My understanding of Memorial Day centered on the three-day weekend it provided. I remember driving past a large cemetery not too far from my home, suddenly eye-catching with brilliantly colored flowers against a grassy background. I remember a few extra conversations about my forebearers, but tales of those spunky individuals hadn’t been absent from my life. It seemed like a holiday for old people, the wrinkled woman speaking through tears and the leathered man whose facial furrows deepened as he squinted into the sun, interviewed for the local news.

During the four months I spent in Paris in 2003, I saw more memorials than ever before or since. It seems that every little town and every little church had a marker or statue or plaque honoring the war dead. Even the Arc de Triomphe, built to commemorate Napoleon’s victories, houses a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I synthesized my visits to these memorials, along with many other tourist sites, in two conclusions. First, the United States is a young country — no wonder it acts like a teenager on the international stage! Second, France and other European countries are much more intimately acquainted with war than the United States. The land itself is marked by conflicts past; could the countries’ mentalities be otherwise? I stand by these conclusions, but they now seem analytical, distant, and cold.

I am humbled and awestruck by the willingness of American soldiers to fight for freedom and to die for democracy. I’m grateful for their courage, their patriotism, and their sacrifice. I wish I could believe that all this is in the service of a good cause, that the war really is vital to the preservation of "American values," that the bravery and dedication of the soldiers somehow offsets the senselessness of their suffering.

If that’s not the case, then Memorial Day is just a hollow holiday, a way of institutionalizing a mawkish, inaccurate version of the past.

I flinch from the cynicism of that last sentence. Perhaps it’s true on an analytical level, though I hope it’s not. For soldiers and their families everywhere, Memorial Day is about honoring and remembering. The grand sweep of history cannot compare to the intimate majesty of a thousand conversations, a smile creeping across a beloved face, plans made yet unrealized, an old joke, still funny, if only for the memories it conjures. Yet the details all too soon fade from crystalline recollection, swept away by the pressures of daily living, but never soon enough to dull the pain.

I hope the inscriptions on their grave markers are true.

As others have mentioned, this whole place is something of an homage to Jurgen Habermas and the European coffeehouses he cited in Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere.  Indeed, the idea of a "public sphere" has become an important conceptual resource, establishing the canonical definition of what constitutes debate in a democratic society.

That model seems quite fitting — it not only describes the atmosphere that’s developed in the past few days but also the ethos that seems to be motivating participation.  Somehow, we all feel like we’re contributing to the democratic process here.

TPMCafe does satisfy many of Habermas’s requirements.  We’re a bunch of private individuals coming together to discuss public matters, those related to the common good.  We bracket our social differences, focusing on the arguments made rather than the status of the person presenting them; reach conclusions through rational argument and deliberation, a practice Habermas called "rational-critical discourse"; and discuss freely any matter related to the common welfare.  (And possibly a few cats.)

That said, for Habermas, a genuine public sphere depends upon  both an ethos of widespread participation and an expectation of high-quality, rational-critical discourse.

During its early years, however, the public sphere did not extend significantly beyond the bourgeoisie, creating a gathering of elite minds and gradually cleansing “public opinion” from the taint of commonness.  Over time, the public sphere began to encompass additional participants.  Habermas argues that this expansion of the public sphere eventually destroyed any common ground, leading to degeneration in the quality of the discourse and the twentieth-century disintegration of the public sphere.  In this indictment, Habermas’s focus on institutional developments — including the rise of the welfare state, identity politics, advertising, and the culture of consumption — cannot dilute his reluctant conclusion that widespread participation in public debate precludes high-quality discourse and thereby the creation of a true public sphere.

In evaluating whether a given public sphere lives up to the ideal, most commentators focus on either the quantity of participation or the quality of the discussion.  Few of them seem to address the fundamental tension that Habermas described.  It’s seemed like an irreconcilable difference.

It’s probably too grandiose to say that TPMCafe will change the world.  But I think it does suggest that is possible to apply Habermas’s ideas, to translate the theoretical and ideal "public sphere" into reality.  Which only adds to the niftiness of this whole endeavor.

In short, I’ve spent way too much time here in the past couple of days.

One of the current tenets of U.S. foreign policy is that we should promote the spread of democracy.  By overthrowing dictators, the argument goes, state support of terrorism will dwindle and we will all be safer for it.  After all, good democracies don’t have terrorists.

This line of reasoning bothers me.

For starters, it raises the specter of the shifting rationalizations for the war in Iraq.  Which is a thorny issue in its own right.

Defining terrorists as those who “hate democracy” does several disservices to our understanding of the world.  It makes it difficult to remember that terrorism is a tactic, one that works because we don’t like to see our people die.  It suggests that all terrorists have the same goals and the same motivations, that they are all irrational haters of freedom.  While The Terrorists share a similar understanding of the worth of human life in comparison to a valued cause, I suspect we impair our understanding by eliding the differences among terrorist groups and organizations.  It’s already difficult to battle terrorism; we shouldn’t add willful ignorance to our challenges.

This line of reasoning also disregards history.  The United States has produced its own terrorists, as the ten-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing recently reminded us.  That incident suggests that a democracy is not immune from the production of terrorists, indicating the likely continued prevalence of terrorism and the philosophical flaws of the current administration’s policies.  (I know some would argue about identifying the U.S. as a democracy during the last five years, but…)

Please don’t mistake me.  I’m a huge fan of democracy, and I never even jokingly said I’d move to Canada.  I am persuaded by the findings of political scientists that democracies don’t fight wars against each other.  But they’ve also found that democratizing countries are some of the most unstable, the most likely to fight a war, and the most likely to do something stupid.  Not to get all Thomas Friedman here, but actively seeking to promote democracy is a risky business.  In the short term, it could be one of the more dangerous paths.

