Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Politics

  • Beware: McCain Could Win

    My cynical side compels me to state that I think it not at all unlikely that McCain will win the election.  Why?  Because We The People are generally unwilling to embrace reality.  I suppose that’s one way of saying that Americans are stupid.  Sorry, can’t help it.

    Here is a New York Times piece detailing Governor Palin’s shortfalls.  Partisanship aside, this is a model of a small-town mayor who believes in controlling “her town” with a iron fist.  Unfortunately, she’s not in charge of a small town, she’s in charge of a state and she somehow doesn’t “get” that this kind of behavior is unethical.  The media—at least in print—is doing its job, bringing this stuff to the general public.

    Will the public respond rationally?  Depending on which set of polls you look at, no.  It’s not so much that anyone thinks this kind of person is somehow a good politician, although there are those who will read these charges, shrug and say “So?”  It is that the charges will not be believed or they will be misunderstood.  See, the New York Times is one of those Liberal rags.

    But the allegations can be checked.  These things are not hidden.  Yet the perception will be that Palin is being unfairly put upon.

    There are a number of good, sound reasons to reject the McCain-Palin ticket.  There are a number of good, sound reasons to vote for Obama-Biden.  None of those will, I think, be determining factors.  The Republican’s Karl Rove Machine is back, running full-tilt-boogie, to turn this campaign into one of personalities, avoiding issues.  American’s like tough, simple-minded grit, it seems, even when there is no substance to back it up.  This is a sports nation, after all, and the intellectual doesn’t play tackle in the national psyche.  It appeared for a time that Obama had a shot, that he had managed to keep the discourse on the issues, but that’s deteriorating in favor of the soundbite of personal combat.  The Republicans have seized on the Lipstick comment like a drowning man to a life raft and are running with it as if Obama actually intended to insult Palin.  (If he had intended to insult her, he could doubtless do so in terms so elevated that they wouldn’t know how to respond—cheap shots haven’t been his style thus far.)

    But it’s not McCain or Palin who will be responsible for victory should they win.  It will be the bone-deep fearful dull-witedness of the American voter who responds like a rabbit in mating season to personal attacks.  Politics in America often devolve to cut fights and that’s the game McCain is playing now.  We remember those as kids, don’t we?  The one option you didn’t have was to just not play, because that automatically tagged you a wimp and a loser.  It takes brains and maturity to realize that the game itself is worthless.  I’m afraid I’m not sanguine about our collective brains and maturity.

  • Gay Marriage and the State of My State

    This is another repost from 2004. As the election nears, this may be something we hear more about (again!), especially since McCain has selected a pit bull for morality as a running mate—which is really a clever move, reminiscent of Nixon’s selection of Spiro Agnew to be his attack dog. Utah of course will vote red based on this kind of stuff, as will other states. It bears a re-airing, and so…

    You may have heard. Missouri has become the first state in the union to establish a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. More will follow, of course, but it’s something to be the first.

    I live here. This is my state.

    Shame on us.

    This was not, however, unexpected. Did anyone actually believe Americans, especially in the middle of the country, are ready, en masse, to embrace such a substantial change in attitude toward an institution that extends back to the murkiness of prehistory?

    Prehistory. Genesis notwithstanding, I make that claim based on the fact that we have no documentary evidence that at a given moment Marriage was invented. It’s something homo sapiens brought with it into the historical period, which is really only that part of time in which we have had writing. Writing that survived, to be more specific. For all we know there may be a cache of stone tablets or whatever yet undiscovered extending that time backward reliably by a century or millennia or more. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the historical era has lasted (reliably) for ten thousand years. We can quibble over certain dates, but we’ve got evidence suggesting that humans have lived in organized social groups for at least that long, which suggests that we’ve been doing so for a lot longer. Marriage has been with us just as has been agriculture and the domesticated dog. It came with the package.

    By marriage I mean a formalized union establishing what we call a Family Unit. For purposes of this discussion, I’m only interested in the Formal part of that. It’s quite self-evident that humans come together in unions of various types quite spontaneously and without the need of an overriding authority to give us permission. All the surface (and most of the deep core) attributes of marriage are manifest in self-selected associations all the time. We have never needed marriage for sex, the Fifties notwithstanding, and since the Seventies we have evolved a line on the Census to cover people with not-formalized arrangements—POSSLQ: Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters.
    The fact that we have had the concept of “common-law marriage” for a long, long time proves that such arrangements have also been around for long, long time. Communities recognizing this fact decide at some point that, whether the participants like it or not, the condition constitutes a marriage. This was eminently practical in the days of expanding frontiers, when more often than not the formalizing apparatus was nowhere to be found (because just as often it was intentionally left behind, a lesson most people didn’t quite pick up on).

    (I recall a hysterically funny argument in high school—my first ever encounter with a hardcore fundamentalist—over the status of Adam and Eve. Who married them? No priests and it was not stated in Genesis that they were husband and wife, but rather companions. Not only weren’t they married, but obviously they practiced some form of birth control since the kiddies didn’t show up until after they were banished from Eden. Maybe that was the definition of paradise then—lot’s of sex, free food, and no kids. The reply was that God had married them and while in a state of grace, they did not have sex. The older I get, the more I think this is fractured thinking, especially when one recognizes how often fundamentalist groups, regardless of what other purpose they may have, subjugate the women and turn them into sex toys.)

    Okay, so we have this Institution called Marriage. Long history. After so much time it has become something other than a solution to a problem. We’ve hardwired it, seemingly, into our culture. Every culture has it. It’s so basic that for the most part no one questions it as a cultural phenomenon, only it’s imposition as a requirement on the individual. I may reject the idea for myself, but I don’t really question it across social landscapes. Marriage is emotionally and financially useful—so much so that all attempts to rid ourselves of it don’t even get off the ground in any meaningful way. I mean, even people like me—who do not live in a formalized union with our significant other—come in time to consider ourselves “married”. (And pleasantly so. It is not, when it works, a Bad Thing. If it were, it would not be so tenaciously part of our cultural identity.)

    So we defend it. We protest over the specifics—its implementation, its uses in hiding inequities between men and women, its cultural drawbacks across social lines when questions of economic and educational status arise—but we don’t question the basic idea. We realize, at some times more than others, that we conduct it wrong, that we abuse it, that it doesn’t work the way it should, but we’ve never really questioned it as a desirable practice.

    Given which, it should come as no surprise to anyone that groups who are barred from it would wish to eliminate those barriers.

    This is not, historically, a Gay issue. But you can see the same arguments cycled over and over again in every instance that a social norm was challenged.

    Everyone should know what Miscegenation is. If you don’t, open a dictionary. Then start checking social histories.

    Basically, miscegenation is a term applied to the practice of sexual intercourse with an out group. In America, it was against the law for white people to have sex with (not to mention marry) black people. (Yes, I know, a lot of mixed blood Africans found their way to the auction block in the Old South, fetching higher prices for their lighter skins. Racial laws were in place to prevent their existence, but there you have it—and why let a little illegal screwing stop us from making some money?) Go see the movie Showboat for a dramatic example. Not only was the fictional couple unable to travel south because he was white and she a mulatto and because they were married, both could end up in jail—not only that, but the movie studio wouldn’t even allow a black woman to play the part, substituting Ava Gardner for Lena Horne. In fact, laws forbidding interracial marriage were not overturned in the United States until 1967—just in case you thought these things existed only in the Dark Ages of our history.

