My too often nonsensical and forever unenlightened reflections on people and life and everything else I understand as well as I understand everything else. Not well at all, in other words. Love thy neighbor, is my motto. Unless something better comes along. Make sure to say so when you find it.
Jonathan Cohn lets slip his true colors in this really revealing piece of the attitudes of too many leftists, and conservatives, and so many folks, sadly.
"To be sure, Liberals can flex their muscle, too. Bernie Sanders made very clear, in his own statements over the weekend, that he wasn’t guaranteeing to give his vote--particularly if conservative Democrats (and former Democrats) extract even more concessions.
Sanders is right to play hardball like this, but, at the end of the day, it’s hard to imagine he’d cast the vote to kill health care reform. He simply cares too much about the people even a weakened bill would help. The same goes for Sherrod Brown, who’s emerging as a leading voice for progressives. Their interest in helping their fellow man is, in strategic terms, a great weakness."
You see, for too many leftists, as, sadly, with too many conservatives, and just pricks of all stripes, genuine concern for others cannot be interpreted as anything other than weakness.
Why?
Because it helps Jonathan sleep at night knowing that he's such a shithead. Oh, and giving a shit gets in the way, apparently, of the exercise of overwhelming power.
It couldn't possibly be that Jonathan Cohn is a sanctimonious, self-centered prick who can't even imagine that he might be wrong, on this or any other issue. You know. Exactly the type of guy that folks like Baron de Montesquieu, James Madison, and Lord Acton were trying to check and keep away from power.
This guy's got to be a real winner as a husband and father, doesn't he?
"Sorry, honey. I can't make love tonight. It demonstrates weakness."
Or maybe you're just a dumbass, Jonathan, who can't quite face the fact that your poor policies and means are getting your ass beat in the last and next election.
Hmm. What do you call proud dumbasses who keep losing because they don't give a shit about people?
Weak. That's what I fuckin' call them. You know. Folks who whine like a little bitch while they're losing because they can't acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, it's them.
Jonathan doesn't want to look weak. So he whines like a little pussy about how his weak-ass, cowardly efforts to force Americans to take on obligations they think are a bad idea are not persuasive enough to win public support.
In every circle I've ever swam in that is called weak.
Hitler was weak like this.
And that little bitch lost, motherfucker.
You will too, Jonathan.
Except, like every other motherfucker who has espoused force as a governing philosophy, noone will give two shits when you eat dirt.
Because you're such a fuckin' prick, that's why.
And you deserve to eat some topsoil.
Enjoy, Jonathan. From the bottom of my heart. Enjoy.
"Israel's long occupation of Palestinian territory has helped produce the cynicism and weak leadership on both sides that confound would-be international shapers of peace and moral rectitude. Outsiders cannot resolve this conflict: Only an Israeli decision to end that occupation in fast order can lead to the security Israelis need and deserve, and the dignity Palestinians seek through a state of their own. That is the broader, more vital decision that Netanyahu needs to make."
It is a bit more complicated than that. Israelis will need a security partner in Palestine who will cooperate in arresting or killing terrorists who will not end their murder of Israelis. Palestinians need a state. The two states will need to develop workable ways to share Jerusalem, religious sites, scarce water resources, etc. Security will be needed for those Israelis who settle in Palestine and Israeli settlers should be put on notice that they settle at their own risk. Israelis will need to address right to return issues for Palestinians with family members murdered and forced from their homes in Israel.
And much time and healing will need to take place. A truth and reconciliation process like the one in South Africa and East Timor might facilitate this better.
But the truth is that the heart of the matter in the Middle East as in most difficult political issues is for people to have the courage to do the hard thing rather than fiddling around the edges of the cowardice of those who posture as tough in lieu of the genuine courage that would end their ugly legacies.
This is the heart of the matter on almost every political issue, is the truth. Various partisans not wanting to face honestly their ugly and abusive legacies and the bitterness and cycles of recrimination they inspire.
And the situation in the Middle East symbolizes the cowardice and failures of the world at large better than any issue we face today.
There is only one way through. A commitment to a resolution. And nothing else will ever, ever, ever end the murderous and tragic legacy that Palestinians and Israelis have heaped on one another until they decide to seek resolution of the pain that a hundred years of murder and tragedy has inflicted on their populations.
And the truth is that doing so takes courage that most people in the world, right now, nevertheless in Israel and Palestine, have rationalized that they just cannot find in their hearts.
While they watch the world burn down around them in consequence.
The only way through is the path of courage. On every issue. From here until the end of humanity.
And the path of courage is one of freedom, of conscience, and of our highest liberal ideals, an end to the legacy of manipulation and intimidation and power as a means of circumventing more honest resolution of each of these very serious matters of the heart.
Until Israelis and Palestinians find the courage to forgive their murderous pasts, their family, friends and neighbors will continue to die on the alter of their cowardice.
The same is true of most very serious matters of the heart in the world today. As Jim's headline alludes to, until we face the very sad and ugly unintended consequences of our legacy of trying to force resolutions that only genuine commitments of the heart can honestly resolve, we will continue to fail on almost every single major and minor issue we confront.
All so we do not have to face our own cowardice.
It is sad. Tragic, in the case of Israel and Palestine.
But it is not hopeless.
Because no matter how long we fail to make the more honest choice, the choice of courage sits in front of us like a child waiting patiently for its mother to claim it.
We just need to decide if we will choose the path of courage or not.
And, until we do, we can expect to reap what we sow and live with the consequences, in the meantime.
I have to say that watching the last 10 years of politics in America and in the world, I have no doubts whatsoever in Lord Acton's wisdom.
He was right. Power corrupts. Period. And that is all she wrote.
Power is one long lie, sadly and typically, for why I cannot even consider admitting that I might be wrong that my efforts to use force, to bully and intimidate my friends and neighbors, except to prevent physical violence and, even then, when no other alternatives literally exist, are foolish and tragic efforts to get my way, no matter how much damage is done to both my and their larger purposes and to my and their sense of dignity and self-respect.
Power generally becomes one long justification for why I can and should impose as much tragedy for whatever purposes I please. No matter how much it hurts the people I impose upon and their efforts to improve their lives and the lives others.
And noone is immune. Period.
And, as with sin, the people to be most concerned about are those who believe they are incapable of its corruption. Especially those who would use power to remove sin, and all inevitable mistakes of life, from human existence.
Those who claim they are immune are not only wrong, their use of power becomes one long justification for their conceit in the matter, almost without exception.
And that's all she wrote.
And you know why I still remain hopeful.
Because every single man, woman, and even children who covets and holds power as inevitably falls. Every single one. Without exception.
As it should be.
And, over time, the romanticism of aggression to resolve human conflicts in lieu of more honest appeals to conscience gives way to a recognition that the ugly reality it imposes is far more dangerous than our fears about the absence of its use.
It is the only honest standard for progress, in fact.
And, deep down, we all know that is true. Because the yearning for freedom is univeral in every man, woman, and child. And it is universal because it is a necessary condition for our learning and growth, which is the only honest measure of our progress. No matter our fears to the contrary.
Lord Acton was right. And all of his contemporary, self-important challengers are wrong. Every one of their protests to the contrary.
Think that ideas are not as powerful as the use of force? Think that power trumps better conceptions of people and the world?
Watch. And learn.
And ask yourself whether it is force of the Roman Empire or the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the might of the British Empire or the ideas of men like John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, James Madison, and Baron de Montesquieu, the legacy of American imperialism and unchallenged American power or the wisdom of Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Mohatma Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, Mohammed Yunus, Shirin Ebadi, and the like that is standing and will stand the tests of time.
