Beyond Polarities: Occupying the "Third Space"

Someone sent me a thank-you note recently which contained a quote by William Hazlitt that I quite loved: "The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up." Hazlitt never knew about blogging (obviously), but the quote captures the state of me and my brain cells these days. Sometimes it is really hard to get into writing-wet-suit gear and dive in.

One thing did wind me up this week. I finally got to see "The King's Speech." and went straight to heaven. You wouldn't think the relationship between a reluctant would-be king who stammers with his speech therapist could take you there but, trust me, it does. I used to think Ralph Fiennes had the best eyes in the business, but now, he has been toppled, just like some Middle East despot. The entire center of gravity in "The King's Speech" emanates from Colin Firth's eyes. They allow you to track the agony of a suffocating affliction in a way that will haunt you forever.

As for my synchronistic hit this past week, it arrived while reading "Don't Look Back," a profile in The New Yorker (by Ryan Lizza) of the 57-year-old, six-term California Republican congressman recently elected Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Darrell Issa. Lizza refers to Issa as "Obama's tormenter," since he is now the head of a committee which "may at any time conduct investigations of any matter." In the middle of the article there was a cartoon inserted of a homeless (or jobless) man sitting comfortably in a chair on the street, his legs crossed, and holding a saw in his hand. Nearby is a sign which says: "Tattoo Removal, $50." Synchronistically the perfect image, I thought to myself, for Republican overkill. Current Republicans have taken reductionist views to the point where if the government takes any positive action, it is considered bad. To be a Republican now means that the government only takes negative actions: cutting taxes, cutting services, cutting regulations, and the like.

Issa is the man who once described Obama as "one of the most corrupt Presidents in modern times," who believes climate change is a fraud, and who has publicly made known his intention to harass the Obama administration with endless subpoenas and investigations, as a way to distract and weaken the President before the 2012 election. Meanwhile House Republicans say they want to cut $100 billion from domestic spending this year, even if it means throwing thousands of federal and state employees out of work. One Republican Study Committee has called for the elimination of the Legal Services Corp., which provides legal help to people who can't afford a lawyer, the elimination of Amtrak, NPR, and NEA subsidies and community development grants, and slashing the federal work force by 15 percent. Darrell Issa intends to be the background music to all this, taunting the alligator and throwing up roadblocks, while Tea Party-backed candidates , in alphabetic order, have served notice that there will be no compromise in matters of federal debt reduction.

One account I read on Ben Smith's Politico blog states that it took less than three weeks for the new Republican Congressional leadership to claim credit for job growth after they had prevented tax increases for the rich. The landslide election, combined with the recent tax vote, they said, had sent a positive signal to businesses and provided the certainty they needed in order to expand.

Right after the midterm "shellacking" that gave Republicans control of the House, New Yorker columnist George Packer predicted that the level of extremism and partisanship would go way up. There would be little mercy and a great deal of rancor, he said, adding that we are facing one of the ugliest political periods in his lifetime.

And then the gun shots rang out in Tucson.

Suddenly, incentives rose for not riding the horses of invective full gallop. Unchecked venom had become a bomb with the fuse lit. I saw the faces of Congressmen on TV that day and the next, and every single one of them looked ashen. The issue of partisanship had taken on a whole new dimension: no one was exempt. Flaws in the democratic system had (once again) revealed themselves as potentially fatal. You could smell the fear in the air. Warfare politics had just produced this sickening testimonial. Yet, in some ways, it was a gift. The President got his unexpected chance, and he took it, and he ran with it.

Stepping into the breach, Barack Obama reverted to his indelible, core posture: occupying the "third space," where people can be civil, exchange ideas, and interweave competitive relationships without rancor. He soothed, he inspired, and in the aftermath, he exemplified the kinds of bridging that will be needed for all future governmental tasks. A lack of civility did not cause this tragedy, the President assured, but only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation. Instead of pointing fingers or assigning blame, he exhorted us to "use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

I pull an unread book off the shelf, "Necessary Wisdom: Meeting the Challenges of a New Cultural Maturity" by Charles M. Johnston. Tell me something relevant to what I am writing, I ask, opening the book at random and hoping for something useful to reveal itself. Sometimes this works, sometimes not.

