some gains to satisfy political goals. Countries might differ in their goals, but the underlying bargains were similar.
Politics was prosperity — and prosperity was politics.
Countless commentators (including me) have analyzed the disappointing economic recoveries and the parallel political backlashes in the United States, Europe and Japan. Galston, who served in the Clinton White House and now resides at the Brookings Institution, extends the process by asking a deeper question of whether the basic political superstructure is at risk.
What if governments can’t fulfill the role that justifies their legitimacy?
There are ominous precedents. “During the 1920s and 1930s,” Galston writes, “the failure of market economies and democratic political institutions boosted the credibility of totalitarian governance and central planning.”
"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
Already, populist and nationalist parties in Europe have gained ground; in the United States, the fringe wings of the Republican and Democratic parties seem emboldened. Resentment is building. “Human experience suggests (and behavioral economics confirms) that the pain of loss exceeds the pleasure of gain,” Galston argues. “While failing to improve one’s well-being is disappointing, losing what one has enjoyed is productive of bitterness and anger.”
The obvious solution is to increase economic growth. But if that were easy, it would have occurred. Galston lists some obstacles. Innovation favors growth but also threatens existing businesses and jobs. Resistance by potential victims may provide short-run stability while reducing long-term growth. Large government deficits risk sharp changes in policy; the uncertainty may discourage business investment. High payments to the elderly for income support and health care may crowd out public spending on education and research and development, weakening growth.
Canadian Healthcare: Not Perfect, Just Better. Lots Better
(I am an American citizen and a proud graduate of The University of Toronto where I received world-class education at the same steeply subsidized cost as Canadian citizens. While a Toronto undergraduate from 1965 - 1970, I received free healthcare under Canada's Single Payer system)
Galston does not predict the collapse of market-based democracies. But he fears a vicious circle of public discontent and weak governments. “When times are hard, the varied social and economic groups . . . struggle with one another, each striving to minimize its losses at the expense of others,” he writes. “Elected governments mirror these divisions, which makes it hard for them to act effectively.”
I’ve read lots of analyses of our predicament. This is among the best. Still, I’d qualify Galston’s argument in three ways.
First, he goes too easy on economists. They oversold their capabilities to control the business cycle and raise incomes and living standards. The resulting optimistic climate caused political leaders to adopt policies that, perversely, increased short-term instability and reduced long-term growth.
Second, he fails to focus on the role of the 2008-09 financial crisis in frightening — and changing — public opinion. People were unnerved, precisely because the crisis was unpredicted (indeed, was thought to be impossible). Government was automatically discredited.
Republican Rule And Economic Catastrophe, A Lockstep Relationship
Third, he underestimates the resilience of modern democracies. For all their flaws, they seem to be, at least for most people in advanced societies, the least bad way of being governed. Their shortcomings need to be balanced against the alternatives. Still, this could change.
That’s Galston’s point. We view the lackluster recovery mainly in economic terms. This is too narrow. A political system that depends on strong economic growth will, when growth falters, lose its capacity to ensure social peace and stability. This loss, though hard to calculate, might one day dwarf the more easily measured economic damage.
Alan: The current crisis of Democratic Capitalism is nothing a new"New Deal" couldn't resolve. What is lacking is political will to redistribute wealth.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "I Welcome Their Hatred"
In a prime-time speech Thursday night, President Obama will announce a major executive action deferring deportations for some 4 million undocumented immigrants. You'll find everything you need to know here and on Wonkblog
Obama's order would offer a temporary legal status to the undocumented parents of children who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, where the immediate threat of deportation would be removed. The order would require the parents to have lived in the U.S. for a set period of years - probably five. David Nakamura and Pamela Constable in The Washington Post.
Millions of these undocumented immigrants could apply for work permits.
The president will expand the 2012 program that deferred deportations of nearly 600,000 younger immigrants arrived in the U.S. as illegal immigrants as children. Obama could raise (or eliminate) the maximum eligibility age, currently set at 30, and could raise the maximum arrival age above 16.
Disappointing immigrant advocates, however, the executive action does not appear to extend protections to hundreds of thousands of parents of these "dreamers." Julia Preston in The New York Times.
Obama also expand visas for high-tech workers; change detention procedures; and strengthen border security.
There is a precedent set by Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In 1987 and 1989, with an immigration bill stalled in Congress as it is now, the two presidents issued orders deferring deportations for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. The orders weren't controversial at the time, but the political environment has changed since then. Andrew Taylor for the Associated Press.
SARGENT: The law clearly gives Obama the authority to delay deportations. Conservative critics have tried to make the dispute a question of the executive branch's constitutional authority. In fact, the text of the immigration statute is clear. Congress has already explicitly given Obama everything he needs to act. What's more, an order will probably not affect the total number of undocumented immigrants deported every year, which will remain small in any case. The Washington Post.
DOUTHAT: The president's logic makes sense, but what are the consequences? "The White House's case is straightforward: It has 'prosecutorial discretion' in which illegal immigrants it deports, it has precedent-grounded power to protect particular groups from deportation, and it has statutory authority to grant work permits to those protected." But these arguments could be applied in plenty of other contexts, too, creating "a model for a future president interested in unilateral rewrites of other areas of public policy (the tax code, for instance) where sweeping applications of 'discretion' could achieve partisan victories by fiat." The New York Times.
BROOKS: The order sends the country down a dangerous path. "Instead of a nation of laws, we could slowly devolve into a nation of diktats, with each president relying on and revoking different measures on the basis of unilateral power — creating unstable swings from one presidency to the next. If President Obama enacts this order on the transparently flimsy basis of 'prosecutorial discretion,' he's inviting future presidents to use similarly flimsy criteria." The New York Times.
BEUTLER: This line of reasoning is not that the order is illegal, but that it violates important political norms. That's a nebulous argument, and it's hard to see exactly which norms are being violated, unless there's one that says that the most conservative members of the House G.O.P. caucus should always be listened to carefully. Just because "right-wingers are blind with rage" doesn't make the order illegal. The New Republic.
The order does not mean that undocumented immigrants get Obamacare. "The White House decision to deny health benefits also underscores how far the president’s expected actions will fall short of providing the kind of full membership in American society that activists have spent decades fighting for. The immigrants covered by Mr. Obama’s actions are also unlikely to receive public benefits like food stamps, Medicaid coverage or other need-based federal programs offered to citizens and some legal residents."Michael Shear and Robert Pear in The New York Times. In some cases, the federal government does pay for their health care already. Hospitals provide emergency and maternity care to undocumented immigrants, at a cost of around $1.3 billion annually to the federal government and more to state governments. Undocumented immigrants are able to get health insurance through an employer or individually, although they won't qualify for subsidies. Jason Millman and Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post. Silicon Valley won't be entirely satisfied with the order. Obama's order will expand a program for foreign students in science and engineering that allows them to work here temporarily, but the technology sector would prefer more H-1B visas. Mike Dorning for Bloomberg. Governors will have to make decisions about driver's licenses, in-state tuition and more.Republicans measuring the drapes in governors' mansions around the country after their sweep in the midterms have politically sensitive choices ahead. Michael Barbaro in The New York Times.
It's about time Obama did something. "Years were wasted, and countless families broken, while Mr. Obama clung to a futile strategy of luring Republicans toward a legislative deal. He has been his own worst enemy — over the years he stressed his executive impotence, telling advocates that he could not change the system on his own. This may have suited his legislative strategy, but it was not true." The New York Times. WILKINSON: The order is a risky move. "Yes, any executive action would be temporary. Yes, Congress could pass legislation to supersede it. But this could prove to be a turning point in the partisan polarization of Washington. Having reshaped itself in Newt Gingrich's image, the Republican Party has proved increasingly willing to undermine democratic norms -- and institutions -- in hopes of inheriting the rubble. If Obama is not departing from norms in this case, he certainly looks to be pushing the line." Bloomberg.
Jim Webb is considering a presidential bid. He's the first to officially make an announcement of any kind about the race. The former Reagan administration official, now a Democrat, has criticized Obama and talked about how his new party needs to appeal to the white working class. Dave Weigel for Bloomberg.