    The LAW was brought to bear to prevent marriage between two groups society had decided shouldn’t come together that way. For a more violent, but no less savage example, look at the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany. Same idea, carried to horrific extremes.

    Examples of less formalized restrictions abound—look at Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Class is more often than not the basis of such restrictions. Often religion. Aristocrats have always been barred from various associations on both those bases. The whole awkward debacle of Prince Charles and Princess Di was born out of the religious problem—the woman Charles actually wanted was (gasp) Catholic! Can’t have that. (Diana was not only the right religion, but, ostensibly, a virgin—another holdover from a less enlightened time.)

    In every instance over time we have grown out of it and rejected such proscriptions. After three or four generations in this country, what difference does it make if an Italian marries a Russian, or a Protestant marries a Jew? At least, where the law is concerned. What difference does it make if a white marries a black or an Asian? The law no longer concerns itself with enforcing such restrictions because we as a society have gotten to the point of recognizing the stupidity of such laws.

    But here’s a new one. People of the same sex wish to marry.
    What?

    I imagine that for a lot of people who don’t initially react with the distorted horror of some religious objection, the first response is:

    Why?

    In one of the most superficial readings, this is a legitimate question. The basic assumption we grow up with (whether we maintain it into adulthood or not) is that marriage is for the formation of a Family. And “family” means mommy, daddy, and children. It’s a Standard Model image that is very difficult to disregard when questions of social propriety or morality or just plain tradition arise. Basic biology—you need a male and a female to make more of either.

    So, the question follows, what would be the point of two men or two women getting married to each other?

    I said superficial. For this question to have any real meaning, one has to accept the most basic concept of the purpose of marriage.

    But once you put it that way—The Purpose of Marriage–you open the box and let out the genie, because up to that point most people don’t actually regard marriage as having A Purpose. It’s one of those things that simply Is. We marry because we’ve always married. Because in its way, it is Natural. What need to discuss Purpose when considering something Natural? What is the purpose of a flower?

    And at that point, if one has a scintilla of intellectual honesty, one realizes that marriage is not natural. Sexual partnering is. Living in a community is. Friendship is. But the formal condition of Marriage is an invention. Like rituals. Like all communal institutions. It’s an artifice imposed upon us, which we impose or embrace ourselves, but it is not Natural. It has Purpose. We do it for certain reasons. We don’t do it to find love—love, it is presumed, is already there before the proposal is made. (We certainly don’t do it to maintain love—it doesn’t work, obviously.)

    All the emotional components of a bonded relationship happen between two people whether there is a formal arrangement or not. So what do we do marriage for? Stripped of its romanticized components–which happen outside, in spite of, but certainly independent of marriage—we find a social form that fulfills certain requirements of community.

    Rousseau had it pretty right—it’s a contract.

    No, really. You might be surprised how many people don’t—or won’t—see it that way, but under all the pretty clothes, big cakes, photographs, champagne, and hoopla, society in fact does see it that way. Fill out these forms, meet these criteria, and you too can enter into a contractual obligation that makes you into a fiscal unit obligated for each others’ debts, with all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges thereto appertaining. The interface between family and society has always rested on one basic question: Who’s going to pay for what?

    This may sound cold, but when it works, this has proven to be a very efficient boon to the human condition. Just consider the one aspect of this debate that has everyone so concerned—children. Until the last century, reliable contraception has been, well, not. Hit or miss. Often people with money got better product or could afford to “take care of” the problem by other means. Children are the inevitable by-product of humans indulging in sex without benefit of contraception. (This is a no-brainer, and may be too obvious to even state, but I don’t make assumptions like that anymore: people are dense when it comes to certain topics.) Children require.

    Children require Everything. They are, to put it as bluntly as possible, expensive.

    So who will pay for them?

    My theory is that the institution of marriage evolved over time to by law and custom divide the responsibilities for children in such a way that the community would not be adversely affected by their production. In other words, once you’re married, whatever you produce is your responsibility. You pay for it.

    Now, of course, the community will help. The way it’s come down to us today, the community will help a lot. Schools, doctors, daycare, etc etc, in various forms and to different degrees, the community provides support for families. Always has. The inadequacies of that support are legitimate political questions, but underlying it is the assumption that there is a division of labor. You, the parents, will do XYZ, we the community will do ABC, and somewhere between those extremes we will have a working social structure.

    But marriage is the legal framework.

    Illegitimacy, although not the stigma it once was, still has drawbacks unless the parent that keeps the kids is very careful, very resourceful, and very There. The relationship between community and single parent is somewhat different. We’re working on it.
    But because we’re working on it, because it’s becoming less stigmatizing, it is clear that marriage is no more than one possible arrangement of the social contract. It’s not the only thing that will work for us.

    However, it’s so old, so well practiced, so ingrained, that it is in many ways the easiest way to handle all these matters. All the benefits accrue to the married couple without their even being aware of it.

    It’s that lack of awareness that pushes issues like Gay marriage into the realm of morality as opposed to a logistical problem. Because people who don’t think about it believe marriage is somehow natural, who don’t understand that it is a contractual arrangement that simply helps keep the proverbial boat unrocked, they see this issue as something Unnatural and therefore a religious issue rather than a social issue. (Of course, we have conflated religious and social issues in such a way that it is often difficult to tease them apart.)

    By now—after all the debating, the media coverage, the outraged speeches from both sides, and the judicial reactions across the country—it might occur to some people to ask: what rights? I mean, part of the problem of debating this issue is that we in fact live in such an open society, with so few restrictions on personal behavior (yes, I said so few, all you who think we live in an oppressive state take note) that the difference between a married couple and a couple simply cohabiting is hardly noticeable. Those differences only emerge in extreme circumstances.

    Representative Henry Hyde (R-Ill), while chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary in 1996, requested that the General Accounting Office make up a list identifying “federal laws in which benefits, rights and privileges are contingent on marital status.” The GAO response ran to 75 pages. You can go look at it online, at www.gao.gov/archive/1997/og97016.pdf

    It turns out there are over a 1000 federal benefits. Add to those roughly 400 state benefits, and you can see that this is not a question of just a few “niceties” married people enjoy that make little difference. It makes a huge difference.

    The laws break down into 14 groups:

    Social security and related programs
    Housing, food stamps
    veterans benefits
    taxation
    federal civilian and military service benefits
    employment benefits
    immigration, naturalization, aliens
    Indians
    trade, commerce, intellectual property
    financial disclosure and conflict of interest
    crimes and family violence
    loans, guarantees, payments in agriculture
    federal natural resources and related laws
    miscellaneous
    Among those, let’s list a few of the biggies:

    judicial protections and evidentiary immunity
    crime victims’ recovery benefits
    joint filing of customs claims when traveling
    veterans’ discounts on medical care, education, homes loans
    joint filing of tax returns
    inheritance of jointly-owned real and personal property through the right of survivorship
    joint insurance policies for auto, home, and health
    next of kin status in cases of illness or accident
    joint parenting, joint adoption
    wrongful death benefits
    inheritance automatically in the absence of a will

    Many of these benefits can be arranged by legal instrument, if one takes the time and trouble and spends the money on the paperwork. But many cannot be had, regardless. For instance, outside of marriage there’s no guarantee of joint responsibility to the partner and to third parties (children) in such areas as child support, debts to creditors, taxes, and so on.