"In chapters ahead," it says on p.75 where my hand falls, "we will examine a wide array of major future social challenges: issues of the environment, ethics, education, labor relations, health care, and more. In every case, we will find traditionally liberal and traditionally conservative viewpoints inadequate either for providing the needed solutions or for even fully framing what needs to be asked. Decisions in times ahead will require an increasing ability to think in terms of the whole living picture."
And from the previous page: "The back-and-forth warfare of partisan politics serves increasingly only to mire our good intentions in bureaucratic gridlock. Left opposed to right is simply not big enough to hold the new questions. More and more we should see leaders setting aside party ideologies to propose programs inconceivable from either side alone and inconceivable even through compromise."

So, if the Tucson tragedy can teach us anything, it will be this germinal truth--in today's world, using a saw to cut the mustard is not going to work. Identifying with one half of a polar opposite and disowning the other is not going to work. This doesn't necessarily mean, as Johnston points out and as our President so astutely understands, being friends with everyone. But it does mean entering into a creatively potent relationship with your adversary. And this is something Our Man in the White House knows how to do better than anybody. He knows how to live in Johnston's "third space." He knows this is the place that will offer a new start for putting together a new picture. Only time will tell whether the rest of us are willing to join him there.

Tragedy in Tucson: The Fatal Convergence of Politics and Madness

As a blogger who mostly stalks contrasts and synchronicities, this has been quite a week. The attempt by a lone gunman to assassinate a Democratic congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, while she was meeting with constituents in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, instantaneously unleashed predictable and bitter partisan posturing, each side menacing the other with accusations and blame. Was this terrible crime the handiwork of a single "bat-shit crazy" person, as Rush Limbaugh was quick to declare, or had it been torqued by right-wing, excessively violent, anti-government rhetoric? It wasn't long before both political parties were scrambling to control the narrative of what had happened by attributing blame to the other side.

The gunman, Jared Loughner, had already shown warning signs at Pima Community College--of paranoia, jumbled speech, scary outbursts--and believed he was a victim of government mind control, indicating possible psychotic illness. But then, paranoid speeches about government and senseless, inflammatory rhetoric punctuated by scary outbursts festoon the phrase-making of public figures like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck on a regular basis. You could say, as columnist Leonard Pitts did say, that these individuals mainstream a brand of political discourse that is "a national disgrace, hateful, poisonous and coarse," continuously stoking divisions through hatred, lies, and fear.

Palin, however, was quick to proclaim innocence, stating unequivocally that "acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own." and individuals are thus accountable for their own actions. Meanwhile, "irresponsible statements" from critics "incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn." Despite her efforts to exonerate herself, it was hard not to draw certain inferences and parallels. Palin's comments, meant to disassociate her brand from any remorse or blame, reeked anew of the the common Tea Party mantra: "Don't Tread on Me," as she ended up threatening her accusers of committing "blood libel."

Speaking, as far as I can tell, for many people, James Tarantino, a student at a local community college in Roanoke, wrote a commentary published in the Roanoke Times, in which he chastised the media for using the event to discredit Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, and to make conservatives look bad. There is no proof, he argued, that current political rhetoric fueled the young man's shooting spree. And of course, he's right: no evidence of such a link has come to light.

But the crucial point here is not whether the killer was (or was not) a proven Sarah Palin-Glenn Beck groupie. The real point is that Giffords herself felt under threat from the "crosshairs" map posted on Sarah Palin's Facebook page, that targeted a list of 20 Democrats running for re-election--with the crosshairs of a gun sight superimposed over their districts--and exhortations elsewhere to her followers to take up arms and "reload," with the suggestion that "if ballots don't work, bullets will." At least three other of the 20 members of Congress on Palin's map had also, like Giffords, been hit with vandalism and death threats.

