This is why I love Ted Koppel

Former Nightline host and a journalist with plenty of liberal credentials Ted Koppel had a dead-on commentary on the Iraq War debate this morning on NPR.

How Honest is the Debate over Iraq?

This is the money quote:

"The administration is right. The consequences of a premature U.S. withdrawal would have disastrous implications for the region...

...So setting benchmarks for Iraqi achievements and behavior is nonsense. What are we saying? It's too dangerous to leave because of possible consequences to the region; but if the Iraqis show that they're incapable of preventing anarchy and chaos by not meeting our benchmarks, then we're going to leave?

I think what we ought to be saying is that U.S. troops will start withdrawing as Iraqis do meet the benchmarks."

Exactly. And the exact same problem with the No Child Left Behind Act and politicians and activists and journalists and even citizens pressuring others to be responsible for results that they themselves are not responsible for creating.

That is the problem with pressure versus genuine commitment and support to solve problems.

And it is one of the most fundamental problems in the current discussion of policy.

I'm reposting the whole commentary in full because it's just so chock full of good stuff.

"There is something profoundly dishonest about the way the current debate over troops in Iraq is unfolding.

The administration is right. The consequences of a premature U.S. withdrawal would have disastrous implications for the region. And the region, in case anyone has forgotten or is too polite to mention it, is the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

So setting benchmarks for Iraqi achievements and behavior is nonsense. What are we saying? It's too dangerous to leave because of possible consequences to the region; but if the Iraqis show that they're incapable of preventing anarchy and chaos by not meeting our benchmarks, then we're going to leave?

I think what we ought to be saying is that U.S. troops will start withdrawing as Iraqis do meet the benchmarks.

We've been given so many bad reasons for why we went to war in Iraq — those weapons of mass destruction, Hussein and his neighbors, Hussein and al-Qaida, establishing democracy — that we've actually convinced ourselves that we did it for them… for the Iraqis; not because it served the U.S. national interest.

That makes it easy to depict the Iraqis as a bunch of underperforming, ungrateful wretches; and if they don't start shaping up, we're pulling out.

Well, despite the vice president's bravado, things are not better in Iraq and the Persian Gulf than they were before the U.S. invaded. They are much worse and much more dangerous to American interests.

That's something the Democratic candidates for president seem to believe also.

So, exactly how and why do they justify pulling our troops out? Their slant on the debate, it seems, is equally dishonest."

Exactly. The whole thing is so self-serving, by Democrats and Republicans, that I can barely stand it.

What we need is a genuine commitment and proactive support of the Iraqi people and their need for security and a workable political arrangement. But so much of the current debate is about people trying to get out from under a mess that they don't want on their plates, anymore.

That is why I love the best journalists. Because they cut through the bullshit better than the rest.

Love,
Ben

Why compelling priorities doesn't work for proactive commitments

I just got a really great concrete lesson in why compelling priorities does not work for proactive commitments (which are most of the commitments that we compel for).

Force is most useful, really, for negative priorities. It's needed when you want to keep someone from doing something. It's far too blunt and just doesn't work to compel proactive commitments because people always find ways to resist. Passive resistance is the form of resistance that most people take on, whether they be teachers, students, administrators, politicians, activists, or whomever in the education field and everyone else everywhere else. The only people who cooperate in life, for real, are the people who want to cooperate.

Force creates artificial cooperation for a limited period of time - when the threat of consequences are imminent - and then wears off as the consequences are not imminent. That's why force based regimes like the Nazis and Communists applied so much force. Because it was the only way that force could sustain any impact, long-term. Because it wears off, otherwise, even for negative priorities - trying to keep someone from doing something - without proactive commitment.

Proactive commitments needs people on board. It needs people convinced of your idea and working actively and collaboratively to achieve goals and solve problems along the way. Collaboration, by its nature, is genuine cooperation that is proactive rather than passive cooperation. And it can't take place when it is forced because, by its nature, it cannot be forced. It's not genuine cooperation, otherwise. No matter how much we might make excuses otherwise.

And today, I just had this really great lesson in why you, ultimately, can't compel long term development of whatever goals you want to achieve between people. Even to reduce and end violence and murder, two of the clearer cases for the use of force, will only stop, in the big picture - plenty of individual murderers can be shut down by jailing them or killing them - when people commit themselves to nonviolent and least possible and necessary aggression in resolution of problems, generally, and build a culture that better supports those commitments.

But when it comes to a goal like improving student achievement, pressure, force, and compulsion cannot create proactive commitment.

Today, we met around those goals and developing lesson plans to improve student achievement.

I teach math, which is the big area that the district is compelling efforts to improve achievement. They've developed benchmarks in the 8th grade that students have to pass before they move onto 9th grade. They've compelled teacher improvement. They've compelled the development of lesson plans according to very specific criteria. They've compelled a pacing guide for a district proscribed curriculum to achieve all those objectives. This is all on top of the millions of mandates from special education on my time and energy.

There is no lack of compulsion in American public education (and yet, it is never enough for its advocates, is my experience. The Nazis had the same problem).

Today, my teacher colleagues and I shared our lesson plans for comment and critique. I shared my plans on my team. And from every comment I got, it became clear that the thing people were most impressed with was how closely I followed the mandate for how the lessons were to be done.

Translation: noone else was doing it.

The reason, I'm pretty clear, is because I, ironically, have a much better attitude about these things than most people. Most people like to compel others and hate to be compelled themselves. And resist it like crazy when it is imposed upon them.

I hate it. And I spend time venting to friends, on my blog, and in life, generally, to have a release of all of the anger and frustration and hate I often feel having my hands tied to achieve results that I generally - and most people, really, if you ask them - will have better ideas for given a freer hand than I will if someone arbitrarily imposes a structure on me that may or may not be the best structure.

The thing that everyone forgets and that is the source of the hubris that the Greeks spoke about over 2000 years ago as the fundamental human error is that there is noone who has final knowledge or real, final authority - beyond their always artificial roles as authority figures - about how anything should be done, and even whether it should be done. No group of people, no matter how multilateral or built on consensus or otherwise legitimized has that power. Noone does. And it doesn't matter how much I or we assert it. It doesn't exist. Not in reality.

The best we do is we assert it and hope people go along. And induce, force, and otherwise manipulate them.

But the only way that any great effort ever gets achieved for real - meaning proactively with people on board - is if people believe in it. Period. There is no working your way around it. Because people always do, will, and should resist those things that their consciences and judgments are not convinced of. It's a good instinct that we have. And yet, it's not really an instinct at all. Fucking is an instinct. Eating is an instinct. Shitting is an instinct.

Critical thinking and skepticism are learned behavior.

And good for us for taking it more seriously than the current advocates of force to achieve their ends.

The irony in my life is that I more happily comply with laws and rules, generally, than do most people, because I understand that they are generally created from good intentions. Not all the time. I break rules and laws all of the time. As everyone does, no matter how careful they are not to. There's too many of them for us to keep up with all of them, is the truth.

And as Winston Churchill brilliantly observed:

"If you have Ten Thousand Regulations, you destroy all Respect for the Law "

And that is what we are and have been in the process of doing for the last 6 years, and for quite a long time, now, truth be told.

We've done it before, obviously. Hence, Prime Minister Churchill's observation.

And that, I think, is the engine for liberal reform when those with a regulatory instinct do not want to or will not let go.

And that is the process we are in the middle of, right now.

As I watch my teaching colleagues, the one thing that comes clear more than anything else is that they resent and resist the impositions and regulations and coercion.

And their resentment of it interferes with their ability to do what I do: to look deeper and understand intentions, even as you disagree with the means.

I don't even do this as well as I notice I need to as things move along.

And I'm a best case scenario. Most people just resent and resist.

And you can't create more genuine proactive commitment and collaboration with resentment and resistance. Genuine proactive commitment and collaboration come about because people are persuaded that the goals matter and when they genuinely work with one another through all of the pitfalls to solve problems that inevitably face all kinds of obstacles.

That's why a volunteer army is so much more effective than a conscripted one.

Because people who freely commit themselves will give exponentially more to the effort, and to any enterprise.

That's why Stephen Ambrose was right that Allies would inevitably win World War II and that the only question was how quickly and how many people would die in the process.

Because free people love their freedom more and will work harder and longer to keep it and expand it than compelled people will work to appease those who enslave them.

That's why the American military outstrips every other military in the world in its manpower, technology, and development. It is freer than other systems and has more people more collaboratively dedicated to achieving it's goals. And it is supported by a free economy that creates technology, resources, and services that is one of the freest and most proactive in the world.

You can't imitate or substitute that with force. It isn't possible. Our military certainly has a long way to go to have more of this kind of advantage that comes from a freer institution. But is far better than almost all militaries over the course of civilization, and most militaries today.

The same is true of education and journalism and business and even politics and the law and every field, when they stop to think about it.

