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

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)

The War On Choice

I'm not talking about abortion, but rather an interesting form of a nigh-invisible double standard Orcinus brings up:

Ah yes. We've heard this line before. Because being gay is a "chosen behavior," it is undeserving of civil rights protections.

It's the same reason given by many evangelicals -- and particularly black and minority evangelicals, and people who claim they support civil rights -- for not supporting gays and lesbians in hate-crime protections: "You can't compare being gay to being black. One's immutable, one's chosen."

Well, yes, this is true when it comes to race. And even ethnicity. These are, after all, two of the three main legs of anti-discrimination and hate-crimes laws.

But it's not true of the third leg of these laws: religion. Last I checked, this too was a "chosen behavior."

Hmm. Okay, so let's review. Homosexuality is not deserving of anti-discrimination protection because it involves "choice." So does religion.

Of course, most of the anti-rights jihadists who hate gays would gleefully purge the country of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, neo-pagans, agnostics and liberal Jews and Christians – and an awful lot of them would happily turn their guns on Catholics (they're "Papists," after all) and all Jews. Can't be too careful, you know. So I guess this one isn't really about hypocrisy so much as resentment of that annoying First Amendment that protects freedom of religion. They can't legally discriminate against the heretics, but by God they can persecute the homos.

Unless they’re Republicans, that is. IOKIYAR, after all.

(/) Roland X
Who apologizes yet again for the incredibly long dearth of posts, but isn't going to waste lots of bandwidth on the subject.

Terror v. Incompetence

Greetings, gentle readers. My apologies for the relatively long dearth of posts; the post-election season has been, at turns, depressing, frightening, and incredibly busy. I'm hard at work (well, maybe not too hard at work ;-) coming up with a strategy/ideological framework for our local think tank, dealing with the holidays, and trying to get my professional writing done. Still, there's always a bit of time to ruminate on the current crises, particularly when there are so many to choose from.

For now, there's the issue of terrorism -- particularly Bush's incompetence and the liberal/progressive response -- as currently being discussed in a pissing contest of sorts between Kevin Drum and Atrios, all started by a truly asinine piece of work in The New Republic, which my favorite local politician would call a "Vichy Democrat" magazine. Essentially, the article espouses a purge of people like Michael Moore and organizations such as MoveOn for being "soft" on terrorism. They are to be replaced with a grassroots Democratic force, which is interesting as almost all of the grassroots energy in the Democratic party is coming from groups like MoveOn.

The article is fundamentally McCarthyesque, particularly in its attempts to dismiss charges of McCarthyism. Yet it specifically refers to 50s purges of insufficiently hard-line liberals -- within liberal organizations of the time. It is the old song of "tougher than thou," a game no sane liberal will ever win against rabid "kill 'em all" pseudo-conservatives. Kevin, as usual, is more balanced:

Let's take first things first: it's pretty clear that a lot of liberals really don't like being told they need to "get serious" about terrorism. And I don't blame them — especially since regular readers know that I think Republicans are the ones who have trivialized terrorism by treating it more like a partisan wedge issue than a serious danger.

So let's be more precise: the charge isn't so much that liberals don't have a serious approach to terrorism, it's that liberals tend to think that terrorism and national security just aren't very important in the first place.

...

Rather, he criticizes MoveOn because they even opposed the Afghanistan war (and he criticizes Moore for flatly denying that terrorism is a real threat). This is quite a different thing, and a distinction that strikes me as pretty well justified.

The problem is, Beinart's criticism is, um, well, let's be generous and call it a generalization. There's also the issue that many who opposed the Afghanistan war did so because they saw the Bush administration's incompetence clearly and didn't trust them to run a boxing match, let alone the most important American military conflict since V-J day. (I supported the war initially, and boy, I had to eat some serious helpings of crow, let me tell you.)

Meanwhile, Atrios' response is largely on target:

The consequence of marginalizing all such sentiments, or reducing them to caricatures, is that we never have a decent conversation about what we're doing. Acknowledging that there are almost always other options than war is one way to ensure that we understand more fully the consequences of those wars. War should be the last option, not the first one, almost no matter what. I don't say this because I'm a peacenik, but because war is fucking expensive in blood and treasure and has a lot of unintended consequences.

...

Final thought: who should be considered more worthy of marginalization? Those who cautioned against a just war, or those who supported an unjust and increasingly catastrophic one. Whatever the ultimate outcome of our Afghanistan conflict (which, by the way, is still going on), I submit it's quite likely a decision to not go to war there would have had far fewer negative consequences than our decision to go to war in Iraq.