On May 6, 2013, I was arrested by the North Carolina Capitol Police in front of the doors of the state Senate chamber, protesting our legislature's decision to forgo Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). For a practicing physician and professor of medicine, this was an unusual turn of events in an academic career. But given that 23 states have decided not to expand Medicaid, I find it less surprising that I was arrested than that more health care professionals have not taken to the streets to protest the harm being wreaked on our patients by decisions driven by partisan politics.
In North Carolina, many physicians, nurses, and other health professionals advocated for passage of the ACA, writing editorials and letters to legislators and holding a rally with patients in front of the University of North Carolina Hospitals. When the ACA was signed into law in March 2010, and again when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in June 2012, we breathed a sigh of relief. No longer would we have to worry that our patients could not afford the medications they needed. Preventive care provided without copayments could reduce expensive admissions and alleviate chronic shortages of hospital beds. Providing contraceptives free of charge would decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies that shackle teen mothers to unrelenting poverty. We believed that these and many other benefits meant the dawn of a new era in U.S. health care.
Since passage of the ACA, 23 million to 28 million Americans have gained access to health insurance through insurance exchanges, Medicaid expansions, and the mandate that children be allowed to remain on their parents' policies until the age of 26.1 Several studies have shown a very concrete benefit of expanding insurance: reduced mortality.2 If a Medicaid expansion in North Carolina achieved similar results, hundreds of deaths per year could be prevented. Less tangibly, millions of citizens have had a weight lifted from their shoulders and can now feel free to change jobs or pursue less lucrative careers as entrepreneurs or artists, assured that they won't have to go without health insurance.
Yet many states have decided not to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government is bearing 100% of the costs for the first 3 years and never less than 90% thereafter. Those decisions have left 5 million Americans — most of them the working poor, with incomes below the federal poverty level — in the “Medicaid gap.”3 I see many such patients in my practice.
In February 2013, before a law was passed in North Carolina blocking Medicaid expansion, health care workers and nongovernmental patient organizations held a press conference at the North Carolina General Assembly building. Then we published an editorial arguing that expanding Medicaid would be financially beneficial to North Carolina in the long run. Our legislature plowed on. So on April 29, 2013, the “Moral Monday” protests began, in an attempt to change the minds of Governor Pat McCrory, House Speaker Thom Tillis, and North Carolina legislators. To academics, such a quest might sound quixotic, but protests (along with common sense) have helped to lead several conservative Republican governors to change their views on Medicaid expansion. Jan Brewer (R-AZ), John Kasich (R-OH), and Rick Scott (R-FL) had all campaigned against the ACA but eventually supported its implementation. We hoped that protests in North Carolina would have a similar effect.
On that April day, a few hundred peaceful protestors sang songs and carried placards; 17 of them were arrested in front of the General Assembly chamber doors, including leader Reverend William Barber II of the North Carolina NAACP, the historian Tim Tyson, and Duke faculty member and physician assistant Perri Morgan. The following Monday, I was arrested along with 32 others, including lawyers, professors, and activists. By the end of the legislative session in July, more than 900 people had been arrested, and thousands were traveling to Raleigh from all over the state on Monday afternoons. With the protests and arrests receiving constant publicity, our governor, who had been elected with 54.6% of the vote, saw his approval rate drop to 39%, while the legislature's fell to 24%.4 The Moral Monday protests, by contrast, remain popular and are known statewide. Our political leaders have not budged, but the protests have educated and informed independent voters about the impact of legislative decisions and fueled a voter-registration drive with enthusiastic supporters.
Although my personal decision to protest was somewhat spontaneous, the rally was not. The event was carefully planned by a broad coalition of North Carolinians, including environmentalists, voting-rights advocates, leaders in reproductive health, educators, workers, and immigrants, all led by the North Carolina NAACP. The protest was organized in the tradition of civil disobedience, whose history reaches back through Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi to Henry David Thoreau. Physicians and other health care workers chose to participate out of frustration at our inability to protect our poorest patients. We could make difficult diagnoses on the inpatient service and express empathy for patients and their families, but when it came to seeing them as outpatients or ensuring that their prescriptions were filled, we were helpless. These problems are not unique to North Carolina.
When I graduated from medical school in 1979, we did not take an oath, but I have since striven to adopt the words of Moses Maimonides as my guiding philosophy: “The eternal providence has appointed me to watch over the life and health of Thy creatures” and “Preserve the strength of my body and of my soul that they ever be ready to cheerfully help and support rich and poor, good and bad, enemy as well as friend.” My interpretation of this prayer is that I need not only be a good clinician in the hospital or clinic but also attend to the effects on my patients' lives of the wider world, whether my own hospital or the state government. To be good internists, I believe, even subspecialists are obligated not to ignore our knowledge of internal medicine in order to focus exclusively on lungs or livers; we must pay attention to the whole patient. Similarly, I now believe that our concern for our patients should encompass the effects of public policies that result in direct harm.
By willfully rejecting a Medicaid expansion to thousands of hardworking North Carolina families, our state government was consigning these citizens to the same fate as many patients I've cared for during research and service projects in Africa — dying needlessly for the lack of appropriate preventive care. North Carolina has high infant mortality (a measure on which we rank 46th in the country), a high rate of low birth weight (40th in the country), and a high prevalence of diabetes (36th). We rank among the bottom 20 states in terms of premature deaths (36th), cancer-related deaths (35th), and deaths from cardiovascular causes (31st).5 We are not a healthy state. With so many poor medical outcomes that can be prevented through access to good care, how can we not protest the decision to deny several hundred thousand North Carolinians access to health insurance? And how can my colleagues in the 22 other states blocking Medicaid expansion not speak out as well?
More than a year has passed, and we health care workers are still protesting, joined with a coalition of teachers, union workers, immigrants, environmentalists, and people of all races and religions — all staying on message until we reverse these policies. As health care providers, we know we have an obligation to protect our patients not only from harmful diseases but from the harmful policies and toxic politics of the current leadership in our state. In the face of great danger to our patients and our state, we believe that remaining silent is not an option.
Disclosure forms provided by the author are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.
SOURCE INFORMATION
From the Division of Infectious Diseases, School of Medicine, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
***
The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism
The hard, central "fact" of contemporary "conservatism" is its insistence on a socio-economic threshold above which people deserve government assistance, and below which people deserve to die.
The sooner the better.
Unless conservatives are showing n'er-do-wells The Door of Doom, they just don't "feel right."
Almost "to a man," contemporary "conservatives" have apotheosized themselves and now -- sitting on God's usurped throne -- are rabid to pass Final Judgment.
Self-proclaimed Christians, eager to thrust "the undeserving" through The Gates of Hell, are the very people most likely to cross its threshold.
Remarkably, none of them are tempted to believe this.
As Ursula Le Guin receives the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards, she talks to Hari Kunzru about alternative fictional worlds
Ursula K Le Guin lives along a winding road in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. Walking uphill towards her house I find the way spectacularly blocked. A bridge is being rebuilt and the road is broken by a steep drop, forcing me to pick my way along a trail down into a ravine, then back up the other side. This small detour feels auspicious. There ought to be more adventure on such a journey than an airport security queue and a taxi rank. I am resisting the temptation to use the language of the quest here, or get into any dubious comparisons between writers and wizards or witches. I didn’t have to change myself into a hawk or cross over into the land of the dead.
I have rarely gone to visit a writer bearing so many messages of love and admiration. People want to thank Le Guin. Many readers discover her young, through her Earthsea sequence, now acknowledged as one of the great works of 20th-century fantasy. This week, 40 years after the third Earthsea book, The Farthest Shore, won the National Book award in children’s literature, Le Guin has been awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, presented to her by Neil Gaiman in New York. One of my friends, a Le Guin fan of great depth and seriousness, remembers being nine years old, in pain and distress as he recovered from open heart surgery. “Reading the Earthsea trilogy saved my life,” he wrote to me. I don’t think he was being altogether rhetorical. Escape is derided as the cheapest of literary pleasures, “escapism” the name for a particular kind of aesthetic cowardice, a culpable flight from the real. But there are situations when what you need is teleportation. You need to get out of the surgical ward. You need to stay in Earthsea for as long as your imagination can float its little open boat.