    A lot of this has to do with money. Please note.

    Money money money. Money makes de vorld go round, de vorld go round, de vorld go round…at least in the bromide made famous by Joel Gray. Ahem.

    We have a lot of myths about marriage these days. Ask anybody and they will tell you that the divorce rate is at fifty percent. It’s not. The peak was reached in 1980-81 and it was 22.6 divorces per 1000 married women over the age 15. As of 2000 it had declined to 18.9 (Personally, I don’t think divorce as such is a terrible thing. We make mistakes. The idea of living unto death with a mistake just isn’t, well, good. We complicate the issue with children, though, and that is a whole other issue—and again it mainly concerns money. It does. Really. Child support, alimony, custody battles. I suppose in that last other issues enter in, like philosophy, religion, mutual animosity. But the legal structure we’ve built around the question of child custody in divorce overwhelming addresses the money issue.)

    Average age of first marriage today is around 27, which is the oldest in the history of the United States.

    Cohabitation is way up. That’s why unmarried couples now get a line in the census. There are close to five million unmarried couples now. There was a time you could be arrested and sentenced to prison for that. State laws, mostly, a lot of which are still on the books, but the sheer numbers militate against any kind of law enforcement crack down on what today nearly 70 % of young people take as a right and consider a good idea, at least as a prelude to marriage.

    Pregnancy rates have declined, and are still declining, even though as a percentage of population unmarried pregnancy has risen.

    That last is important because it directly relates to one of the chief reasons in the past to get married. There are two things to be said about it. The first, and most obvious, is that marriage to start a family is now an elective. People choose to marry, to start families…or not. Because they can. Not only because effective contraception is available, but because the economic opportunities for women have exploded since 1960. Then, a woman would have to be rich or nuts or profoundly unlucky to be stuck raising a child on her own. The job market was closed tight, as a legacy of the post WWII employment adjustment (which kicked a competent, powerful female work force out of jobs for returning veterans to take, and then made every effort possible to instate a single-breadwinner family model according to a stereotype that HAD NEVER EXISTED BEFORE in large enough numbers to merit the attempt) and women simply could not find work that paid sufficiently to raise a family on their own.

    The daughters of Rosie the Riveter changed this by the mid-70s. Or at least started to. We’re still fighting over it, and pay equity is still one of the biggest thorns in the social briar patch. But it is changing.

    We’re not talking about a small amount of money here. If you are an employer with a payroll of a hundred workers, and you can, by whatever means, pay a significant portion of them less–say by a third–depending on the gender make-up of your staff (which should be roughly two-fifths female, I think), you’re looking at enormous savings. If the bases for that pay disparity disappears, your bottomline just got smaller. Multiply that across the fiscal landscape of society and we’re talking about a chunk of change.

    We still, financially at least, prefer that model we erected in the 50s. Male breadwinner, stay-at-home mom. When women charged through the doors into the work force, the economy made adjustments. The buying power of a dollar decreased, the wages of that single breadwinner did not keep pace, requiring two incomes to maintain or do slightly better. The price of women entering the professions, of taking their place as part of the labor force, was the devaluing of the paycheck. Hey, remove the gender question, and just ask what happens when you dump a third to one half more workers into a labor pool and expect the economy to absorb them. You get inflation, you get a value squeeze, and you get a changed social contract.

    Where it becomes obvious that there is a bias can be seen in the credit industry. Single women have more difficulty getting loans. When a divorce occurs, despite the contribution she may have made to the marriage—she may have paid the lion’s share of the bills, in fact—the credit benefit goes to the man, not her. She has to rebuild from scratch. Now, what actual monetary benefit comes of this lopsided mind set I’m not sure—but I am sure there is one. All these things conspire, subversively, to drive women to seek a new marriage. It just becomes easier. When you add the fact that if she has majority custody of children (and often even when she doesn’t) and the added burden of expense on that, plus the fact that she is likely earning less at her job (most of the child support will be going into daycare and school expenses, possibly medical expenses, and doubtless there is a shortfall) AND that she has a harder time getting the same kind of credit established as her male counterpart, well, it must seem simply practical to jump once more into the marriage pool—which, if that one goes bad as well, leaves her with exactly the same credit problems she had after the last one.

    Why am I harping on all this in an editorial about gay marriage? Well, I’m glad you asked that.

    Because if marriage becomes a civil institution legally shorn of all gender qualifications, then none of the aforementioned equity problems can long stand. If the credit industry is suddenly forced to choose between two divorcing males over who “inherits” the credit and who gets penalized; if they are suddenly forced to contend with how to determine who is the dominant breadwinner in a two-female relationship; if employers find that family leave, parental rights, and loss-time due to caretaker duties has no gender basis; if lending institutions find that they can no longer make assumptions about future marital arrangements when considering a loan to a single/divorced/alternately married individual, then the financial (read, book-cooking) bases for inequality disintegrate.

    Why? Because by legalizing gay marriage (and, yes, all you terrified neocons who think the end of the world is nigh because of such things, all the other alternative arrangements, like polygamy, line marriages, communes, etc etc) you legally make marriage an institution between two individuals, with all rights accruing thereto, AND THAT’S IT. No other assumptions can be made.

    Of course things will change. But things have already changed. And will continue to change.

    A word to those who view this as a strictly moral issue. A great deal has been said about how homosexuality is undermining of “traditional values” and that legitimizing it will bring moral ruin. There are two ways to address this.

    The first is to point out that the so-called “moral ruin” attaching to homosexuality is a matter of ostracization. The illegality of it in the past set up a circumstance in which gays found themselves entering clandestine lifestyles in order to find fulfillment—which, of course, since the practices involved could not be conducted in the open like “normal” (read “legal”) relationships, fulfillment became virtually unattainable. Certainly, since openness was impossible, guilt accrued to the act, not so much because the impulse was wrong, but because one had to break the law to do it. Most people, quite outside their sexual orientation, desire to be good citizens, and when forced by circumstance to violate the law or custom, a erosion of one’s sense of citizenship is likely. Look at Prohibition. We turned hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of previously law-abiding citizens into criminals by a change in the law, and one result was the solid establishment of a criminal subculture with which we live to this day. Since it has stopped being the actionable issue of days past, and gays live openly, the moral wrack and ruin has failed to transpire—unless you are one so rooted in apocalyptic neuroses that the very fact that gays live openly constitutes that wrack and ruin.

    The second, of course, is to draw the venom of Scripture on which much of this moral condemnation is based. The key passage is Leviticus 18:22. When you read the rest of that chapter, you find it is a whole screed about proper sexual conduct. Taboos about incest can be found here as well. Expand your reading throughout Leviticus and you find all kinds of stuff which no one today, with the exception of a few fringe cults, would tolerate for a minute. Just for a sample, check out Leviticus chapter 12—this concerns the rituals of childbirth, with references to “uncleanness”. You will note that giving birth to a male child is less unclean than giving birth to a female. Leviticus 15 deals with “sexual impurities” and, of course, the woman gets the worst end of the rules. The first half concerns men with, essentially, the Clap. But the second half deals with a woman’s menstrual cycle.