In March 2010, Giffords openly voiced her disquiet about being "targeted" in an interview on MSNBC: "...we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, and when people do that, they've gotta realize there are consequences of that action," she commented, as it has turned out, rather presciently. So, is Palin's targeting relevant to any discussion of the shootings? You betcha! given that Giffords considered the map a threat to her safety, and had expressed her fears more than once, both publicly and privately. It is hard to see as totally coincidental the fact that the same Congresswoman who had complained about the recurrent use of gun imagery was subsequently shot through the head while holding a small public rally.

Having gotten this far with my thoughts, I realized I was somehow missing the final clincher. Where, exactly, was I headed with this piece anyway? What was I really trying to say? I had not yet experienced the synchronistic buzz (that "Aha" moment) which usually makes the raison d'etre of what I am writing perfectly clear to me. In short, I still had no punch line pulling it all together.

Yesterday being Sunday, I routinely checked out Frank Rich's column in the New York Times. (A friend of mine insists that Rich and I seem to share an inside track when we analyze things, often coming from the same angle and drawing similar conclusions, completely independently.) This time she was undoubtedly right, because waiting there was the precise punch line I had been looking for. It dropped out of the sky on top of me from Rich's opening headline--the title of his article--which was:

"NO ONE LISTENED TO GABRIELLE GIFFORDS." Will they listen now, I wondered?

Schmuck of the Year

Inevitably, the arrival of a new year ushers in a cover story for the winner of Time magazine's "Person of the Year." This year it is Mark Zuckerberg, the nerdy lad who invented Facebook while he was still a student at Harvard. Now, at age 26, he has become a multi-billionaire presiding over an online empire that currently boasts some 550 million members, 70% of whom live outside the U.S. This means that one out of every dozen people on the planet is a Facebook user. Personal disclosure: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but I am not among them. (I couldn't even stay the course when seeing "The Social Network.")

By wiring together one twelfth of humanity into a single network--a social entity, according to Time, almost twice as large as the U.S. itself--Mark Zuckerberg has earned the distinction of having changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale; we have entered the Facebook age, and Zuckerberg is the one who brought us here. In his profile on Zuckerberg, Lev Grossman presents a likeable-enough guy, someone who doesn't publicly preen or reveal much about himself. He may be a billionaire, but he's not particularly into material things. He drives what Grossman calls "the automotive equivalent of a hair shirt," ie, a black Acura TSX, and he's already pledged to give away at least half of his wealth over the course of his lifetime to the campaign organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

"The thing that I really care about, Zuckerberg states, "is making the world more open and connected." Facebook encourages revealing your true self, not some anonymous, invented, or disguised virtual double. When you log on to Facebook, it is to meet up with your friends: a world of people voluntarily sharing things, staying in touch, having a voice in the world. All things considered, the enterprise is pretty benign in its intention. The idea of VOLUNTARY sharing is key.

Which is possibly why Time named Zuckerberg "Person of the Year" instead of Julian Assange, the orchestrator of WikiLeaks--even though Assange was the actual front winner in their online poll. Time describes Zuckerberg and Assange as two sides of the same coin, in that both of them express a desire for openness and transparency. As far as I am concerned, the similarities end there. Assange's transparency is totally involuntary, with the goal of incriminating and disempowering big institutions and governments. In his own words, Assange is fomenting "a world-wide movement of mass leaking"--dumping secret documents into the public domain on a scale without precedent--with the intention of bringing about (again in his own words) "total annihilation of the current U.S. regime."