Force achieves narrow and minimal objectives. It cannot produce genuine commitment and cooperation and collaboration. Because genuine commitment and cooperation and collaboration, by their natures, cannot be forced. That is the nature of them being genuine. And force, in the meantime, as Churchill wisely observed, undermines that kind of genuine commitment and collaboration.

I hate all the regulations and impositions that I have to deal with. But I do them more happily than most people and with a clearer effort to live more within the spirit of the law than the letter of the law. Because I take seriously the spirit of the law and the politics that created it and understand that it means something, even if it is flawed or wrong-headed or ill-conceived.

That is what the advocates of the contemporary political moment of force as a governing philosophy do not see, understand, or recognize as the mistake that is, currently, undermining all their efforts.

But eventually you have to face it. It took the Soviet Union 70 years to face it. It took the Nazis 26 years to face it until they were forcibly deposed, one of the classic and most important examples of how and when force, even considerable force, must be used because no other sufficient alternatives exist.

Leftists in Cuba and North Korea and their cheerleaders in the West have still not faced it. Right-wing ideologues in Pakistan, Syria, Iran and elsewhere, and their cheerleaders in the Arab world and the West, still have not faced it.

But eventually you have to face it. Not because you are forced to by others, necessarily (though elections are nifty ways of doing just that; and an excellent example, especially in less mature democracies, of where people can resist such imposition unless they are proactively committed to purposes of democracy and regular elections).

You have to face it because the failure becomes too obvious.

So many people were killed, imprisoned, and hurt in the old Soviet Union and Nazi regime until the failure and grotesqueness of their ideologies became completely clear for enough people to end their rules.

I do wonder how long it will take liberal societies to fully embrace their liberalization. Their freedom. And the far superior abilities that such freedom gives space to breathe and learn and grow.

All I know is that no matter how long more repressive ideologies march ahead (30 years for Naziism, 70 years for Communism, thousands of years for the more repressive history of humanity pre-democracy), they cannot sustain themselves. It is both a matter of morality and commitment by free peoples, where power distorts morality and loses touch with its higher purposes, and a matter of reality, where more repressive philosophies and governance and ideas and cultural commitments cannot sustain respect for the law and governance and even ideas that undergird them, and where, in reality, free people and cultures always dance circles around their repressed brethren on the things that matter most.

I am very proud to take a liberal education and a more genuinely liberal outlook on life much more seriously than most people, even in liberal societies. Because I'm completely clear that it is our liberal worldviews that afford us every most important quality of life that we have in a world that takes advantage of all that liberal education and all those liberal commitments and is forever taking them for granted.

And I would rather have a liberal democratic culture that is taken for granted, than a repressive culture to abandon or overthrow.

What we need, all of us, is a liberal democratic culture that we more genuinely appreciate, expand, and sustain, rather than perpetually undermining its opportunities and the freedom that creates them.

And the first thing we need to build that more liberal culture is more genuinely liberal schools, universities, educations, and engagement, in and out of schools, to sustainably support that kind of culture for the long haul of humanity.

Love,
Ben

The real case for controlling peoples' lives

John Hawkins has a shockingly argued case for the drug war on Human Events that I think more plainly than anything I've read, lately, illustrates the arrogance of those who limit peoples' freedom in the name of looking after their lives.

In Defense of the Drug War

His closing argument really illustrates how morally repugnant his case is:

"That's why once, way back when William Bennett was the drug czar, he responded like so to a caller on the Larry King show who told him that he should 'behead the damn drug dealers.'

'I mean what the caller suggests is morally plausible,' he said. 'Legally, it's difficult. But somebody selling drugs to a kid? Morally, I don't have any problem with that at all.'

Bennett was right then, he's right now, and my guess is that most parents, upon finding out that someone was peddling drugs to their kid, would agree with him. Since that's the case, do we really want the federal government to take over the role of a pusher and get our kids hooked on drugs to make a profit? No, we don't."

It never surprises how the less people respect the freedom of others, the more they will rationalize anything in the name of their cause.

Bill Bennett and John Hawkins don't even find the most minute of moral qualms with the idea of beheading those who traffic in any of the various substances that they don't want people to use.

Because moral and political self-righteousness become the perpetual rationalization for every form of ugliness that their advocates favor.

The real case for controlling people's lives is because they can't do a fuckin' thing about it, whether they wanted to or not.

And that's really how John Hawkins and Bill Bennett and a whole load of conservatives and liberals think that life should be.

John Kennedy challenged us: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

His Democratic and Republican contemporaries tell us: "Whether you fuckin' like it or not, we're in charge."

Inspiring.

Love,
Ben

Too pussy to admit that we might be wrong

You know the worst part? Of all this rationalization of pressuring and bullying to impose our will and get our way?

Is that it is THE rationalization for terrorism.

You don't think Hamas and Hezbollah don't think that they're killing innocent Israelis to create a credible threat and pressure a better land deal for Palestinians?

You don't think that the Weathermen or Black September were created to enforce various left wing agendas?

You don't think that the KKK and many neo-nazis aren't concerned with terrorizing minority groups and putting the fear of God in them?

You really think that all that terrorism is really so different than the efforts to bully and pressure and otherwise impose our will on one another?

Yeah, terrorists do too. They think others are just too pussy and hypocritical to acknowledge that they do the same thing, just with a less credible threat.

And so it all goes on and on and on and on and on into perpetuity. Terrorist and other radical groups perpetually get cover from the self-righteous associations and impositions among moderate folks.

Maybe they're right. Maybe we are too pussy. Because there is definitely one place in life where everyone, apparently, is too pussy. Too pussy to admit when we might be wrong.

Love,
Ben

The need for thoughtful discourse

Joe Nye has a blog, it turns out, with the Huffington Post. And he writes another excellent article on the discourse about the Iraq war that I found myself nodding with.

Our Impoverished Discourse

Money shot, as Andrew Sullivan would say:

"If Republicans and Democrats continue to ignore soft power and our public discussion is limited to a competition about who can sound tougher, our truncated debate will remain like the sound of one hand clapping. America's current partisan atmosphere has ossified our foreign policy debate. What the nation needs is a discourse that recognizes the importance of both hard and soft power and debates a smart strategy to integrate them."

Joe's argument, that Democrats and Republicans need to be smarter with power rather than tougher and that our discourse should be about how to use soft and hard power to tackle the situation in Iraq and other policy objectives, is a welcome and important one.

Joe opposes a surge, which I think is a mistake, and seriously humbles any sense I have that anyone really knows what will improve the situation in Iraq (I still support a surge, at this point, because I think Frederick Kagan's arguments on the matter, that a pull-out will undermine the necessary security for Iraq to negotiate a political settlement, are the strongest I have encountered).

And as I watch the most brilliant policy minds in the world disagree about how to best approach this situation in Iraq, I think, "Why would we think, given the diversity of opinion on something as serious and as clearly a matter of goverance of any question that we face, that somehow we have divined the ability that has eluded every past generation to know exactly what matters upon which we should force, pressure, repress, and otherwise impose our will?"

We don't, is the answer. What we maintain is the hubris to believe that we do, and the shortsightedness to think that doing so will have no impact on the credibility, the soft power, of governance.

Politics and policy in Iraq

It is so refreshing to just read something and nod, every once in awhile.

Grand Delusion

Robert Kagan cuts through the political posturing pretty well in this piece.

It is very strange to watch liberals clamor for an intervention in Darfur, Sudan and simultaneously set up Iraq for a similar fate with an American withdrawal.

I'm pretty sure that they are doing so both because they're giving up on Iraq (which, as Kagan argues here, is a recipe for more headaches and more human slaughter to deal with later, and lots of people dying, unnecessarily in the meantime), and more nepharious, as Kagan argues in this piece, because they're positioning politically, because, truth be told, they don't really feel much responsibility for Iraq. Iraq is President Bush's problem, as far as many liberals are concerned, I am convinced. Failure in Iraq has an easy target for blame. So who really cares if we fail there, they reason at some level. It's not our problem anyway. Or, like Carl Levin, they have become convinced that the only thing that stands between them and a sustainable security situation in Iraq is pressure from America. In Levin's distorted worldview, it is people like him who have made the world safe and good. If it weren't for his pressure or the pressure of liberals, reason Levin and millions of liberal activists and politicians, this world would be in a right bloody mess, as Michael Palin says in Monty Python's Life of Brian. It nevered occurs to them that perhaps their ideas might be persuasive, and, more importantly, that sometimes, they may not.

It's so sad to me to find out how little people really care about the important priorities, so wrapped are they are in smaller priorities. Petty partisanship trumps a more thoughtful Iraq policy discussion, because so many people are more interested in proving that they have the right ideology and the President has the wrong ideology, and duking it out, politically, legally, and rhetorically.

And the tragedy of the whole thing is that noone has the right ideology, anymore than the foolish notion that Protestants were better than Catholics or vice versa in the civil wars in Great Britain.

