Thursday, June 23, 2005

Good vs. Evil

Troll repellent: Yes, Osama bin Laden is an evil SOB who needs to be brought to justice, or barring that, gunned down. Saddam was a psychopathic, merciless tyrant. Etcetera.

That doesn't make everyone who fights them good. Stalin fought Hitler tooth and nail when he had to.

Compare and contrast the Bad Guys:
Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war. Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said we must understand our enemies.
...and the Good Guys:
I am deeply disturbed and disappointed that the Bush White House would continue to use the national tragedy of September 11th to try and divide the country. The lesson our country learned on that terrible morning is that we are strongest when we unite together, that America's power is in its common spirit of democracy and freedom.
I will say this about our side -- we are often reluctant to use the language of good and evil, particularly now, when the Shrub has tainted the concept of such stark contrasts. In this case, however, it's really simple. One side has routinely attempted to put aside the partisan crap when it comes to defending our country and its ideals. The other has done everything it can to drive a wedge between Americans in the hopes of scraping a few more voters into its corner.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader which is which.
--
(/) Roland X
"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803

Saturday, June 11, 2005

I almost cried...

...when I read this:

Via Ivo Daadler at TPM Cafe, text from Barack Obama's recent commencement address at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois (full text of speech here):
[America is a] place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form "a more perfect union" on this new frontier. And as people around the world began to hear the tale of the lowly colonists who overthrew an empire for the sake of an idea, they started to come. Across oceans and the ages, they settled in Boston and Charleston, Chicago and St. Louis, Kalamazoo and Galesburg, to try and build their own American Dream. This collective dream moved forward imperfectly--it was scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of women, shaken by war and depression. And yet, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, people kept dreaming, and building, and working, and marching, and petitioning their government, until they made America a land where the question of our place in history is not answered for us. It's answered by us.
What Obama suggests is truly something that moves me. In short, he tells a narrative of American greatness in profoundly liberal terms. This is not the kind of patriotism that has been in vogue in recent years, certainly not the kind of national greatness propogated by folks on the right. Indeed, in the liberal narrative, America is great, or is special, or is an example to the rest of the world because being American is a process, it is never fixed. On the one hand, this is why America deals better with immigrants than virtually any other industrialized society I can think of, but also why the culture wars here rage so fiercely, and why liberals constantly have to hear that they are "unAmerican" or "don't love America enough." Because what being American means is fundamentally never a settled question. Much of American literature and autobiography gets to the heart of this idea: from Crevecouer's Letters from an American Farmer and Ben Franklin's Autobiography forward.

For a liberal to believe in America's exceptionalism, it can't be "America right or wrong," as conservatives were wont to say during the Vietnam era and are essentially saying again today. Hence, the divide over Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, where conservatives can't comprehend - and think even borderline traitorous - shining a light on and condemning the practices perpertrated by Americas here. For them, American exceptionalism is inherent. In this sense, the conservative version of patriotism/exceptionalism is much more like - ironically - European nationalisms. And thus, something like Abu Ghraib is essentially irrelevent.

For liberals, however, greatness is something that must constantly be created and reconfirmed. It is never a settled a matter. And indeed, it is this various unique process through which America is always/constantly defining and redefining itself that makes America exceptional, not the simply the existence of America and Americans.
I'm not sure whether the tears that formed in my eyes were at the beauty of this vision...or at how close we are to losing it completely as a significant force in America. Perhaps both.

To me, to speak of "the American Dream" is a redundancy. America is a Dream, a beautiful and glorious dream every bit the equal of Atlantis or Camelot or Shangri-La. This land we live on, the laws we live by, the flag we wave...those are the mere trappings of a mortal nation. The Dream will live forever, for it is rich and complex, yet exquisitely simple: liberty and justice for all. For all.

This means that a KKK fanatic can rant on his own time all he wants, true. It also means that the government has to leave Paul Krugman alone, and that Randi Rhodes is as inviolate as Dennis Miller. All things flow from those two basic principles. Liberty means the right to write what you want, play what you want and believe what you want, as long as you respect others' freedom in the process. And that is where justice comes in. Even though liberty is threatened now, it is justice that has come the farthest, and has the farthest to go. Slavery was a vast, horrific injustice -- but it has been undone. Equality for women and minorities is as yet unrealized, but so much has been accomplished since the revolution. We keep most of our seniors from starving, but children still die needlessly from preventable illness and treatable injury.