Friends (which includes many of mine) and supporters of Julian Assange refer to him as "a breath of fresh air," someone who is performing an act of great public service. They like seeing government and corporations take a hit, and consider these transcriptions of tapes to be like sacred oracles, giving everyone access to the truth at last. Big exhale. The truth at last! Yeah, but... what they have failed to fathom, in my humble opinion, is that in reality Julian Assange is a malevolent wizard who, much like the sorcerer's apprentice, has built a machine that no one knows how to stop--and loosed it on the world. "If something happens to us," he has baldly declared, "the key parts will be released automatically." This year's breach of containment spilled nearly half a million documents that included classified military documents from Afghanistan and Iran, and a stream of diplomatic cables. The idea of a secure secret is over. Tech-savvy insurgents have unleashed an anonymous, ruthless monster that is seemingly resistant to attack. It could be the beginning of many missteps from which it turns out, we cannot recover.

Where Zuckerberg's world is filled with "potential friends," according to Time, Assange's is filled with "real and imagined enemies." Given that Assange's operative concept consists of anarchy, I personally applaud Time's decision to go with Zuckerberg instead. What is more, for his blood-curdling vein of hostility and nihilism, I relish the chance to designate Julian Assange as my personal "Schmuck of the Year."

This is NOT meant to be construed in any way as an implicit defense, or feigned ignorance, of the multiple war crimes and deceits perpetrated by the U.S. government around the globe over decades. When former Secretary of State Colin Powell made his trumped-up yellow-cake case for going to war in Iraq, I already knew, without WikiLeaks, that it was all lies. Because I happen to think that Julian Assange is a cyber-terrorist creep does not mean I am in support of U.S. foreign policy and its imperial wars. I am not. Nor do I mean to imply that Assange is the only deserving candidate out there for the title of Schmuck of the Year that I have bestowed on him. (Pace Michael Moore, who contributed to Assange's bail and defends him vigorously. I still love you.)

Merry Everything to All!

Virgil and I, who are busy all week attending (or giving) holiday parties, send you our warmest greetings of the season and wishes for a prosperous and scintillating 2011. We will be back on track soon, hopefully with some new cultural and political lunge lines. Meanwhile, do not forget, Virgil advises, that "the present is a natural reservoir where tricksters learn to dive and swim the backstroke."

The Stag Nation

American politics seems to have mutated into a game of playing shit-ball, with our unfortunate President as the ball. It doesn't really matter which team you are on, both sides are going for the jugular.

I was absolutely horrified last Sunday (Dec. 4th) when Frank Rich, arguably the New York Times' best liberal commentator, wrote a column implying that Obama was now a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. WTF? I thought. Republicans were threatening to boycott not just the President's entire legislative agenda, but to hold the whole government hostage, unless the Bush-era tax cuts were extended for the top 2 percent of richest Americans--something which Obama explicitly opposes. Despite this outrageous threat, Obama seemed all too willing to negotiate a deal. Stockholm Syndrome (as defined by the FBI) is when a hostage concentrates on his captors' "good side" and tries to please them. It's a term which describes capitulation to the enemy as a form of mental illness. Obama had not yet cut any deal with Republicans at that point, but Rich was already seeing the handwriting on the wall: the President was going to surrender "his once considerable abilities to act, decide, or think" and cave in to Republican blackmail.

So distraught was I at this below-the-belt ad hominem attack on the President by a writer I mostly admire, that I immediately copied out the piece and emailed it to a few friends, asking for their response. One wrote back, "OK, so Obama is Patty Hearst and the GOP is the Symbionese Liberation Army? Hell, I don't know what to think anymore." Soon afterwards came these reassuring insights from my friend Jane Vance. They made me want to bring out the champagne.

Jane stated unequivocally that for Rich to describe Obama's diplomatic demeanor and willingness to compromise as evidence of Stockholm Syndrome was just plain weird, and stupid. "Obama doesn't act like a hostage," she said. "His policies may be hostage, but his psychology isn't. He doesn't try to collaborate because he is fearful and submissive. That's not why healthy people cooperate and compromise. Since when did the wish or the ability to harmonize become so suspect as to be associated with trauma and disease?"

The minute I read this I thought: OK girlfriend, you just hit the ball right out of the park.