“He’s more than welcome,” Le Guin says, when I relay my friend’s thanks. In person she is tiny. The unwary might mistake her simply for the genial 84-year-old wife of a retired academic, a cat owner, who has lived quietly in the same house for half a century. Perhaps it takes a certain kind of temperament to absorb so much devotion and retain equanimity. A fierce, waspish energy animates her as she listens and speaks, but for a writer she seems strikingly unneedy. She frequently talks about herself as an object of wry or amused discovery. “Apparently,” she will say, “I don’t mind living in the margins, because I’ve put myself there often enough. Apparently, I never sought moral guidance in religion,” as if her past is a kind of text, from which she is only now making these deductions.
In an astonishing run in the late 1960s and early 70s, Le Guin produced not just Earthsea but several of the great novels of science fiction’s postwar new wave. The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, The Word for World Is Forest and The Left Hand of Darknessfulfilled the genre’s promise, using speculation to address social, political, ethical and metaphysical questions. Since then she has continued to publish novels and short stories informed by the mystical philosophy of the Tao Te Ching and the west coast tradition of political radicalism, written in a clear, clean prose that is never tainted by inkhorn medievalism or technological jargon. A two-volume collection of stories, The Unreal and the Real, was published this summer, giving an overview of her entire career.
Because of her subject matter, Le Guin isn’t always recognised for what she is, one of the great writers of the American west, a product of a coastal tradition that looks forward at the Pacific with a wilderness at its back and the great cities of Europe very far to the rear.
Le Guin claims to “get very uppity” about the “parochialism and snobbishness” of the East Coast literary establishment. “The idea that everybody lives in a large city in the east, it’s such a strange thing for an American to think.” She grew up in Berkeley, the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, one of the major figures in US anthropology. Her mother was Theodora Kroeber, who became well known in the 1960s, around the time of her daughter’s first fame, as the author of popular books about Ishi, the last survivor of the Yahi tribe, who had lived as her husband’s ward in the early years of the century. Alfred, a student of the “father of American anthropology” Franz Boas, gathered and preserved information about native peoples and traditions in California, excavated archaeological sites in Mexico and Peru, and some years before his daughter’s birth had briefly practised as a psychoanalyst. The family home was a magnet for displaced European emigres, many of them anthropologists. Le Guin remembers dozens of intellectuals “in and out of the house”. Many of her earliest stories are set in a fictional middle European country she called Orsinia, like her own name a derivation of the Latin for bear.
Summers were spent in the Napa Valley, not then the manicured hub of boutique agribusiness it is today. “It was much more like a valley in Provence or Italy. Olives and plums and apricots and grapes. They grew everything. Lots of small farms, Italian family farms. North Italians came there because they recognised it, they knew what to do with that land.” In a “wild and hairy” farmhouse, the Kroebers would also play host to the Native American subjects of Alfred’s research, giving the young Ursula “an experience that a great many American kids don’t have, of knowing people really from somewhere else”.
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin
Her father was one of the pioneers of “cultural relativism”, a theory that was to have huge influence on the progressive politics of the late 20th century. The notion that desires and moral values may be culturally specific was enormously challenging to a Victorian intellectual framework that dealt in universal hierarchies. For a nation that was just mopping up after a 300-year genocide, the thought that the people they had eradicated weren’t inferior but different was (and remains) unwelcome. Le Guin’s fiction is littered with moments of cultural contact, and heroes who approach the unfamiliar with an open mind and a desire to learn. How much of this perspective was learned in the family home? “It’s got to be partly nurture,” Le Guin allows, “but I really wonder if it’s partly nature, too, if I simply inherited something like my father’s temperament.” I put it to her that humility before otherness is always a signal virtue in her fiction. “It’s great curiosity also,” she says. “You want to know. You want to go and be there.”
The Word for World Is Forest, published in 1972, is clearly a product of this view. The book is a response to the Vietnam war, to which Le Guin was vehemently opposed. In a 2008 interview with the novelist Alexander Chee, she remembered writing it in London, where she and her husband were spending a sabbatical year. “I was unable to protest my country’s increasing involvement by non-violent action. My frustrated anger and shame went pretty directly into the book.” The planet Athshe, an Edenic forest world, is the site of New Tahiti, a human logging colony. The humans have casually enslaved the inhabitants, who are peaceful, physically slight, with a subsistence-level material culture. The narrative pits Captain Davidson – a violent exploiter whose rape and murder of a native woman sparks a revolt in the hominids he derisively calls “creechies”– against anthropologist Raj Lyubov, who becomes a kind of species traitor as he discovers more about the nature of the native relationship to the forest. The anthropologist is despised by the military commander because he appears content to be in the world, to try to understand without altering it or bending it to his will. Lyubov, precisely because he is mindful and aware, realises that Athshe’s inhabitants, stigmatizsed as lazy and work-shy, actually spend part of their “waking” time in a state of lucid dreaming.
If this reminds you of James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar, you’re not alone (though the aliens in the film are large and blue rather than small and green). In Le Guin’s opinion, Cameron “had quite a few people to thank” for inspiring his story, but “he dodged all that”. Likewise she thinks JK Rowling “could have been more generous” in acknowledging A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), a novel in which a young boy attends a school for wizards and attracts the attention of metaphysical dark forces. Though Le Guin is certainly a famous writer, she is probably not as famous as she ought to be, and these days her influence is mainly felt indirectly. Her novels, like Ray Bradbury’s short story about cultural assimilation, “Dark They Were and Golden Eyed”, and Robert Heinlein’s novelStranger in a Strange Land were among the dog-eared paperbacks that passed hand to hand in squats and communes across the US, as SF became one of the unacknowledged intellectual drivers of the counterculture. As she writes in her 1997 translation of the Tao Te Ching “true leaders/ are hardly known to their followers … when the work’s done right/ with no fuss or boasting/ ordinary people say/ Oh, we did it.”
Le Guin’s engagement with Taoism underpins The Lathe of Heaven (1971). It’s set in a dystopian version of Portland in 2002, where George Orr arrives in the consulting room of Dr William Heber, an ambitious psychiatrist. Orr has been trying to avoid sleeping because he believes his dreams are “effective” and can alter the course of events. Heber, at first understandably sceptical, comes to believe in Orr’s power and makes disastrous attempts to harness it, producing a series of increasingly appalling realities. George Orr has a logical operator for a surname, because his mind is a garden of forking paths. The book produces a state of radical uncertainty, as the city outside the psychiatrist’s window changes with each waking. Does Le Guin believe that dreams have such power? “No, except insofar as they are obviously the dark parts of one’s mind operating, and we do affect the world. I’m not a lucid dreamer; I think my dreams are quite ordinary.”
The title The Lathe of Heaven is an artefact of a 19th-century translation of theZhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu), the collection of anecdotes and parables traditionally attributed to the Taoist sage Zhuang Zhou, the best known of which features a sage who doesn’t know whether he has dreamed of being a butterfly, or is a butterfly dreaming he is a man. “To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.” Heber’s hubristic desire for control is, in Taoist terms, evidence of lack of spiritual attainment. It makes him a monster of a less obvious kind than the colonial overseer Davidson, but a monster nonetheless. After The Lathe of Heaven was published, Le Guin was contacted by a sinologist who informed her that her source for the title was inaccurate – the 1891 James Legge translation she was using had many problems: for one thing, the lathe had not been invented at the time of the Zhuangzi’s composition. Le Guin brushed away this disappointing news. “At least I got a good title out of it.” Le Guin had first discovered the Tao Te Ching as a teenager, and her own version (“a rendition, not a translation”) was the result of many years of wrestling with the obscurities of this terse, enigmatic text. “My father had a copy of Paul Carus’s translation. It has the whole Chinese text with transliteration and literal translation. You realise that a single word can be two or three different words in English. I think I was 14, 15, the age when you’re beginning to look around for religious guidance or whatever you want to call it. I found in it the thoughts I wanted to think, I guess. Much later I stumbled into pacifist anarchism. I thought I must educate myself about non-violence, so I read Gandhi and branched out from there.”