Americans have given up on Iraq resolving its civil war, I imagine, because Americans have given up on finding any authentic resolution to their own civil war, their political civil war between liberals and conservatives, who look just as foolish as Sunnis and Shias who fight one another over who has the right ethnicity or religious affiliation.

It is definitely possible and likely that we will get over our foolish squabbling and engage in a policy discussion that is more thoughtful and engaged and address one another's concerns with a collaborative commitment to success in Iraq or wherever else we must work together.

But, right now, so many people seem more committed to exactly what Robert Kagan is writing about, here: singing to their choirs and hoping that the gods strike down their political opponents and solve this whole Iraq mess for them.

And the sad thing is that their choirs don't mean shit, pardon my French. Choirs for the political churches of liberalism and conservatism are just like choirs everywhere, singing for you what you want to hear and never challening your doctrine.

These days, I belong to both churches and no church, at all, simultaneously, forever frustrated with how every churchgoer puts on heirs and makes all kinds of effort to prove just how pious they are to their political gods.

And all the while, not giving two shits about whether they are actually doing good by one another and by the world enough to consider that, just perhaps, they might need to listen to one another and identify with one another like people who have more in common than they have different, and engage one another and debate one another and discuss with one another what we're going to do with this godforesaken mess like we're grown-ups who are all playing on the same team, in the big picture.

Too many people don't want to play on the same team, is the truth, so wrapped up are they in their own self-righteous sense of the world.

Our hope lies in either our capacity to transcend our narrower visions of the world, in our own lifetimes, or that one day we will die and our children will have an opportunity to do the same.

There is no genuine hope in a world where we are persistently undermining one another and ourselves in the name of ideological or any other kind of dominance.

The only sustainable hope is leaving it behind.

Iraqis are not the only people who have internal divisions that undermine their own interests. Americans and the people all over the world have a long way to go to transcend their small-mindedness.

Why is it so hard for us to transend the petty polarization?

Because, truth be told, we don't really give enough of a shit to try.

Love,
Ben

The heart of being a liberal

This is how the whole Scooter Libby affair should go down and why.

Scooter and Me

Forgiveness and an appreciation for people's humanity and the complexity of life is the heart of being a liberal.

And that is what should determine the outcome of this trial and of Scooter Libby's life.

Love,
Ben

Sovereignty and self-determination as a democratic principle

Robert Carlin and John Lewis, two North Korean experts, make the general argument that I made in my review of Joe Nye's article on North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

What North Korea Really Wants

What North Korea really wants, argue Carlin and Lewis, is respect for its national sovereignty and a more constructive diplomatic relationship with the United States, to stave off efforts by China, Russia, and Japan to control and influence it, argue Carlin and Lewis, as much as anything else.

I didn't make the argument that North Korea, as with Iran, I believe, want their national sovereignty respected because I have any specific North Korean expertise.

I made the argument because it only makes sense if you take the democratic principles of sovereignty and self-determination seriously and the argument that even unfree and undemocratic peoples and governments want those principles respected, when it comes to themselves, at least.

Which country want other countries dictating its defense policies? Aren't defense policies, by their nature, the most fundamental issues off national sovereignty and self-determination? Which country would the United States and China or Russia or Japan trust to defend them for them or to determine their defense policies?

The trick is that when liberal democracies are all rationalizing force as the most effective and inspired form of governance, they do exactly what Kim Jong Il does in his own hypocritical expectations of the those trying to dissuade his nuclear ambitions: they value their own freedom, without any expectation of respecting the self-determination of others.

Where Iran and North Korea really have a strong argument is that in our haste and stubborn resolve to bully our way through both of these situations, we ignore the very democratic principles of sovereignty and self-determination, constructive debate, discussion, and diplomacy that we otherwise say is the basis for our right to make these kinds of demands in the first place.

How much failure will finally dissuade us of the current policy, I wonder?

The why of liberal, secular, free and democratic values

I'm realizing over the last few days of reflection that the why of freedom and liberal democratic values is so that we can see ourselves, and the world, better, for who we really are and how the world really is.

The reasons for secular thinking about the world are obvious really, after many years of thinking and writing and sacrafice dedicated to the subject by secular and more liberal thinkers: to understand the world better for what it really is.

Galileo and Descartes study science and philosophy, respectively, to help us all see the world, better, as it really is, and not just according to our romantic ideas of how we believe it should be.

The reason for secular and liberal democratic thought in understanding ourselves and one another is exactly the same: to help us see ourselves, each other, and the world, better as we really are, and not just according to our romantic ideas of how we believe we should be. But it has always been in tension with more traditional and romantic moral and theological notions of what makes for a good life. More traditional and romantic moral and theological notions tell us that doing good involves committing ourselves to a particular theology - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc. - doing good and not doing bad, and being subject to punishment, with varying degree of harshness in different historical periods and in different cultures - more in the past, progressively less in the present - when we do bad.

But secular and liberal democratic values take freedom and free will more seriously than does more traditional theology. Those values entail freedom to think about, question, challenge, and make choices around our values. And as Maslow wrote eloquently, it is in that freedom and in those choices that we learn about what values serve us and what values do not. Such a commitment does not, at all, assume a final stance on questions of value, by individuals or by a culture, except that they are always subject to questioning, challenging, debate, and discussion, even as it might acknowledge universal truthes. Universal truthes may exist, and it is the challenge of secular and liberal thought to uncover them, but they are uncovered and our ideas constructed, as is the term used in education circles, by individuals and cultures, and are always subject to challenge and questioning, never being taken for granted.

Ancient Greek writers and philosophers conceived of Gods as so in control of their lives because it reflected their own lack of freedom and the helplessness they felt - learned helplessness, as psychologists refer to it - in the face of the substantial control that existed over their lives in Ancient Greek, culture, I believe. They yearned for freedom that they needed to develop their thinking and their cultures, but which they lacked because of these very backward and backward-looking fears. The same kinds of fears that still dominate contemporary liberal democratic cultures.

The problem of contemporary liberal democratic cultures is that they embrace the benefits of liberal democratic life while being perpetually wary of the risks that come with such freedom.

And so they perpetually curb the freedom that make those benefits possible.

It is ever recurrently tragic and irrational, with those cultures perpetually looking back with regret at those curbs on freedom and the ways that it undermines their values, which were only made possible by that freedom.

We are liberal democratic peoples embracing secular thought and the freedom that makes them possible, but only when we are not perpetually afraid of the risks that come with that freedom, as well.

And it is that fear, of course, which has rationalized all curbs on freedom since the dawn of humanity.

Our rationalizations are only different from those of the Catholic church, various dictators, and more repressive cultures of yesterday and today in degrees and for what cause.

But the result is always the same.

Repression and control that undermines the very values that make our better quality lives possible.

It's a very tragic irony of history. That humanity has spent more than 2000 years trying to escape its inhumanity and propensity for control on the basis of fear. And yet, 200 years into the triumph of our liberal, secular, free and democratic values over our inhumanity and values of control and brutality, our fears still so dominate our own lives and have us dominating our neighbors.

For those who love liberal, secular, democratic values, societies, and their virtues, as I do, it is, perhaps, the most tragic irony of history.

Love,
Ben

Status

I've been thinking a lot, last night, about how status and status anxiety and insecurity is the source of so many of our problems of equity in the culture. The money doesn't do enough good after a certain amount to warrant obsession with it. The fame is as much a disadvantage as an advantage much of the time.

But the status is what drives too many of us. Including academics who both have one of the highest status positions in most cultures and which, in liberal democratic cultures, pride themselves, the most, of being more equitable and less status obsessed.

The truth is that status drives much of what happens in academics. And, hence, where many of the problems in our culture derive.

I have much more to say about this. I have an IEP to finish up:).

Ben

Trust and why confusion about it is the source for so many of our problems

I am seeking out Francis Fukuyama's book Trust and other similar books around matters of policy and trust, lately, because I am beginning to see what I think Fukuyama sees: trust as the cornerstone of relationships into which authority and power enters, for good and, too often, for bad.

The more I work with kids, and the more I reflect on my own childhood, and especially my young adulthood, the clearer I become that trust - its presence, its absence, and its consequences - is the basis for so many problems in our culture, and so much of the confusion that young people, in particular, and older people, as well, feel in their lives. Confusion about what trust is and what it isn't. Confusion about who to trust. And perhaps, most importantly, confusion about how to handle relationships when trust is broken.

It's pretty clear to me, at this point, that there is a paradox of trust that too often is reduced to far too simplistic equations of power rather than dealing with the trust broken and the need for trust restored.

There is a need by most people, I think, to both trust others and to be trusted. But paradoxically, one of the more fundamental trusts that kids, especially, seem to need and take for granted, and that I very much remember as an important part of a childhood and especially a young adulthood that I took for granted was the need to be forgiven and trusted even after trust was broken.