Short version: Democracy is good.  Getting there is tricky.  And we shouldn’t expect democracy to fix the world’s problems (hey, check out the U.S.!) or eliminate terrorism.

Politics today seem predicated on adversarial system—right v. left, hawk v. dove, even progressive v. Democrat.  What’s missing is the recognition that there can be valid points made by either side, especially when discussions turn (as has been the case amongst Café denizens in the past few days) to religion and politics.

There are ugly stereotypes on either side of this largely specious divide.  And so, two memoranda.

Others here have commented on the depiction of the Left among those on the Extreme Right.  I agree—it’s inaccurate and mean-spirited.

MEMO: To the Extreme Right

Voting for Kerry (or Gore or any other Democrat) doesn’t mean that I’ve failed to understand proper religious principles. Please don’t lecture me about what I’m supposed to believe. Please don’t assume that I haven’t considered the candidate’s differing positions on “moral issues.” Please don’t think that my disagreement with you makes me a sinner. 

Many thanks, viviane

I’m also troubled by the depictions of religious folk among liberals.  They can be just as inaccurate and mean-spirited.  Perhaps these stereotypes aren’t perpetrated by elected officials, but they are a significant part of our public space.

Consider this article from Slate, describing any Democrat effort to “reach out to the heartland” as absolute absurdity, because religious people cannot recognize a good idea or principled stand.  And this pre-election article argues that all of George W’s faults are exactly those of organized religion.

Removing religion from public debates, as so many liberals seem to want, is a way of imposing a particular religion on everyone: that of no religion.  I don’t want to impose my religion on everybody else, but I do want my concerns taken seriously.  For example, I cannot wholeheartedly endorse abortion-on-demand, but I don’t want to see Roe v. Wade overturned.  That does not mean that I’m reactionary or bigoted.

MEMO: To the Secular Left

Please don’t tout the Enlightenment values of liberty and equality while treating anything grounded in religious principles as immediately suspect.  Please don’t fail to consider my perspective before condemning my position.  Please don’t lecture me on how “any thinking person” would reach the same conclusion you do. Please don’t assume that a religious person cannot be a thinking person. Please don’t think that my belief in God and adherence to an organized religion makes me stupid.

Many thanks, viviane

In the discussion about the controversy caused by Tom Cruise’s remarks about psychiatry, some commentators raised the question of today’s "drug culture" and how that relates to all sorts of things.  I realize I’m a bit behind on this matter.  Two stories and a few thoughts, nonetheless.

Not too long ago, a new doctor quizzed me about my habits: exercise, smoking, alcohol, and "recreational substances."  I couldn’t help it; I started giggling.  After regaining my composure, I tried to explain my amusement.  In reply, the doctor said that patients gave more truthful responses to a question about "recreational substances" than to a question about "illegal street drugs."

I’m less amused by the euphemism now, though it’s still on the top ten list.  Still, this one incident does seem suggestive of the pervasiveness of drug culture today.

Story #2 makes a very different point.  In this article from The Chronicle, published 6 May 2005, psychiatrist Peter Kramer recounts some of his travels and lectures.  He writes:

"What I spoke about seemed not to matter. Inevitably someone would ask: "What if so-and-so had taken Prozac?" The candidates for drug treatment were drawn from a short roster of tortured 19th-century artists and writers. Friedrich Nietzsche and Edgar Allan Poe made frequent appearances."

His reflections on this question make up the bulk of his article, which concludes with a list of the different diseases that have been romanticized, including tuberculosis, epilepsy, and depression.  Kramer notes that, today, there are no qualms about prescribing antibiotics as needed, but we still worry that treating depression will somehow dampen a divine creative spark. 

Kramer’s article highlights the differences that we see between "psychiatric" and "physical" ailments.  It also emphasizes how much we take medication for granted.

Medication does present two sides: the wonderful treatment and the unfortunate side effects.  But I don’t think modern worries about overmedication are anything new.  Think of the dystopian novels (especially Huxley’s Brave New World) that include misused medication as one of the key problems.  Instead, medication is able to accomplish much more than was possible before.

Most doctors are reluctant to prescribe unnecessary medications.  But how can they deny a medication to a patient that it might help?  How can society insist that some medications, though life-saving, are too expensive?  I don’t think we can.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.  Much of health care today is based around companies, including our pharmaceutical friends who try to persuade us that we all need prescription antihistimines or sleep aids or heartburn medication.  Don’t get me wrong — many of those drugs have drastically improved the quality of life for many people.  But advertisements that market directly to patients too often try to create a market, rather than respond to patients’ needs.

Short version: I don’t know what should be done, but I’m going to keep thinking about this.

An excerpt from Nick Duerden on Starbucks, from The Independent:

Every afternoon around 3pm, I begin to crave a break. And so I go to one of the three [Starbucks] within walking distance of my flat, I buy my inoffensive tall extra-hot latte, collapse into one of its purple, upholstered armchairs, and lose myself in a paperback book. I must admit to finding it all pretty relaxing.

In other words, then, I have succumbed to founder Howard Schultz’s notion of Starbucks as "the third place" – a location that is neither work nor home, but contains elements of both and acts as a refuge from either.