Le Guin’s self-education ultimately took the form of The Dispossessed (1974), one of the most fully realised visions of a functioning anarchist society in literature. The novel is set on the planet Urras and its moon Anarres. Centuries earlier, to forestall a revolution, the Urrasti allowed anarchist sectarians to settle on the moon, giving them a guarantee of non-interference. The two societies have developed separately, with little contact. Anarres has become a place without authoritarian institutions or a conception of private property, while Urras has many states and ideologies, broadly reflecting the various alignments of the cold war period in which the book was written.
“What did I know about Utopia?” she reminisced in a 1976 essay about the book. “Scraps of More, fragments of Wells, Hudson, Morris. Nothing.” Looking for models, she took assistance from “Engels, Marx, Godwin, Goldman, Goodman and above all Shelley and Kropotkin”. One of Le Guin’s great imaginative strengths is, paradoxically, her dislike of whimsy, and The Dispossessed considers many un-Utopian practicalities – who sleeps where, who looks after the children, how work is assigned and performed and compensated. The book still circulates widely in activist circles, and young anarchists often find their way to its author, hoping for political advice. These encounters make her “embarrassed and a bit guilty”, because one of her conclusions from writing the book was that “the only way it can be done” –“it” being the full implementation of an anarchist system of social organisation – “is to be completely isolated from everybody else. Then it will probably all the same destroy itself from inside, because we are perverse creatures. But it was a lovely thing to follow through in a novel, as an intellectual framework for a book. Which is really what anarchism was to me, a way of thinking, a way of imagining, but not a belief.”
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le GuinPhotograph: PR
The “dispossessed” of Anarres are, of course, those who attempt to live without property, but also without a certain kind of language. They have no possessive pronouns (not “you can borrow my handkerchief”, but “you can share the handkerchief I use”) and abjure possessive sexuality. “The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act … The usual verb, taking only a plural subject … meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had.” Like much of Le Guin’s writing, this is marked by her engagement with the women’s movement, and the notion that a patriarchal language will produce a patriarchal world.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), probably Le Guin’s most celebrated work, is a novel that follows a human emissary to a winter planet whose inhabitants spend most of their time as asexual “potentials”, only adopting gender during a period of sexual receptivity known as “kemmer”. Le Guin follows trains of thought about sexual desire, gender identities and parenting. Like The Dispossessed, it was, she has written, “a thought experiment … Because of our lifelong social conditioning, it is hard for us to see clearly what, besides purely physiological form and function, truly differentiates men and women.”
The novel has become a classic not just because of its themes, resonant though they have proved to be. Le Guin has a commitment to world-building, to constructing her unreal cities along scrupulously realist lines. In an excoriating review of On Such a Full Sea, Chang-Rae Lee’s recent foray into dystopian SF, she lists various faults of logic and plausibility, charging him with being just another literary tourist, one of a crowd of mainstream writers who have dabbled in the genre without paying their dues. “Neglect of such literal, rational questions in imaginative fiction is often excused, even legitimised, as literary licence. Because the author is known as a literary writer, he will probably be granted the licence he takes. But social science fiction is granted no such irresponsibility … Like Cormac McCarthy and others, Lee uses essential elements of a serious genre irresponsibility, superficially.”
“I hated to do that,” says Le Guin of delivering this stinging rebuke. I half-believe her. Speculative fiction’s commitment to plausible, coherent world-building is often overlooked (or even attacked) by critics , and Le Guin would hardly be the first SF writer to feel irritated that the difficulty of her craft was underrated. Of course, her preference for coherent, consistent worlds is not prescriptive. She has termed SF “a crazy, protean, left-handed monkey wrench”, a fictional tool that “can be put to any use the craftsman has in mind – satire, extrapolation, prediction, absurdity, exactitude, exaggeration, warning, message-carrying, tale-telling, whatever you like”. Throwing the ultimate insult back at its detractors, she has also remarked that “fake realism is the escapism of our time”. She is not, for example, a fan of John Updike, though at the time of my visit she was reading and enjoying Arnold Bennett.
Le Guin may be able to produce effective dreams, escape routes for the reader, but she is not an escapist. Her writing walks towards reality, not away from it. For all its furniture of spells and dragons, her Earthsea trilogy has something pithy and solid about it, something defiantly unwhimsical. In Earthsea, magic is predicated on naming, on knowing the “true name” of a person, place or thing. Her wizards attempt a sort of disclosure of the world as it is, rather than a flight from it. Le Guin has observed that “wizardry is artistry. The trilogy is, in this sense, about art, the creative experience, the creative process.” Le Guin’s own creativity has barely slowed over the years. In the noughties she wrote a trilogy (Gifts, Voices and Powers) that was marketed as teen paranormal fiction, thus ensuring it missed much of its audience. Her last novel, Lavinia, in which she adopts the voice of a minor character in the Aeneid, appeared in 2008, and since then she has published stories, essays and poetry.
In The Farthest Shore (1972), the final part of the Earthsea sequence, the mage Sparrowhawk offers a quasi-Taoist lesson in ethics to a young prince, as they sail a small open boat into the west:
On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole. But we, in so far as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.
Or, as Le Guin put it to me: “If you’re going to create a world out of whole cloth, that is to say, out of words, then you better get the words right.”
This post originally ran on Juan Cole’s Web page. Bassam Haddad, a prominent Syria specialist at George Mason University, interviewed me this fall for the new web radio program Status Hour , on the Middle East. Do check out the range of important interviews already up at the site.
My own audio interview is here. For those who like to read, I am mirroring below the transcript kindly made by Zachary Cuyler at Status Hour.
Juan Cole Interview Transcript
Transcribed by Zachary Cuyler
Bassam Haddad (BH): Good afternoon. We have with us here Professor Juan Cole, who has been able to give us some time during his lecture tour—which seems to be consistent and constant. We would like to ask Professor Cole about a few things that are happening now in the media and in the region, starting with the question that is on everyone’s mind, and that is: What is happening in the region right now, in terms of the basic drivers—what would you consider are some of the basic drivers that are producing the outcomes we are all watching on television and listening to on the radio, and so on?
Juan Cole (JC): The post-war governments of the Middle East tended to be Arab nationalist governments. They were deeply influenced by the Soviet model, even though they were not
communist regimes, but they called themselves socialist. There were enormous state sectors, public sectors. You know, it was not to the extent of the East[ern] bloc. A place like Hungary probably was ninety-five percent state-owned, the economy. Egypt was probably half, Syria more. In comparison, Nehru’s socialist India was never more than twenty-five percent of the economy, [the] public sector.
So these were socialist states, and their premise was that the colonial powers and often indigenous rulers in cahoots with the colonial powers had produced extremely unequal societies, and had produced societies that were not characterized by healthy social statistics. They were largely rural, villages, they were largely illiterate, the countries lacked infrastructure, they lacked very much in the way of factory production. They were still, for the most part, agricultural and dependent on primary commodities. And these post-war, anti-colonial, anti-imperial states attempted to bring their populations forward. They established mixed school systems, they established high schools, universities, and they really did succeed in making most of the population, at least of the younger generation, at least literate.
And then they did state-led industrialization: they committed resources to making sure that there were factories producing things, substituting those locally-made commodities for international imports.