I didn't understand this issue the first time I really broke a serious trust in my life. And life turned out very different than I expected it to, as a consequence. I've lost some very important relationships in my life because of trusts broken, and I'm saddest to say that I've given some relationships long hiatuses because of trust broken (I'm sorry to say that because I very much believe that forgiveness is the cornerstone to a decent, happy, and secure life). But my experiences taught me a lot about trust, and the confusion surrounding it, that are more universal than just my experience, I think.

I'm beginning to understand, better, that the classical liberal maxims that people are self-interested and that everyone wants freedom for themselves and not for their neighbor runs deeper than that. It is a corollary to Jesus' teaching and aphorism that people pick at the splinters in other peoples' eyes before they pick out the beams from their own.

What I'm learning is that everyone comes at trust in a million different ways. Many people try to find trust through control, when it is over others. Most people prefer not to be controlled, when it is over themselves. And most people are relunctant to forgive, I'm learning; certainly far more reluctant than I am, despite what I agree is the need to face the honest breaches in trust that take place when they take place. But one thing that everyone has in common is that they both want, expect, and need forgiveness for all their screw-ups. We literally would not be able to function hardly at all without forgiveness, which is the source of the decency and humanity that allow liberal democratic cultures to function so much more effectively than less liberal, less trusting, less decent and humane cultures, I'm convinced.

And yet, despite the fact that so many of us are often so relunctant to forgive, feeling hurt and afraid of being hurt more - a completely understandable reaction in the face of a serious breach of trust - all of us want, expect, and need forgiveness when we breach trust, because we - individually and interdependently - would not be able to function without it. We cannot function well at all without forgiving ourselves and seeking forgiveness. And we cannot function very well without forgiving others, as well, as it turns out.

And yet it is that forgiveness and perpetually bigger-heartedness that allows us to function better within the world, as individuals and as cultures of people.

I want to explore this theme in depth in the near future. I have an IEP I need to work on right now, that is a part of a relationship between a mom, a student, and me that I need to give my attention.

But I'm fairly convinced after my experiences with this issue in my early adulthood that this issue of trust is the one that really functions at the core of our relatioships with one another and which is the source for so much confusion, misunderstanding, and unnecessary misery, and, at the other end, is the source of the most profound happiness and genuine security that we can experience in our lives.

Love,
Ben

The right way to begin this discussion

Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton both open the health care discussion on refreshingly open-ended notes:

"Obama's call was an echo of a speech he made last April when he said Democrats 'need to cling to the core values that make us Democrats, the belief in universal health care, the belief in universal education, and then we should be agnostic in terms of how to achieve those values.'"

And Hillary Clinton remarks:

"'One of the goals that I will be presenting ... is health insurance for every child and universal health care for every American," she said at a community health clinic in New York Sunday, the day after entering the 2008 Democratic field. 'That's a very major part of my campaign and I want to hear people's ideas about how we can achieve that goal.'"

This is exactly how that discussion should be opened. A firm commitment to universal health insurance with an open-ended discussion of ideas about how to get there.

Including the very decent idea, with all its flaws, introduced by President Bush.

I'm not enamoured with the President's efforts to penalize generous health insurance. If people want to pay for better health insurance or if they get it as a deal with their employer, so be it, I say.

But the general idea of encouraging univeral health insurance and access while maintaining consumer freedom within an exceptionally high quality health system is exactly the right direction for this discussion, I think.

And what I like about Obama's and Clinton's opening up the discussion is that it allows us to explore all of the our best ideas to provide for universal health insurance, ideally, in my view, without overburdening all of us with a massive government bureaucracy.

There are plenty of really great alternatives to a national health service and all of the pitfalls that come with that system that we can explore in a more open-ended conversation.

I was just talking with my friend and roommate, Devang, about how public education in the United States did not begin, at all, as a Federal program. Federal legislation was not passed around public education, thankfully, until the beginning of the 20th century. The common education movement of the mid-19th century was a movement of Protestant social reformers led by the likes of Horace Mann to bring schooling to all children below the college grade. It was not as glamourous as a national public education system initiated by the Federal government. But it built upon a very important value in American democracy - citizen participation and voluntary association and commitment to values like universal education, or universal health care.

It is the fact of American democracy that Alexis DeToqueville features in his observations of the new American democracy in Democracy in America. And it is a much taken for granted feature of American democracy that is quite possibly the most important check on perpetual acquistions of power by the Federal and state government. Sadly, it is also one of the things that facilitates that acquisition of power, sadly, as groups lobby for state and Federal governments to take on more resoponsibilities and, consequently, more power and control over how important issues like education and health care operate in our lives, for better and often for worse.

The major problem with Federal and state power and responsibility over so many various responsibilities for Americans and communities - as long-standing and perpetually unresolved debates over how to fix problems in social security and medicare illustrate - is that Federal and State programs are often quick fixes that often avoid long-term problems that come with investing so many responsibilities and so much power in so few people. They are programs that are perpetually short for money because taxes and government revenue is not as sustainable a means of funding important values and priorities as for-profit or non-profit fundraising models, which are freer, more flexible, run by people closer to the day-to-day responsibilities and professionals who can specialize in a field, can diversify to offer a whole host of different kinds of services, products, options, etc., more dynamic in terms of people being able to identify and avoid programs that lack real credibility in dealing with serious problems and supporting and developing newer and more credible organizations and programs to deal with new or old problems.

Government is just a really terrible place to try to innovate and engage in efforts that add real value to a commitment like education or health care. Long-standing dissatisfaction with public schools reflects much of this problem and the difficulty in seriously correcting the situation. And the failures of the No Child Left Behind Act (and I would add the Individuals with Disabilities Education act, as much as I'm sure this would not be popular in a special education field that loves to tout their association with and development of this legislation) illustrate the problem with Federal fixes. They are one-size-fits-all, run by bureaucrats and politicians thousands of miles away from the problems faced day-to-day, and it, consequently, lacks any of the opportunity to flexibly and innovatively deal with new and even old problems.

There is much effort that has been dedicated by non-profit folks committed to univeral health insurance in the United States and internationally, and it is these efforts that need our support and expansion, I think, rather than introducing public bureaucracy and rigid legally-bound solutions to problems that need flexibility and diverse service options to sustainably deal with new and old problems.

So opening up the discussion of health care with a commitment to universal access but with an open-ended discussion is a good way to open this discussion since it allows these kinds of problems to be discussed.

Americans should be cautioned as much as encouraged by the efforts of Canadians and Europeans to nationalize health insurance. National health insurance has not made the problems of health care in these countries go away. To the contrary, it has many many resolutions much more difficult without substantial private for-profit and non-profit sector capacity built and invested in to deal with issues like medical technology, perscription drugs, medical rationing, and wrangling betwen various levels of government over how public health commitments get funded (like in American, the Federal government in Canada is fond of taking the cheap way out and passing mandates for provincial government to fulfill and to find funding for without providing adequate funding, very much like special education in the United States).

Government commitments are a quick fix that are favored by far too many liberals, I believe, that ignore the very serious problems that come with government and bypassing the very important opportunities in the for-profit and non-profit health sector.

And legislation like Massachusetts' most recent entry into the health care foray and Governor Schwarenegger's similar effort in California create a whole new level of impostion on people with limited income, similar to car insurance - as someone who was briefly jailed because I drove without car insurance for a job that I was in no position to turn down, I am particularly sensitive to the problems with mandated car insurance for low income folks - and which seems to ignore people's right to not carry health insurance if they choose not to.

And Barak Obama's and Hillary Clinton's opening to this discussion is a refreshing one. It is one that should include the proposals of the President and everyone who is interested in the idea of universal health insurance with an open-ended discussion of the problems and opportunities and the implications for peoples' health and freedom that come with various proposals.

Universal health insurance is not lacking the political will to pass legislation that will, rightly, prompt a backlash without broad support.

Universal health insurance is in need of a sustainable commitment and model for providing it that accounts for the various concerns about health care and with as much respect for peoples' health care freedom as possible.

If Obama and Clinton intend the former, this will be one more chapter in a long history of failures to comprehensively address the very complicated issues associated with universal health care.

If Obama and Clinton, intend the latter, perhaps we will embarking on a path that might finally deliver access to high-quality universal health care that we, our children, our grandchildren, and our and their great-granchildren can all be happy with for the long run.

Rarely does such patience, engagement, and vision feature in this debate. Without it, we will be having this debate until the issues that require that kind of patience, engagement, and vision get resolved.

Love,
Ben

Learning the lessons of war policy

Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations and international diplomacy professor at Columbia University writes an excellent piece on lessons to be learned from the Korean and Vietnam conflicts for the current war.

The Right Strategy Isn't Enough

Sestanovich is right that abandoning the South Vietnamese, if a winnable strategy to beat back the Communists who slaughtered and politically imprisoned their own people following American withdrawal, seems shocking to anyone genuinely concerned with the aspirations for some alternative to Communist imposition of those who were left deserted in that withdrawal.

But Sestanovich is right that if abandoning the role of providing nominal security to Iraqis is to be avoided, then the President will have to make the case in terms of the larger policy discussion and engaged Democrats rather than stubbornly following his own path.