Military and legal force can achieve important and limited purposes. But without a respect for those limitations - namely, a respect for the liberty and self-determination of individuals except when engaged in physical violence against others - those purposes are regularly undermined. Including and especially the purpose of encouraging compassionate, moral, and responsible learning and development. And the behemoth that is American power in the 21st century demonstrates that fact of human existence as clearly as any example today.
And the fact that most students of political life know Lord Acton and his wisdom, even if they have not fully internalized or acknowledged its implications for their own adventures with power, demonstrates the much more substantial power of the marketplace of ideas and free thought and action to correct for the very serious mistakes of power that Americans and most peoples of the world commit today.
And there will never be any real progress ever until that legacy is corrected. And a thriving human race will not be fully realized without it being fully corrected. Ever.
I've never been the kind of guy who school was something I just had to do but hated. In general, I've been someone who loved school, warts and all. I've had my problems with school, of course. As everyone does. But, when push came to shove, I generally enjoyed studying and learning more than most people. Still do.
When I was a senior in high school, my school won the state basketball championship. So our senior class had a senior gyp day to commemorate the honor. Virtually all of my fellow seniors left school that afternoon, except for me. I was in a child care class, in preparation for a teaching career. And I went and took care of the kids while all my friends took the afternoon off.
I just liked school more than most people.
Until now.
With all the Federal, state, and local legislation. With No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and every layer of bureaucracy I face at the local, state, and federal levels, as a teacher. For the first time in my life, I'm really beginning to hate school.
With all the bureaucracy and all the implicit leveraging behind them, I am, for the first time, beginning to hate being somewhere that I have organized my whole life around, I loved it so much.
It's really fucked up is what it is.
To take something someone loves and to fuck it all up. Because you care more about controlling them than just letting them do what they love.
For three weeks, I've been really hating my job, and all the bullshit that goes along with it, for this reason. The more people around me act this like is the way things are supposed to be, the less I want to be a part of it.
And you know what the really fucked up thing is about it? Most of those people never have and likely never will love education the way I have. It's a job for them. Or it was something they had to put up with until it was out of the way.
It was never like that for me.
Until now. Fucked up.
And I've gotten to a point where I don't even care anymore. I just want out. I want to support myself independently and just get away from people until they learn to stop twisting my arm to do something I already love so their egos can feel more secure that they are responsible for my efforts than I am. It's a really fucked up way to think about others, really. And I am tired of being subject to it, is the truth.
And now I just want a life of independent work so I can avoid it all as much as possible.
And let someone else let everyone else bully them into their own warped sense of how education and the world should work.
All so they can avoid the real challenges that come with an honest liberal education. And learning to reason better through life.
Bill Clinton and Michael Moore don't take care of their own health. But they lead the campaign to put people in jail who don't buy insurance to take care of theirs, even if they don't need or want it.
Oh, and these are liberals, by the way. In case you'd lost track. Liberals are the folks who put people in jail who decide they don't want health insurance, or who are homeless, or who otherwise inconvenience them. Or really anything they disagree with these days.
Because that's what liberals are. Liberals are people who put people in jail or who bully and intimidate people who disagree with them. In case you had any questions what it meant to be liberal.
That is, of course, what it means to be a liberal, as anyone who has ever been one knows. It's what the term liberal means.
To put people in jail who disagree with you.
Could be the opposite. I've lost track myself.
George Orwell, I'm pretty sure, would have something to say about this political period. And I'm fairly certain it would not be flattering.
All I know is that liberal kid I was not too terribly far back would not recognize this as liberalism at all.
To be a liberal meant to be compassionate and thoughtful, when I was growing up. It was the reason why I admired such people when I was growing up.
And legislation like this health care proposal demonstrates just how much liberalism has turned away from its original and strongest principles.
So enamoured they've become of power.
Because that's what a liberal is. Someone who covets power. Because too little power to fix our problems is exactly what has ailed the world for most of its history. And liberals were the folks who finally figured that out.
Power enobles, as one famous liberal once said. And absolute power enobles absolutely.
And now, finally, we can make the progress that all that power makes possible.
John Bolton is right that we should stop acting like China's totalitarian Communist regime is stronger than it really is. And that's about where it ends.
What John can't get figured out, right now, is that most people thought he was kind of dick when he was in office for a reason.
Because he is kind of a dick.
And it hasn't quite occurred to John, at this point, that he and his boss were removed for exactly that reason. For being dicks.
So how does John respond to that sequence of events?
"I must not be a big enough dick."
Sound more and more like a leftist every day, Mr. Bolton. In fact, you sound much more like that Chinese Communist leadership than you would ever want to admit. Which is appropriate. Because that's what so many leftists want to sound like, as much as possible, these days. Just so everyone knows they're serious.
Trick is, everyone knows they're serious. We just don't give a shit.
Because Americans don't back down to intimidation easily. That's what makes us Americans, you fuckin' prick.
Dicks is dicks. And they can all eat a dick. And we will take them down, one by one, until they get the fuckin' message.
Or until they aren't a concern, at all. Whether they get the fuckin' message or not.
"Where the Obama administration has stumbled is in handling the Republicans in Congress. In its eagerness to avoid attacks from business and conservative Republicans, and to win over the few Republican moderates, the White House has appeared willing to ditch significant parts of its reform program, including the public option from its health care bill and strict regulation of derivatives from its financial-reform proposal, even though these kinds of measures have remained popular among the public.
The White House has also mishandled liberal and left-wing movements when they have run ads against wayward Democrats who appeared unwilling to back the administration’s reform agenda. Generally, the White House has tried to discourage them from taking positions independent of the administration’s. And it has thrown its support to Organizing for America, a quasi-political machine that grew out of the campaign and that is united by its loyalty to Obama rather than by its support for liberal reform. That’s a mistake. Obama and the Democrats need active, unruly, and independent pressure from the left to combat Republican conservatives, intimidate Democratic fence-sitters, and persuade business that, if it doesn’t back Obama’s reforms, it could face much more radical measures.
Still, with these exceptions, Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have done well under conditions that are not as favorable for reform as they seemed in January. Obama and the Democrats understand not only the opportunity for reform, but also the long-standing ideological obstacles they face in obtaining it, and they have adopted a strategy of dividing business and framing their proposals as market reforms. If they continue to do so, and if they are not scared off by pressure from the right, they should succeed in getting a health care bill and new financial regulations. A climate-change bill will be more difficult but not impossible, as long as they can keep the voting public focused on the specifics of liberal reform rather than the atmospherics of ideological conservatism."
What John Judis just can't get through his thick fuckin' skull is that it is exactly this kind of bullshit and intimidation into trusting government more than it has earned parading around as something more honest that is leading independent voters like myself to vote for Republicans and let Democrats eat some serious fuckin' dirt.
We know you're game, shithead. We're voting against it, moron. You're just too stupid and stubborn to face up. And so be it. So you lose. Boo-fucking-hoo, you fuckin' bully.
"I'm so fuckin' scared that my ideas suck - which they do, as it turns out - that I can't even have an honest discussion and debate about them. Because that might expose how little substance there is to my thinking.
And my ego and my power to bully on this and all such matters is far more important than getting to better ideas.
Because being a shithead for a favored cause is just how things are done. And always have been. And nothing's going to change that."
Except for elections, you stupid arrogant fuck.
Note to John Judis and all leftists:
Maybe it's you.
Either way, you are losing. And for good reason.
Whether you will ever be able to admit that you are wrong about anything, at all, ever in your lives, or not.
In the meantime, the good guys will win. Bank on that.
No matter whether you ever get over yourselves or not.
Americans took care of one arrogant President. We'll take care of you, too.
And every single son-of-a-bitch who doubts that freedom is what America is all about.