And then the 1990s came, and the Soviet model collapsed, and Soviet patronage disappeared, and enormous pressure was applied by Washington, London, and Paris on the states of the Middle East to privatize their economies and reduce the size of their public sectors. And in the process of privatizing, new billionaires were created, so it was a little bit like the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the oligarchs in Russia. And neoliberal policies where market mechanisms were instituted, started to substitute for some of the public sector enterprises. But, as we know from Eastern Europe, there are right and wrong ways to privatize, and in the Middle East the state elites engaged in insider trading, they used their advantages to create crony billionaire classes, and because the state elites were not representative. Typically, they were what is called in the Middle East a shillah, or a clique. The inequalities that grew through the 1990s and 2000s excluded often the majority of people living in the country, and those inequalities—regional, ethnic, sectarian, and so forth—they hurt people, they hurt the ability of young people to get jobs, their futures seemed blocked. So you had a lot of regional protest, a lot of labor protest, and what seemed as though they were sectarian protests. But I am arguing that sectarianism was really invoked as a way of objecting to the concentration of wealth in a few hands of a particular social group.
BH: Thank you. Surely, this is not what you would hear in mainstream circles, whether media or academia, sometimes, regarding these political economy factors that are drivers. How do you think someone might respond to this and say, no, this is strictly a cultural issue and what you’re saying is some [. . . sentence ends]. They might even say some Marxist, leftist jargon from a time gone by.
JC: If it is cultural, the culture hasn’t changed that much, so why were these ethnic and sectarian conflicts not big in the 1950s and 1960s? If you go back and read the US State Department cables about a place like Iraq, Shi’i Islam almost doesn’t appear. And concerns about instability owing the Sunni-Shi’i conflict is almost completely absent from those cables of the 1960s and 1970s. The big concern is the strength of the communist movement, the ways in which there were conflicts between poor peasants and big landowners. Now, it may be that sometimes the poor peasants were Shi’a and the big landowners were Sunnis, but that was not ethnicity that they were fighting about, it was the distribution of land and wealth. We saw in Iraq in the 1950s enormous numbers of landless laborers had grown up and maybe 2-3,000 families owned the lion’s share of the good land in Iraq. So the big conflicts were over political economy and I think that has continued.
But whereas in the 1960s and 1970s, it was unusual for those conflicts to be reworked into sectarian or other kinds of primordial identity conflicts, over time this became a fruitful tactic for entrepreneurial politicians. Once you have two groups that are fighting over distribution of material goods—for jobs and resources—it becomes an advantage for politicians if they can mobilize one of the groups against the other on identity grounds.
I think the reason that political economy is not taken into account is that you have to know something fairly serious about economics to understand it, you have to know something serious about the history of these societies in the last fifty years. And, frankly, a lot of our journalists are not trained either in economics or history, or certainly of this region.
And so what is easiest is to fasten upon surface characteristics, though we have the trope of the age-old hatreds. They did this in the Balkans when the Croats and the Bosnians started fighting with each other in the 1990s and the journalists in the United States often attributed it to age-old ethnic hatreds. But the fact is that there is very little difference among the languages. Serbo-Croatian is basically a single language and the big difference among them was religion—the Croats were Catholic and the Bosnians [Muslim] and the Serbs are Eastern Orthodox but almost nobody practices religion so that cannot possibly have been very important. And, in fact, if you look at the history of that region, there was some trouble in the mid-19th century, but for the last hundred years or so, there really had not been much in the way of ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. So there is a tendency to essentialize, to see primordial identities as somehow eternal, unchanging, and then as productive of constant conflict, whereas none of those things is true. So I think there is a lack of attention to history, to the fluidity of identity over time.
BH: Thank you. What about, if we want to move from some of the internal dynamics to the external arena, or at least the influence coming from the outside, or the intervention, or the invasion, or the manipulation, what have you, starting with the Iraq-Iran War, which was certainly something that was also in the interest of external powers, and then moving on to the First—or Second Gulf War, according to the people of the region, [the] First [Gulf War] in the United States—then the sanctions and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Can you tell us how these events in this sequence might have produced what everyone is concerned about today—or what many people are concerned about today, especially in the mainstream media—which is that word, ISIS? And how can we put it in a broader context?
JC: Personally, I—with the exception of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which obviously turned that society upside-down in very unfortunate ways—I do not think that the imperial interventions in the region are primarily responsible for these changes. I see them as indigenous. I know that there is a kind of trope out there that Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 at the behest of the Carter administration, but I have talked to members of the National Security Council at the time who deny this, and who say that it came as a surprise to them. Knowing the policies of Jimmy Carter, the idea that he called up Saddam and said “Hey, why don’t you invade Iran” seems a little unlikely. I think later on in the Reagan administration they did send Donald Rumsfeld out, when he was CEO of Searle, to see if Saddam would be willing to do a deal with the United States, and found that he was. So I see the US-Iraqi relationship as close in the 1980s, but I think it really started in 1983.
I think that the invasion of Iran was all Saddam Hussein’s idea, and there were internal reasons for doing it. Saddam was ambitious and he wanted Iranian Khuzistan, which is where the oil is, and wanted to make Iraq a very major player on the world stage. Then, after their revolution in in 1979, the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini went on radio and called upon the Iraqi Shi’a to rise up and overthrow the Ba’th party in Iraq. So the Ba’th party felt that the best defense is a good offense and… I do not think that the Iraqi Shi’a would have paid much attention to Khomeini if Saddam had not invaded Iran. And in fact, people say it was a million man army, the Iraqi army, [and] apparently only about forty thousand Shi’i Iraqis defected to the Iranian side. The vast majority of Iraqi Shi’a fought their Iranian co-religionists on behalf of the Iraqi nation. This is why it is so inaccurate for analysts today to see all signs of Shi’i activism as somehow making them cat’s paws of Iran. In fact, a lot of Iraqi Shi’a or Shi’a elsewhere in the region resent Iranian dominance and see themselves as Arabs first or as having local economic or political interests. So I think that while the Americans were drawn into the Iran-Iraq war, I think its impetuses were primarily local, though to some extent the Iranian Revolution itself was a reaction against US imperial dominance of Iran, so the US had a role there.
As for the [Second] Gulf War, that was really a status quo war and in some important respects it was an Arab League war against Saddam Hussein. His invasion and occupation of Kuwait alarmed all of the other states in the world. State elites are very good about protecting the prerogatives of the state, so it was not hard for George HW Bush to put together a coalition that was truly vast. I mean, people now forget that it included Argentina. There was an Iraqi [who was] interviewed who had a sense of humor, who said “Our leader Saddam is very great. He has provoked the entire world—even Argentina is against us.” But the Arab League joined in, [and even] Syria and Egypt were both allies of the Western powers in restoring the sovereignty of Kuwait in that war. So I do not see it as [ . . . sentence ends]. And in fact, it should be remembered that the Bush administration was a realist administration. Realists in foreign policy think you should follow national interest and think that you should not get so worried about injecting morality into politics. James Baker, the Secretary of State at the time, I think genuinely was uninterested in who controlled Kuwait. He thought the oil would be pumped no matter whose hands it was in, and it does not affect the United States’ interests. So, I think that there was resistance to getting involved. It was still the post-Vietnam era: having a war was not popular in the United States.
So I see that whole episode around the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait not in terms of imperial politics, but as, an important part, in a regional response to aggrandization on the part of a “barracuda state”—I think Iraq under Saddam Hussein was what Immanuel Wallerstein calls a ‘barracuda state.’ He [Wallerstein] thinks that those kinds of aggrandizing smaller states that want to become great powers are typical of being on the semi-periphery of the world capitalist system. These are states that are in some way locked out of certain opportunities and resources, and so resort to violence, invasions, big militaries and so forth, and the grabbing of other people’s resources in order to build themselves up to the point at which they could challenge the international system. In the case of Iraq, this barracuda strategy failed because it was too open, it challenged the world system too directly, and it provoked such a powerful, united response—from not only the international powers, but the regional ones—[so] that ultimately Iraq was contained and put under sanctions and its middle class was destroyed.