...but I'll submit that the above paragraph goes a bit far. Our problem, IMO, is not the "hards" or the "softs" but the left's tradition of self-immolation. The circular firing squad is in fine form just now, and while I sympathize greatly with the Atrioses and MoveOns here, I do believe there is a strong case to be made for a robust, nuanced, multifaceted engagement on terrorism in all its forms.

As usual, Orcinus nails it:

Over the past 15 years and more, the great generator of terrorist acts around the world has been the phenomenon that embodies the commingling of all these traits: radical religious fundamentalism. The forms this takes range from the right-wing domestic terrorists of the Patriot movement to the Al Qaeda fanatics who struck on 9/11. (A variant on this is Tim McVeigh, who was closer to a neo-Nazi than a fundamentalist; but he clearly shared their apocalyptic worldview and urge to defend "traditional" values.) All of them have one key trait in common: an abiding hatred of modernity and progressive values.

So progressives indeed have a clear and compelling interest in opposing terrorism. Central to their support, indeed, is confronting the core of what is driving the phenomenon. The left naturally will readily confront radical fundamentalism, as long as it's made clear that's what we're dealing with.

What's been missing, however, is either a recognition or at least acknowledgement of this aspect of the problem from the right and its toadies on the left. Since American fundamentalism is primarily associated with the mainstream right, it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that the Bush administration has assiduously refused to frame the modern terrorist threat (including, notably, Al Qaeda) as primarily a right-wing phenomenon -- even though that is clearly what it is. And the ever-timid "moderate" leadership of the Democratic Party has been too polite to point it out.

I highly recommend the entire post, which (like many of Orcinus' posts) is too long to quote in its entirety here. Still, none of this answers the one big question, which Kevin sums up nicely (IMO, he's better at coming up with the questions than the answers):

Maybe Islamic totalitarianism is as big a threat as fascism and communism were in their day. Maybe it's not. I'm not sure. But I would like to see liberals address the issue head on. It would be good for liberalism and it would be instructive for me.

Excuse me while I indulge in a bit of hubris here, and tackle this head-on.

The short answer to this is yes, though I'd recast the question as "fundamentalist terrorism." If we don't count the strongmen who basically serve American interests, the "Islamofascist" governments can be counted thusly: Iran and the remaining portions of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban. They're not going to be landing platoons in Arlington any time soon. Terrorists, however, might turn it into glass someday. And therein lies the problem.

Imagine if one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center had a nuclear device on board. What would the political, social and economic consequences of wiping Manhattan off the face of the Earth have been? Chemical weapons could be even more insidious, and a stupid terrorist with the right virus could wipe out the human race. Yes, religious fanatics with WMDs are a a real and unspeakable threat, and many on the left must indeed face this danger realistically.

At the same time, the disgust many liberals and progressive feel about the war on terror can be explained very simply: the Bush administration isn't taking it seriously. They use it as an excuse to conquer nations with oil and then implement various ideological theories of warfare and economics. They crack down on peaceful activists while botching enormous swathes of the battle against Islamic extremism and completely ignoring domestic terrorism. Unless you count nude environmentalists on bicycles.

But hey, it's good for beating Democrats with. Even Vietnam vets who lost three limbs in service to their country. That's what the War on Terror amounts to for Bush, Cheney and Rove -- a political advantage over their rivals. If no terrorists hit America, they've protected Our Country. If terrorists do hit America, we have to vote Republican because it's too dangerous to change horsemen in the middle of an apocalypse. And all the while, it makes a convenient tool for silencing criticism and shredding the Constitution.

It is time for an articulate progressive position on fighting terrorism. Bush's nonsense about the "failed policy of law enforcement" is laughable, and one of the most toxic effects he's had on the whole debate. The only administration that's ever failed against large-scale extra-national terrorism is his. Clinton's administration could be said to have failed in the Oklahoma City bombing, but is anyone arguing that we have to declare martial law in areas with large militia movements? The simple truth is, we need to use every tool in our arsenal to battle what is in every real sense a criminal empire. You fight al-Qaeda the way you fight the mob -- you go after their assets, you infiltrate their ranks, you raid their bases when you can, and you make being a member unpalatable by making life as a decent citizen more attractive. Given that terrorists do occasionally acquire "state sponsors," military intervention is one tool -- but it is arguably the least efficient tool, because any mistake made when using it exacerbates all the other facets of the conflict rather than relieving them.

It is vital for Democrats and progressives to come up with an alternate strategy in the battle against fundamentalist terrorism, not only because it is an essential political job, but because Bush's horribly incompetent ego-driven policy is endangering the entire world.

(/) Roland X
Getting Serious Today