"We are there with the Americans not just because it is our function to be their loyal lieutenant, the fidus Achates of Washington. We are there with the Americans in Afghanistan because the Americans are right to be there. We are there because our forces are doing their level best to improve the lives of the people of that poverty-stricken country. We are there to try our hardest to teach them the value of democracy and of educating women. We are there to do what we can to wean them off the opium crop.
Of course, no one could pretend that things are going well. Yes, it is difficult to promote women's liberation and democracy and drains and habeas corpus when you have a constant risk of attack by a resurgent Taliban. How can our troops hope to deal with the opium crop when the very brother-in-law of President Karzai turns out to be one of the biggest drugs gangsters of the lot? Of course, it is depressing that British soldiers fought and died to ensure that Afghans in Helmand could vote – and yet one in three of the ballots turns out to have been fraudulent. The position is grim.
But what is the alternative? The answer is that the alternative is even grimmer. I have an Afghan sister-in-law, and she remembers the chaos and the carnage when the Russians finally pulled out in 1989. She doesn't want the Taliban to take over the entire country, as they did before. She doesn't want Afghanistan to become a giant version of the Taliban mini-state of Waziristan. Are we really going to follow the advice of the Independent on Sunday, haul up the white flag, bring our troops home, and consign Afghanistan to a bunch of thugs and religious maniacs?"
And I do want to point out the obvious.
At every point, in these two wars, Americans and their allies have done the right thing not because they had to or were compelled to.
But because it was the right thing to do. And we just chose to do it.
And that should be contrasted with the cowardice of those who would compel our will otherwise. And still choose cowardice over that more genuine courage.
Courage is something you either choose to demonstrate. Or not. It cannot be compelled.
And that is a fact of life that only those who demonstrate it know.
Because cowards can do nothing but take that courage for granted. Because they could not possibly know any other way of life.
Because it is those with courage who keep them alive. And keep all of us moving in the right direction.
If we don't want to demonstrate that courage, that is all fine and dandy.
But folks without that kind of courage need to stop pretending to have it when they don't.
And learn to let those of us who do to do our jobs.
And stop being hamstrung by those who can't find it within themselves to offer it up.
It's finally occurred to me why I have to live a life I love, as I fight through a paper for school, right now, that I am utterly disinterested in.
Because I would be thoroughly bored if I chose any other kind of life.
Why choose a life worth living, even with the hassles?
Because a life without important challenges is mindnumbingly boring. Which may be why this is the most common complaint among kids in school and adults with their work (outside of feeling like you're being treated or getting paid like shit).
Why do I want to marry someone who is thoughtful and loving, even when that often makes them somewhat complicated and unpredictable?
Because those are the kind of people I most like to hang out with. Because they keep me interested. And they are the ones who can challenge me in a way that keeps me learning and growing. They also happen to be the folks who treat me nicer, typically.
And nice and loving trump all the rest any day of the week. No matter what talking heads tell you different.
I gotta have a life I love because I want to love my life. And I can only love my life if I'm doing something worthwhile. And the worthwhile stuff always comes with headaches. That's what makes it worthwhile.
But, mostly, I gotta have a life I love because I want to meet a girl, someday, who has a life she loves. And I want to share a life I love with someone else. And some kids, at some point.
And, if I don't, I'll always be faking it. Trying to pretend I love a life that really makes me unhappy. And that unhappiness will be clear as day to everyone else. No matter how much I try to fake that my life is going better than it is.
Find a life you love. So you're not pretending that you love your life when you don't. Or worse, so you're not pretending that a life you've settled for isn't really so bad just so you don't have to take the risks that would be involved with living a life you love.
You only get one. Choose one that's close to your heart. Because it's the only one you'll get to live. No matter how you choose to live it.
I know, I know. All that Keynsian activity that preceded these numbers couldn't possibly have made things worse. It's all George Bush's fault. Democrats make all the right calls. Republicans make all the wrong calls.
Even when things go to shit on your watch.
To even conceive that you might be wrong is the greatest sin in politics, apparently.
That and really giving a shit.
Thank goodness we have political leaders who do neither.
Because what a goddamned mess the world would be then.
After much reflection, I have come to the conclusion that Americans, and most people in the world, really, are my crew. My humongous crew of lovable, whiny little bitches.
Forgivable, to be sure. But the biggest bunch of whiny bitches I've ever met, just as surely.
No matter how much opportunity they have to make a life they love, no matter how much more they have than the rest of the neighbors around the globe, and no matter how much, despite that, they end up, generally unintentionally, making life miserable for themselves and others, they are just never satisfied. No matter what kind of solid chance they have to make a life worth living.
Kinda sad, really. But I love 'em anyway. They're my crew. My American crew. My crew of humanity. And I will stand with them through thick and thin. Whiny little bitches and all.
I'm pretty sure I should have been a rock star, at this point.
I'm just thoroughly disgusted by the cowardice of most "grown-ups," at this point.
As liberal peoples all-too-quietly celebrate one of the most important events of the 20th century - the fall of the Berlin Wall - and as a I read all this nonsense about China as some kind of serious autocratic alternative to Western liberal democracy I just want to scream at these shitheads, "The Founders' courage was wasted on you stupid fucks."
Cowardice in the West is what embolden these shitheads. In China. In Zimbabwe. In North Korea. In Iran. In Cuba. And all over the world.
Cowards need to learn the courtesy to shut the fuck up if you aren't going to stand squarely behind people with more courage who challenge these regimes on principle, not as a matter of easy pontification.
Anyone who rationalizes these regimes deserves to be imprisoned, tortured, or killed at their hands, just to make sure they still hold the same opinion, once their done.
And if they don't think that's a fair test, perhaps they might want to rethink their cowardice.
Or perhaps they might want a more intimate knowledge of their favored coffee-shop foreign policy.
And, barring that, that they are willing to readily admit their mistakes.
Which one of those assumptions is true? Of anyone?
Neither.
Which is exactly why it is a good instinct to, generally and really almost always, not trust people with power, except when there are literally no other alternatives.
Because they can fuck with peoples' lives. And because they are prone to fucking up with its use.
And, most importantly, because they are loathe to admit when they are fucking up.
Everyone.
Even teachers.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
That's what Lord Acton meant.
And that's why he is the badass to end all badasses.
The greatest and most tragic irony of homo sapiens, by my lights, is that, outside of disease, generally in the form of bacteria and viruses, this most intelligent of species has fended off almost all of other natural predators. Except for itself.
And in the effort by this natural predator to fend off fear of itself, it has made every effort to prove to the rest of its species just how unfraid it is. And to that end, it has made every effort to instill the fear of God into the rest of the species. And the response to that stroke of diplomatic and criminological genius has been for everyone involved to go to great lengths to instill the fear of God into those doing the scaring. To prove just how unfraid they are. And around and around they go. Leaving death and destruction in their wake for as long as they have inhabited the earth.
And the most profound irony of this long and fruitless exercise in overpowering all those sources of fear, of which human beings are, collectively, the sole responsible source, is that, at the bottom of all of this mindless posturing is, in fact, a deep and profound fear. Of one another. Of themselves. And of everything that might challenge their ability to overpower that fear and all its sources. All while multiplying all of the fear meant to be overpowered. Meaning, the efforts to overpower their fear and the sources of their fear have made them less safe and more afraid, not more safe and less afraid. And the added fear thus becomes justification for renewed efforts to start down the same road all over again.
Fear that none of us actually have, mind you. That was the whole point, remember. To prove how unfraid we are. In fact, that is the point of every player in the endless manipulations of power. To master the sources of our fear. To prove that we are not afraid.
So unfraid, that we obsess endlessly about how to build up the caches of power, leverage, and weaponry we can manage to prove just how unfraid we are.
This has been the long, tragic, murderous, and oppressive length of human history.