To some extent, as a non-coffee-drinker, I find the whole idea intriguing.  It’s occasionally fun to order a hot chocolate quite early in the morning, just to see people’s expressions.  But I have the sense that I’ve missed out on something, some vital component of modernity — or at least civilized society.  After all, meeting someone for "coffee" is a fundamental part of any social repertoire.  (And debating whether or not such a meeting consititutes a "date" can provide many hours of fruitful discussion.)

It seems that coffee has become a ritual of sorts, as well as a vehicle for caffeine consumption, whether becuase of the beverage itself, the settings in which it is sold, or the interlude in a busy day that it provides.  

Okay, I think I have the coffee meme out of my system now. :)

Sixty years have passed since the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing roughly 140,000 people.  Much can—and has—been written about this: the “decision” to use the atomic bomb, the likelihood of Japanese surrender, the perceived costs of an American invasion of Japan, what might have happened if FDR had lived, how Truman carefully didn’t tell Stalin about the bomb, why a proposed Smithsonian exhibit in 1995 triggered such outrage among veterans and then historians, how the Manhattan Project changed science.

I’ve read about all these issues, but I’ve largely seen the development of the atomic bomb through the eyes of the scientists involved.  I was surprised to learn that many of them saw the atomic bomb project as J. Robert Oppenheimer did, as “primarily the development in time of war of a military weapon of some consequence.”  Though drawn by the many Nobel Laureates at Los Alamos, the scientists went to serve their country.  And that was their main concern.  Patriotism trumped science.

Two comments capture this dedication to building a weapon so that it could be used.  Robert Wilson, a physicist who worked on the bomb, recalled: “Our life was directed to do one thing.  It’s as though we had been programmed to do that, and we as automatons were doing it.”  In April 1945, Oppenheimer lamented, “For the last four years I have had only classified thoughts.”

Patriotism buried moral concerns.  For instance, the only scientists who publicly questioned the morality of using the bomb worked at the Chicago laboratory, which finished its contribution to the project in April 1945.  Such worries did not appear at Los Alamos, whose task required a feverish pace until the end of the war.

A few weeks after V-J Day, Oppenheimer affirmed his commitment to the United States.  “All of us [scientists],” he wrote, “would earnestly do whatever was really in the national interest, no matter how desperate or disagreeable.”

I suppose all this is expected, though the assumptions both scientists and policymakers made disturb me.  The atomic bomb was built to be used.  It was built as a weapon.  And there was never any doubt that it would be dropped on a city—one previously undamaged by conventional bombs, so that the awesome power of the A-bomb would be made manifest.

I understand how and why the atomic bomb was used on Hiroshima and on Nagasaki.  I don’t think that U.S. policymakers were malevolent or malicious.  But I wish history hadn’t happened that way.  I wish the government hadn’t been so eager to show off its new toy.  I wish Truman and his inner circle had been more open-minded.  It’s frightening what can be justified by war.

That’s part of what worries me today.  The pressures of war and patriotism are undeniable.  All the more reason they should not be exploited.

Today, no atomic weapons currently grace our nuclear stockpiles.  The United States relies on hydrogen/fusion/thermonuclear bombs.  Asked whether the U.S. should build such a Super bomb, the key scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project said no.  It was, they wrote, “necessarily a weapon of genocide” and “an evil thing in any light.”

Some politicians (including GWB) now advocate “strategic” nukes.  I don’t understand how they could be used in a military setting, in a way that doesn’t target noncombatants.  But on this anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima—which made the United States the first and only country to use a nuclear weapon in war—I return again to Oppenheimer.  Testifying before the Senate Military Affairs Committee on 17 October 1945, he explained: “I have no words of apology based on the fact that they [atomic bombs] were nice weapons.  They weren’t.”

In part because of the ratings controversy here at TPMCafe, I’ve been thinking about why politics so often turn nasty.  At the same time, I’ve identified one key principle that guides civil discussion.  My pledge, as an occasionally trusted Café denizen, is that I will strive to uphold that principle in my comments, my ratings, and my thinking about political issues.

Principle: Rational people can view the same set of facts and reach different conclusions.  Disagreement does not indicate a) stupidity, b) inaccurate or incomplete information, or c) malfeasance. 

My undertaking: I will not dismiss an argument or an arguer under the guise of disagreeing with a particular position or point of view.  I will acknowledge that “illegal” and “immoral” are different, though sometimes overlapping, categories.  I will introduce any MIA facts without making said introduction a veiled accusation.

My worldview (with a tip-of-the-hat to GFunk): I think people are generally nice and have good motives.  A lot of times, however, their decisions are less than ideal.  This is part of why I don’t trust the government, just generally.  (That, and reading a whole lot of history books.)  It’s also part of why I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, just generally.

Soapbox moment:  Failure to observe this principle is, perhaps, one of the reasons that current political discussion features so much invective.  People who voted for George W. Bush are not, by definition, bigots, racists, “fundies,” or sheep blindly following the current administration.  People who oppose the war in Iraq are not, by definition, anti-American, anti-soldier, or anti-democratic.

The question arose from one of those late-night, free-wheeling, dangerously diffuse conversations that seem to touch on all the world’s problems and seem much less insightful in retrospect. 

That said, the question has stuck with me: can good people become world leaders?

My friend suggested that good people cannot become political leaders on a worldwide scale.  The politicking and horsetrading and compromising required to become, say, the President of the United States, he said, make it impossible for someone truly moral, truly good to achieve that goal.  Even if they started out as the most moral person in the world, they couldn’t maintain that morality.  Moreover, he thinks that the power and scope of such a leader makes the situation even worse—after all, if one could launch nuclear weapons, why be bothered with petty matters like “right” and “wrong”?