"Stockholm Syndrome," Jane went on, "means that a person is so degraded that he has to invent a perverse hope. Obama isn't degraded...[he] is still a kite, and with enough give he would fly. There is no flattening him...If he has any syndrome, it is optimism, which works better than stagnation. We are that beast now, the masculine complement to the Mama Grizzlies: the Stag Nation."

More like the stagnating nation, I thought, acutely concerned about how any president could possibly bust this particular roadblock: Republicans had clearly drawn their line in the sand, stating that nothing happens unless the rich get their tax cut.

Obama, being Obama, had drawn no such line and remained coolly open to negotiation, opening himself up thereby to yet more hateful rants from the Left on the Huffington Post and elsewhere. "Obama's style," Robert Kuttner wrote on HP, "is not to draw bright lines, but to blur them. He will never beat the stuffings out of the Republicans...[so] let's stop pretending. Barack Obama is a disaster as a crisis president...the more that he is pummeled, the more he bends over."

So much for playing shit-ball with the President, Mr. Kuttner. Can I just say, right here and now, how truly repugnant I find your comments? You claim the problem is Obama's ineffectuality--a "failure to know how to fight and lead as a progressive." But did Obama ever once, in two long years of campaigning, bill himself as "a leader of progressives?" On the contrary, he has ALWAYS calibrated himself as a "postpartisan leader," representative not just of one party (or one party's agenda), but of "all of the American people." That definitely includes you, Mr. Kuttner, but it also includes people who are not you.

When Republicans obstruct Obama implacably, when Democrats such as Kuttner villify him for "caving" to Republicans, condescendingly demanding that he "grow a spine," Obama continues to do what he always said he would do: govern the country as a whole, not just represent a single component of it. Indeed, the most stalwart and admirable thing about this president is how much he remains true to his original commitment to govern in a bipartisan manner, no matter how much he is beset about this on all sides. "It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right," Paul Krugman wrote recently in the New York Times.

"I have not been able to budge them," Obama explained, after he had accomplished the impossible task of managing to cut a deal with the Republicans anyway.

"I realize It's tempting," he told everyone afterwards, in a not-so-veiled reference to Rich, "not to negotiate with hostage-takers," but then he flipped the whole argument around, redefining exactly who the hostages were: not him but the American people. "I could have picked a big fight," he said. But instead he chose to compromise, because the deal he got was the best one for the American people. "This country was founded on compromise," he somewhat caustically reminded everyone.

Democrats immediately reacted like hot-dogs sizzling and popping in the microwave. As expected and feared, their leader had predictably "caved." However, at least one Republican pundit (Charles Krauthammer) described Obama's deal as the "swindle of the year" for Republicans, because Obama had gotten so much of what he wanted--and managed to boost his re-election chances in 2012 to boot. Yesterday, on Meet the Press, Mayor Bloomberg sang Obama's praises and heartily approved his deal. "The country," he said, "needs this president to succeed. If he goes down, we all go down, so we need to pull together and get behind him." A voice of sanity in the wilderness. Someone who gets it, Mr. Kuttner. Maybe try listening to him?

"Look," says Virgil, who has suddenly loomed into view and is pointing in the direction of the White House. My alligator assistant is shirtless, his belly soft and pink, still wearing his old Dodger cap. He flips the cap around so I can better see what he's saying. "Nix on all the worry about Obama," he counsels. "The man is a blue aquarium light in the dark corridor where everyone else is stomping. He doesn't have Stockholm Syndrome. Not only is his spine more than ample, he's got a very fancy pair of antlers as well."

When Does Partisanship Morph into Treason?

It may be just an amateur's opinion, but treason is when Republican Eric Cantor of Virginia meets independently with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to express his sympathies and allegiance to Israel, stating that he stands with Israel's leader against his own President--and that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the administration in defending the interests of Israel.