There, the aftermath of the [Second] Gulf War, I think, is one that was very unfortunate, and for which you could blame US policy, because it was quite ruthless. The sanctions that Iraq was put under by the United Nations and by the United States in the 1990s were the most severe sanctions that had ever been applied to a country up until that point, and they were applied to civilians. And so, since chlorine can be used to make weaponry, it was interdicted as an export to Iraq. But chlorine is essential to water purification. Sewage is such that people’s waste goes into the rivers and we drink from the rivers. Without water purification, the water of the Tigris and the Euphrates became extremely unsanitary, full of bacteria. While adults can survive that kind of thing, they might develop some gastrointestinitis, the children—toddlers and babies—die very easily of bad water. So you probably have excess mortality among toddlers and infants on the order of 500,000 Iraqis who died in the 1990s because of the interdiction of chlorine. That seems to be clearly a war crime, and it was the result of not just US but United Nations sanctions, so the extent to which the world system was willing to go to punish the Iraqi regime spilled over into punishing the Iraqi people.
And that has been a major generator of radicalism in the region. Nobody can stand by and see 500,000 children murdered in this way. You know, a lot of the radical groups mention this as a reason for their anti-US actions, including al-Qa’ida. What al-Qa’ida did is unforgivable, it is a crime, it is a major war crime, but US imperial policy did help to provoke some of this radicalism.
An academic’s doomed attempt to explain why there are no good right-wing comedians.
By Joshua Green
A Conservative Walks Into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor by Alison Dagnes Palgrave Macmillan, 255 pp.
Alison Dagnes, a political scientist at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, has a curious affliction: she thinks the comedian Dennis Miller is really, really funny. She wanted so badly to meet him and discuss his craft that she contrived to write an entire book on the subject of comedy and politics essentially as a professional excuse to fulfill this desire. Dagnes was working as a production assistant at C-SPAN in 1991 when she discovered Miller, who was then at the apex of his career, fresh off a successful run on Saturday Night Live and famous for his knowing, referential brand of humor. As she moved on to academe and he to HBO, Dagnes kept up what she calls her “steadfast devotion.”
Miller styles his act as a stream-of-consciousness rant that is heavy on cultural allusions and was, back then, laced with an acid scorn toward the unenlightened — especially hicks, rednecks, culture warriors, and other right-wingers. Here’s the flavor of Miller’s comedy circa late 2000:
And on Monday, movers went to the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas, to transfer Bush’s belongings to Washington. The move itself took very little time once workers discovered that Bush had nothing upstairs. Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but as a comedian, with George W. Bush coming into office, I feel like the owner of a hardware store before a hurricane. I hate to see it coming, but I have to admit it’s good for business.
Then something odd happened. The attacks of September 11, 2001, turned Miller into a fawning admirer of the same president he’d once held in contempt. The change was striking not only because Miller was supporting a Republican, but because he lost his sense of irony and adopted the full complement of Fox News- Republican vices: the chest-thumping America-first bravado, the angry paranoia, the presumption of treasonous bad faith in anyone who didn’t share his views. This was especially jarring because the latter included most of Miller’s fans, who didn’t know what had happened to the guy. Dagnes, confused like the rest, watched her friends turn on Miller, and then watched the long arc of his career decline, from a failed stint hostingMonday Night Football, to a short-lived show on the financial network CNBC, and finally to his current role as comedian in residence at Fox News. Dagnes, who describes herself as “fairly liberal,” is touchingly devoted to her hero but also somewhat blinded by her fandom, because she attributes Miller’s shrinking audience to his reversal in politics. In A Conservative Walks Into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor, she sets out to discover why conservative satirists number so few and whether this is something that we, as a country, ought to be concerned about.
Dagnes is a pleasant guide and companion, whose accessible (sometimes chirpy) prose helps the lay reader to grasp what I suspect is a punishingly dry canon of scholarship on political humor. Most of us, for example, would prefer her synopsis of the Norwegian psychologist Sven Svebak’s attempt to quantify and measure the sense of humor in 54,000 Swedes by administering his “Sense of Humor Questionnaire (SHQ)” than to read the unabridged Sven for ourselves. (Trust me, I Googled it.) Another frustrating aspect of the scholarship is that it seems awfully haphazard and contradictory. One set of scholars studying The Daily Show accused Jon Stewart of “unbridled political cynicism” and cultivating distrust in his impressionable viewers. But two other sets of scholars concluded that satirical comedy increased viewers’ political awareness.
Do these hyperaware cynics even vote? And do they vote differently because of Stewart and his ilk? “The answers,” reports Dagnes, “are wildly divergent.” Some scholars have concluded that cynicism discourages participation, others that satire fosters enlightened engagement. One study determined that viewers of late-night comedy shows are more inclined to cross party lines (seeing politicians from the opposing party yukking it up with Letterman presumably casts them in a more favorable light). But Dagnes’s own earlier research concluded that such personalization “encouraged superficiality,” thus trivializing the discourse. Whole shelves groan with academic treatises on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report — stuffed with typologies, program analyses, monologue exegeses — but they don’t seem to have proven much or illuminated anything particularly interesting about the audience.
In fact, much of the scholarship feels like it was primarily motivated by the authors’ desire to study something cool, and then retrofitted with exaggerated significance to justify the endeavor. Take the conclusion of two academics who studied Will Ferrell’s Saturday Night Live presidential debate skits in 2000: “Voters seeking to understand the substance of ideas in the debate may have found the parodies of the debate to be a useful organizing tool for their inherent complexities.” Only a Will Ferrell character would rely on a Will Ferrell debate skit to parse the complexities of modern presidential politics. An academic herself, Dagnes doesn’t avoid some of these pitfalls. As she explains in her introduction, she examined political humor to gauge the bias, studying the content of satirical shows, columns, and drawings.
I examined the guest lists of programs and explored other data on the target of political jokes, and surveyed the long and impressive history of American political satire from its founding until today. I analyzed the satirists, their skill sets, political ideology, liberalism, conservatism, and the goals of the entertainment industry.
In other words, she is attempting, like Sven Svebak, to quantify and measure something that doesn’t lend itself to quantification and measurement. Humor is subjective; an academic’s tool kit—scrutinizing joke targets, sniffing out “bias” in guest lists — doesn’t yield much insight about why there aren’t more conservatives on late-night television. Her dutiful slog through the litany of gripes from right-wing commentators and media organizations is likewise unilluminating (they blame nefarious Hollywood liberals).
What redeems Dagnes’s book is that she also interviewed a ton of comedians and television writers, who are amply and colorfully quoted throughout. This provides a real-world grounding absent from most other studies, although much of what she’s told goes against her thesis that these shows are a vital part of the political process — in fact, the interviews undermine the whole idea of academics parsing Daily Show transcripts. As the comedian Marc Maron explains, “The one thing I do know is that 90 percent of the time if you’re going to talk about politics the audience’s eyes [are] going to glaze over and not know how to take it in because they don’t fucking think about it.” When Dagnes cites the studies about how satire affects political behavior, the comedian Lewis Black replies, “Well, first, tell those academics to fuck themselves.… Really, tell them it is bullshit … satire doesn’t have that effect. If satire was really that important as a way to get things done, then, you know, more shit would be getting [done].” The common thread running through all these interviews is that professional satirists are almost exclusively concerned with being funny, and while many hold liberal views, they don’t expend much effort trying to impose them on others or imagine that they’d succeed if they did.
Dagnes isn’t having it. “Modern political humor,” she writes, “has become a powerhouse of cultural influence and Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and their brethren wield an immense amount of sway among voters, especially young ones.” And elsewhere: “As our news media soften considerably in their changing work environment, satirists (whether they like it or not) are filling some of the watchdog functions that journalists used to carry out.” But the notion that journalism has become so impoverished that hungry minds have turned to The Daily Show for news and moral guidance doesn’t hold up. Not only is there more and better national political journalism than ever before, spread across more platforms and easier to share, but it supplies the subject matter for The Daily Show and other shows like it, which don’t produce journalism, but riff on that produced by others.