And now, they claim, the source of our progress. Or so says the they who claim progress as their political mantle. As it has always been. No matter who carried that mantle.
It is not a new logic. This logic of intimidation and aggression to get one's way. It's as old as hominid species have walked the earth. It's as old as predation itself. It is, in fact, the logic of predation.
And the question homo sapiens need to ask themselves, today, is, "Is this what the future holds?"
Powerful and powerless. Master and slave. Predator and prey.
Is that it how humanity improves itself?
By overpowering one another.
Because if that is what we believe, it has been tried.
With much death and destruction left in its wake.
Perhaps our capacity for overpowering will be for good cause, this time.
Because that could not possibly be what every other group who ever aspired for power believed. They all must have thought they were using it for the purposes of evil. We, alone, will use it for the purposes of good. And finally right will be wedded to might.
This logic of predation and intimidation has been with us since the beginning of human existence and the existence of our hominid brethren.
Perhaps, this time, finally, it will yield the progress that we so desperately seek from it. Perhaps, this time, our overpowering will finally yield the hope of a better tomorrow. And not the tragedy that it has yielded since our earliest existence.
And when it does not, we can lament amongst ourselves about how there is no better tomorrow. And how there is nothing that can be done anyway.
For it could not be our failure. It could only be the failure of our enemies. Or our foolish neighbors. Or our children. Or anyone who is not us.
For we are a brave species. We do not fail. And we most certainly do not admit our failure. Because to do so would be to show our weakness. And show disloyalty to our courage. The courage to continue down a path even when it leads to nowhere.
To continue despite disappointment is a sign of courage. To admit failure is to betray cowardice.
And thus begins the long series of lies that animates power and its obsession. And always has.
All because we are unfraid. And bound and determined to prove just how unfraid we are.
A species that has, otherwise, outside of disease, fended off every other natural predator it has faced.
This most intelligent of all species, or so it says, is finally only preyed upon by the most deadly of all its sins. It's own pride. It's own incapacity to recognize when it's instincts for predation and aggression have failed it many times over.
All because doing so would be to admit the very fear that it claims to not harbor.
The only thing we have to fear. Or so they say.
Or maybe what they should say is that progress only comes with just enough of the only thing we have to fear.
Perhaps that's what that revered American President meant.
Perhaps, this time, instilling the only thing we have to fear will prove once and for all just how unfraid we are.
The most important mistake humanity makes, I think, in addition to the killing, and aggression, and general meanspiritedness, is waiting for someone else to love them.
If you are waiting for someone to love you, you are wasting your time.
Love comes to those who have it to offer. Love, as Clint Black wisely croons, is something that we do. And love, like everything else, comes most to those who have the most to offer. What comes around goes around. And that includes all the good stuff like love.
If you are waiting for love, you are going to be waiting a long time. Because love comes to those who work on having it to offer.
If you want love, or you're unhappy because you feel like you don't have enough love in your life, the path to happiness is making it available to others, not waiting for it to come your way.
If you want to be loved, then your task is to work on loving. Lots of it. As much as possible.
And, if you listen to haters, expect to get as much love as they get. Meaning, very little. The scraps from the table of those rich in this most valuable commodity.
If you build it, it will come. For reals, homey.
Take that from a lover. And a fighter. But, mostly, a lover. Or at least I'll love the fuck out of you while I'm beatin' your ass, if that's what you need.
But most people don't need more ass-beating. Most people need more love. And they won't find it until they get off their lazy asses and start sharing it with others. Slackers.
Make love. Even when you need to make war.
And work on making a world where we make love and not war, as much as is humanly possible.
And that happens when you pitch in. And offer up all the love you have to contribute.
The problem with the world is not too little Hitler and too much King. That couldn't get more obvious, really, when we aren't bullshitting, all the time.
More love + less ass-beating = real progress. Where people get treated better.
And that's frankly what everyone wants, when we get really honest.
"'The vendors there are criminals,' said one woman, to nods of agreement.
It didn't seem like the kind of deep-searching probe of the nation's problems that President Raul Castro solicited when he called for a national dialogue on the future of the country's socialist system in an August speech.
Since then, authorities have set up discussions at universities, government workplaces and under the glow of street lamps. Community organizations called Committees for the Defense of the Revolution - created in part to root out anti-government activity - are now tasked with collecting criticism of the socialist system, along with suggestions for how to reform it.
Declining revenues and mounting debts have stretched the Cuban government to the point that it must trim some of its longstanding entitlement programs, Castro told the National Assembly during the August speech.
'Nobody, no individual nor country, can indefinitely spend more than she or he earns. Two plus two always adds up to four, never five,' he said. 'Within the conditions of our imperfect socialism, due to our own shortcomings, two plus two often adds up to three.'
That losing formula has the Cuban government increasingly exhorting its citizens to work harder, expect less and come up with solutions to their own problems.
The input is funneled upward to Cuba's leaders and will ostensibly be used to guide the reform process. Similar discussions soliciting criticism and ideas were gathered during a round of open-air discussions called by Castro in 2007. The government collected 1.3 million opinions from residents during that period, Castro said, nearly half of which were criticisms of one problem or another.
While Cuban authorities have made it clear that major political and economic reforms to the country's one-party system are not on the discussion agenda, participants at the meetings are being encouraged to speak freely and openly about problems in their daily lives.
Many Cubans simmer with frustration brought by chronic transportation and housing shortages, a gargantuan state bureaucracy and salaries that average roughly $20 a month, even though most consumer goods in state-run stores are priced above what they would cost in the United States.
Subsidies for food, utilities and other basics offset those meager earnings, but as the government's fortunes decline, authorities are increasingly telling Cubans to tackle their own problems. One high-ranking party official recently said Cubans can't expect for the 'daddy state' to fix everything, waiting with open mouths 'like baby birds.'
Such a statement is 'offensive' to the Cuban people, said dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, who has spent time in prison for his opposition to the government.
'This system was designed to control everyone, so it's absurd that the official propaganda talks about the ‘daddy state,'' he said, referring to Cuba's government-run media. 'It's as if the Cuban people were to blame for this economic debacle, and not the government. The government is to blame for the way Cubans behave, because this is the system it created.'"
Free peoples are free for a reason. It's not an evil conspiracy. Or a failed utopia.
It's the best that we have to offer. And the best means we will ever have to make it infinitely better.
What we need is more freedom. And more honest and decent treatment of one another. And more of everything that really is our best.
When we're not bullshitting, that is.
And bullshit will always be bullshit, no matter how much we try to manipulate around it.
After a long meeting and an all-too-long career with teachers and parents and various adults who have given up on kids.
This is dedicated to all the little girls and boys out there who have adults in their lives who don't believe, anymore, in them and everything they can be. Yeah, you. You know who I'm talking about. I'm talking to you, kid.
A little advice, kids. Pardon my french. But, fuck 'em. Every last one of them. They're wrong. You can be whatever you want to be. Don't listen to adults or anyone who's given up on themselves and, thus, on you and everyone else.
And for the adults who have done so. You probably need to take a moment, to think, for just a second, about that little boy or little girl inside of you. That cute, pudgy one who was always afraid about what everyone else thought about them. And you might take a moment to remember at what point that little boy or little girl started to give up on themselves.
I just want you to remember, if even for a moment, what it was like to still believe in yourself before all those fears about what you couldn't possibly be started to overwhelm your dreams about what you could be, given enough heart and effort to make it so. And you want to do so to help you get honest about the fact that you talking kids and people and yourself up or talking them down is the likely the single most important thing that you could do to either support or sabotage a child. Or yourself. Or anyone for that matter.
So talk your kids up. Talk all kids up. As high as they can go. As high as their dreams will take them.