As Sestanovich writes:

"Henry Kissinger has long insisted that Watergate kept the United States from helping South Vietnam, but President Bush should know the more dispiriting truth. Americans simply wanted nothing further to do with the place. The struggle between the president and Congress had become so bitter, so corrosive -- such a grudge match -- that the two sides ceased to agree on even the most basic goals. Today it seems shocking that people preferred to let South Vietnam go down rather than help it. But Congress was not solely responsible for this result. The president had done much to undermine his own policy.

Bush may be right that Americans will not long support policies that don't involve trying to succeed. But if he wants to do better than Truman, he'll have to do better than Nixon, too. His debate with Congress on Iraq will unfold much as the Vietnam debate did, and that means it's not enough to have a military plan that could work. Richard Nixon's plan "worked," too, but in four years of implementing it, he lost the political support he needed to keep South Vietnam afloat once our troops were gone.

If this is how Bush succeeds, if he focuses entirely on what's needed to improve things in Iraq in the short term without making his policy more sustainable in America in the long term, we'll have to call it a failure. There's no point learning from the one war unless you learn from the other as well."

The more sustainable path that Sestanovich is speaking of would involve engaging the debate and discussion about how to proceed in Iraq with more intellectual honesty and openness, listening to Democratic concerns and accounting for them, better, in a a policy discussion that works to do right by the Iraqi people while giving assurances to Americans that soldiers' lives will not be sacraficed in vain.

That is a discussion that is not taking place, right now, as Democrats and the Administration and its supporters speak past one another, each vying for political control of the situation rather than engaging with more genuine intellectual honestly and openness about the difficult choices to be made in Iraq.

That is the problem with substituting power for engagement, debate, discussion, and thought. It avoids substantive problems with assertions of authority that miss the point, which is that better policy needs more discussion and thought, not more assertions of authority. Assertions of authority don't account for people's concerns. In fact, they shut down the conversation, as has clearly happened between the President and Congress at this point.

At some point, you would think that one of these smart people would learn this lesson already.

One thing is for sure, though. If this thing goes down as a pissing war rather than as an engaged policy discussion, everyone loses. Everyone fails. It's not just the President's failure, at this point. Democrats control Congress. Failure or success are on their watches, at this point. Things go sour in Iraq, the fingers of blame do not just get pointed at the President. Plenty of fingers to go around the Democratic table as well.

And the most tragic thing is that for 3 years the blame-shifting, finger-pointing, pressure-tactics and other efforts to force this issue have failed, on both sides, so clearly, while many, many Iraqi and American lives have been lost in the effort.

Power is not a substitute for thought. And thought is not advanced by control of any branch of government. Thought is advanced by engaged discussion and debate about how to do right by Iraqis and American soldiers and to clean up the mess that we are now all responsible for, whether we like it or not.

Perhaps Sestanovich's warning will be headed and a more sustainable policy based on genuine and bipartisan efforts to listen and engage one another will be taken seriously. Perhaps some good can be snatched from already so much tragedy in Iraq.

Either the political environment will take a cue from Gerald Ford and take on a more forgiving, open-minded and open-hearted tone and a better policy will be developed out of that discussion and the disagreements that make up that discussion or we will all go down with this ship and forgiveness and open-mindedness and open-heartedness will be necessary to get us through the bitterness and division that will undoubtedly follow that mess.

Why is it so hard to listen to one another and learn from one another independent of political stripes, I wonder?

Because of the need to develop the one thing that political leaders struggle with most, generally:

Humility. The propensity to assume that you might be wrong rather than always assume that you know or that your ideological colors are some kind of substitute for better policy.

Humility is not in strong supply in Washington, D.C. as a general rule, it's true.

But it's what's needed, right now. And perhaps Americans, including our elected officials can dig deep to find some of it. For the sake of Iraqis, Americans, and everyone who has Iraq on their hearts, right now.

This political moment is too sober a season to be lost in the lightning storm of ungrounded polarized politics. There are too many peoples' lives at stake to act like anyone has figured anything out completely. Only a more engaged, humble, open-minded and open-hearted discussion will point us in a better direction.

So many people with liberal educations. You'd think that one of them would have figured out, by now, that all that discussion and debate and reflection they engaged in college was not some form of mental masturbation. That is means something. That this is the reason why intelligent people engage debates and discussions and dialogue. Because they always have much more to learn.

Washington needs a lot more people genuinely talking with each other, right now, and a lot fewer people talking and strong-arming at one another right now.

This is why I have a "Would I want to drink a beer with this political leader?" test. Because better policy is formed when people with some humility and with some sense of their own and others' humanity, good and bad, sit down with one another and hash things out like grown-ups. Rather than forcing themselves upon one another like less evolved primates.

Force is the way of the jungle. Might makes right, and all that.

Civilized people talk with one another. And the most civilized people do it over beers or hot chocolate and in the context of people who have families and loved ones they care about that they are trying to look out for.

That's what Washington needs right now. Stephen Sestanovich is totally right. It needs more sustainable policy, which is found out of engaging one another like friends and human beings and fellow travelers in the great discussions of life, including "What the hell are we going to do about that mess in Iraq?"

That is the humble conversation that most Americans are engaged in, I hope.

And that is the conversation that Congress and the President need to join.

Love,
Ben

Who would have guessed that disillusionment would come in the form of a Democratic majority?

I've been growing old.

I've been settling down quite a bit, lately. Not that my life was really ever all that exciting. But I've been getting more grounded, lately. Many ways nice.

One way not so nice.

I'm learning to live by the rules. All of them.

And I am growing old, quickly.

This is not a favorable way to grow old. It's just something over which you have very little control as a mature adult. You learn to compromise with all the petty ways that others seek to control you, whether they have an business controlling you or not.

This is why people talk so badly about growing old. It may be the reason why so many peoples' music sounds so uninspired in their old age or why they often get meaner and more defeated as they get older.

Because there is nothing inspired or inspiring about this kind of growing old.

The sad thing for me is that now I get to join the millions of other old people who harken back to their freer days of youth and wait for young people to inject inspiration in their lives because they've had all the winds taken out of their sails, ironically, by the very rules and controls that they so passionately advocate and self-righteously believe to signify their still passionate commitment to...something.

Most adults are kind of petty and small-minded, is the truth. But knowing that about others and less about themselves, they advocate all kinds of stupid shit in their lives that creates cynicism for all of them.

I say them because I barely feel like an adult, in this sense. I've definitely made peace with the idea that mature adulthood involves learning to compromise with the power-hunger of my fellow and far wiser grown-ups.

But I have no interest in wanting to control others in the way that my wiser brethren advocate. I think it's because I'm naive about people. I just don't recognize just how much wiser my fellow countrymen are than me and how much better position they are to know what is good for me and everyone, really, than I am myself. I'm trying to learn to do the bidding of others better. I'm just not a very grateful servant, I suppose.

And the irony is, really, that the time when my disillusionment and cynicism would be most pronounced in my life is when I became a servant for the party that presumably wants to lift everyone from servant status.

The Democratic Party.

(Except when you stop to consider that it was the Democratic party that defended slavery and segregation in the Old South. They were much wiser than those servants too. Some things never change, I suppose).

It's terribly ironic, really, except when you consider that Democrats have always wanted to liberate every servant but their own. Something tells me that Teddy Kennedy does not do his own laundry. But thank goodness I have him and President Bush to look after me and other ordinary Janes and Joes like myself who just wouldn't know what to do in this big bad world without them. That's why those guys deserve the big bucks and the big power. Because house slaves like me just wouldn't be able to survive outside of the plantation without their generosity.

And just like when I was a kid and the only thing I could do to maintain any kind of sanity with adults who were barely literate and who barely hid their hypocrisy always telling me what to do and what was good and right in the world, the only way I can maintain my sanity as an grown man is to comment on the bizarre and yet curiously similar state of affairs of adults who are barely literate and who barely hide their hypocrisy always telling me what to do and what is good and right in the world.

Who knew that disillusionment would come in the form of a Democratic majority, the party that I have identified with for, by far, the largest proportion of my life (I voted Republican in my first election, out of identification with my conservative friends and coach, at the time. Otherwise, my life has been as liberal as a John Lennon's male hairdresser smoking crack; except for this next election, so it looks.)

Hope springs eternal in a democracy, I suppose. That's what makes it the best worst form of government. Even as you sit through Robert Byrd's Democratic bloviations or Jesse Helms' Republican bullheadedness, there is always hope that blowhards and bullies don't run the show.

Until being a blowhard and a bully becomes the central governing philosophy for the majority party, that is.

Here's to one of the most important qualities of a democracy: the capacity to throw the bums out.

Democrats. I'm already sick of them.

Love,
Ben

Back to school

I am getting enrolled at Washburn for the fall semester to finish up my Master's in Special Education and to make a new start at my university education.

