Who'll Stop The Madness?

Ok, so Joe Wilson's behavior was unbecoming of a member of the United States Congress. He apologized. The president accepted it. Did the congress really need to drag this on this way?

I don't know which is worse, the Republicans falling off the deep end of sanity to paint Obama and the Dems as evil and scary or the Democrats overreacting to EVERY LITTLE THING? Don't they know this fuels the vitriol?

Oh, that's right. They WANT to fuel it. Ultimately this is the problem with our two-party system. Neither is ultimately interested in the business of the people's work so much as they are in vying for political power.

In ancient Rome, they kept the masses preoccupied with bread and spectacle. Our ruling classes have managed to do away with the "bread" part.

That's Why They Call It "Memorial"

Does the drowsy yet relentless passage of time really heal all wounds?

Should it?

For the first time since that fateful day eight years ago, I woke up, got ready, and walked out of the door without clutching a flag, without remembering what day it was.

When I realized that I'd forgotten, I got a brand new ache in my heart. Now that the pain is abating. . . are we turning it into another empty ceremonial event, like we did to Memorial Day?

It's not that I want to wallow or be immobilized by the horror and loss of that day. In fact, I'm sometimes troubled by the tendency of some to fetishize it (I once I saw something on TV called "100 most significant moments in TV history" wherein even the moon landing came in second to the images of those attacks). I wince when politicians shamelessly appeal to the painful memory of that day to push their worldviews on us.

But I don't want to forget.

I haven't yet - and I doubt I ever will - forget December 2nd, the day my father died. In a sense I have nurtured that particular wound in my heart instead of letting it scab over. Because while his soul may be celestial and eternal, I love and miss the finite bodily form of him, the man, my father, made of flesh and blood, a man with a voice and a smile and a touch.

Records remain of his insights, his language, his great wit, his ideas (and his memory that "lives on in me" as countless people told me after he died, well meaning people, with their parents still alive, trying their best to help me "snap out of" my pain). But that pain is the only authentically extant part of my real relationship with the real man. It's the thing that most accurately recalls him by keeping alive his absence, by refusing to substitute his actual presence with echoes and abstractions of him, however beautiful those are.

September 11 has important echoes and abstractions. We've learned things about intolerance, about repressive religious doctrines, about unfathomable hatred, about compassion and solidarity, about selfless acts of kindness and courage, and about loss, on a grand scale. President Obama is right to call us to serve our country and our communities - it's the best way to honor the fallen and to rekindle the flames of the great American civic spirit.

But for me, September 11 can't help remaining a day of mourning as well. A day of remembering the injury and the loss, of three thousand people, of the physical integrity of a great city, and of our collective innocence about what can happen to us, right here in America.

I don't want us to be paralyzed by loss but I don't want us to be anesthetized against it either. I want to continue to mourn it in some small and reverent way so that we never confuse the lives that once were with the tributes that we pay them, however beautiful and touching those are.

In fact, I'd like us to resurrect the true meaning of Memorial Day. It's chilling that we've turned it into the national day of beach and barbecue. I know it was a century and a half ago, but the Civil War was the deepest trauma our country has ever lived through and though its memory is dim, its legacy is real. Also, given the alarming rifts that have been forming in our polity in the last decade and a half, there are really urgent reasons to remember and mourn that particular past.

Incidentally: say what you will about secular liberalism, but, as I've explained before, secular liberalism is the reason you don't see people like me (and you?) go and drive a plane full of innocent people into towers full of innocent people in someone else's country just because they don't share our belief systems.

Paranoia In Shifts

Some people will believe the very worst about others. Well, not all others, just some others . . .

People will believe that president Obama would euthanize their grandparents. They will believe that he "hates white people." They will cry in public and ask for their "America back" -- when to most of us America doesn't look all that different from last year. That is, unless there really is no place in one's America for a black president -- but I don't honestly believe that's what that woman was thinking. Even if race played into her fears, I'm pretty sure it was subconscious.

So why is it that people are willing to believe such extreme things about Obama and the Democrats? Why are they willing to believe, not just that they have misguided ideas, but that they have such actively evil intentions? It seems incredible to me.

A friend of mine asked me an interesting question the other day. "Do you think this is how conservatives felt during the Bush years?" She wondered. "That they couldn't figure out why so many were fearful of the administration's policies -- not just disapproving, but fearful?"