Play pretend trumpets with them. And pirates. And princesses. And Indie pop stars.
And, more to the point, stop talking kids down. Stop talking yourself down. Stop talking everyone down. And stop taking those foolish fears you live inside of so seriously.
Get busy finding a life you love. And stop talking down kids and everyone else around you.
And, in the meantime, kids. Listen to Aunty Ingrid. She knows what she's talkin' about.
And when adults tell you different, tell them to go fuck themselves. Not out loud, of course. Because you'll probably get smacked. They're still bigger, after all.
But in your heart. Tell them to go fuck themselves. Nicely. You know. As nicely as you can tell someone to go fuck themselves.
And go be whatever you want to be. For real. Find a life you love. I mean it.
And, while you're working and patiently waiting for that life to come through, love the one you have now. Because I said so, that's why. And go give your mom and dad a kiss, why don't ya. And go clean your room, for Christs' sakes.
For your own sake. And for the sake of your own children.
Oh, and by the way. Thanks mom. You were right. I love you.
A reminder, today, of why I've always liked nice people and the bighearted more than anyone else.
Reading the national political coverage, today, it occured to me that most of politics, frankly, is shitty people doing shitty things to other shitty people. And doing shitty things to not-so-shitty people along the way.
As the National Review put it very well, today, "The love of power can prove at least as corrupting as the love of money, and the American political class does not seem likely to resist either temptation, much less both at once."
It's kinda stupid, really. Most of it. It's remarkably stupid, actually. Since so little of it does any real good.
And, lately, even though an enormous commitment of my life is to clean up the mess and to have something more honest in the way of governance and life, I've just found myself wanting to avoid it all, frankly. I understand my friends, now, who feel overwhelmed and powerless to do anything about it all. It's understandable. But if noone does anything to think bigger than our problems and work on more honestly viable solutions, we'll be stuck with the same mess a hundred years from now as much as we are today. So our children get stuck with the same shit.
And everyone pretending that being shitty really does more good than it really does.
That's the part that I can't handle. I can't handle the idea of my kid growing up to be a nice kid, a good kid, I hope, only to have assholes come at him or her from every direction telling him or telling her how they're the cause of all the bullshit in the world. Because they're so nice. All so those very same assholes never have to face up to the fact that the problem is assholes not wanting to face up. And so it'll be easier to blame the nice kids, like my kids, I can only hope, so dicks can go on being dicks. Sociologists call it scapegoating. I just call it bullshit.
It's fucked up to the nth degree, is what it is. It's shitty people doing shitty things to other shitty people. And along the way, doing shitty things to the not-so-shitty people in the world, while they're at it.
After awhile, I understand the cynics and the apathetic. Who gives a shit if people keep fucking up in the same direction just so they never have to consider that they might be wrong. About anything. Nevertheless anything important.
All of it makes me want to just avoid it all, is the truth. And hang out with folks like Ingrid.
I just want to find someone to spoon with like noone else. And leave to its own devices a world bound and determined to fuck itself into oblivion because it is too stubborn to face it's own bullshit. And it's own failure.
But I'll have to leave my teaching position to do that. Because it is sadly, and so unnecessarily, bound up in all this bullshit.
I keep thinking maybe that will be for the best. So I can get out of the way of all this progress. And let the shitheads have their way and make everything anew.
I may end up doing just that. I'm tired of the heartache of it all, is the truth. And something with a little less of it would be just fine by me.
In the meantime, I'll try to keep Ingrid and Sara and their Wintersong close to my heart.
I'm tired of shitty people justifying their shittiness on my back of my decency. And the decency of people who really do give a shit.
But there's not a damn thing I can do about it.
And I just want to hide away from it all, is the truth. With a woman who will love me honestly and unconditionally. I don't give a shit how unpopular that notion is. And never will. And I want to have kids that I can count on that woman to love unconditionally with me. No matter what shape the world or their lives are in.
Because the truth is there's not a goddamn thing anyone could ever do to convice me not to love my children and my wife and my family unconditionally. There is no amount of force anyone could offer up that would ever change that. Ever.
And if my experiences during this period have taught me anything, it is that I will be kinder, more understanding, more decent, more compassionate with them than before we took this tragic turn, not less. Because I'm much more aware of just how stubbornly fucked up the world is, today, than I was when we started down this ugly path.
And fuck every last asshole who defends things otherwise. What comes around goes around. And so it goes.
Though the truth is that we will, none of us, be out of this mess until we finally figure out that treating each other like shit is not the path of progress or anything else for that matter except for the same path to oblivion that has ever futily consumed our energies and never taken us anywhere resembling forward.
The damned human race. Until it learns its lessons. And that only happens with an open mind and an open heart and a little honesty with ourselves.
I'll take the company of someone who brings both to the conversation over just about anything else in the world, is the truth. Be nice for one of those someones to be a woman, at some point. And to raise a couple kids with the same. So maybe somebody can do something to unravel this godforesaken mess that is the human race, at some point.
Is love alive? I don't know. All I know is that if it isn't, we're all in much more trouble than anything any law or party or belief could ever offer us. That's just a fact. And no amount of stubbornness on our part will twist our way around it. I sure hope love is alive. Because we're in deep shit, if it's not.
Because it's about the only thing that can possibly get this foolish species through the rough spots of its own making, as much as any of the rest.
I want to take Twain's outlook and laugh at what a stupid, stubborn species we are. But, the truth is, like Twain, I think, as one of his admirers, H.L. Mencken, wisely observed, though he could be shy about sharing it, I just want to experience the tragedy, sometimes, that I feel on my heart, of just how lost and awful we are.
That's where Sara and Ingrid come in. I appreciate it, girls. Gives a heart or two to connect with when mine feels heavy with the world on it.
I wish I didn't care, most days, is the truth. And I wish it was funnier to me than it is, at this moment, most of the time.
But there's just a part of my heart that really does give a shit that we get it figured out. And that part weighs heavily with me, tonight.
I know. I need to get laid. Drink some beer. Watch a comedy.
Thanks for the advice, bro. It's just that sometimes, I just need to feel what's really there. And not pretend that I feel better for someone else's sake or to pretend that I feel better than I do.
Because if I don't, I never get to feel the good stuff, either. And there's too much good stuff out there in the world to forgo just so I don't have to feel the bad stuff.
And if I want to fall madly in love, to love my wife fully on our wedding day and every day after that. If I want to love my kids with as much depth as I can muster after a long day of work. If I want to love my family and my friends and my colleagues and everyone I care about in my life with as much as they deserve, then I gotta feel the bad stuff when it comes, too. It's just part of the deal.
And that's why I love these girls and their beautiful songs. Because they open up that part of my heart that feels all of it. The good. The bad. All of it. Whatever is there. So that I can keep love and hope and all the rest alive.
This is how we keep it alive. And this is how we find real strength. The kind that loves fully and thoroughly. The kind that Christ and the Buddha, Ghandi and King, Mother Theresa and Mohammed Yunus, Desmond Tutu and and all of the strongest among us bring to life. And remind us what real strength looks like.
I don't know why we take all of their efforts for granted. Why we take all of it for granted. I don't know why.
I just know that a world that operates like that without something more honest to help people correct it will consume itself. As North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Zimbabwe, as much as Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism are testament to.
And I don't want that for my children. Or anyone else in my life, frankly. And I'll do everything in my power to make sure that they live in a world that is as free and safe, decent and good, loving and kind, abundant and hopeful, and all the rest that makes for the kind of life that makes life worth living.
Is love alive?
That is the question to ask if we're wondering if we've made a world worth living in for our children.
It's the central question, really. All the rest, after a certain point, for which Maslow has more details, is just window-dressing, really.