I made a lot of mistakes in my last graduate experience. A lot of mistakes. I made some mistakes in my last semester at Washburn (summer of 2006), still taking incompletes in two classes because of my 11 year propensity during my entire university career to always try to extend deadlines to get papers "just right," never completely understanding that the real limitations of time exist, and are facilitated in the form of deadlines, whether I was aware of those limitations or not. This was an enormous source of many of the mistakes I made at KU, also, withdrawing from too many classes as well.

My first full year of teaching at Eisenhower and my experience with summer school at Washburn have taught me much needed lessons about limitations - time limits, personal limits, professional limits, real-time people limits, etc. This last year has been one long lesson on limits. And it has been a welcome lesson.

And I have to say that I am so excited to be enrolled in school again, even as I bump down the academic prestige ladder, because I am so much more mature going into a university experience, this time. I'm more aware of my own limits, the limitations of the world, the limitations of university politics, and the limitations of people, generally, no matter who they are, and the limitations of my professors and university staff and administrators, no matter how brilliant they may be. This lesson would apply whether I was studying with Joe Nye at Harvard or Francis Fukuyama at Johns Hopkins or finishing my Master's in Special Education with Gloria Dye and Michael Rettig at Washburn University.

I am learning, a lot, these days, as a teacher as much as a student, how important individual students and teachers and people are in an school and in an education. As a teacher, I see it every single day, because individual students and teachers make an enormous difference. And as a student, I am much more aware of the power that I have as a student to make an educational experience a really outstanding one or a really sour one. I regret the ways that I made my educational experience a sour one in too many ways when I was in grad school last. I have no intentions of repeating those mistakes. And I feel more confident that I have learned the lessons I need to learn, in life and in school, to make this educational experience a really quality one.

It's both humbling and really exciting to go back to where I started, in a third-tier school with teachers I love and respect, and an education that is all mine to make or to break. I hope I can make a substantial enough showing in this Master's program and publish my work in formal journals and magazines to be a strong candidate for a Ph.D. program of my choice. Studying with Joe Nye or Francis Fukuyama would be a really awesome opportunity, should it be available, although prestige, wealth, connections, etc. are not, at all, my pursuit. If I had to take them or leave them, I would almost prefer to leave them if studying with minds like these weren't such an honor. I would just fine with a Ph.D. from a home state institution or a university like Illinois State where I coached this summer. But it would be nice to be mature and responsible enough to take on a more challenging education, should that be something that might be available and that I might be interested in.

The bottom-line right now, though, is that I'm just really excited to get back to school. I am so excited to be studying again, to be in a university library again, and to be taking advantage of an education that I took for granted at the end of my last tenure that I have no intentions of repeating. Proof is in the pudding. But I trust myself more around this - and the maturity and responsibility that make it possible - than I have ever trusted myself before. Perhaps my personal best will not/does not translate into excellence in a more competitive sense. I will do my best. And if I was ever going to be competitive, this is the best time of my life to do it.

But most of all, I'm just excited to be in a place that takes learning seriously, with 4 years under my belt working and living in a world that does not take learning and studying nearly serious enough. It's my most serious frustration as a teacher, though I think my students are getting used to the rigor and some of them even might appreciate it, when the notion occurs to them and their not busy fighting me to take school seriously. And they're not busy sleeping or passing notes or arguing in class.

In a university I can really appreciate how hard teaching in a middle school, and teaching special education in an urban middle school, especially, really is. It makes me proud of the work. Because the one thing you can always take more for granted in a university or a suburban school or a private school or even a charter school with students from similar backgrounds as the students I teach is that students, generally, want, more, to be there. That is not always true in my classroom, though I do think that is becoming more true the more I work with kids. I can only hope. My strongest student in the 7th grade wants out of my class, right now. She needs to be in a collaborative class (general education class with support from a special education teacher or paraprofessional) with stronger students in a general education class. But I hope she doesn't want out of my class for good reasons that I am just not accounting for well enough, yet, in my teaching. I have so many weaknesses as a teacher I am so clear about now much more than my first year. I hope she gets the strongest education she can get and I can deliver in both my class and her new collaborative class. I want her to be prepared for the college education that she set her sights on the first year we met.

I better head home and get some dinner. I need to get officially enrolled on-line so I can start checking out books from the Washburn library. The library is the one of my favorite places on campus and one of the best reasons for me to be back in school.

Have a great week, everyone.

Love,
Ben

Understanding ourselves to understand the world

99% of our experience of the world is based on how we relate with the world, I'm convinced at this point in my life. It's Heisenberg's principle with Martin Luther King's message.

The world is as we make it. And we too often make it lousy because we relate with it poorly.

The bottom line for humanity is that we fight too much. And we are far more convinced that we know what we're doing than we ever deserve.

Aggression is our natural reaction to fear. It is a reaction that too often betrays us. Thought and free will and compassion and the least possible necessary aggression in life are what offer us our best chance to end the self-fulfilling prophecy of a world made too violent, too combative, too hateful, and far too tragic and absurd by our propensity to turn to fear, aggression, power, and control to relate to our problems and to one another around them rather than through more throughtfulness, compassion, and respect for free will.

The world is not any particular way except for the way that we make it. And even in the most dangerous and violent affairs that humanity faces, thoughtfulness and understanding are more important than force, which is used most wisely when it is used with greater understanding of all people, especially of the people to whom it is directed.

Understanding people, especially ourselves, as King and Ghandi and Tutu and others have taught, is the single most important thing that humanity can do to improve its lot.

If we want to know how the world is, how it has been, and how it can be, the most important thing we can do is to understand ourselves, in a context of good faith, forgiveness, a serious sense of humor, and a respect for our own free will, good and bad.

As we better relate to ourselves, we better relate to the world around us. And that is where the world changes most intimately and profoundly for the better.

And if you don't buy all that, check out Natalie Portman lampooning the violent alternatives. And check out Dick In a Box when you get a chance.

Love,
Ben

No need to consider you might not know when everyone else is dead wrong

Ariana Huffington has a pretty funny post on her blogpage today I thought worth sharing.

The Mainstream Media's Take on Iraq: Right, Left...And Dead Wrong

Huffington's concern is with mainstream, objective, thoughtful analysis, as she makes clear in her post:

Divorced from the reality of what's going on in Iraq. Wedded to a deluded perception of the war. Unwilling to acknowledge widespread and irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Sound like anyone you know? No, I'm not talking about President Bush -- though it's certainly true of him as well. I'm talking about the mainstream media, and their relentless depiction of the Iraq war as a left/right issue, even as the facts give lie to this hoary framing.

According to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, 60 percent of Americans oppose Bush's escalation of the war, and 65 percent want to "withdraw right away" or "withdraw within a year." Other polls reach the same conclusion: Iraq is simply not a right vs. left issue.
But you'd never know it from watching the pundits on television.

Here's Howard Fineman on Countdown with Keith Olbermann: "...that's the tension that people like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden are caught in as they try to move to the left on the war without taking themselves out of the mainstream of the country."

Of course, what Fineman means by "left on the war" is being in favor of ending the war, and against Bush's handling of it. No Democrats need worry that taking those positions will take them out of the mainstream.

But don't tell that to Candy Crowley. Here was her cobweb-covered analysis of Ted Kennedy's anti-escalation measure: "What Senator Kennedy is going to do is lay down the liberal view of things, which is to say, he will say, look, no additional troops and no additional money for additional troops, unless Congress approves."

The "liberal view of things"? More like the view of things of almost two-thirds of the nation."

The same 2/3 of the nation that supported the invasion going into Iraq - as well as the same 2/3 plus of Democrats in office who supported that invasion - and have backed away from the decision now that things have gone terribly wrong, Ariana argues, are being ignored now that their collective conventional wisdom has finally got the right answer on this whole war in Iraq thing.

As Ariana argues:

"When the macro framing of the war is so warped, it makes productive discussion of how to deal with Iraq even harder. The encouraging thing is that while so many in the mainstream media continue to believe that being in favor of ending the war means you're a "left-winger" and "out of the mainstream," a growing number of politicians don't.

How long will it take for the media to recognize reality and drop their outdated, obsolete, and thunderingly inaccurate framing of the war debate?

Iraq is not about right and left. It's about right and wrong -- and the vast majority of the public clearly knows this. It's time for the media to catch up."

The problem with the war in Iraq is not that we don't know exactly what to do or that a fuller and more good-faith policy discussion might both create more humility about the situation and more ideas about how to facilitate better political and security solutions for the situation there.

The problem is that the media is not listening to the wisdom of the American people. And that they, like the corrupt conservatives and Republicans that they toadie for, have seen the choice between right and wrong and they have chosen to do wrong.

Ariana goes on to outline all of the reasons for why she thinks a withdrawal will most effectively facilitate a more democratic and peaceful Iraq:

...in another post, I'm pretty sure.

