What progress sounds like

Whether folks know it or not, this is the future.



There are plenty of places in life where we will need to use blunt force because no alternatives really do exist.

But the notion that more force, more recriminiation, more vengeance, more punitiveness, the notion that treating people worse really is the path to progress is just kind of silly and not very serious as a path to genuine progress.

Progress means people getting treated better. Always. Always been so. Will always be so.

And no amount of rationalization otherwise will ever trump that. Ever.

Why? Because treating people like shit has consequences. Consequences we are all dealing with, right now, when we're not bullshitting otherwise.

Political parties, like private citizens, will have to deal with some hard knocks until they get that figured out. But we will definitely be learning those lessons, over time. Why? Because things won't get better until we do.

And, bottom-line, progress means things getting better.

And no amount of the world turning into a shitheap will ever successfully bullshit itself otherwise.

No matter who's shoveling the bullshit.

Progress is people getting treated better. It's people getting more compassionate. Not less. It's people getting more understanding. Not less. It's the world getting better. Not worse.

No matter who bullshits otherwise.

We will be treating one another better. And more responsibility for that and the good things that come with it. Believe that.

Because that's what progress look like.

And this is what progress sounds like.

It's a beautiful future, ain't it?

Yeah, I know. Goddamn gorgeous.

The future is intimidation and fear

The tell-tale line in E.J. Dionne's sloppy and less than honest attempt to synthesize a foreign policy in the Washington Post today.

A Foreign Policy Based on Moral Balance

"But these are the days of European second thoughts: Obama is still interesting, he's still not George W. Bush, but what can he show for his efforts? His Israeli-Palestinian initiative has gone nowhere. The fruits of his new overtures to Iran, Russia and North Korea are far from obvious. Where is the climate change legislation that was supposed to get through Congress?

And why did Obama skip the anniversary celebrations of the Berlin Wall's fall? OK, Europeans say, we understand he sees that the future lies in Asia, but did he have to rub it in? And can't he find at least one European leader to bond with?

In the midst of such complaints and questions, I sat with a group of Americans and Europeans to listen to a live broadcast of Obama's Oslo speech before the opening of a conference organized by the French Institute of International Relations. For me, the address was Obama's answer to his critics, both American and European.

To begin with, the president reminded us why he had seized the imaginations of so many in the first place. The speech was commonly described as a defense of "just war," and it was -- a rigorous, unblinking argument for why violence and the threat of violence can be necessary on behalf of the right and the good."

First of all, if the President thinks that the future lies in Asia, I certainly hope he's referring to Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and the other genuinely strong economies and liberal democracies in the region. If leftists really think that the future lies in China, they have another think coming. And the world will not only watch that situation unravel until China goes democratic. The world will remember what self-indulgent, self-righteous shitheads in the West rationalized that brutal regime for their own ideological purposes for the rest of our liberal history. If there is anything that leftists could do, right now, to undermine confidence in their ideology, rationalizing the totalitarian impulses of their ideological brethren ranks right up with the list of "what bonehead moves put left-wing ideology in the trash bin of history."

Secondly, and most importantly, if E.J. thinks that violence and the threat of violence are the wave the future, he has a lot of history that he might consult on where that thinking leads us. Because it's been responsible for more bad than good, on balance, by far. And rationalizing that bad in the name of good is exactly what has fucked humanity since it's inception. Might makes right is a line to caution against such thinking, not to reinforce it.

And if E.J. thinks that he has done an endrun around such wisdom because he found the right cause, history will undoubtedly offer a cold shower dose of reality for that kind of arrogance.

In fact, it has.

The unfailingly failing agenda the Obama Administration is exactly the kind of cold shower leftists could use, right now. If they could get honest with themselves, that is.

And the fact that they can't is exactly what Acton meant.

This is why Orwell wrote those books. To help us see through this bullshit.

And we will continue to get the governments we deserve until we do exactly that.

Power and responsibility

If there is anything I have come to realize, sadly, from this period, it is that power, far too often, is an explicit exercise in escaping responsibility, much of the time. It is about blaming someone else for the mistakes of those who have it. It is about the absence of integrity, far too often.

Not always. But too often to count.

That is why Lord Acton was so skeptical of it and those who have it. And he was right. And that kind of corruption does not discriminate based on ideology or party or any other factor other than the independent integrity of those involved. And even that is not too difficult to compromise with enough muscle. Which is why people do it. No matter how much it builds dishonesty - dishonesty, especially, about the effectiveness of governing efforts - into government.

It doesn't have to be that way. But we'd have to get more honest for it to change. And the most important bit of honesty would be admitting the limits of power to improve our lives.

One day, perhaps. Until then. We get the government we vote for.

And thank our lucky stars that we have opposition parties, checks and balances, and all the ways that we can check and challenge power in liberal democracies to make them more liberal and more genuinely democratic, as we move forward more honestly.

In the meantime, we live with the consequences of the lies we tell ourselves and one another in lieu of something more honest.

And we move, hopefully, toward a day when we can be more honest and compassionate, and everything that is entailed with more genuine progress.