Michael Steele and Why We Need the GOP Back

(NB: This is basically a cut and paste from my Facebook, but I think it's important and I haven't babbled on about politics for a while, so here it is.)

Justin linked me to this article about Michael Steele. Read it for yourself, it's short.

First of all - and forEVER - this is another problem of language. Having empathy does not mean "doing what everyone says, without contemplation." It has to do with understanding others' emotions and opinions, and I think any Supreme Court Justice should have that quality. There is precisely one solid and inarguable fact about the US Constitution - that it was created to govern and serve the citizens of the United States. The rest of it has been the source of endless debate since its adoption. To marry the Constitution with its primary purpose, a Supreme Court Justice need to be a wicked smart individual with a true sense of empathy. Steele either doesn't understand or is ignoring the fact that empathy means something completely different from what he's attacking.

Secondly, he's addressing the NRA. The NRA's wackier membership is maintained by fearmongering in the direction of the Second Amendment, which I think is dishonest at best. For the NRA, the left is always trying to take their guns and in Obama's case, he apparently sat on a board that tried to lobby for a pretty outrageous gun ban. Now, regardless of this board membership - which frankly I discount because I don't know what his role was on the board nor how the corporation was structured - he's had a pretty middle of the road record on gun rights. A very small percentage of liberals actually want guns, period, banned...most people just want to make sure they're sold to people who can handle them and use them wisely. Steele is appealing to the typical, boring Lefty Gun Hate boogeyman that politicians have been waving in the NRA folks' faces for years.

Third, that memo about right wing extremists was some bush league, Bush-style horseshit and I don't really mind people saying it. That was a clear fuckup.

Fourth, that being said, I don't know what the hell restricting gun ownership has to do with bringing Guantanamo detainees to US prisons or where the irony is. Both of these endeavors involve a noninterpretivist reading of the Constitution.

Finally, and I cannot say enough about this...Steele is an idiot. The GOP has fallen so far from the Republican revolution of '92, it's almost sad to see. They have allowed their party to be ... Read Moreinvaded by ideological zealots completely disconnected from prevailing public opinion and sometimes from reality. What the Republicans have done SO WELL in the recent past is to choose a select few opinions that You, A Republican must toe the line one, producing a unified front in which they could consolidate power. I think that the GOP realized that their previous strength had become a liability once it failed to adapt to the shifting political landscape, and they kind of freaked out. They then lunged towards a sort of pop neo-conism, which lead them to put people like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber at the fore of their public image, when their greatest assets ARE people like John McCain, who are able to hold fast to their beliefs while still compromising and working effectively where necessary. It's a little depressing...the GOP's willingness to let Rush Limbaugh be any kind of mouthpiece for them is just ridiculous. Yeah, he's got a huge audience, but he's simply an angry, ... Read Morevitriolic jerk with a huge hypocrisy problem. That's not the way to get back in black. It's this kind of panicky rush to regain footing in the new, modern politics that has lead to the appointment of Steele, and it's a huge mistake. Particularly when contrasted with Obama, he comes off as a vaguely goofy, inept Johnny-Come-Lately who's trying to be hipper than he is.

I believe part of what keeps our politics vibrant - and what will save it from the hot mess that it currently is - is the two party system, so I do hope the GOP can get back to basics and fix these weaknesses, but Steele is not the man to do it.

Cannonball Read #30: Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt wrote what is pretty well accepted as the most soul-crushing and most uplifting book in the history of life when he published Angela's Ashes. For those who haven't read it, it's an account of his completely gut-wrenching childhood in Ireland and let me tell you...it is crushing. McCourt's childhood is the kind of stuff very few make it out of.

This is not Angela's Ashes. It's a solid book, but it doesn't reach the heights of his previous work. He has gotten free of his hellish upbringing and is beginning to strike out towards a new life in America. Obviously, his childhood still resonates through his adult life, but there is a different tone to this story of McCourt's life teaching in New York.

Frank McCourt is clearly the teacher that you remember on your wedding day and your graduation and the days your children are born. He doesn't just teach a subject, he teaches you about how life is and should be. He clearly understands that his teaching methods are unconventional (and largely improvised) but it's equally clear that he is able to connect with a huge variety of kids, which is extremely difficult. He tells stories of his children in Teacher Man and these stories let you in on how many different people he was able to reach, even if he chooses those stories because they resonated with HIM.