    But there are others. Leviticus 20 is the penalty chapter. Verse 9 through 17 lists a number of offenses all of which carry the death penalty. Cursing ones parents brings a death sentence. There is somewhere in all this a prescribed “price” for deflowering a man’s daughter. Fine, uplifting family values stuff.

    Anyway, the passage I wish to deal with in this context concerns the applicability of Leviticus to our situation. We go back to Leviticus 18, verses 24 and 25, to wit: “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these practices, for it was by such things that the nations that I have expelled to make way for you made themselves unclean. The land became unclean; I exacted the penalty for its fault and the land had to vomit out its inhabitants.”

    Now, this pertains, of course, to the Chosen People moving into Canaan, from which, presumably, the previous residents were expelled. Of course, Joshua had to do battle with some holdouts, but that’s a trifle.

    Did the land “vomit out” its inhabitants? Apparently not. The entire region, however, was vacated by the Hittite during a massive catastrophe, the details about which we are still rather fuzzy, but seem to have had something to do with the Trojan War. See, it was around the same time. Troy fell and in the aftermath Something Big happened, remarked in many places around the Mediterranean. I would guess a massive economic collapse. The Trojan War, if Homer is to be believed even a little bit, lasted ten years and involved huge resources. Troy was a crossroads in a vast trading network. Its demise no doubt caused more than a little difficulty.

    What does this have to do with Moses and the Tribes? The area into which they moved had been part of the Hittite sphere. A hinterland, really. In the political, economic, and military vacuum following the collapse of the Hittite Empire, the Hebrews moved in against demoralized, unsupported provincials, and kicked them out. Yahweh didn’t do it. Global politics did. Once the Hittite recovered, becoming the Babylonian Empire, they easily swept down, reconquered what had become Israel, and the second Hebrew Exile began.

    Between these two events we have the stories of Joshua, Saul, David, and Solomon. And to a large extent, these people lived in a Hellenized world. Greek culture dominated everywhere except Egypt, which took a while to become Hellenized under the Ptolemies. This is important in relation to the story of David and Jonathan. It makes perfect sense in Greek terms, and it was perfectly homoerotic.

    And David was the favored of Yahweh.

    He also had a man killed so he could take his wife. He remained God’s favorite. He had several hundred wives. Still a favorite. Solomon, his son, had more wives, and lots of concubines, and was one of the principle characters in one of the more erotic love stories in history.

    The inconsistency of Yahweh in these matters makes sense when you realize that all these laws, rather than coming down from Sinai, were manmade. No, I don’t expect fundamentalists to be swayed, but I do expect a little perspective from people less radicalized in their religious outlook. If homosexuality makes you uncomfortable, it’s YOUR problem—you may not refer to Scripture to legitimize your prejudice. Live with it. There is not one single passage in the Bible that says anything at all about gay marriage. There are three beautiful love stories that are clearly homosexual. Ruth and Naomi (the word “clave” is used to describe their relationship, which is exactly the same word used in describing husband-wife relationships); David and Jonathan; and Daniel and Ashpenaz (the Hebrew describing their relationship is chesed v’rachimin–chesed translates as “mercy” but v’rachimin, which is used in a plural form suggesting more than one of its usual meanings, which includes “physical love”).

    But go ahead, peruse Leviticus, read all the rules and restrictions and requirements. The point I wish you to understand is—we don’t do that stuff anymore. Not for a long time have we considered these rules, most of them, useful, nor have we taken to heart the penalties for noncompliance. We live—and have lived for a long while now—in a post-Levitical world.

    And civilization has not come to a halt. In fact, there has been considerable improvement.

    So why pick and choose among laws we no longer pay any attention to when we find one that agrees with our prejudices and claim that we’re in violation of God’s law when we ignore it? (The answer is too obvious to state. I hope so, anyway.)

    When we hear conservative opposition to same-sex marriage, there is always the claim that marriage is between a man and woman for the purpose of having children. While this is certainly the way a majority of marriages play out, it is ridiculous to assume that this is the only reason to be married. But it does in fact support the contention that marriage is, ultimately, an institution with strong, if not primarily, monetary concerns. The production of children has traditionally been a measure of potential wealth for the community. We have entered a period in which this is no longer the case, but it takes time for custom to catch up to reality. It is nevertheless an imposition of prejudice, seeking to dictate not only to gay couples but to straight couples what they OUGHT to be doing. Perhaps when gay marriage is recognized and legitimate, we heterosexuals might find other, more relevant reasons for marriage across the board.

    The bigot will not be swayed. The bigot must be defeated. The bigot hates and then finds justification for hatred. The first thing to do in the fight against bigotry is to learn. If this exegesis has in any way aided that particular quest, well, good. But let me make this final observation: bigotry like this stands only in ignorance, and not simply book ignorance. I have found in my life that it becomes impossible to hate people different from me once I know them (barring, of course, the obvious—ax murderers, rapists, environmental despoilers…but even these people I don’t exactly hate, so much as fail to understand). It’s easy to buy into stereotypes until you have to deal with someone who is supposed to fit that stereotype, and discover that what you thought you knew just isn’t true.

    But for now I live in Missouri, which has decided to enact its ignorance into law. I return once more to my theme, that a whole lot of money is being spent on this issue, by those who are more afraid of having to correct the inequities still extant in so-called “normal” relationships than any kind of apocalyptic fall-out from allowing same-sex marriage. They play upon the uninformed fears of those who still believe marriage is—at least as far as society is concerned—a matter of romance and “traditional” family values. Of course, marriage is that. But that doesn’t need defending. I doubt you could hurt it where it truly exists between two people who love and respect each other, enough to make a lifelong commitment.

    No, the only thing you could damage is the legal standing to deny humanity to people you don’t care for. Whether they’re gay or straight.

  • Phyllis Schlafly for President

    Since Palin’s from Alaska, I thought it appropriate to post this link from an Anchorage newspaper. This ought to get plenty of circulation in the next couple of months. Even if, as the article indicates, Palin’s questions regarding the censorship of library materials was “rhetorical” it nevertheless is informative that the question would even occur to her.

    Compare the toned-down “rhetoric” of Palin’s approach to the more forthright and visceral approach of another grand lady of the Right, Phyllis Schafly, here prescribing a cure for campus mass murder.

    So far, Palin’s main success at censorship seems to have been imposed on her future son-in-law, Levi Johnson, whose MySpace page was rendered “Private” after the convention. Among other things the young man asserted there was his disdain for marriage and his love of profanity. In all likelihood, he wasn’t about to marry Bristol, who apparently has benefited from the Abstinence Only education the Republicans have been pushing and, if Mrs. Palin is anything to go by, will continue to push in a McCain presidency.

    My point here is very simple. The title of the post is for those remaining Hillary diehards who may still be considering a vote for McCain out of protest over Obama’s winning the Democratic nomination. Ask yourselves if, just to have a woman in the White House, you would vote for Phyllis Schlafly. Because that’s about what a vote for McCain would amount to, especially now. McCain is 72, cancer-prone. Even if he doesn’t die in office, there may be times when he is incapacitated, which would leave the estimable Mrs. Palin in charge.