I mean, Ariana's a smart gal. She's not going to claim that she understands the basic rights and wrongs of Iraq and the world without making her case. Ariana's only concern is with the strongest, most thoughtful, most decent and humane policy - the right decision - in how to handle the mess in Iraq, right now.

The truth is that I like Ariana Huffington. I think her and Nancy Pelosi and Democrats are being really self-righteous, right now, about what they are sure are the right answers to handle the situation in Iraq, but I like Ariana and Nancy Pelosi both. The truth is that, like everyone else, they really don't have much a clue exactly what will make the situation better. Everyone knows what they would like to see (although, for many, many people, Democrats and Republicans, this means a situation that is better for America, first and foremost, and better for Iraq as an afterthought).

But getting to a more democratic, more peaceful, more free, and less bloody Iraq is a more difficult question that everyone wants to play Emperor with and yet noone is really wearing much clothing, these days.

Here's my thinking about Iraq.

I don't know exactly what will make the situation in Iraq better. The current moment has made it so much clearer to me how little anyone does, including a lot of the more thoughtful policy people I've read and respected. The people who have really earned my respect in the last few months have been people like George Will and David Patreus, the new commander of operations in Iraq, who have said as much about the situation, and yet maintained some commitment and hope that a workable and more democratic solution can be found.

I tend to agree with military historian Frederick Kagan and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol - All We Are Saying Is Give Petraeus A Chance - that the best hope in Iraq is to better secure Iraq with necessary additional troops to create sufficient security to facilitate constructive dialogue to find a political solution and the necessary compromises on the outlook for a democratic Iraqi government between competing parties. Following through on even the threat to withdraw troops - which would be necessary to make that threat credible - would leave parties in a civil war engaging in ethnic bloodshed with no credible third party, in an underprepared Iraqi national army, to put an end to that bloodshed and facilitate a political solution.

The truth is that I don't know what exactly will resolve the security and political problems of Iraq, right now. I'm just convinced that the only hope for a political resolution is found in the context of an improved security situation, which I (and the Iraqi government) am not confident at all, at this point, would be facilitated by the withdrawal of American troops. If the Iraqi government or the Iraqi people were asking for an American withdrawal, I would feel different about what we should do, not because I would all of a sudden have more confidence in the Iraqi army and law enforcement to handle the situation, but because I would respect the self-determination of the Iraqi people, right or wrong. As is, I have very little confidence in the Iraqi government and people to handle the explosive and very complicated security situation in their own country and respect their government's request for assistance until they are ready to be responsible for the situation without the presence or with limited presence of American troops.

I could be wrong about that. The presence of American troops could be the cause of much of the insurgency and sectarian bloodshed may calm down if Americans are out of the picture, or the threat or actual withdrawal of American troops might be what is needed to motivate the Maliki government to find a political compromise, to effectively challenge and undermine the sectarian commitments of Al Sadr's Shia militias as well as the sectarian efforts by Sunnis and Kurds, or as Charles Krauthammer has posited, this might be a situation that only Iraqis can resolve and that an escalated American presence is unlikely to improve.

I'm not sure exactly what will undermine and halt the violence and create the space for a political solution that only Iraqis can arrive at. I just happen to think that the arguments and plans laid out by people like Frederick Kagan are the best I've seen thusfar.

It makes sense to me that an precipitous American pull-out would only create a power vacuum in the competition for a monopoly on the use of force that Shias and Sunni militias would only feel emboldened by and too afraid not to engage for fear of being killed, mass murdered, and oppressed should their competitors will out in such a conflict, and that such open conflict without credible third-party security, aligned with the sovereign Iraqi government, will make political solutions and political compromise both less likely and for such political compromise to become a pawn in a military conflict meant to up the ante on the use of force to leverage for political power in the emerging Iraqi governing compromise solution.

I have to say that it is really, really refreshing when I read people saying that they're not quite sure about what to do in Iraq. It's more honest, first of all. And it shows more genuine humility in the face of this most serious issue that America and the world faces, nevertheless in the myriad of other issues that America and the democratic and non-democratic world face.

It is always interesting to me that the people least likely to say that they don't know how to find sustainable resolution on various issues are, generally, the same people who are completely sure of their need, right, and wisdom in bullying me or others in doing what they hold such absolute wisdom over.

The less likely people are to question their own wisdom, the more they think they should be able to impose that wisdom on others is the one rule of life that you can count on more than any other, in my experience.

And there is no other issue in America where that truism plays itself out with more tragic absurdity than the war in Iraq, right now, sadly.

I've never followed an issue where such absurdity was so clear to me and tragic as a consequence in my all too brief lifetime. So many people so goddamned sure of their respective solutions, so sure that they feel the compulsion to impose it on the Iraqi government, the President, the American people, and anyone else who gets in their way, and yet so few people in agreement that any particular solution is likely to yield success.

The whole exercise bears out the reason to be skeptical that people in government or who aspire to steer the ship of state, as journalists, activists, scholars, minor and major politicians, and even everyday citizens, are somehow wiser or better in their understanding of the world. We must participate in a democratic society and government to contribute and be responsible for efforts as serious as war and peace, especially, and yet we all engage that discuss so self-righteously, with so little thought and genuine efforts to listen and consider and respect different perspectives, ideas, and arguments, and with so much too-certain certainty about what will resolve our shared and especially our independent problems.

Even around an issue like the war in Iraq which burden is clearly shared by the American people and which clearly needs a government response, the certain answers for how to resolve our most serious problems are still so elusive (except to those who most certainly do not deserve our trust that they really have arrived at certain answers).

And the war in Iraq is our best case scenario for a political question that most certainly needs a collective, government (and therefore imposed) response.

Hubris, the Greeks whisper to us. Hubris.

Love,
Ben

King's greatest legacy

My friend, Carson, at ContentDoneBetter inspired my Martin Luther King post, today, with his post. I would check out his post on the subject when you get a chance. This was my comment.

"We spent Friday at school talking about King. It was really nice. Ms. Smith, the teacher I collaborate with and this really wonderful black woman I work with and respect, had a really nice discussion in her class with the kids about King.

This is my second MLK holiday celebration as a teacher, and it always surprises me how little seriously most kids take King's legacy, sadly. I work in a majority black school in a poor neighborhood - the exact kinds of kids and people that King spent his life dedicated to helping - and very few of the kids take his legacy seriously, out loud, at least. I've got to hope that it sinks in with some years. But the most vocal thing I ever heard from a kid about King was from one of my really obnoxious black students: "Fuck Martin Luther King."

It's very sad to me that so few kids people openly take King's legacy seriously or appreciate what he and others dedicated to civil rights went through to help create a more color-blind, multiracial, loving, compassionate world. I have all kinds of disagreements with Martin Luther King as I have with most people. But his courage made civil rights finally possible in a country that had denied them for over a hundred years after abolishing slavery of African Americans.

I never told you this, Carson, but when I left grad school, I was a member of a poverty lobbying group called RESULTS. I had been inspired by the calls by Muhammad Yunus for an international poverty movement at our annual RESULT International conferences that I attended in Washington D.C. and had been talking about the possibilities of an international poverty movement for a year or two, at that point. When I left grad school, I wrote emails to many people about my intentions of starting an international poverty movement. Most people thought I was kind of crazy. A couple friends were encouraging.

But the more I got to know the real world, the less convinced I became that a social movement could eliminate poverty. The more I got to see poverty up close, the more I became convinced that poverty was too complicated to be solved by protests. It wasn't the same thing as a legal battle over voting rights. It needed genuine and sustained commitment and generosity rather than a single or even a series of political victories which I became convinced created resentment and resistance from those not quite on board and those with legitimate concerns, especially small businesses, who were often in a different position in terms of money available and profit margin, to do all the things that I still think need to happen around wealth equity issues consistent with a market economy which makes so much of the abundance that we all take for granted possible.

I worked for almost a year on the Kaw Valley Living Wage Campaign. It became clear to me that the business community and the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce would work with us if they didn't feel bullied into it. And they resisted us when they did feel bullied, for reasons I find completely understandable at this point.That wasn't enough for my Living Wage companions, who were convinced that either they had to bully the business community or nothing would come of their efforts.

As it turned out, the best thing that came of their efforts, I think, was the raising of the issue and the commitment by many businesses to the relatively reliable living wages that Lawrence had to offer when I was looking for work, by businesses who were not compelled by the living wage in Lawrence which only applies to businesses that locate in Lawrence and receive tax abatements.

In the meantime, my liberal friends bullied the shit out of me, too, as I looked for a compromise with business leaders and city council representatives who would approve of a "wage floor" or other comparable voluntary measures but who weren't interested in a legally imposed living wage.

I pointed out to them that their proposal would only touch a small fraction of businesses and employees in Lawrence, since tax abatements didn't impact the vast majority of folks with businesses and employed in Lawrence. And that securing genuine voluntary commitment to living wages would impact the vast majority of people in Lawrence that the law they were fighting for wouldn't touch.