I instinctively recoil from this idea.  I want to believe that good people CAN become the President or some other leader on a worldwide scale.  So I offered up Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.  Apparently, this didn’t count because they weren’t elected.  With that criterion in place, though, I couldn’t—and still can’t!—think of anybody.

Are genuinely good and moral political leaders around today?  And if not, is that simply a coincidence or a fundamental flaw in the system?

As others have, I’ve spent much of this week paying attention to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  At first, I didn’t realize how bad it was.  As that realization gradually sunk in, I visited feelings of helplessness and tears, outrage and anger, sympathy and concern.  That’s passed, and I seem to be stuck at numb.

I cannot run political scenarios in my head — my usual response to most anything.  I cannot speculate about the future of New Orleans or the Bush administration.  I feel guilty for my glee in installing new memory, when so much tragedy was going on in my own country.

I know that “disaster relief” isn’t my job — but those whose job it is aren’t doing it well! Listening to the “leaders” on this matter has made me literally ill.

I appreciate the many Cafe denizens who’ve been trying to make sense of all this.  I can’t, just yet.  I don’t know what I should do or what the country should do. But oh, my heart hurts for the people who’ve been caught up in this.

In "Defining Conservatism Down," from the 29 August 2005 issue of The American Conservative, Austin Bramwell contends that as the Right’s popularity has grown, its intellectual challenge to the Left has diminished.  Be that as it may (and it does warrant some thinking), I found his commentary most noteworthy for its assessment (and condemnation) of liberal thought.

According to Bramwell, liberalism grew up as a counterpoint to progressivism.  This is an interesting theory.  I don’t find it fully convincing, but there were many elements of the rise of liberalism that combatted the more populist strains of progressivism.  Of course, progressivism incorporated more than just populism.  All that said, it’s another something worth thinking about, though probably in a history classroom rather than at TPMCafe.

Anyway, Bramwell concedes that liberalism began with some shining lights and a rigorous intellectual regimen.  But then...

Intellectual sclerosis, however, soon set in. Second-tier intellects such as Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith took over from Lippmann and Dewey and began to take liberal ideology as a given. They proposed not new ways of understanding the world but new ways of advancing liberalism. In the hour of their triumph, liberals became blind to their own ideological shortcomings, which later became all too manifest.

The rest of the story is well-known: in the 1960s and ‘70s, liberalism ran up against the "limits of social policy," failed to respond to crime and urban decay, lost its appetite for resisting Communism, exacerbated racial tension with policies based on wishful thinking, and surrendered the commanding heights of culture to New Left radicals.  At the same time, liberals alienated ordinary people with their sympathy for criminals, race-rioters, anti-Americans, and moral libertines.  As Nixon put it, the Democrats became the party of acid, amnesty, and abortion.  They have been losing power ever since.

I don’t want to contribute to the Democrats-have-no-ideas meme.  I’m aware that Bramwell isn’t an objective commentator, and I disagree with much of his characterization of liberalism in the late 1960s.

BUT I think he raises a fair point: we still take liberal ideology as a given, even in combatting the evangelical nature of the Right today.  We too often assume that any thinking person will see things our way.  And so we’re left "advancing liberalism" rather than "proposing new ways of understanding the world."  This kind of "intellectual complacency" contributes, I think, to the general feeling that Democrats have been on the defensive while the Republicans have been shaping the agenda.

Maybe that’s the appropriate goal for Democrats, especially as an "opposition" party.  (Quotation marks in homage to this discussion thread.)  But I worry that that’s all we’re doing — a concern expressed ever so eloquently over here, in Cafe Management.

I think it’s legitimate to wonder about the future of liberalism.  I think it’s legitimate to worry about new ideas.  I think it’s legitimate to question whether a liberal framework still applies.  Maybe it should be replaced with a "progressive" framework?  But what on earth does that mean?  (I know people here have set ideas on that, but I’ve spent far too much of my life reading and discussing historical literature about the definition of "Progressivism" for it not to be a question.)

It would be good for the Democrats, for the Left, and for the country to think about all of this.  It’s our turn to provide the "revolution."  I just wish I knew how to do that without conceding ground to the Republican agenda.

John Tierney’s most recent op-ed piece is somewhat thought provoking and utterly infuriating.  A few noteworthy excerpts.

Mr. Bush made a lot of mistakes last week, but most of his critics are making an even bigger one now by obsessing about what he said and did. We can learn more by listening to men like Jim Judkins, particularly when he explains the Magic Marker method of disaster preparedness.

Mr. Judkins is one of the officials in charge of evacuating the Hampton Roads region around Newport News, Va. These coastal communities, unlike New Orleans, are not below sea level, but they’re much better prepared for a hurricane. Officials have plans to run school buses and borrow other buses to evacuate those without cars, and they keep registries of the people who need special help.

Instead of relying on a "Good Samaritan" policy–the fantasy in New Orleans that everyone would take care of the neighbors–the Virginia rescue workers go door to door. If people resist the plea to leave, Mr. Judkins told The Daily Press in Newport News, rescue workers give them Magic Markers and ask them to write their Social Security numbers on their body parts so they can be identified.

"It’s cold, but it’s effective," Mr. Judkins explained....

That simple strategy could have persuaded hundreds of people to save their own lives in New Orleans. What the city needed most was coldly effective local leaders, not a president in Washington who could feel their pain....

The liberals bewailing the insensitivity and racism of Republicans in Washington sound like a bad rerun of the 1960’s, when urban riots were blamed on everyone but the rioters and the police. Yes, the White House did a terrible job of responding to Katrina, but Democratic leaders in New Orleans and Louisiana didn’t even fulfill their basic duties.