    Her comment about the difference between pit bulls and hockey moms is telling. I know, I know, it was humor. Wasn’t it? I know a lot of women who like being compared to a dog. It was the lipstick punchline that held the main clue, which is to say that Mrs. Palin, in default mode, thinks of women about the same way Phyllis Schlafly does. Those who find themselves in special situations where they can have careers is fine, for those women, but a concerted effort to alter the social landscape to accept the idea that women are more than a facade with a family is unacceptable.

    Palin has already egregiously misrepresented her record. This won’t matter to her base, which lives and dies on the proper spin, but each and every instance ought to be held to the same scrutiny Obama has been and is about to receive.

  • And Again….

    “Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight, the turn to individual conscience lay ahead.  To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.”  Barbara Tuchman

    “…a total of 15 certificates of achievement and decoration verified his integrity and competence for all the world to see.  On some days he would haze at the rows of his awards in smug satisfaction.  On others, he would search within the frames for some proof that he was a good man.”  Michael D. Weaver, Mercedes Nights

    “Somewhere in somebody’s sacred scripture it says: ‘And there shall be caused to be built dark alleys wherein the mockers and the unrighteous shall in their turn have their heads laid open and in likewise their fat lips busted; and even this shall be pleasing in the sight of Heaven.’”  George Alec Effinger, Marid Audran When Gravity Fails

  • More Quotes

    I should point out that some of the quotes I’m putting up are my own thoughts, based on something I read. So anything unattributed is probably mine. With that in mind, here are a few more.

    Numbers suggest, constrain, and refute; they do not, by themselves, specify the content of scientific theories.

    H.H. Goddard and Robert Yerkes and Lewis Teman managed to supply the U.S. Government with a supposedly scientific basis for passing the strict immigration laws of 1924 that effectively kept millions of Europeans from coming here where Hitler was coming to power. They had nowhere to flee, since American I.Q. tests indicated they were of inferior racial stock and could not be allowed into America to “dilute” our native intelligence.

    “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Oliver Wendell Homes, jr., Buck vs. Bell Supreme Court 1927

    Alfred Binet destroyed Broca’s process of division by craniometric study, determined his own predilection toward subjective bias, and formulated the first crude I.Q. tests (1905). “The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.” Nevertheless, his work, misunderstood and coopted, was used to create the Standford-Binet I.Q. test, which held sway over the educational destinies of American children for decades, even though misapplied.

    “A society defines what is normal and what is crazy—and then says anyone who challenges the definition is crazy.” Elizabeth Butler from “The Falling Woman” by Pat Murphy

  • Georgia On My Mind

    Just when we thought it was a good time to buy one of those magnificent, Soviet-era dachas in Georgia, this happens.

    We’re getting the updates on the most spectacular round of this event, but the fact is this has been brewing since the break up of the Soviet Union. Georgia couldn’t wait to get out from under Russia’s thumb, where it had been for two centuries at least. That they could not understand the desire on the part of the Ossetians and Abkhazzians to get out from under their thumb is proof that willful blindness, when politically inspired, is alive in all parts of the world. Georgia has been conducting low-level warfare in these two regions since 1993 at least. What has prompted this present crisis is Georgia’s president’s decision—due to a promise he made in his election campaign—to settle the issue once and for all and bloody well take the two provinces in question. In anyone’s lexicon of who to blame, Georgia is here the equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its decision to annex Kuwait (or China in its decision to annex Tibet—but for diplomatic reasons we don’t wish to draw such comparisons).

    By that calculus, Russia has acted the part of the United States by invading Georgia and beating it about the head and shoulders until leaves Ossetia and Abkhazzia alone.

    So why are we condemning Russia?

    Because Georgia is the poster-child for America’s post-Soviet ambitions to see democracies spring up and flourish all over the former superpower. Saakhashvilli won a more or less open election with a staggering landslide (something the Republicans claim often but never achieve for themselves) and Georgia has every appearance of becoming a successful democracy.

    We’ve made commitments, at least verbally. We told Georgia we’d back them. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

    Just what does that mean, though? Back them how? Cheer? Send money? Troops?

    We are organizing humanitarian aid. We want to use our military to deliver it (though that’s still tentative). This would put U.S. troop in Georgia, sort of a glove on the ground in front of Russia, a school yard dare. If Bush plays this right, we may be in a shooting conflict with Russia before he leaves office. McCain’s rhetoric seems to support the idea that we should push Russia out. Diplomatically, of course (if possible).

    But the fact remains that Georgia was the bad guy first. We should have told Saakhashvilli to leave those two little breakaway states alone*. Democracy being our religion, our missionary zeal should have inspired us to take the side of the underdog. Or in this case the under-underdog.

    I am not so naive as to believe that the reasons for saying this and not saying that in a political situation are not complex. But the consequences of policy can often surprise and embarrass us. Damnit, why can’t the allies we back just behave?

    Saakhashvilli and Vladimir Putin have also had a running cut fight going on since they got in each others’ faces. There is no love lost between these two. At times it has been juvenile, with references to height or brains. Doubtless Putin welcomed an opportunity to humiliate Saakhashvilli and that, too, is bad public policy. As I say, juvenile.

    Doesn’t this all remind us of someone else, though?

    The real tragedy is that here we have a president who has squandered whatever moral authority he had by essentially behaving in more or less the same way—naked aggression, overt regime change, nation building, using any excuse to send in troops, a snide remark about not needing a permission slip from the U.N. etc etc—trying to shake his finger, school-principle-wise, in Russia’s face, scolding them in a classic “Do what I say, not what I do” moment.

    Now, for their part, Russia has a problem it will need to get over. What Putin really doesn’t want is for Georgia to become a member of NATO. Bad enough to have all the former Eastern Bloc countries signing up in what Russia can only perceive as a competitor organization—not necessarily the enemy, but surely we can understand their sentiment in feeling that Europe, not to mention the United States, may still feel a bit of concern over Russia’s ambitions and the bases of her fears? So it is reasonable to see Russia’s attack on Georgia as—also—a warning. Russia is saying, “Look, we can overrun this pissant democracy whenever we want, so have a care what kind of deals you make with them.” This is a form of gunboat diplomacy. Russia is probably saying more to us than to Georgia, which they consider a nuisance more than a threat. But they would like to keep it a nuisance. By joining NATO and allying itself with the West in such an overt way, Georgia does become a threat.

    So what? If Georgia wants to join NATO and we want them, so be it. But we really ought to be more careful what kind of commitments we make to what kind of leaders and we ought to be willing publicly to chastise such leaders when they become antithetical to the stated goals of American policy.

    *Because in point of fact, the state department told Saakhashvilli not to go into Osettia. We knew he was about to do it. We suggested in very strong terms that this would not be a very good idea. He ignored it. We’re downplaying that now. Maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe we should let some of these sorts hang out to dry when they go against what we not only believe but in fact told them about.

    It all goes back to what kind of promises got made. And man we need to be more careful with those.

    I’ve heard mention of Teddy Roosevelt with regards to Bush’s ideas on foreign policy. Bush seems to like the Big Stick approach. But take note—Teddy said “Speak softly” first. He rarely used the Stick. It was a warning as much as a prescription. For all his bombast, Teddy Roosevelt was a cautious diplomatist. He had a grasp, as they say.

    This guy doesn’t.

    Apparently neither do many of his allies.