Perhaps some folks are satisfied with window dressing. I'm just not. And never will be. No matter how much bullshit we engage in.
Is love alive? That is the question that my children will ask me for whether we have made real progress in the world.
At least I hope they will. I'll be damned disappointed if they don't. And I'll be goddamned proud, if they do.
Is love alive?
Good goddamned question.
We get to decide.
Let's hope the answer is yes. For all our sakes.
In the meantime, it's nice to have someone ask the question.
After watching a long period of people in all walks of life, futily and foolishly, try to scare the world and one another into some bizarre and dangerously distorted notion of progress in the world, this is what I have to share as a bottom line.
It is clearly a failed path. It's not just a failed path for us, as is so clearly is to anyone not trying to defend the failure.
What has been bizarre about this path, from the beginning, is that it was the most clearly failed path of the 20th century, and really the failed path of the long length of any honest history of humanity. It was the failed path of Adolph Hitler's Nazi regime and Joseph Stalin's and the Soviet Politburo's Communist government. It was those failures that vindicated the efforts of liberal democracies, like our own, that took freedom and democracy seriously in a world that, at the beginning of that century, oppressed the majority of its people under the auspices of the very same logic that has animated this bizarre and failed period of repression as some proxy for a more honest path to progress.
The world got substantially freer over the course of the 20th century. And it's inhabitants had lives that were substantially better by almost any measure one could take of quality or quantity of life offered by this freedom.
And like every period of regression and repression in human history, the world looked at all of that real progress and said, "But it has not kept us from making the mistakes that frighten us." And they started turning the clock backward.
Apparently oblivious to the fact that no philosophy, or religion, or form of governance, or any institution or rule or law or belief or system of belief whatsoever will ever keep people from making mistakes in the world, even the mistakes that fighten us.
Quite to the contrary, most of the most serious mistakes in the world that frighten us are a function of the very kind of cynicism and fear about the world that animates that belief. Nazism and Communism being but only two of the many plethora versions of that tragic and foolish and clearly ineffective means of making all of our mistakes and our fears about all of our mistakes go away.
Here's the bottom line for our personal lives.
If we do not take responsibility for our failures, including our failures trying to force one another to stop failing and stop making choices we don't want them to make, it does not make our failure go away.
Pretending that you haven't failed doesn't mean you haven't. It just means you're pretending.
And the most important failure we are experiencing, right now, outside of failing to keep ourselves safer or more financially secure or have more honest safety around our health or to address our environmental or other common problems effectively, is raising our children and believing that trying to force them to be better people really is some kind of compensation for our own failures to be better people and the examples they need.
In all our fear-mongering, we have desperately lost sight of being the kind of honest, decent people that our children need to look up to.
And trying to pretend that we are being those people when we very clearly have decided to take the route of dishonesty, manipulation, fear, and base impulse, is really the saddest fate of all.
Failing and honestly facing your failure so you can move forward and avoid making the same mistakes is by far a better path than screwing up again and again, pretending like you are not, and then refusing to face your failure.
And failure as a parent, on this mark, is the saddest failure I can imagine.
Which is why it becomes all the more incumbent for us to get honest. And to face that failure, rather than stubbornly refusing out of an ego that betrays us because it fails to allow us to move forward and learn from the failure and our mistakes. And, ironically, the reason why threats and force and power are so counterproductive is because they undermine this very kind of open acknowledgement of mistakes and failure that allow us to move forward.
So here's the bottom line.
We want to keep failing as parents and teachers and political leaders and citizens because we stubbornly do not want to face the much more stubborn fact that our efforts to force others to be who we want them to be is counterproductive and demonstrates a lack of respect for their own ideas of what kind of people they want to be, so be it.
Don't face it.
And live with it.
And at the end of the day. When you're making excuses for how it's the pop culture or the schools or capitalism or the government or Western decadence or whatever dumbass excuse people have come up with, this time, for why they're not responsible for their failures as parents to treat their children with kindness and respect or why they're not responsible for the failures as citizens, neighbors and political representatives to treat their fellow citizens, neighbors, and colleagues with respect for their conscience and understanding and choices.
Just know that pretending that we are not failiing does not make the failure go away.
If you doubt that, ask the Soviet Union. They did it for 70 years. And only stopped because people just wouldn't put up with it anymore when it became crystal clear what a failure the whole dumbass idea of Communism was.
If you don't want to face your failures - as a parent, in your career, as a leader, as a human being - noone can make you. That's just a fact. And there is no talking or leveraging or manipulating our way around that fact.
You want to keep failing. So be it. Keep it up.
But no amount of pretending makes the failure go away.
Facts of life are stubborn like that. Much more stubborn than anything denial of them could ever muster.
That's why it's been so important to me to keep this one straight, no matter how much people try to bullshit they're way through it.
Because that failure, the failing as a parent, is the one that would break my heart more than any other. And I would count myself as a failure not if my child made mistakes or failed, themselves. That is an inescapable fact of life. There is no learning that happens without it.
I would count myself as a failure as a parent if my children either held back their own dreams to please some distorted notion of my own ego desperately trying not to face my own failures or if they decided just not to talk to or deal with me anymore, at all, as a parent, because I just persistently refused to face the fact that they are their own people with their own chosen courses in life and that I am there to help facilitate their growth, not to determine it's direction.
And if we don't want to face our failure to force people to be the kinds of people we want them to be, either as parents or teachers, or through politics or any other forum, then we will live with those much more serious failures.
Failures of the heart. The most serious failures of all.
Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson offer a more honest way forward.
It is in opening our hearts that we will more honestly move forward.
Without it, we are lost. As long as we take the path that avoids it.
And that really is the most tragic fate of all.
Perhaps it is time to reconsider what our hearts have to offer.
When did foreign policy get so unfathomably dumb that it became a contest between nice and tough? How stupid do we have to get before we recognize that we can be tough and nice as situations honestly call for them?
Who do you know who is only nice all the time? Or tough all the time? Noone. Not even King and Ghandi were nice all the time. And not even Hitler and Stalin for tough all the time.
But that doesn't mean we're going to sit around and pretend like the problem with the world is that there are too many Kings and Ghandis and not enough Hitlers and Stalins. And it doesn't mean that we sit around and act like we somehow forfeit understanding for tough as our liberal values and our self-defense are honestly advanced by either.
Least possible necessary aggression. Meaning, we use force as little as possible. And we only use it when it is honestly consistent with our liberal values.
Note to John Bolton: this is why you lost your job, dumbass. You want to sit around and pout that the world just doesn't understand what guys like you who want to whack everything they don't like do for the world. So be it.
And don't expect to get your job back, you dipshit.
And don't expect the rest of us to listen to a guy who can't get figured out that he and his boss were booted from office for exactly this reason. It certainly wasn't for the socialism, that's for sure.
If you can't reason beyond this stupid false choice, John, you need to join professional wrestling where that level of reasoning is more appreciated.
Because we need something smarter than that in foreign policy, John.
And every time you write you remind me why I put up with the socialist bullshit to make sure I get someone in that office who knows to stop pretending to be a terrorist to defend ourselves against them.
Makes me yearn to hear from one of my more important heroes. C.S. Lewis.
This is one of the more resonant religious discussions I have heard in a long time, from Reverend Tom Honey.
As a Christian youth leader, earlier in my life, and an atheist with a deep and profound Christian and moral grounding, a believer in universal morality and spiritual connection, and who finds much more in common with people of various faiths than I could ever possibly find different, I found this discussion of God in the contemporary world very moving and thoughtful.
I think the bottom line is do we live lives where we honestly prevent such tragedy, or do we live lives where we are indifferent or make worse such tragedy or make it possible, at all?
We make choices, is what we do. And our choices either hasten tragedy. Or they prevent it.