Where to start?

I have to admit, it’s unsettling to think of a house-by-house search for bodies.  Not just for the expected grisly factors.  Instead, like Tierney, I wonder why such an operation wasn’t conducted earlier — when there might have been a chance to save a few lives.

That said, he’s wrong on so many levels.

First, Tierney equates New Orleans and coastal Virginia, which, as he says, "has a large black population and plenty of Republican politicians."  That’s nice, but those are hardly the most important points of comparison.  City size matters: it’s a lot easier to stockpile provisions and run door-to-door checks for fewer people.  Tierney doesn’t say, but I suspect New Orleans is substantially larger and has a higer percentage of citizens living in straitened circumstances.  Both of those factors make it difficult for local leaders to "fulfill their basic duties."

Second, the idea that people should have "saved their own lives" is patently ridiculous.  Yes, some people refused to evacuate.  Yes, this kind of "magic marker" strategy could have changed their minds.  But it seems that the vast majority of "refugees" did not remain in New Orleans by choice.  No magic marker could provide transportation.

Third, while the local leadership in New Orleans probably cannot be described as "cool" or "calm," they still did the best they could with limited resources to address an overwhelming need.  Tierney condemns Louisiana’s leaders: "The local officials who knew about that problem [lack of cars] didn’t do anything about it–and then were furious when Mr. Bush didn’t solve it for them."  The local leaders did not ask George W to solve problems for them.  They didn’t ask Geroge W to feel their pain.  Instead, they and others on the Gulf Coast were asking for the federal government to do something, to bring the resources of this nation to bear on a big problem, to help coordinate a massive effort.  That didn’t happen.  Did the local leaders make mistakes?  Yes, but that does not excuse George W.

Fourth, why does Tierney say it’s an even larger mistake to talk about George W’s mistakes?  How else do things get fixed?  It’s hard to learn from a mistake unless one knows that it’s a mistake.

Fifth, there are substantial differences between asking for federal assistance because of a hurricane and asking for federal help to clamp down on urban crime.  Hurricane relief is a one-time deal, even if that "one time" extends for several months.  It also is designed to rebuild, not reshape.  Hurricanes are not urban riots.  The 1960s and Giuliani are not relevant.  Besides, Tierney’s simply repeating arguments from the culture wars as if they were fact.  Makes me grumpy.

Sixth, although FEMA has been "criticized for ineptitude" in the past, that does not invalidate the idea of the agency or its purpose.  That doesn’t mean that FEMA isn’t a good idea!  It worked quite nicely under Clinton.  No, FEMA isn’t the problem; the problem is the unqualified, incompetent bozo who runs it and the president who appointed him.  (By the way, I don’t think airline screeners were FEMA’s responsibility.  Again, drifting off topic... tsk, tsk.)   

Tierney’s one — or possibly two — good points cannot compensate for the rest of this.

According to the New York Times, two Navy pilots helicopter based in Pensacola, FL are being disciplined for helping rescue people.  They had orders to deliver supplies to the Stennis Space Center, on the Mississippi coast, a federal facility that was without power.  On their way back to base, they heard a radio request from the Coast Guard for helicopter support.  So they went.

One of them has been taken out of the flying rotation and is assigned to the kennel.  He did say he didn’t see that as punishment, but....

Excerpts and some quick comments below.

Recalling the rescues in an interview, [Lieutenant Shand] became so emotional that he had to stop and compose himself. At one point, he said, he executed a tricky landing at a highway overpass, where more than 35 people were marooned.

Lieutenant Udkow said that he saw few other rescue helicopters in New Orleans that day. The toughest part, he said, was seeing so many people imploring him to pick them up and having to leave some.

"I would be looking at a family of two on one roof and maybe a family of six on another roof, and I would have to make a decision who to rescue," he said. "It wasn’t easy."

While refueling at a Coast Guard landing pad in early evening, Lieutenant Udkow said, he called Pensacola and received permission to continue rescues that evening. According to the pilots and other military officials, they rescued 110 people.

The next morning, though, the two crews were called to a meeting with Commander Holdener, who said he told them that while helping civilians was laudable, the lengthy rescue effort was an unacceptable diversion from their main mission of delivering supplies. With only two helicopters available at Pensacola to deliver supplies, the base did not have enough to allow pilots to go on prolonged search and rescue operations.

I do understand the need for military (naval?) discipline.  But I cannot accept that delivering supplies took precedence over saving people.  Moreover, according to one of the pilots, there was practically no rescue operation in New Orleans at all — he called it "shocking."

Now I’m trying to decide which is more egregious: charging the young man who "stole" a bus or reprimanding the navy pilots.  Gah. 

In one of his early posts at the Table for One, Representative Rush Holt wrote: "The essential role of government is to provide for its citizens in their time of need."

This seems obvious, but I cannot recall ever hearing this principle explicitly stated.  Maybe it’s the last five years of Bush and co….  But I haven’t heard this from the Democrats either.  So many of the ideas for a Democratic platform, fifty-word mission statement, or ten-point contract with America have stumbled because they fail to provide an overarching goal or an underlying principle.  Well, I think we’ve got one.

I’m amazed at the simplicity and the forcefulness of the concept — we have governments in order to help citizens in their time of need!  That’s the basic principle; everything else is policy details.  I suspect we can agree on the principle, even if we disagree on the implementation of it.