  • Equality and History

    This will be brief.  Going along with my last couple of quotes concerning the election and all that it implies this year, I thought I’d post one of my very favorite quotes.  This comes from a wonderful book about the Heroic Myths of the Greeks, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso.  I recommend this to anyone struggling with mythology and origin motifs and the history of so many things Hellenic we take for granted.  Anyway, this quote is one of those “obvious” things we usually forget about when dealing at a fever pitch with, you know, equality.

    Equality only comes into being through initiation.  It does not exist in nature, and society wouldn’t be able to conceive of the idea if it weren’t structured and articulated by initiation.  Later, there comes a moment when equality is geared into history and thence marches on and on until the unsuspecting theorists of democracy imagine they have discovered it—and set it against initiation, as though it were its opposite.

  • Elitism

    In a previous post I talked about merit. It seems this election ability and expertise are hot topics. McCain has decided to attack Obama as Elitist. One wonders if he has any idea what that means.

    To be utterly dismissive about it, it seems to mean that Obama speaks with an educated accent, uses words precisely, and refrains from talking to his audience as though they had only an eighth-grade education.

    Unfortunately, we can’t be dismissive about it, because this sort of attack has historically played well in this country, and not always for the same reason.

    Let’s start with Websters, though:

    Elite: Those who are choice or select; the best; a kind of typewriter having twelve characters to the linear inch.

    Elitism: The practice of rule by the elite class; the belief that this practice should prevail; a pride in belonging to an elite class.

    Aside from the typewriter, what we have in those definitions is a mix of something being described as the best and an implied structure that separates members of a class from everyone else. In latter case, we tend to be suspicious of such folks because, as we all know, membership in a group does not automatically equate to possession of all the traits of that group. Meaning simply that just because everyone else is competent, brilliant, talented, good-looking, and popular doesn’t mean junior will be. But the group will defend junior’s privilege to pretend to be all those things, unto the detriment of the group. Often. This leads to potential disaster, as we have seen time after time.

    As for members of an elite being the best, well, the way that should work is from the outside in—the best become part of the elite rather than being presumed to be the best because they were born into it.

    This comes up strikingly in the current campaign. Garrison Keillor recently weighed in on McCain’s tactics over at Salon.com

    And it’s an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.

    Good luck with that, sir.

    The elite to which McCain belongs seems to be of the born-into variety, at least under the terms of his attack on Obama. We can take nothing away from the man based on his war record, nor should we even attempt it. Personally, I’ve never put much stock in the whole “mediocre student” argument, even in the case of Bush. I was a mediocre student. If people choose to judge me on that basis, well, as far as I’m concerned they have a very narrow scope. But that’s personal anecdote, which is always dangerous. Nevertheless, McCain became a fighter pilot, and one does not get to do that if one is in general mediocre. In spite of the family managing to get him into Annapolis (which only goes so far—getting junior into Annapolis does not mean the family can keep him there, nor does it mean that, because daddy was an admiral that the Navy would let junior go through fighter training if he displayed indifference to training).

    We do, in this country, make the mistake often of assuming skills in one area translate automatically to skills in another. It does happen. Many people are multi-talented. Ability is somehow raw and polymaths do exist.

    But it’s not automatic. You have to work at it.

    Obama has a demonstrated willingness to work at things. He’s had to. The question is, does this make him an elitist?

    Taking Bush as an example, the claim he makes (or has had made for him) is that he is not an elitist. The logic may be something like the following:

    “Just ’cause we got a lot of money and influence and can buy our way into positions designed to move us along the path toward power (and you don’t) doesn’t mean we’re elitist ’cause, really, look at me—I’m just as dumb as you are.”

    This is the argument from the “I’m one of you” column of political tactics.

    On the other hand…

    “I came from a modest background, without the money to buy my way into anything, but I applied myself to my studies, I strove to shape myself into a capable person with certain skills, and earned my way into the positions I’ve had. Despite my more commonplace background, though, because I use my intellect I’m not one of you because I’ve made myself smarter than you. I am an elitist.”

    Pause. Consider these two arguments. Which seems to be the truer description?

    It is an interesting paradox in this country that parents charge their children to do well in school, get good grades, go to college, all so they can do well in life. It would seem that there is some grasp as to the value of learning. But we can also make the argument that learning is utterly beside the point, that the only thing of value in getting the good grades etc is the Good Housekeeping Seal one receives at the end and it has less to do with what junior ends up knowing and everything to do with the fact that junior was able to make the right associations.

    Associations. Isn’t that the basis for an elite?

    So if the latter reason for good grades is in fact the case—and it’s hard to argue that it isn’t—doesn’t that mean parents are trying to lever their kids into an elite?

    Which, if this is the common understanding of the process, means that, really, the kid whose folks can buy his or her way through everything, regardless of ability, really isn’t one of “us” but part of a different elite and the kid whose parents urged, encouraged, and abetted an earned degree really is one of us (whoever the Us in that instance may be, but definitely common).

    Which would kind of make McCain’s charge of elitism true—but it is an elitism of ambition and application, something we should all recognize as part of who we are.

    Here’s the problem with all of this, though. It reduces the equation to one of Sets—which Set does the person in question belong to—and this threatens to render any personal qualities irrelevant. In this game the only thing that matters is the appearance of belonging. It doesn’t matter who or what the person is, only the characteristics of the group to which they ostensibly belong. It takes the individual out of the equation.

    We have a history in this country of distrusting people not of Our Group, and for a long time that applied to intellectuals.  Adlai Stevenson is a famous victim of the kind of reduction to moronism national politics likes to play.  He was erudite, gifted, profoundly intelligent, and refused to pretend to be something he wasn’t.  According to the Republicans, he was an “egghead”—a label that seems to have lost currency in recent years, which makes me hopeful.  At the time, a college education was rare, certainly rarer than it is now.  The great wave produced by the G.I. Bill and the subsequent embrace of higher education as the mark of social status that came with the Sixties had not yet occurred.  People didn’t like being made to feel ignorant—not that they were, but in the hands of a virulent breed of politico they were told that people like Stevenson thought they were too stupid of comprehend their own interests.

    But you can see it on a basic level, socially.  I don’t know how many conversations at parties I’ve shut down cold by contradicting a cherished myth with solid information or addressing an issue from a position of knowledge.  Party conversation, of course, is more ritual than actual discourse, so maybe that’s not fair, but if you go on up the continuum you find that certain myths never get debunked.  You can poke a hole is them all you want, wait a week, and the same people are repeating the same canards.

    McCain understands this about people.  At least certain people.  That’s why, foolish as some of his assertions are, he knows those folks will respond.

    What he has miscalculated, perhaps, is the effect this will have when it comes to the public apprehension of his opponent.  Because Obama is so clearly not the traditional target of such barbs.  People are having to do double-takes, rethinks, and self-examinations this time, because, while McCain’s tactics would probably work perfectly well against someone like John Kerry, they possess a patina of patronization about them when  aimed at Obama.

    If Obama plays this carefully, he may succeed in making the voting public feel that McCain is impugning its intelligence by casting aspersions of elitism on someone who by every cultural metric of the last century cannot possibly be an elitist.  Obama may along the way instill a notion, finally, that being competent is not a bad thing, that knowing something and being unafraid (or unashamed) to say it, clearly, and not dumb it down is better in the long run for the country than pretending to some agrarian myth of American yeomanry, uneducated but instinctively intelligent, the model of Jeffersonian Arcadia.