Treason is when Republican Senator Jon Kyle of Arizona risks the President's (and America's) international credibility by sabotaging passage of the START treaty, designed to reduce the proliferation of nuclear warheads and set up a mutual system of inspections, as a means of deliberately damaging Obama's "reset" of America's ties with Russia for crass political opportunism.

Treason is when Republican state governors band together to pass a "repeal amendment" that would allow a super-majority of state legislatures to overturn federal laws and sabotage the entire federal system of government. It's when the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Republican Darrell Issa from California, declares his intention to hold one or two hearings a day--hopefully maybe even "seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks"--to investigate Democratic policies like the stimulus, the health care bill, and the bank bailouts.

Treason is when the co-chair of the President's fiscal commission on deficit reduction, Republican Alan Simpson, gleefully predicts that the new freshman class of congressional Republicans will do their best to shut down the government, if the national debt limit is not capped. (The debt limit now is at $14.3 trillion, and it will probably be reached in early 2011, so that if Congress doesn't pass legislation to raise it, the government will no longer be able to borrow money, whether or nor not the economy is in recovery.) Simpson has called those who would force the government into default "sharp cookies," claiming that closing down the government is exactly what they came here for.

Treason is a bunch of white Republicans in Congress who have decided it is politically smart to show disrespect for the first black American president, and who treat him, in Maureen Dowd's inimitable phrase, "like a dirt sandwich." This is a dishonor to the office of the presidency in full view of the whole world. By definition, if you Google it, treason is a crime that undermines the offender's government. It is disloyalty by virtue of inviting mutiny towards one's country or sovereign, or aiding its enemies by attempting to overthrow the government through subversive behavior.

"The fact is, Paul Krugman wrote recently in the New York Times, "that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it's doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party's cooperation--cooperation that won't be forthcoming."

I think even Google would have to concur that what is happening in America today is more than just shameful and distressing. This isn't your garden-variety partisanship. By definition, it has to count as nothing less than treason.

Have a Wonderful Day, and God Bless!

I've been wondering what to write about today for this holiday weekend? Maybe how North Korea is doing a scary war dance on an island military base a few miles off of South Korea? Maybe about those dastardly Republicans who refused to find time to accept an invitation to the White House this week, thereby snubbing the President? They are the same guys threatening to undermine his nuclear START treaty with Russia, a big issue for me. Meanwhile, I'm off soon to Thanksgiving dinner with my longtime "holiday family," to which I am taking my favored stringbean dish, laced with yellow peppers, gouda cheese, fresh dill and tarragon, olives, and pine nuts--added to make the humdrum beans more alluring.

But then, what actually lit up my day today was getting a personal note from the President:

Suzi --

When Michelle and I sit down with our family to give thanks today, I want you to know that we'll be especially grateful for folks like you.

Everything we have been able to accomplish in the last two years was possible because you have been willing to work for it and organize for it.

And every time we face a setback, or when progress doesn't happen as quickly as we would like, we know that you'll be right there with us, ready to fight another day.

So I want to thank you -- for everything.

I also hope you'll join me in taking a moment to remember that the freedoms and security we enjoy as Americans are protected by the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces. These patriots are willing to lay down their lives in our defense, and each of us owes them and their families a debt of gratitude.

Have a wonderful day, and God bless.

Barack

Call me a cornball, if you must, but something about this brought tears to my eyes. I think it was the Suzi/Barack thing that hit a nerve. I just couldn't think of a single other national leader who might have written me like this. I was moved enough to send a reply:

"And right back at you, Barack. Enjoy the respite of the day. You've earned it. We are so lucky to have you in our midst! Hidden among the hate-mongers are many who love your sweetness and your willingness to struggle tirelessly under the most horrible conditions on our behalf. Thanks for your wishes. Suzi"

Recently I read that Cleopatra wrote her love letters on tablets of black onyx. Getting this note on my email today was a bit like getting a love letter from Cleopatra. Despite being a mass-mailing, it felt just so tender, heartfelt, intimate. And such a wonderful way of saying a very Happy Thanksgiving to all!