This principle—helping citizens in times of need—gives an intellectual coherence to most Democratic positions.  Government’s not about liberalism or conservatism or church v. state or the culture wars.  Instead, government is about helping citizens—all citizens—in times of need.  It’s about helping people when they cannot help themselves or when their own resources would be inadequate.  This is why I support Social Security, this is why I want a strong FEMA, this is why I support money for education, Roe v. Wade, welfare, a “social safety net,” and access to the courts and trial by jury. 

Moreover, this principle applies to more than just domestic policy.  As a collective citizenry, we have the “need” for “security” or “defense.”  Those are matters that we, as individuals, cannot handle.  Nevertheless, the principle of providing for citizens in times of need adds an important qualifier: in times of need.  This means that, unless we need a war, we shouldn’t have one.

It’s the idea of government for the people.  That phrase is often quoted, but, like many others, it’s lost its punch.  To repeat Representative Holt’s sentence: “The essential role of government is to provide for its citizens in their time of need.”  (I think this is why the federal response to Katrina has aroused such anger and fear.  The government failed its part of the bargain, however implicit that bargain may be.)  I’m not saying that good government can fix every problem this country faces, but it can certainly make a big difference.

A while back, the Café seemed to be rallying around the theme of “corruption,” which a few folks spun more positively as “good government.”  That partially worked.  I like the idea of good government and of challenging corruption.  But it didn’t go far enough.  Because a dominant strand of conservatism wants to eliminate a federal government—or at least shrink it—we need to make an argument for government, for the collective good. 

In doing so, we’ll be able to do more than criticize the Bush administration; we’ll also be able to articulate a unified approach to government and even something of a “vision thing.” 

Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve fame, writes about “The Inequality Taboo” in the September 2005 edition of Commentary.  Breaking his silence in response to the flap over Larry Summers’s comments on sex differences, Murray explains his interest: “[S]pecific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.”

He talks about women v. men and black v. white, in terms of innate ability or differences.  Excerpts below....

One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong....

The historical reality of male dominance of the greatest achievements in science and the arts is not open to argument. The question is whether the social and legal exclusion of women is a sufficient explanation for this situation, or whether sex-specific characteristics are also at work....

When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.

Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified. It is a lie because so many elite politicians who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. It is a lie because so many elite scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences.

Thus my modest recommendation, requiring no change in laws or regulations, just a little more gumption. Let us start talking about group differences openly—all sorts of group differences, from the visuospatial skills of men and women to the vivaciousness of Italians and Scots. Let us talk about the nature of the manly versus the womanly virtues. About differences between Russians and Chinese that might affect their adoption of capitalism. About differences between Arabs and Europeans that might affect the assimilation of Arab immigrants into European democracies. About differences between the poor and non-poor that could inform policy for reducing poverty.

Even to begin listing the topics that could be enriched by an inquiry into the nature of group differences is to reveal how stifled today’s conversation is. Besides liberating that conversation, an open and undefensive discussion would puncture the irrational fear of the male-female and black-white differences I have surveyed here. We would be free to talk about other sexual and racial differences as well, many of which favor women and blacks, and none of which is large enough to frighten anyone who looks at them dispassionately.

In this charming article from the Financial Times, Trevor Butterworth offers his observations on the semicolon, which he calls a "weapon of mass seduction."  He opens with this observation: "Punctuation is hot: Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots Leaves is to this decade what The Joy of Sex was to the 1970s–a guide for those of us fumbling over what should come naturally."

He then discusses the opposing camps on semicolons, notably the American distaste for them.

Though I had long noticed a curious lack of semicolons in American print, with the exception of publications such as The New Yorker, and writers such as Tom Wolfe (who seems to nurture every symbol on the keyboard as one would one’s children), it wasn’t until the start of the war on terror that I realised that the absence was deliberate.

”They should be turned into periods,” explained Fred Barnes one day, after I had appeared on his radio show to discuss media coverage of the war in Afghanistan. He explained that this made for shorter sentences and that brevity was the soul of clarity. It seemed to make sense that Barnes, who as the editor of The Weekly Standard is one of America’s most influential conservative writers, should value muscular, declarative prose; politics may require the art of compromise, but political writing should be adamantine in conviction. No orotund stateliness, no “on the one hand but on the other” vacillation, no–as President George W. Bush infamously decried–nuance. And sure enough, Barnes’ prose has the pummelling ferocity of a Maxim gun.

Butterworth may take things too far; after all, maybe we Americans have simply spent too much time reading Hemingway.  Then again, I remember my eleventh-grade English teacher telling me — repeatedly — that the semicolon could be a very elegant construction and therefore shouldn’t be overused.  She said that one per paragraph was more than sufficient.

Overstated or not, Butterworth’s case is intriguing.  And I accept his fundamental premise: How we express ourselves is indicative of the way we think, and that includes punctuation.  (emilis made a related point.)

Hmm... I wonder if there’s any correlation between one’s political affiliation and one’s views on semicolons.   

In "The Uses of Disaster," published in Harper’s Magazine, Rebecca Solnit describes the experience of a disaster as a "crash course in consciousness."  It’s a thoughtful and oddly topical essay, written just before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.  (There’s a longer version in the October magazine that is definitely worth perusing, but the online version is still a tasty tidbit.)

Solnit’s essay is ambitious.  It seeks to tie popular culture,  weather, government, the human psyche, and disasters together in an exploration of how society works.  She develops two fairly standard themes — skepticism of authority’s role in the aftermath of a disaster and laudatory words for people’s willingness to help others — but with a few twists that added to my enjoyment of her prose. 