It was classic MLK versus Malcolm X. Change hearts and minds or bully and pressure the unconvinced.

I think Lawrence has made some small progress on this issue because of a town of people who think about these issues more and maybe even facilitated by a campaign that raised the issue. Though, as the Lawrence Journal World pointed out in an article from that time, wealth inequities are still serious in Lawrence as they are any place else, even in the Lawrence school systems and the University of Kansas, the most liberal of institutions in Lawrence and the most presumably committed to alleviating wealth inequities.

Hypocrisy abounds on this issue, amongst liberals and conservatives, rich, middle class, and poor. Just as with race 40 years ago.

Racism gave way, largely, for the reasons MLK argued. Hearts and minds have changed in 40 years. I can only hope that hearts and minds will change on wealth equity issues in 40 more years.

One can totally understand MLK's urgency in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and his impatience with Bobby Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, and black and white religious leaders in Birmingham who told him he was pushing for too much, too fast.

But the reality was and is that important changes in the culture take an enormous amount of time.

I share King's impatience. On race, on poverty, and around the issues, like expanding liberal democratic values, that I care about. But I also bring to the table a realism about the issue, and it's complexity and the lack of easy answers, that we needed and need on race as much as we needed and need on poverty.

Martin Luther King's and Mohatma Ghandi's legacies are two of the finest in the 20th century, I think, as much as anything because they demonstrate the power of ideas of those who do not have formal power but who move hearts and minds. By the ends of both of their lives, they moved more people and were more powerful, in real terms and in terms of a legacy, than any of the politicians of their day. And in the end, it was their courage and ideas and words that captured our hearts.

Today is more complicated because very few of the challenges we face today are by necessity legal in nature as was voting rights.

And the blunt use of force to achieve whatever it is that we say that we want is hardly as inspiring as MLK's "I Have a Dream" or Jack Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country". It's much more reminiscent of radical demands of the 60's, backed by terrorist action and violent factions, and Soviet demands of their people, backed by a totalitarian regime.

There are no Martin Luther King's in today's world, save for perhaps Mohammed Yunus or Desmond Tutu, because everyone in the current political period has latched onto the most base of messages from King's legacy: the need to pressure and bully for reform. And just as black radicals used the least of Martin's legacy to rationalize their own ugliness, so too do contemporary liberals and conservatives use the least of Martin's legacy and the legacy of the civil rights movement, in the case of contemporary wealth equity activists, or the abolitionist movement, in the case of pro-life activists, to rationalize their own bullying and worst behavior.

And there's just not much to inspire people in that message. Because it's not inspiring.

Yunus' (and John Hatch of FINCA and other similar groups) strongest legacy is in his creating a workable model for sustainable wealth and anti-poverty business development for the poorest of the poor. And Desmond Tutu's strongest legacy is his commitment to truth and reconciliation in South Africa and a commitment to truth and reconcilitation as an alternative to more recriminatory approaches to resolve longstanding injustices and unfairness between peoples, like the International Criminal Court, which seems to undermine efforts to end genocidal conflicts as an excellent editorial argued is occuring in Sudan in the Washington Post recently.

And what King would be whispering in our ear, today, I would hope, would be, "Why are so few liberals or conservatives genuinely committed to wealth equity? Why do we persistently make excuses for our greed? Why do so many Democrats and Republicans grandstand on the issue in Congress while failing to practice serious wealth equity in their lives? Why are so few liberals and conservatives committed to ending serious wealth inequities in the world, satisfying themselves with a largely symbolic minimum wage increase and avoiding a larger discussion about wealth inequity and greed and their consequences on our democratic life?"

If King had the same kind of cynicism about the capacity for Americans to get over their racism as so many people have about their capacity to get over their greed and our lack of commitment to genuinely overcoming wealth inequities, as a matter of heart and mind much more than as a matter of law or politics, it would have been much more difficult for people to overcome the racism that so substantially characterized northern and southern America in his day.

But liberals and conservatives too often, in my experience, chase the money and take very little real responsibility for the consequences of wealth inequities in America and the world, largely because the issue is so much more complicated than just learning to judge someone for the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

Bill Gates gives away half his wealth. Warren Buffet gives away a substantial amount of the same and leaves no money to his children to tackle the issue of inherited wealth. Americans are the most generous people in the world in terms of voluntary giving, and generate wealth unprecedented in history because of their vast free and dynamic economies.

But noone, from any country, wants to give up the power that comes with greater wealth, and the wealth that comes with greater power.

Because that power, we arrogantly believe, is what makes things in the world go right. Without it, the world would go to pot, we tell ourselves. With it, we make the world as inspiring a place as it is, ignoring all the ways that it undermines higher ideals.

It's bullshit, of course. But we'll rationalize it, liberals and conservatives, as long as we believe that we can get what we want with all that wealth and power.

I have a dream. I have a dream that one day people will stop playing that bullshit game with one another, as much as possible. And start treating each other like they really give a shit about one another. I have a dream that people will stop making excuses for what dicks they are to one another, all the time, and treat each other like they might like to be treated, the golden rule and all that. I have a dream that people of all backgrounds, all classes, and all ideological stripes will stop engaging in self-righteous grandstanding on every issue that strikes them and to take seriously intelligent and rigorous and respectful and self-reflective engagement and debate and discussion and respect for their neighbors when they disagree without demonizing them because they belong to a different political church, religious, ethnic, gender, racial, class or other group. I have a dream that we will care for one another as fellow human beings because it's the right thing to do, regardless of whether it makes profit or serves our bottom-lines or wins the next election for us.

We could have that dream. But, right now, most people settle for the bullshit that passes for decency and humanity, these days.

King's legacy was, fundamentally, about the golden rule. About treating one another like we would want to be treated.I'm not sure who his heirs are, today. Yunus and Tutu, to be sure. All of us, in some respect since we are people who are, by and large, more favorable to King today than people were to King in the 50's and 60's. And very much like the 50's and 60's, all of us fall short of King's legacy or our best selves beyond King or any of our heroes.

King will forgive us that, I'm sure, just as he forgave Malcolm X and Stockley Carmichael for making his job harder and all of us for the racism that permeated his society up till his death.

And hopefully, as King I'm sure would have wished were true rather than the riots that followed his death, we will jaw-jaw much more than we will war-war over this issue and every serious issue that we face. Because as radicals and terrorists of King's time and our time demonstrate, forcing ourselves upon others rather than changing hearts and minds is an ugly and unsustainable means of changing the world for the better, no matter how self-righteously terrorists or any of us might believe otherwise.

The real King legacy is not in any one of the anti-discrimination or affirmative action laws adopted after his death.The real King legacy is found in young and old black people and white people who treat each other like fellow human beings rather than asserting superiority over one another or the self-righteous claim to bully one another or harboring hate or bias or ugly or destructive feelings toward one another.

That is the most sustainable way to change, and King was its most brilliant proponent. That the real standard for progress is the hearts and minds of a people, not what is imposed upon them.

That's the legacy we should be celebrating today. Because that's the legacy that made the most real difference in the world.

I hope my kids realize how much they take that legacy for granted, someday. Because it's the one that is so easily taken for granted, today. Because the kids (and most adults, thankfully) live within that spirit so much better than they did in King's day."

Thank you, Martin.

Love,
Ben

I think I might quit teaching

What we need in the world, today, especially as teachers, is people who kick ass and take names.

I'm not that person. I don't like to hurt people or force their hands to get my way.

I want to do something where I can just do my thing and avoid people altogether, as much as possible, I think.

Teaching and education just don't mean anything to me as long as they end up with someone forcing someone else's hands when reason fails.

I need to find a profession where I can live a quiet life and avoid all this ugliness that passes for reason, these days.

Happy Martin Luther King Day.

Love,
Ben

Pressure

Melissa and I saw the most horrific thing last night. It was a beheading of an American by Iraqi insurgents.

Warning: Extremely graphic and disturbing
Beheading of Eugene Armstrong

Terrorists and those from autocratic countries reason that liberal democratic countries just really don't have the balls to use pressure and blunt force like they do.

People from liberal democratic countries who aren't quite convinced of their liberal democratic values get scared that the terrorists are right.

And the truth is that far too many citizens from liberal democratic countries act as if the terrorists are right, so enamoured are they with the use of force or pressure - bullying is the common term for that strategy - to accomplish their ends.

I don't understand why free people can never quite embrace their freedom, and the learning that comes with it, from good choices and from bad choices.

And bad choices by average people in liberal and autocratic countries always rationalize bad choices by a government and by other average people to force themselves on one another.

That beheading video is what real pressure looks like. I wonder if liberal democratic citizens will either have the balls to apply real pressure like that beheading, or give up the practice, altogether, as much as possible, since it undermines development and exercise of conscience.

All I know is that while I may be forced to live with the awful choice that liberal democratic citizens have chosen for this political period, I will never recognize it as the right choice or the best choice. Because it clearly isn't, no matter how much pressure people apply.

Love,
Ben