So why do conservatives fail to turn political news into entertaining satire like liberals do? In 2007, with the Republican Party in tatters and Jon Stewart splashed across every magazine cover, Fox News Channel began broadcasting ,em>The 1/2 Hour News Hour, which was billed as “a conservative Daily Show.” It was a spectacular flop, because it put politics before humor. “It was mostly just loud and complainy with not a whole lot of basis in fact or reality,” says the Saturday Night Live writer Alex Baze. A writer for The 1/2 Hour News Hour told Dagnes that Fox News censored the best material because it was deemed “too controversial.” Surveying this landscape, Dagnes concludes that conservatism is philosophically incompatible with satire. “The nature of conservatism does not meet the conditions necessary for political satire to flourish: conservatism is harmonized and slow to criticize people in power, and it originates from a place that repudiates humor because it is absolute.” Any member of the Obama administration would heatedly disagree with the first claim; and there’s plenty of conservative humor if you know where to find it. Conservative satire flourishes in places like the Weekly Standard, particularly in the essays and articles of Matt Labash and Andrew Ferguson, and the cover art of Mark Fredrickson and Thomas Fluharty, whose paintings travestying braindead hippies and aging radicals are dead on and piercingly funny.
It’s true that late-night television is largely bereft of conservative humor — Fox News’s late, late-night (3 a.m.) Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld being a notable exception. To me, the conservative inclination to put politics before humor goes a long way toward explaining this disparity. It’s one reason why talk radio has been such a successful format for conservative entertainers (and such a challenging one for liberals, who have failed in their attempts to match it). You can’t cultivate a national television audience for a comedy show if being funny isn’t the first order of business. Throughout the time she was researching her book, Dagnes was toiling to convince Miller to talk with her, at first by touting her academic credentials and finally by approaching him through an intermediary. He declined every advance. This wasn’t very sporting of him, but on the other hand, the prospect of his career being rigorously examined couldn’t have held much appeal.
There’s something karmically fitting about the fact that Miller, whose act requires an audience with deep cultural fluency and a finely honed sense of irony, has wound up performing for the boobs who watch The O’Reilly Factor. His fall has been long and precipitous, from the comedy flagship of Saturday Night Live to the graveyard of Fox News. Miller is too sharp not to recognize this himself.
To Dagnes, the explanation lies in the complicated interplay of political philosophy and cultural climate. But what killed Dennis Miller’s career wasn’t that he became a conservative. It’s that he stopped being funny.
President Obama's remarks to the nation, as prepared for delivery, on his plan to protect 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Alan: President Obama's nationally broadcast address describing -- and contextualizing -- his "executive action on immigration" was superb. Finally the nation has moved off Square One. It is now time for the upcoming Republican Congress to temporize, stonewall, repeal or replace. Although I am prepared to be surprised, the GOP -- if true to form -- will do nothing or make matters worse. Having redefined "political success" as non-stop obstructionism, Republicans have no positive program and will set an agenda that reiterates century-old platitudes that are even less effective now than "back when." 1.) Lower taxes. 2.) Strengthen defense. 3.) Deregulate. 4.) Promote personal responsibility. 5.) Worship the One, True Christian God. 6.) Privatize education and Social Security. 7.) Replace Obamacare with free market competition. 8.) Support motherhood. Promote apple pie. Distribute flags. 9.) Post The Ten Commandments in public places. Inspired?
***
President Obama: My fellow Americans, tonight, I'd like to talk with you about immigration.
For more than 200 years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world has given us a tremendous advantage over other nations. It's kept us youthful, dynamic, and entrepreneurial. It has shaped our character as a people with limitless possibilities — people not trapped by our past, but able to remake ourselves as we choose.
But today, our immigration system is broken, and everybody knows it.
Families who enter our country the right way and play by the rules watch others flout the rules. Business owners who offer their workers good wages and benefits see the competition exploit undocumented immigrants by paying them far less. All of us take offense to anyone who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America. And undocumented immigrants who desperately want to embrace those responsibilities see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart.
It's been this way for decades. And for decades, we haven't done much about it.
When I took office, I committed to fixing this broken immigration system. And I began by doing what I could to secure our borders. Today, we have more agents and technology deployed to secure our southern border than at any time in our history. And over the past six years, illegal border crossings have been cut by more than half. Although this summer, there was a brief spike in unaccompanied children being apprehended at our border, the number of such children is now actually lower than it's been in nearly two years. Overall, the number of people trying to cross our border illegally is at its lowest level since the 1970s. Those are the facts.
Meanwhile, I worked with Congress on a comprehensive fix, and last year, 68 Democrats, Republicans, and Independents came together to pass a bipartisan bill in the Senate. It wasn't perfect. It was a compromise, but it reflected common sense. It would have doubled the number of border patrol agents, while giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship if they paid a fine, started paying their taxes, and went to the back of the line. And independent experts said that it would help grow our economy and shrink our deficits.
Had the House of Representatives allowed that kind of a bill a simple yes-or-no vote, it would have passed with support from both parties, and today it would be the law. But for a year and a half now, Republican leaders in the House have refused to allow that simple vote.
Now, I continue to believe that the best way to solve this problem is by working together to pass that kind of common sense law. But until that happens, there are actions I have the legal authority to take as President – the same kinds of actions taken by Democratic and Republican Presidents before me – that will help make our immigration system more fair and more just.
Tonight, I am announcing those actions.
First, we'll build on our progress at the border with additional resources for our law enforcement personnel so that they can stem the flow of illegal crossings, and speed the return of those who do cross over.
Second, I will make it easier and faster for high-skilled immigrants, graduates, and entrepreneurs to stay and contribute to our economy, as so many business leaders have proposed.
Third, we'll take steps to deal responsibly with the millions of undocumented immigrants who already live in our country.
I want to say more about this third issue, because it generates the most passion and controversy. Even as we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws. Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable — especially those who may be dangerous. That's why, over the past six years, deportations of criminals are up 80 percent. And that's why we're going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mother who's working hard to provide for her kids. We'll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day.
But even as we focus on deporting criminals, the fact is, millions of immigrants — in every state, of every race and nationality — will still live here illegally. And let's be honest – tracking down, rounding up, and deporting millions of people isn't realistic. Anyone who suggests otherwise isn't being straight with you. It's also not who we are as Americans. After all, most of these immigrants have been here a long time. They work hard, often in tough, low-paying jobs. They support their families. They worship at our churches. Many of their kids are American-born or spent most of their lives here, and their hopes, dreams, and patriotism are just like ours.
As my predecessor, President Bush, once put it: "They are a part of American life."
Now here's the thing: we expect people who live in this country to play by the rules. We expect that those who cut the line will not be unfairly rewarded. So we're going to offer the following deal: If you've been in America for more than five years; if you have children who are American citizens or legal residents; if you register, pass a criminal background check, and you're willing to pay your fair share of taxes – you'll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily, without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law.
That's what this deal is. Now let's be clear about what it isn't. This deal does not apply to anyone who has come to this country recently. It does not apply to anyone who might come to America illegally in the future. It does not grant citizenship, or the right to stay here permanently, or offer the same benefits that citizens receive – only Congress can do that. All we're saying is we're not going to deport you.
I know some of the critics of this action call it amnesty. Well, it's not. Amnesty is the immigration system we have today – millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules, while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time.
That's the real amnesty – leaving this broken system the way it is. Mass amnesty would be unfair. Mass deportation would be both impossible and contrary to our character. What I'm describing is accountability – a commonsense, middle ground approach: If you meet the criteria, you can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. If you're a criminal, you'll be deported. If you plan to enter the U.S. illegally, your chances of getting caught and sent back just went up.
The actions I'm taking are not only lawful, they're the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican President and every single Democratic President for the past half century. And to those Members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill. I want to work with both parties to pass a more permanent legislative solution. And the day I sign that bill into law, the actions I take will no longer be necessary. Meanwhile, don't let a disagreement over a single issue be a dealbreaker on every issue. That's not how our democracy works, and Congress certainly shouldn't shut down our government again just because we disagree on this. Americans are tired of gridlock. What our country needs from us right now is a common purpose – a higher purpose.