When I was reading this book, I was strongly reminded of a professor who I have taken several courses with at Assumption. I love all of my professors in the political science department, but there are two who stand out as polarizing characters. One is a taskmaster - he expects you to show up with your shit in order, papers produced with perfect grammar, and produces blue-book exams that strike fear in to the hearts of the bravest political science wonks. The other is a somewhat looser individual - I have yet to write a paper longer than 2 pages for him (font size your choice) and his finals are always optional. The latter professor is somewhat confounding - I once informed him that I thought he was great when I didn't want to slap him in the head - but once you figure out the differences between the two it becomes clear. Professor Number One is there to relay the wisdom of the ages, to forcefeed you information that he believes vitally important to your life. Professor Number Two wants to teach you how life works so you can figure out the important stuff yourself, and most of all to always question what's presented to you. They're both wonderful teachers, from different points. My collegiate life wouldn't be the same without them.

This is a brilliant book for reminding you of the best teachers you've ever had. It's a spectacular book for future teachers - it reminds you that it's not all nobility and praise from thankful parents. McCourt reminds you that it's a tough slog to teaching, and that even once you get there, it's tough work for a very small percentage of reward.

272 pages

How Not To Study

Dear Guy Sitting in Charlie's Laughing His Ass Off at Some Movie Amidst People Doing Nothign but Studying, Who Has a Star Wars Ringtone and Yesterday Explained to Our Study Group that One of the Problems with British Civic Nationalism Was that "They Keep Invading My Country,"

Stop that.

Cheers,

Josie

Over Hill and Veil

On my Mom's side of the family, there is a family veil. You would think that this would be something people would want to keep fairly close track of, but apparently, you would be wrong. The various matriarchs of the family have been looking for it amongst the most recently married Gustafson women, but so far no luck, so I called my grandmother on my DAD'S side to see if she could help with the "something old" factor. Grandma Brown has an epic historical fashion collection, which she lends out to museums and exhibits and colleges and travels all over the place talking about, so I thought she might have something that fit the bill.

Grandma has mastered exactly one piece of technology from the modern age and that piece of technology is the fax machine, so I got a fax with several pictures of a beautiful veil with some gorgeous floral embroidery on the edges. When it's not on grainy fax paper, this is what it looks like.
Totally love it. I was planning in the absence of the family veil to wear a birdcage veil, but I love the look of this one and think it's just perfect for an outdoor wedding. For those who don't know, this is the style of dress I'm wearing (don't worry, I already showed Rich this picture, he's safe):
Had my first fitting on Wednesday and it was sooooooo easy, which seriously thank god because we all know I don't deal with the aggravation of these things well. Just needed it bustled and the straps adjusted so they didn't stick out like mutant wings.

Cannonball Read #29: The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria

Before we begin, I would like to have a brief word with the publishers of books about freedom, liberty, and other such thrilling concepts in political science.

Seriously, you guys, if you do not stop slapping Delacroix's "La Liberté Guidant le Peuple (Liberty Leading the People)" over every goddamn cover of every book that even tangentially references the concept of freedom, I am going to come to your offices and whomp you to death with the heaviest of the nine thousand books I now own with the work on the cover. I had two books assigned with good ole France leading the way on the cover this semester alone. I am sick of it. DELACROIX is sick of it, and he's dead. Expand your horizons and find some other freaking art to put on your books. Thank you.

All right, with that aside (and I am not even kidding a little bit about the frequency of that painting's use), I'd like to call Fareed Zakaria's fence-sitting ass out. I know he's a super nice guy and he's a huge boon for CNN and media in general because he's an articulate Indian dude, but I insist that we stop looking at him as a political theorist rather than a really good researcher. He just will NOT take a stand on anything, and this drives me nuts. I went to see him speak alongside the excellent Niall Ferguson at Harvard last year when his latest exercise in noncommittal writing, The Post-America World came out and it's the same shit in person. While it's interesting to see the desire to sell books fight with an absolute lack of innovative angle. That book was about how various foreign entities were outstripping America in various social and economic arenas.