The trick of life is that we all work with terribly incomplete understandings of what will and what will not hasten or prevent tragedy. And we have stronger opinions, on the matter, typically, than we have reason to believe so strongly. We talk more than we listen. We assume more than we know. We try to overpower more than engage and understand.
Real progress in tackling our problems necessitates that we are humble more than we are more certain than we can ever possibly be about how we can work together to tackle them together.
Steve Coll has a remarkably well-reasoned and thoroughly knowledgeable essay about Afghanistan and our future course in the current issue of Foreign Policy.
"To improve its chances for success, the United States and the international community must bring all of their leverage to bear to ensure the formation of a coalition government in Kabul that incorporates all of the meaningful sources of non-Taliban opposition and sets Afghan political and tribal leaders on a sustained, Afghan-led program of political, constitutional, and electoral reform.
Some analysts have suggested invoking the Afghan institution of a loya jirga to host some or all of this continuous reform process. Whether that specific institution is selected or not, the spirit of this suggestion is critical -- Afghans have many difficult but important political and constitutional issues to negotiate, and political business-as-usual will not carry these negotiations forward adequately at a time when the United States is risking blood and treasure in support of Afghan stability. Issues that require discussion and negotiation among Afghan leaders, both formal and informal, include the future of the electoral system, to ensure fraud on the scale alleged in the most recent election cannot recur; political party formation and activity; constitutional issues such as the election of governors and the role of parliament; and issues of national integrity such as the access of different ethnic, tribal and identity groups to government employment and opportunity in the expanding security services.
Political reform and Afghan-led negotiations of this type must be seen as fundamental to American policy in Afghanistan no matter what choices are made about troop levels and deployments. Such a process would be part and parcel, too, of national program of reconciliation and reintegration designed to provide ways for Taliban foot soldiers to find jobs and for their leaders to forswear violence and enter politics.
This emphasis on political stability through continuous Afghan-led negotiation and national reintegration, as opposed to grandiose state-building or policies premised on the pursuit of military victory by external forces, should not be seen as an adjunct wing of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, but as fundamental. It is clear that no realistic level of American and Afghan forces deployable in the foreseeable future can provide security to the population in every village of Afghanistan. Accepting this reality and developing a political-military strategy that best accounts for it will lead, inevitably, to support for Afghan-led political approaches at the national, provincial, district and sub-district level. This is how the late Gorbachev-backed government in Kabul achieved a modicum of stability in far less favorable circumstances.
America's record of policy failure in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the last 30 years should humble all of us. It should bring humility to the way we define our goals and realism about the means required to achieve them. It should lead us to choose political approaches over kinetic military ones, urban population security over provocative rural patrolling, and Afghan and Pakistani solutions over American blueprints. But it should not lead us to defeatism or to acquiescence in a violent or forcible Taliban takeover of either country. We have the means to prevent that, and it is in our interest to do so."
The only argument I have with Steve's reasoning is that if you read the entirety of this article - which I highly encourage if you care about the fate of Afghanistan and American troops rooting out our Al Queda enemies and their allies in the Taliban there - the only consistent conclusion you can come to from the entirety of that argument - which I largely agree with; the thrust of which being that all of our efforts must make central the political task of a self-determining Afghani effort to reconcile their ethnic and political differences to create a pluralistic, strong Afghani government capable of offering security to its population and developing a process by which its serious divisions can be healed, over time - such an effort cannnot be secured, as Steve suggests in that first line I quoted, with external Western pressure.
To the contrary, the entirety of Steve's article illustrates the successive folly of various outside forces from imposing or pressuring their will externally and how this has bred the mistrust in foreign armies that is now the central problem America is contending with.
Meaning, we are very unlikely to get ourselves out of that mess if we make the same mistakes that caused this mess in the first place.
Americans and the West need to get on the up and up and be cooperating honestly with competing Afghani political parties to work on building a self-determining Afghani government rather than expecting the Afghanis to be patrons of our largesse and subjects to our leverage. As Steve argues well in this article, I believe, both are bad courses, of the long haul.
Instead of Americans focussing on what they can do to stabilize Afghanistan, what Steve is saying well in this article that deserves our attention, I think, is America should focus on what it can do to support Afghanis to address the political divisions and the military strategies, with American help, when necessary, to secure their country and create a pluralistic Afghani future of their own choosing that looks after the interests of all Afghanis, and seeks to destroy, arrest, and, when possible, coopt or moderate the Taliban and their supporters as a necessary prerequisite to looking after those Afghanis' interests.
The way through in Afghanistan and Iraq is to get more honest with ourselves about the extent to which we have engaged these wars more self-centeredly and to get less self-centered in our engagement.
If we want Afghanis to trust us, we need to be trustworthy. And that is the only honest way to success.
Peter Berkowitz, at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, offers up the most serious case of censorship in the halls of liberal education that I have seen in a very long time. And a testament to just how illiberal we have become.
"Consider Yale. On Oct. 1, the university hosted Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. His drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban became the best known of 12 cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. That led to deadly protests throughout the Muslim world. On the same day, at an unrelated event, Yale hosted Brandeis Prof. Jytte Klausen. Her new book, "The Cartoons that Shook the World," was subject in August to a last minute prepublication decision by Yale President Richard Levin and Yale University Press to remove not only the 12 cartoons but also all representations of Muhammad, including respected works of art.
The Westergaard appearance inspired protests. Muslim students condemned Yale's invitation to the cartoonist as religiously and racially insensitive, compared him to Holocaust deniers and white supremacists, and declared his art and utterances hate speech rather than free speech.
Students will be students. It is to be hoped that those who opposed Mr. Westergaard's invitation will learn at Yale that the aim of liberal education is not to guard their sensitivities but to teach them to listen to diverse opinions and fortify them to respond with better arguments to those with whom they disagree.
Mr. Westergaard's appearance did prompt a small faculty-led panel discussion on Oct. 7. It dealt mainly with Muslim reaction to the cartoons, though Prof. Seyla Benhabib said that in Ms. Klausen's position she would have withdrawn the book. But generally the faculty has been unmoved by Yale's censorship of Ms. Klausen's book, which suggests that lessons in the fundamentals of liberty of thought and discussion may be lacking on campus.
To be sure, Yale's censorship—the right word because Yale suppressed content on moral and political grounds—raised difficult questions. Can't rights, including freedom of speech and press, be limited to accommodate other rights and goods? What if reprinting the cartoons and other depictions gave thugs and extremists a new opportunity to inflame passions and unleash violence? Can't the consequences of the cartoons' original publication be understood without reproducing them? Weren't the cartoons really akin, as Yale Senior Lecturer Charles Hill pointed out in a letter to the Yale Alumni magazine, to the depictions of Jews as grotesque monsters that successive American administrations have sought to persuade Arab newspapers to cease publishing? And isn't it true, as Mr. Hill also observed, that Yale's obligation to defend free speech does not oblige it to subsidize gratuitously offensive or intellectually worthless speech?
These are good questions—to which there are good answers.
Rights are subject to limits, but a right as fundamental to the university and the nation as freedom of speech and press should only be limited in cases of imminent danger and not in deference to speculation about possible violence at an indeterminate future date. One can't properly evaluate Ms. Klausen's contention that the cartoons were cynically manipulated without assessing with one's own eyes whether the images passed beyond mockery and ridicule to the direct incitement of violence.
Even if the cartoons exhibited a kinship to anti-Semitic caricatures, it would cut in favor of publication: a scholar would be derelict in his duties if he published a work on anti-Semitic images without including examples. And finally, if Yale chooses to publish a rigorous analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy, which affected the national interest and roiled world affairs, then the university does incur a scholarly obligation to include all the relevant information and evidence including the cartoons at the center, regardless of whether they are in themselves gratuitously offensive and intellectually worthless.