    That person doesn’t exist, not in any numbers that matter.  McCain is playing to something that faded out of existence as a national constituency half a century ago.  Obama is talking to the Americans that replaced that model, but who may only now be realizing it for themselves.

    That’s an elite I wouldn’t mind being counted among.

  • The Election

    Superlatives aside, I think everyone can agree that we have one those Major Elections coming up that are purported to mark Turning Points in History. We’ve seen many so touted that weren’t. It may be that the presidents involved in those Non Major Elections went on to be remarkable due to what transpired under their administrations, but that doesn’t turn their elections into something that could have been recognized as Turning Points. In a smaller sense, all presidential elections are turning points, because by the nature of our system we can mark shifts in historical currents handily under the heading of who is in the White House when the hairpin switchback came on us. But the fact that a given president was elected as major turning point? You have to look at what was actually at stake before the vote was cast and ask, in the context of the times, how much change was actually anticipated that would not occur had anyone else run and been elected.

    That narrows it somewhat. By that definition, JFK qualifies—based on his youth and Catholicism, and one can debate which was more telling—as does Carter, based on a rejection of Nixon’s Imperial Presidency, since people stated clearly that an appointed Vice President represented too big a shift in our perception of acceptable politics to be tolerated.

    Before that? Hayes, because of the national jerrymandering that resulted in his ascendancy. Lincoln certainly, since his election split the Union, and everyone knew that was in the cards. Jefferson because of his repudiation of Washington/Adams national policy.
    In my opinion, most elections, in spite of the rhetoric, do not hinge on epoch-making change. Finer points can be argued, but the perceived good or bad of the candidates usually hinge on personal views of which of two roads leading in much the same direction is the better. The direction is not that different. FDR picked up and enlarged policies Hoover had already begun—recovery from the Depression was the issue and both candidates agreed. Distinctions of method did not inform the electorate, only matters of which candidate the people trusted to Do Something. As it turned out, FDR’s presidency did alter the national landscape, but the promise of such alterations did not inform the election. And in the case of Kennedy, people expected the country to change profoundly—positively or negatively—because of his election, but in fact it really didn’t change that much. Not due to the president, at any rate.

    What we have before us now, though, is such a pivotal election, and one that has its roots in ideological perceptions ranging across the spectrum.

    Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the divide has grown clearer by the decade between two camps that seem more and more irreconcilable. They differ profoundly over basic ideological concepts concerning economy, religion, foreign policy, science, and civil liberties. Not that the presidential candidates have differed all that much—both parties have striven to nominate candidates acceptable to the broad middle ground that exists between these camps—but the ideals and interests that drive people to the polls are more and more extreme, both sides struggling to find a candidate who will embody some kind of overwhelming choice, a fulcrum that will lever the country onto one path or the other, and in this debate those paths diverge profoundly.

    Until Hilary Clinton lost finally to Barack Obama, it appeared that the race would be between candidates who pretty well embraced that ethic. Oh, certainly the fact that Hilary is a woman would have made this a Major Election, but her politics conform to the “least offense to the greatest number” ideal that has been informing party choices for a long time. Obama is arguably not in that mold. Agree or disagree with his stated ideas, he does not really fit that description. He’s young enough to believe differences can be made, basic changes can occur, and a better road can be built. Whether he’s ultimately allowed to do that is another question. But people perceive him to be an agent of change that is legitimate and sincere and potentially effective.

    I don’t actually believe John McCain is his equivalent, but the fact is he is perceived by his supporters as such. It doesn’t matter. He embodies 20th century policy programs. He is of That Era. Maverick or not, his “independence” serves a vision of the United States that would be recognizable to someone facing the Kennedy-Nixon contest. He’s still arguing over the New Deal and the Great Society and whether or not it’s in our best long term interests to “give money to people who don’t work for it.” He probably still has some vague attachment to what has become a cliched envisioning of an Arcadian America, Traditional Family Values, and that while he wouldn’t himself advocate stripping women of their current rights and freedoms, maybe he believes it wouldn’t be so bad if women stopped “trying to be men” and went back to being wives and mothers and give up the struggle for equality. (Why else would he, the Maverick, embrace a Pro-Life policy, which if fully implemented by those who push it most fervently would lead to a regress to exactly that, overturning not only Roe v Wade but also Griswold?) Maybe he has some vague understanding that the future belongs to a changed global interaction and energy will have to come in new forms, but he stills understands such things in terms of oil and corporate hegemony.

    His selection as the Republican candidate is a lukewarm repudiation of Bush, not because Bush was ideologically wrong, but because Bush failed. The reasons for his failure do not seem well understood by the Right. Talk of tactics and strategy avoid the harder analysis of basic direction. But McCain looks new, at least to Republicans, and I’m not sure why.

    Obama, whether his ideas would work or not, is new. Not, perhaps, as radically as his detractors suggest, but…

    Even so, the election itself will not hinge on that. What it hinges on is what we as a polity will find it acceptable to conceive in political terms. It makes comparisons to Kennedy all the more telling and relevant. What Kennedy’s election said was that this country, after 180 years of anti-Catholic sentiment, could conceive of the notion that all the horror stories about papists and religion were wrong, and that is would be possible to trust a Catholic to set his Catholicism aside and be a secular leader. It said that we as a country could embrace a new perception at the highest level.

    I think this boldness on the part of the electorate carried us through the Sixties, changing one damn thing after another, until, exhausted at the terminus of the Vietnam War we faltered and found ourselves persuaded that all that change might have been in error, and at the end of the confused Seventies we embraced someone who suggested we could have The Good Old Days back. It was this shift in national mindset that Kennedy embodied that was important and made his election a Major One—a paradigm shift that we still carry with us. In the end it didn’t matter what Kennedy did, it mattered what we did.

    So it will be in this election. Obama represents a paradigm shift—not that he would in any way be sure of fulfilling it, but insofar as we as a nation would elect him. It suggests that we are about to make a bold statement as a people about the 20th century and the Olde Time Crap that is currently crippling the Republicans.

    But it is also the first election in a long, long time that cannot be predicted. Until the votes are in, there is no basis for making predictions.

    What has been happening in many districts on the local level for years now is a curious malaise setting in among Republican voters. They are experiencing what Democrats were up till now—if asked, they state their support for this candidate or that, but on the day it seems in many places they’re just staying home. The majority of Democrats now in congress can be to some degree attributed to this. The Republicans are exhausted. I think many of them are also disgusted. I think many of them are just as weary of the right wing jeremiad as the Left is. The trouble is, it makes polling totally irrelevant.

    As does Obama’s race. Odious as it may sound, it’s possible many people are telling pollsters that they support him, but on the day, standing in that booth, the decision before them, many of those same people may decide that they really aren’t ready to have a black man as president.

    I would like to think I’m wrong. I hope so. But it renders all polls problematic.

    We won’t know till the count is in.

    It may also be that the paradigm shift I mentioned has already occurred, and that just the fact that Obama is taken seriously and there has been as little racial flavor to this election as there would have been in, say, 1984 (and yes, the New Yorker notwithstanding, there really has been damn little race-baiting so far) means we’ve already moved past something we’ve been struggling to get over since Brown v the Board of Education. (Yes, the same can be said of Hilary being taken so seriously.)