We should not be surprised, then, that what transpires in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is nothing like the popular version. People rarely panic or stampede, nor do they often immediately engage in looting or other acts of opportunism. The Scottish-born mathematician Eric Temple Bell, who witnessed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, saw “no running around the streets, or shrieking, or anything of that sort” but instead people who “walked calmly from place to place, and watched the fire with almost indifference, and then with jokes, that were not forced either, but wholly spontaneous.” Another survivor, San Francisco editor Charles B. Sedgwick, noted-perhaps somewhat hyperbolically-that “even the selfish, the sordid and the greedy became transformed that day-and, indeed, throughout that trying period-and true humanity reigned.” This phenomenon of “surprising” human kindness and good sense is replicated time and again.

Many official disaster-preparedness scenarios nonetheless presume that human beings are prone to panic and in need of policing. A sort of Hobbesian true human nature emerges, according to this version, and people trample one another to flee, or loot and pillage, or they haplessly await rescue. In the movie version, this is the necessary precondition for John Wayne, Harrison Ford, or one of their shovel-jawed brethren to save the day and focus the narrative. In the government version, this is why we need the government.

In many ways, Solnit’s essay seems more like a thought-piece or meditation than a sustained argument.  Still, I can’t help but admire an essay that pulls in sociology, John Wayne, Reaganomics, and the First Amendment — all without seeming to overreach.  Indeed, that’s one of the elements that makes this essay a delightful intellectual cocktail, to borrow from Stieglitz on Picasso and mix a metaphor or two.  As such, however, it scintillates without satisfying.

An intriguing essay by Bruce B. Lawrence, professor of Islamic Studies at Duke and the editor of a collection of Osama bin Laden’s writings.

Lawrence notes three lessons that can be learned by reading Osama: first, that bin Laden changed his rhetoric following 11 September 2001, to take advantage of the U.S. reaction; second, that bin Laden attacks not only the West but also most Arab and Muslim governments; and third, that Osama has indirectly developed a new just-war theory.

It’s a short piece and well worth a read.  Excerpt below.

From Lawrence:

Bin Laden’s project couples faith and fighting with relentless insistence on the need to act, and his messages continue to have an appeal. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands revere him for his bold stand against the world’s sole remaining superpower and its allies, Muslim and non-Muslim. Ironically, during the 80s the CIA helped him to become a local hero in the Afghan war against the Soviets, but during the 90s and into the new century it was media technology that made him into an international celebrity. Bin Laden could not have achieved global prominence without audiocassettes, the Internet, and satellite television, especially Al-Jazeera. His legacy is more secure than his life: No matter when or how he dies, he will not easily be dislodged from his perch as the most famous/infamous Arab of the 21st century.

If I have learned one enduring lesson from months of reflection on the words of Osama bin Laden, it is that the best defense against World War III is neither censoring nor silencing him but reading what he has actually written and countering his arguments with better ones. He has left a sufficient record that can, and should, be attacked for its deficiencies, its lapses, its contradictions, and, above all, its hopelessness.

It was 1988, shortly before the November presidential election.  Prompted by the teacher, my third-grade class took a vote.  I don’t recall who won, but I suspect it was George H.W. Bush.  (It was Salt Lake City, after all.)  It was a small blip in my eight-year-old world, structured around multiplication tables and cursive exercises.

Not too long after that, the students—on their own—conducted a much more important poll, consisting of a single question: Did Santa Claus really exist?  We debated this back and forth, citing evidence like the reports of a house at the North Pole, the Christmas Eve cookies that were always consumed, parents’ handwriting on gift tags from Santa, and the logistics of flying around the world.  None of us quite understood the relationship between Santa and the Nativity.  Despite that, despite the doubts and skepticism, we concluded that Santa was an integral part of Christmas and that he had to exist.

Looking back, I’m amused by the synchronicity of these two votes, especially the intensity of the debate and lobbying about Santa Claus.  Santa Claus was much more important than the presidential election, which we regarded with general indifference.  It doesn’t say much for my teachers’ efforts to discuss foreign affairs and current events, though I remember learning about the Soviets and Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall, and the Challenger disaster, even Ayatollah Khomeini.  It’s funny, and a bit sad, to realize what mattered then.

Santa Claus mattered to us, in way that who served as President of the United States did not.  We understood what affected our world, though it was a small, suburban one.  I now have a greater appreciation for how the President shapes the world at large.  I have opinions on most political questions, try to think critically about world affairs, and feel quite strongly about recent government actions.  And yet, I wonder if there’s something to our childish preoccupations.

I have a hard time thinking of a more heated debate than that third-grade discussion of Santa Claus.  Maybe it’s because I worried that, like Tinkerbell, Santa might not make it without my belief.  I cannot claim that same engagement in politics today; thank you, electoral college, for making my presidential vote irrelevant.  Maybe it’s because I still think of POTUS as acting on a much broader scale than that of my world, larger than two decades ago but still relatively small.

I know that politics are important, that government policies shape our lives.  But it’s a cerebral knowledge, rather than an instinctive emotional response.

*Special thanks to this thoughtful post by handandfootnoted that, in connection with the holiday season, recalled my third-grade understanding of “democracy.”*

The test of an advanced society is not in how many millionaires it can produce, but is how many law-abiding, hardworking, highly respected, and self-respecting loyal citizens it can produce. The success of such a venture is a measure of the success of our national enterprise.

— John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America,
quoted by Willaim H. McNeill, "The Man Who Changed History,"
New York Review of Books LIII no. 1(12 January 2006), 29

This comment resonated with me, perhaps because McNeill wrote a skillful article, perhaps because I’d just waited in the general public security line (as opposed to first class) at the airport, perhaps because the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. day made me crave idealism in politics.