POP QUIZ! Name three of the countries Zakaria was talking about in that book. Don't use the Internet, just write down three random countries that are outpacing the US in...let's say technology, just to keep it narrow.

Did that take you more than 30 seconds?

When questioned about whether or not this meant that America was going to fall off the Superpower pedestal, suffer a drastic fall economically or lose the ability to compete, Zakaria dropped back ten and punted. I remember this because it was the exact point where my brain went "why aren't we somewhere else, drinking gin?" Zakaria proceeded to explain that the actual freaking title of his book didn't fortell any doom for America (...The Post-America World? No way for that to be interpreted as doom-y, eh?) but rather that the book gave a thorough accounting of various nations whipping our asses economically, which may or may not have any kind of effect on the US's stature in the world.

In any case, The Future of Freedom can be summed up thus: "Liberal democracy is good, but you can't force it on people, because that tends to be when the machetes come out."

I don't mean to say that Zakaria is a useless jerk who deserves to be drawn and quartered in the public square. He's a very intelligent man who excels at making political history accessible to the layperson. However, the portrayal of his works as political theory is dangerously misguided, because it promotes the kind of stagnation that cripples discourse and keeps us all bickering about minutae when we should be acting. Were his thoughts promoted as historical or analytical works, it wouldn't bother me so much, but as it is, I feel like he feeds into the laissez-faire observer culture that seems to be developing. It's fine to comment on history! It's actually IMPORTANT to reflect on the history of politics! But to do so and call it something else is a mistake.

The key concept here is that liberal democracy may not be an assumed universal end a la Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, but rather that there's a lot that goes into making a stable, solid liberal democracy. If the creation process doesn't check off all of its necessary items, you run the risk of developing a very fighty, unstable nation instead. This also means that you can't export democracy. I doubt any modern person who's been awake during the past couple years needs much explanation on this point; our foray into Iraq without considering that perhaps a tribal culture used to conflict between all sizes of groups might not have the right mindset for American democracy is a pretty clear example. This is not to say Iraq can and will never be a democracy, merely that our political planning missed this crucial point and the result backs up what Zakaria's saying.

This is worth reading, I just wasn't that satisfied by it. I also cannot stand the disparity between Zakaria's grand titles and the relatively innocuous material between the pages.

304 pages

Cannonball Read #28: Diplomacy, by Henry Kissinger

I recently was introduced to the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, who is enjoying a somewhat surprising renaissance, given the long, slow drift towards secularism in the West and the general decay of diplomacy. Niebuhr was a truly fascinating individual, able to blend spirituality and secularism in a way that flattered and accentuated both. I could go on for quite some time here, but will instead advise you to pick up a copy of The Irony of American History and draw your own conclusions. Soon afterward, I was presented with an article from Liam Julien about President Obama's affinity for Niebuhr, which I was to write a 600 word reflection on. Not even the START of being enough to hit everything in that article. I had to forego a couple more complex reactions for the sake of brevity, but one of these discarded topics is a source of constant concern to me, and I think it bears discussion.

*DISCLAIMER: I think Julien's clear bias against Obama interferes with his ability to successfully analyze the situation. It doesn't make his article useless, but I think it makes it weaker. I find that there's a huge problem with commentators voicing dissent with the implication that all liberals/progressives developed their views after some kind of concussion-based accident. To think that anyone who has achieved national office without considering and then shaping their views through serious thought is simply ignorant.*

In the opening paragraphs of Julien's article, he appears to take issue with Obama's declaring certain Republican ideas "dumb." Despite this criticism, Julien later quotes some editorialists in defense of his argument that Obama doesn't quite "get" Niebuhr as calling a certain type of pacifism "dumb" (To be fair, that brand of pacifism is kind of dumb). This might seem like pretty standard juvenile language choice, but I find real cause for concern here. Shouldn't our level of discourse be just a sconch higher than one might find on an elementary school playground? As we have seen since the American Founding, our own domestic policy is immensely difficult to parse out, much less decisions about how to form and enact our foreign policy. Can we ever hope to achieve either objective if our vocabulary is reduced to calling things "dumb"?