The wonder is that Yale's censorship has excited so little debate at Yale. The American Association of University Professors condemned Yale for caving in to terrorists' "anticipated demands." And a group of distinguished alumni formed the Yale Committee for a Free Press and published a letter protesting Yale's "surrender to potential unknown billigerents" and calling on the university to correct its error by reprinting Ms. Klausen's book with the cartoons and other images intact. But the Yale faculty has mostly yawned. Even the famously activist Yale Law School has, according to its director of public affairs, sponsored no programs on censorship and the university.
Alas, there is good reason to suppose that in its complacency about threats to freedom on campus the Yale faculty is typical of faculties at our leading universities. In 2006, even as the police had barely begun their investigation, Duke University President Richard Brodhead lent the prestige of his office to faculty members' prosecution and conviction in the court of public opinion of three members of the Duke lacrosse team falsely accused of gang raping an African-American exotic dancer. It turned out they were being pursued by a rogue prosecutor. To be sure, it was only a vocal minority at Duke who led the public rush to judgment. But the vast majority of the faculty stood idly by, never rising to defend the presumption of innocence and the requirements of fair process. Perhaps Duke faculty members did not realize or perhaps they did not care that these formal and fundamental protections against the abuse of power belong among the conditions essential to the lively exchange of ideas at the heart of liberal education.
Similarly, in 2005, Harvard President Lawrence Summers sparked a faculty revolt that ultimately led to his ouster by floating at a closed-door, off-the-record meeting the hypothesis—which he gave reasons for rejecting only a few breaths after posing it—that women were poorly represented among natural science faculties because significantly fewer women than men are born with the extraordinary theoretical intelligence necessary to succeed at the highest scientific levels. Before he was forced to resign, Mr. Summers did his part to set back the cause of unfettered intellectual inquiry by taking the side of his accusers and apologizing repeatedly for having dared to expose an unpopular idea to rational analysis. Apart from a few honorable exceptions, the Harvard faculty could not find a principle worth defending in the controversy over Mr. Summer's remarks.
As the controversies at Yale, Duke and Harvard captured national attention, professors from other universities haven't had much to say in defense of liberty of thought and discussion either. This silence represents a collective failure of America's professors of colossal proportions. What could be a clearer sign of our professors' loss of understanding of the requirements of liberal education than their failure to defend liberty of thought and discussion where it touches them most directly?"
If we cannot count on a commitment to liberal education, thought, discussion, and debate on university campuses, where in the hell can we count on them?
We have taken a very dark and seriously wrong turn in the last decade. Our fears about being too liberal, which more than 200 years of experience should have taught Americans, by now, is not possible, have led us down a terribly ugly and small-minded illiberal path, following the lead of our repressive and illiberal brethren in the Middle East and Communist Cuba, China, and North Korea and all of the places in the world where force really is the governing philosophy.
It is bizarre, in the extreme, to watch the liberal world simulataneously take a more illiberal turn all in the name of battle with these illiberal regimes and actors and out of a seriously unhealthy fixation and obsession with making the world finally right with enough capacity to force it to be so.
That is the central obsession of the terrorists and illiberal regimes we are fighting
Why in God's name would we be adopting it as our own as we defend ourselves from the destruction wreaked by these cultures and their terrorist spawn?
Because we are scared. That's why. And it is our fear of our own shadows, not love for liberty that makes us weak.
Our liberty makes us strong. Because it reflects our courage and confidence. In ourselves and in humanity.
And it is the cruel and bitter face of power as a means to finally rid us of our weakness among Al Queda and the likes of Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe that are the truest reflections of weakness and obsession with power and with the dark impulses it is meant to suppress.
Weakness is our failure to face this obsession with our basest impulses.
Strength is our ability to face it and ourselves honestly. And to openly discuss all that fear that debilitates us and makes us believe that we are unfailingly weaker than we might otherwise be.
One thing is for sure. Our lurch into illiberalism, whether it come from the left or the right, is not a movement forward, no matter how much we might like to pretend to the contrary. It has neither made things better nor will it ever, in Iran or North Korea nor in the liberal democracies that should know better.
Because our progress is predicated on our liberty. It always has been and it always will be. No matter how much we bullshit otherwise.
I think the capacity to reason is wasted on homo sapiens. I have never, in my life, encountered a species with such infinite capacity for thought so stubbornly committed to weaseling out of using it. Except insofar as it can help them avoid doing so.
It is not that people are incapable of reasoning. It is that they willfully refuse to do so. For fear of overspending their severely limited capacity to ever admit they are wrong about any goddamned thing.
"SHIRIN EBADI, a 62-year-old Iranian lawyer who won the Nobel Peace Prize six years ago, is generally cautious and measured in her speech. She is a human rights lawyer who says that she does not involve herself in politics. She says that it's not her job to favor one party over another, as long as the government respects people's right to express themselves.
So it was startling this week to hear Ms. Ebadi say bluntly that the Obama administration has gotten some things backward when it comes to Iran. It's not that engaging with the government is a mistake, she said during a visit to The Post. But paying so much more attention to Iran's nuclear ambitions than to its trampling of democracy and freedom is a mistake both tactical and moral.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 'is at the lowest level of popularity one can imagine,' Ms. Ebadi said. 'If the West focuses exclusively on the nuclear issue, Ahmadinejad can tell his people that the West is against Iran's national interest and rally people to his cause. But if the West presses also on its human rights record, he will find himself in a position where his popular base is getting weaker and weaker by the day.'
Administration officials point out that they have not focused exclusively on the nuclear issue. President Obama has spoken out in support of democracy forces, and Undersecretary of State William J. Burns put human rights on the agenda during his meeting with an Iranian official in Geneva this month. Ms. Ebadi acknowledged that Mr. Obama has said 'that the voice of the people needs to be heard. But he needs to repeat the statement again and again, so that people in Iran hear him.'
Ms. Ebadi suggested that the nature of Iran's regime is more crucial to U.S. security than any specific deals on nuclear energy. Iran's people are not as wedded to the nuclear program as the regime wants outsiders to believe. A democratic government would be unlikely to build a nuclear bomb, she said, and even if it did, the weapon would not be a threat in the hands of a government that would not view America or Israel as enemies. By contrast, she argued, even a seemingly ironclad nuclear agreement with Mr. Ahmadinejad might be of little value: 'Imagine if the government actually promised to stop its nuclear program tomorrow. Would you trust this government not to start another secret nuclear program somewhere else?'
The courage it takes to say such things may be difficult for Americans to comprehend. Ms. Ebadi's husband, 67, and her brother and sister are called in for questioning every week, she said, and pressured to pressure her. Many of her clients are in prison, some now facing the death penalty. She herself intends to return to her homeland. But the events of the summer -- the prematurely announced election results, the shootings of peaceful protesters in the street and on university campuses, the rapes of imprisoned protesters, the ghoulish show trials of alleged traitors to the regime -- seem to have convinced her that she must speak out."
Perhaps honest discussion might do more good than we realize.
Perhaps our weakness has been being too scared to just live up to our highest liberal values.
All I know is that I will avoid voting for as many Democrats as possible, out of this, in the next election and in as many elections to come as is necessary.
And if progressive ideologues doubt that this is a prevailing sentiment, in the face of polls that demonstrate stronger voter disapproval, I suggest they watch how those midterm elections go down.
Anyone wanna bet Democrats lose seats? How much?
And, more importantly, anyone wanna bet how much they deserve it, right now?
This is what we have democracy for. To get rid of assholes who could give two shits about how Americans want to run their our own lives.
I don't intend on taking that freedom for granted.