Franklin here was talking about African-Americans and the rise of the civil rights movement. But his statement is much more broadly applicable. If this "test" were adopted today, I think we’d live in a better world.

I don’t have a specific (or even cogent) argument about this — I just feel wistful.  I can’t even muster nostalgic, because I cannot think of a time when this was the test of an advanced society.  Capability and willingness to produce nuclear weapons? Check.  Largest economy? Check. But "highly respected" and "self-respecting citizens"?

It seems noteworthy that these idealized citizens are more than just "law-abiding."  That leads too quickly to sheep or automatons.  (By the way, check out nightprowlkitty’s argument here.)  But that also means that the laws are those worth obeying, those that do not damage anyone’s self respect.

If this "test" were the standard for every piece of legislation, every appointment, would it make a difference?  I think so.  

Frank Furedi on "The Curious Rise of Anti-Religious Hysteria":

He begins with a look at the kerfluffle over Chronicles of Narnia and goes from there.  He suggests that religious faith is relatively weak, using Intelligent Design to indicate that relgion now relies upon the language of science.  In the end, Furedi contendsthat it is easier for liberal elites to condemn the religious right than to examine their own failures to connect with the electorate.

Perhaps most interesting is Furedi’s analysis of how anti-religious / anti- fundamentalist rhetoric incorporates contempt and scorn.  At one point, he suggests that this type of contempt "hardens" into bigotry. 

It made me think. Excerpts below.

It is now commonplace to attribute the re-election of President George W Bush in 2004 to his army of religious supporters. ‘The fundamentalists and evangelicals who came out in such great numbers in this election are driven, and have always been driven, by fear’, argues one critic of creeping theocracy (2). Instead of asking the harder question of why some of their own arguments fail to resonate with significant sections of the public, many prefer to point the finger at the religious right and blame them for using ‘fear’ and unfair arguments.

The idea that religious fundamentalism is on the offensive and threatening to dominate public life is widely held on both sides of the Atlantic. It is fuelled by the belief that recent developments in the world of politics point to a revival of moralism. Many liberal commentators argue, for example, that the re-election of Bush was made possible by the ability of the religious right to connect with the search for meaning among everyday folk. According to this now-standard interpretation, much of the public ‘found a "politics of meaning" in the political Right’. Why? Because ‘in the right-wing churches and synagogues these voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to their "meaning needs"’ (3).

The religious right is often said to be mobilising and gaining support around values that appeal to a primitive and simplistic electorate. That is why even a kids’ film like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe can provoke such hostility. The liberal elite’s unease with religion is often motivated by the fear that it will become even more isolated from the public unless it can engage with the ‘big questions’ they are apparently asking. It is also concerned that unless it can project a positive vision on to society, people will become influenced by value-driven ‘extremists’, by religious and political organisations that are hostile to the status quo. In short, religion is seen as a powerful force that appeals to those apparently simple people whom sophisticated members of the elite cannot reach.

Such beliefs are underpinned by the patronising assumption that, unlike educated urbane people, ordinary members of the public need simplistic black-and-white answers about the meaning of life. In private conversation, some in the liberal elite discuss the masses–or ‘rednecks’, Nascar dads, tabloid readers, etc–as being crass, materialistic, simplistic, racist, sexist, homophobic.

New theories are doing the rounds to account for the kind of audience that flocks to see The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and other feelgood films and who respond to the appeals of the religious right. George Lakoff–whose book Don’t Think of An Elephant has become a kind of bible that explains their electoral demise for many liberal Democrats in the US–describes those who tend to vote for Bush as the products of authoritarian ‘strict father families’ who are motivated by self-interest, greed and competitiveness. These people hate ‘nurturance and care’, apparently, are religious bigots and lack the therapeutic sensibilities of their liberal cousins.

In the guise of a political theory, Lakoff offers a diagnosis of human inferiority. You can almost hear him murmur: ‘They actually take their children to see The Passion of the Christ….’ In previous times, such contempt for people was the trademark of the authoritarian right. In today’s ‘inclusive’ society, it is okay to denigrate sections of the electorate as simpletons if they are still gripped by the power of faith.

Lakoff and others argue that many people who vote for Bush, or who are influenced by the religious right, simply do not know what is in their best interests. Instead of acknowledging the failure of its own political projects, the liberal elite prefers to indict sections of the public for being thick and gullible.

This trend for blaming the rise of theocracy on ordinary folks’ apparent penchant for simplistic black-and-white solutions shifts the focus from the elite’s failure to promote and uphold a positive vision of the future on to the alleged political illiteracy of the masses. That is why discussions of so-called fundamentalist movements often contain an implicit condemnation of the people who support them–and why the alleged creations of fundamentalist culture are implicitly condemned as immoral. It is the insecurity of the Anglo-American cultural elites about their own values and moral vision of the world that encourages their frenzied attacks on religion. There is a powerful element of bad faith here: many leftists and liberals denounce those who appeal to moral values as being inferior, but they are also envious of them. So when the ‘progressive’ Rabbi Michael Lerner criticises his fellow liberals for their ‘long-standing disdain for religion’ and for being ‘tone-deaf to the spiritual needs that underline the move to the Right’, he is implicitly paying homage to the power of persuasion among his fundamentalist opponents (4).

In the confused cultural elite’s fears of a powerful religious right winning over the masses, we can see a good example of bad faith worrying about real faith.