    The vote in November may well be a turning point, not because Barack Obama might win, but because by winning we will have made a statement about which road to take. That makes it a Major Election. Obama therefore doesn’t have to be the equivalent of past great presidents—he doesn’t have to be Kennedy (who wasn’t all that great) or FDR or Teddy. All he has to be is a clear signpost at the fork in the road.

  • Merit and Fear

    We like to believe, as Americans, that this country is a meritocracy. The idea—Horatio Alger, Thomas Edison, McGuyver, all emblematic of this notion—that the best qualified rise to the top, that those who can display and apply ability, skill, and intelligence are the ones who are selected—either by themselves or through the recognition of society—to do important jobs and that this, as opposed to elitist canards like family or school affiliation or looks or race, counts for more in this society. We like to believe that we judge people by their competence, not other things. It’s a driving national myth.

    We like to tell ourselves that such people are Heroes.

    Like most myths, there’s an element of truth to it. It is certainly the case that the opposite of such ability gets derided once exposed and the people who are less capable lose whatever consideration they’ve received. Eventually. Under the right circumstances.

    But we all know that as a guiding ethic, merit is like anything else, and does not hold universal sway over our sentiment.

    Perversely, many people display what can only be described as fear of people who are genuinely competent and talented, depending on the circumstances. All one need do is look at the condition of regard in which science is held by many people and the way professionals are often mistrusted and we’ve all seen instances where the person at the party who actually knows a thing or three—and dares express that knowledge—often as not ends up not invited back.

    It’s a complex and contradictory attitude Americans have toward ability. We admire and respect it—until it contradicts a long-held belief or runs afoul a prejudice or makes us feel, in ourselves, a bit stupid.

    It is probably more cloyingly and illogically represented in our general attitudes toward race.

    Let me put it as bluntly as possible—in American history, how often has genuine merit been rewarded if the potential recipient is not white? Or male?

    This is largely rhetorical. Most people very well know the answer—seldom, and often when such a person does stand out, attempts are made to diminish his or her achievements. We have been persistently whittling away at this problem for a long time now and we may be forgiven if from time to time we seem to feel it has been solved. It takes a shock to remind us how far we have yet to go.

    In fact, part of the aftershock ought to be a recognition that this is a problem somehow wired into human nature, and that if we solve it for one group, it will simply move to another.

    What kind of shock am I talking about?

    Let me point you to this from John Scalzi’s Whatever. Go read it, then come on back here.

    A couple of things I note—one, the reporter in question is herself clearly a minority. So one wonders why she would be duped into reporting this in this way without being outraged. The other is, the unattributed assertions made in the report.

    But the main problem goes back to the merit argument.

    These two people—Barack and Michelle Obama—are representative of our mythical Competent People ideal. They’ve Done It. They are deserving of our respect for their achievements and therefore deserve to be considered on their abilities.

    However.

    They seem to be of the wrong group. Hmm. How did that happen?

    Wrong group? Do we still think that way?

    Well, you know, maybe not, but we have this other national ideal that tends to undermine the first one, and that is Winning Is Everything. We talk about fair play and sportsmanship and all that, but we don’t believe in it, not when the possibility of losing is in the mix, and this is a presidential race. In politics, all the stops get pulled out, and if one of the weapons is to be race, well, then, perhaps the engineers of such tactics are not themselves blatant racists, but they have no qualms about using discredited tactics in the all-important attempt to win, merit aside.

    Because you really don’t see people very often graciously stand aside for the better qualified. It would be nice if you did, it would say so much to the next generation about what is important. But we’ve debased that coin for 200 + years.

    Equally important, though, is the question of why those who put this out there would believe it would have any impact.

    Because it will. Because a lot of Americans, though they might never say it, still fear the ramifications of such a possibility.

    Which is why I will believe no poll this year. I believe people will be ashamed to admit their prejudices and tell pollsters that they will support Obama, but once they’re inside the voting booth will stop and ask themselves if they’re really ready to see a black man as president.

    Unfortunately, this is America. We may surprise ourselves. Or we may see the upcoming election one in which the next president is the one who simply lost least.

    Joanna Russ, a teacher and science fiction writer and savvy thinker, published a book in 1983 called How To Suppress Women’s Writing. It is a lucid textbook on cultural oppression. The subjects are women and writing, but the methods and tendencies she lays out apply to virtually any sub-group and occupation. It is worth finding and reading. It delineates the subtle—and not-so-subtle—ways in which we as a culture steal merit from those we don’t wish to see possess it. In the prologue, she writes:

    In a nominally egalitarian society, the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which the members of the “wrong” groups have the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant activities) and yet do not do so, thus proving that they can’t. But, alas, give them the least reall freedom and they will do it. The trick thus becomes to make the freedom as nominal a freedom as possible and then—since some of the so-and-so’s will do it anyway—develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning, or belittling the artistic works that result. If properly done, these strategies result in a social situation in which the “wrong” people are (supposedly) free to commit literature, art, or whatever, but very few do, and those who do (it seems) do it badly, so we can all go home to lunch.

    Some will do it well, and then you see the tactics of disenfranchisement take a few steps up the scale of panic and ugliness. Never mind that Hank Aaron actually broke Babe Ruth’s record, he’s black, and shouldn’t have been able to, but since he was about to anyway he had to be prevented. Death threats ensued. Washington Carver was a brilliant chemist, certainly, but look what he did! All his research was based on, well, peanuts. What can one expect from a black man? (It wasn’t, but even so, the denigration ignores the achievement.) Frank Yerby was a brilliant novelist, but he was fluke, the exception that proved the rule that blacks couldn’t write anything other than about themselves. He moved to Spain finally to get away from the racist belittlement of his work.

    The list goes on and on. Add now this absurd, obscene attempt to paint Michelle Obama as exactly the same as every white bigot’s worst fear of a welfare queen sitting in the White House.

    Merit is ignored. Ignored long enough and thoroughly enough, and it cannot shine through.

    At least, so such purveyors of intolerance wish.

    It might not work this time. If it doesn’t, it would be nice to think that, for a change, merit counts for more. But it may also be that further attempts like this will trigger another American ideal, that being our almost reflexive sympathy with so-called underdogs. If that puts Obama in the White House, well, goody for us. But it would also be success that ignores merit. It will be a serendipitous achievement based on our national dislike of bullies.

    What then will be learned from it all?

    If we were, as we would like to believe, concerned with ability and competence above all, then it is inconceivable that George W. Bush could have been elected, even in the first place. Both his opponents are by any measure his superiors in ability.

    The truth is, we value comfort more and Bush, in his own way, is comforting to many people. He’s not our better. He’s “just like us” in presentation and, sadly, ability. He doesn’t make us feel inferior (by now, probably, quite the opposite) and he doesn’t challenge us to rise above mediocrity. With Bush you could share a beer and talk about baseball. With Obama? In truth, you probably could, but more likely if the subject moved on to something real—like taxes or foreign policy—most of us likely couldn’t keep up. He understands these things in a way that most of us don’t.

    Not because we can’t. Because we have neither the time or patience to really understand them.

    How can I say that?

    Well, the evidence. If we did understand such things, we wouldn’t have had to put up with Bush for eight years.

    And we wouldn’t be afraid of Obama.