For all Bush's mad, idiotic hubris, for all Cheney's greed and evil, for all Rumsfeld's treachery and betrayal of our military, even they have tread lightly on this Dream. As deeply as the American people have been hypnotized, the power of the Dream that is America is enough to shake the world, and it lies within the vast, great majority of our people. It is merely quiescent in most, sleeping, waiting to be awakened and realized. Even as insane, arrogant and incompetent as these fools have proven, even they have had enough survival instinct to avoid truly waking it. And yet it stirs. The Dream sleeps uneasily, knowing it has been deeply and fundamentally betrayed.

"Ben P" strikes brilliantly on a primal aspect -- perhaps the primal aspect -- of the Dream when he says that America is the process of redefining (and in an almost alchemical sense, purifying) our nation. Ironically, what I call purification (here meant in a moral, almost spiritual sense) the most radical of our enemies call dilution or defiling. To them, allowing differing, "alien" elements weakens America, not realizing that this constant recreation is what the Dream is fundamentally about: the process of continual rebirth. Heh. Perhaps our national bird should be the Phoenix instead of the Eagle.

Hopefully, this Dream will one day encompass the world. When it does, however, it should not -- must not -- be represented by one nation's flag or people or military. Indeed, that would be to betray it at the deepest level -- which in many ways is what the Bush Administration is doing. That may be the most tragic result of the deep alienation the world is developing regarding the nation of America, as it rejects the Dream along with crude military efforts and selfish corporate gluttony. And yet, if we are ever to transcend politics of division and bigotry, foolishly pitting one ideology against another, we must embrace that Dream. To surrender it is to surrender the future, giving it to the power brokers and fanatics until they finally get us all killed.

Tomorrow can be better than that. Our legacy can be one of tolerance, freedom, opportunity and plenty. That is the very substance and promise of the Dream that is America, which is why the greedy and hateful fear it so much. No matter how badly under siege it may seem, no matter how deeply corporate machines and theocrats and Faux news outlets try to bury it, as long as one person remembers, we keep the flame alive. Even now, when I despair on a regular basis, I still believe that one day, it will light our way to a better world, and then to the stars.
--
(/) Roland X
Hope is a phoenix

Darth Idiot

The Trade Federation:
"My lord, is that...legal?"

"I will make it legal."
Nute Gunray and Darth Sidious, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

The Coalition of the Willing:
MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.
Sure, Iraq isn't Naboo. Still, given that our Vice President is proud of being the "evil genius in the corner," I have to wonder what it will take for the bare majority who voted for these guys -- evil and stupid, what a combination -- and the 40% who didn't vote at all to wake up and smell the fascism.
--
(/) Roland X
"Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you." -- Londo Mollari

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Selling Their Souls

Ye gods, has it been that long (again)?

Well, anyway. This bit of brilliance has been making the rounds thanks to Atrios:
It's not true that the Conservatives I know don't give a damn so much as they are terrified that they were wrong.

Deeply, primally terrified. Their whole psychological infrastructure is cobbled together out of half-baked conservative bumper-sticker ideology, gun lust, socially illiterate hatred of "welfare cheats" and other largely fictional or apocryphal lazy people (read: niggers and other swarthy folk) who want to leech off of them while they work harder and harder for less and less. Despite a lot of bluster about Freedom and Individuality they are, at heart, happiest when they are conforming to the wishes of the Strong Man; when they know exactly their place in the hierarchy.

...

But in exchange for all of this wonderfulness, they have to hand over their souls to truly evil men.

...

This is the ancient, unbridgeable and eternally hostile schism between their template for humanity and ours. This is, I believe, why sometimes we fundamentally cannot understand each other; because we are running two radically different and incompatible O/S's.

...

And because everything – their very souls – rest on the foundation of the infallibility of Dear Leader, they'll happily kill anyone in any numbers who might force them to face up to the fact that Dear Leader is a duplicitous, lying sleazebag who has played on their fear and ignorance and patriotism to turn them out like $2 crack whores.

...

The good news is, we are still 49% of the game; wake up and pick off a mere 100,000 and we can begin to turn a lot of thinks around. The more gooder news is that our O/S thrives best when saturated in pure, clean Reality, and theirs rust and rots and flies apart at the seams when the lies that insulate it are peeled away.
It was a bear choosing excerpts from this post. Go. Read.

The problem is, Reality really is fungible, albeit not nearly as much as the madmen in office would like it to be. And when you bend Reality for too long, at too arrogant an angle, it knocks you over all by itself, to steal and rework shamelessly from Santayana. Worse, their arrogant experiment in molesting an entire region threatens to knock the rest of us over with them.

There was a time when fundamentalist terrorism was on the run. After September 11, 2001, we were united as never before. All that would have been necessary for this brand of evil to be an endangered species was for the men in power to not be arrogant, greedy, psychopathic fools.

Alas, they are.
--
(/) Roland X
"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim." -- Santayana (again)