Most Americans support the types of reforms I've talked about tonight. But I understand the disagreements held by many of you at home. Millions of us, myself included, go back generations in this country, with ancestors who put in the painstaking work to become citizens. So we don't like the notion that anyone might get a free pass to American citizenship. I know that some worry immigration will change the very fabric of who we are, or take our jobs, or stick it to middle-class families at a time when they already feel like they've gotten the raw end of the deal for over a decade. I hear these concerns. But that's not what these steps would do. Our history and the facts show that immigrants are a net plus for our economy and our society. And I believe it's important that all of us have this debate without impugning each other's character.
Because for all the back-and-forth of Washington, we have to remember that this debate is about something bigger. It's about who we are as a country, and who we want to be for future generations.
Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law? Or are we a nation that gives them a chance to make amends, take responsibility, and give their kids a better future?
Are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents' arms? Or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together?
Are we a nation that educates the world's best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?
That's what this debate is all about. We need more than politics as usual when it comes to immigration; we need reasoned, thoughtful, compassionate debate that focuses on our hopes, not our fears.
I know the politics of this issue are tough. But let me tell you why I have come to feel so strongly about it. Over the past few years, I have seen the determination of immigrant fathers who worked two or three jobs, without taking a dime from the government, and at risk at any moment of losing it all, just to build a better life for their kids. I've seen the heartbreak and anxiety of children whose mothers might be taken away from them just because they didn't have the right papers. I've seen the courage of students who, except for the circumstances of their birth, are as American as Malia or Sasha; students who bravely come out as undocumented in hopes they could make a difference in a country they love. These people – our neighbors, our classmates, our friends – they did not come here in search of a free ride or an easy life. They came to work, and study, and serve in our military, and above all, contribute to America's success.
Tomorrow, I'll travel to Las Vegas and meet with some of these students, including a young woman named Astrid Silva. Astrid was brought to America when she was four years old. Her only possessions were a cross, her doll, and the frilly dress she had on. When she started school, she didn't speak any English. She caught up to the other kids by reading newspapers and watching PBS, and became a good student. Her father worked in landscaping. Her mother cleaned other people's homes. They wouldn't let Astrid apply to a technology magnet school for fear the paperwork would out her as an undocumented immigrant – so she applied behind their back and got in. Still, she mostly lived in the shadows – until her grandmother, who visited every year from Mexico, passed away, and she couldn't travel to the funeral without risk of being found out and deported. It was around that time she decided to begin advocating for herself and others like her, and today, Astrid Silva is a college student working on her third degree.
Are we a nation that kicks out a striving, hopeful immigrant like Astrid – or are we a nation that finds a way to welcome her in?
Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger – we were strangers once, too.
My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.
That's the country our parents and grandparents and generations before them built for us. That's the tradition we must uphold. That's the legacy we must leave for those who are yet to come.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless this country we love.
Illegal immigration peaked under Bush and continues to decline under Obama. The total number of illegal immigrants resident in the United States has gone from 12.0 million under Bush to 11.1 million under Obama. Obama has also deported more illegals than Dubya.
Dear Kevin,
It's good to hear from you.
Thanks for forwarding Ray's latest excursion to The Dark Side.
The 9/11 attacks ravaged America by catapulting conservatives into abject alliance with Osama bin Laden's foremost goal: the destruction of America (at least as we know it) through unrelentingly fearful.
Having surrendered to the grip of terror, it is no longer possible to consider the United States The Home of The Brave.
It is possible to break this fever but we face 10 to 20 difficult years during which The Land of The Free will be renewed or inextricably shackled with self-forged chains.
Here are some pertinent posts (If you lack time, I encourage you to use what little you have to watch Bill Maher's "Zombie" shtick.)
Alan: Couldn't let this email (from R) go undistributed! More fear motivation. I hear stuff like this and realize how we have forgotten our history. Love the quote from Ronald Reagan at close. I read one of your other emails; and I have long believed that the strength of the democracy is directly tied to economic well being, and think that is the mentality behind trickle down economics--keep the masses pacified and in fear. Hope all is well. Have a nice Thanksgiving to you & family. Kevin
On Wednesday, November 19, 2014 RG wrote:
Subject: Fwd: American Suicide
If you believe in the America of our Founding Fathers then you MUST READ this stunning, eye-opening article!
American Suicide. Please read!!
We know Dick Lamm as the former Governor of Colorado. In that context his thoughts are particularly poignant. Last week there was an immigration overpopulation conference in Washington,DC , filled to capacity by many of America's finest minds and leaders. A brilliant college professor by the name of Victor Hansen Davis talked about his latest book, "Mexifornia", explaining how immigration - both legal and illegal was destroying the entire state of California. He said it would march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The American Dream.
Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and gave a stunning speech on how to destroy America.
The audience sat spellbound as he described eight methods for the destruction of the United States. He said, "If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let's destroy America. It is not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that ‘An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.’”
"Here is how they do it," Lamm said.
"First, to destroy America, turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bicultural country. History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar, Seymour Lipset, put it this way: ‘The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy.’ Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, and Lebanon all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons, Corsicans and Muslims."
Lamm went on:
"Second, to destroy America , invent 'multiculturalism' and encourage immigrants to maintain their culture. Make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal; that there are no cultural differences. Make it an article of faith that the Black and Hispanic dropout rates are due solely to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out of bounds."
"Third, we could make the United States an 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently: 'The apparent success of our own multi-ethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved not by tolerance but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentrcity and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.' Lamm said, "I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with the salad bowl metaphor. It is important to ensure that we have various cultural subgroups living in America enforcing their differences rather than as Americans, emphasizing their similarities."
"Fourth, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50% dropout rate from high school."
"My fifth point for destroying America would be to get big foundations and business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of 'Victimology.' I would get all minorities to think that their lack of success was the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority placation."
"My sixth plan for America's downfall would include dual citizenship, and promote divided loyalties. I would celebrate diversity over unity. I would stress differences rather than similarities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other - that is, when they are not killing each other. A diverse, peaceful, or stable society is against most historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together. Look at the ancient Greeks. The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshipped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic games. A common enemy, Persia, threatened their liberty. Yet all these bonds were not strong enough to overcome two factors: local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions. Greece fell. "E. Pluribus Unum" -- From many, one. In that historical reality, if we put the emphasis on the 'pluribus' instead of the 'Unum,' we will " Balkanize " America as surely as Kosovo."
"Next to last, I would place all subjects off limits. Make it taboo to talk about anything against the cult of 'diversity.' I would find a word similar to 'heretic' in the 16th century - that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like 'racist' or 'xenophobe' halt discussion and debate. Having made America a bilingual/bicultural country, having established multi-culturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of 'Victimology,' I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws. I would develop a mantra: That because immigration has been good for America, it must always be good. I would make every individual immigrant symmetric and ignore the cumulative impact of millions of them."
In the last minute of his speech, Governor Lamm wiped his brow. Profound silence followed. Finally he said, "Lastly, I would censor Victor Hanson Davis's book 'Mexifornia.' His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to destroy America. If you feel America deserves to be destroyed, don't read that book."
There was no applause. A chilling fear quietly rose like an ominous cloud above every attendee at the conference. Every American in that room knew that everything Lamm enumerated was proceeding methodically, quietly, darkly, yet pervasively across the United States today. Discussion is being suppressed. Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our educational system and national cohesiveness. Even barbaric cultures that practice female genital mutilation are growing as we celebrate 'diversity.' American jobs are vanishing into the Third World as corporations create a Third World in America. Take note of California and other states. To date, ten million illegal aliens and growing fast. It is reminiscent of George Orwell's book "1984." In that story, three slogans are engraved in the Ministry of Truth building: "War is peace,""Freedom is slavery," and "Ignorance is strength."
Governor Lamm walked back to his seat. It dawned on everyone at the conference that our nation and the future of this great democracy is deeply in trouble and worsening fast. If we don't get this immigration monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California wildfire and destroy everything in its path, especially The American Dream.
If you care for and love our country as I do, take the time to pass this on just as I did for you. NOTHING is going to happen if you don't!
"If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under" - Ronald Reagan