My friend, much like me, is a "liberal" in her values, without being committed to any technocratic or partisan political agenda. We are liberals because we believe in freedom and compassion and fairness. We want things like poverty and discrimination to be eradicated without necessarily being wedded to particular policy approaches. We love the founding fathers and will fight any white supremacist who tries to appropriate them for their own sick visions of "their" America. We are willing to be just as hard on the government under President Obama as we were on the one under President Bush on all the same issues: state secrets doctrine, extraordinary renditions, military tribunals, don't-ask-don't-tell, wall street bailouts with practically no strings attached. . . etc.

And yet, we too, are willing to accept that the Obama people aren't dangerous in ways that maybe we weren't always absolutely certain about the Bush people. (Although sometimes I do think Tim Geithner is the devil, but that's a different post).

I will say this, though: the leftist whackos -- the ones that used to peddle anti-Bush theories that 9/11 was an "inside job" or that the delay in responding to Katrina was a result of Bush "hating black people" -- never really got traction with mainstream or influential liberals. Not one factually unproven conspiracy-type theory about the Bush administration was taken up by anyone prominent enough that I can recall his/her name. Dan Rather doesn't count -- he relied on the wrong documents but his charge, that Bush didn't fulfill his National Guard duties, was true and substantiated; and even if he does count, that's just ONE. On the other hand, mainstream, influential conservatives -- Bill Kristol, Lou Dobbs, Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity -- don't seem to have any qualms about giving credence to complete fabrications about "death panels" and "Kenyan citizenship."

I will also say this: for all the conservative accusations of inadequate liberal respect for our erstwhile "commander-in-chief" -- no liberal ever actively wanted President Bush to fail as a president. We just wanted him to be a better president. Rush Limbaugh actually said he wanted Obama to fail (and Fred Thompson and Bobby Jindal defended him in this). Can you imagine the Fox News response if someone had said that about Bush? Despite the conservative alarm at liberals not caring about the security of our country, it was a conservative that wanted Osama bin Laden to attack our country.

I will say this, too: I wouldn't have any reason to be paranoid about President Bush if he didn't actually lie to us about the reason we went to war with Iraq; if he didn't try to usurp legislative power with elaborate "signing statements"; if he didn't have guys like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzalez, Bybee, and Yoo working for him (I know, I know, Tim Geithner. . . but he's kind of a lesser devil, like Phil, The Prince of Insufficient Light).

Nevertheless, I think my friend has a point. What we tend to see as "flawed" rather than "evil" may often be a product of our own invention, at least in part, and this might apply to even the least partisan, most fair-minded and judicious among us. That's bad enough, but what's really scary is that so very many of us these days are deliberately, and gleefully partisan with absolutely no intention of being fair-minded or judicious.

Maybe it's "their" turn to be paranoid. So much for the post-political neo-camelot.

Oven Still Off

Make that mid-August?

Oh, what the heck, let's make that "until labor day," that way, if I do re-start earlier, I can congratulate myself.

Speaking of labor, I apologize for not telling you all about my labors this summer, because, you know, the details of my life are so endlessly fascinating :-)

Stay well, my friends.

p.s., I do want to point out one little thing: before it's replaced by the next ad, look at the Progressive Insurance ad banner on the NPR's All Things Considered website today. Is it me, or does it look like an ad for a "slutty-nurse" themed movie?!

[No reflection on NPR, one of last remaining news sources that still provides actual news. And, oh, yeah, they have an organizational philosophy that actually works! How about that, failing corporations and governments? A world-class service, provided by a voluntary, community-spirited, private, non-profit enterprise with integrity that's viable and able to keep providing that world class service while the rest of you can't do anything. I think public broadcasting has quietly and inconspicuously created the perfect model for the way we could be organizing many (not all, NEVER "all") of our public lives and businesses.... Not dictated by anyone else, not driven by our basest, most self-centered impulses. I know that's a long tangent, but it's a little related to the "labors" I alluded to earlier. And no, I'm not working for a public broadcasting outfit]

Oven Off

Thought Oven will be turned off for a bit. It needs to be cleaned along with other stuff in the "Thought Kitchen" generally. 

Hopefully there will be more baking in a few weeks -- I'm thinking mid-July. 

Please come back then.  Happy summer!