As I mentioned before, I have a huge problem with anyone hoping to offer up some objective commentary on the state of American politics assuming that any kind of political philosophy was developed during some kind of Hunter S. Thompson adventure. Even the wackiest political opinions that make it to the national level are well-considered...perhaps not based on good information, perhaps not in accord with one's own logic, but considered. The difference in approach is manifested in the level of respect afforded to one's political opponents. If you begin a conversation with the presumption that your co-conversant is an idiot, your conversation is over. It's as simple as that. You can disagree, you can talk for years without being convinced, but if you do not appreciate that these ideas don't come from thin air, respect is abandoned and so is the possibility for productive discussion. Kim Jong Il is clearly a nut - we could all riff on this theme for ages - but that doesn't negate the fact that a) he believes what he says, b) he's heavily armed and c) he has transformed the Korean state into his own political tool. We can think he's nuts all we want, but if we can't understand these basic realities, we cannot hope to get him to knock it off with the nukes already.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I worry that diplomacy is dying. One of my biggest complaints with the Iraqi War is not necessarily that we went at all, but rather that the Bush Administration repeatedly said they'd tried that whole diplomacy thing and it didn't work, when in fact the diplomatic offices of the Executive were largely limited in their engagement. Please note - I don't think that diplomacy would have worked with Saddam Hussein, no matter how long we tried. But to SAY that you have been working your diplomatic fingers to the bone when diplomatic measures were abandoned or limited early on tells the world something important about your foreign policy, particularly in the context of the Iraqi War. In this case, it says "we're going to ask you a couple times to do what we say, and then if you don't do it, we're just going to smash you. No negotiation." You might agree that smashing was necessary, but the problem is that it's not just our allies who receive these tacit messages - our enemies do as well, and they may take it as a hint to dispense with formalities and just go with a preemptive strike if negotiation is off the table. There is more nuance and care required for successful diplomacy, and I fear that the patience and consideration required for it is slowly dying off as the business culture increasingly influences our political culture.

Now, one person who has and had this stuff on lockdown is Henry Kissinger. (Side note: Kissinger does not appear to have any plans to die, which I enjoy immensely. I think he has the Philosopher's Stone.) First of all, his book is beautifully written - it's a beast and quite possibly gave me carpal tunnel, but may I say? Worth it. - and that alone sheds light on one of the sources of his success. He is incredibly eloquent. You would be hard pressed to find someone with more diplomatic experience than Kissinger, but the real key is his clear study of history and politics, which ranges far beyond his own personal involvement. This is how true diplomacy should be, if we are to resolve the greatest issues of our time - studied, informed and well-considered. Kissinger takes you through Rooseveltian and Wilsonian world views all the way to the Cold War, but this is also much, much more than a history book. Kissinger manages to make political theory not only understandable, but vibrant and relevant. I have heard so many people complain that political theory is too obtuse and that it's outdated and irrelevant, but Kissinger illustrates brilliantly the many ways in which the politics of yesterday continue to influence and shape our political life.

I know it's 800+ pages, I know you think you don't really care that much about history, or diplomacy, EW, but I really encourage you to do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this (carefully). I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

836 pages

Nouveau Riche

I always thought of the term "nouveau riche" as a vaguely snotty concept employed by ladies who wore a lot of pleated skirts and pearls to refer to those who made their money and spent it on fairly conspicuous consumption. Luckily, the grand tradition of living in society gives us the eternal gift of neighbors, and neighbors are nothing if not constant sources of learning and amazement.

There are some people who live near-ish to Rich's parents who knocked down an extremely old and venerable smallish house to build not one, but two hideous McMansionesque heaps of rock. This would be offensive enough, had they not then decided to top off this extravaganza with lawn decor that could not be more representative of the most garish manifestation of the "nouveau riche" concept if it had neon signs attached to it announcing its price tag. Let me illuminate for you the glory of this masterpiece.
This is a fountain of some sort that represents one of two pieces of pseudo-Asian influence. It's got that kind of Japanese zen fountain thing going on...but accented with some kind of white lump of rock that makes no sense and looks bizarre. There is also a heron sculpture next to it. Remarkably, this is an improvement...it replaced a topiary of either an elephant or a poodle (jury's still out), which Rich brilliantly described as having been "so ugly it killed itself."
This is the Buddha statue upon whose belly the street number is displayed. The hitching post is presumably for tethering the Hummer I'm sure I didn't need to tell you they drive.
On the left hand side of the yard, these two pieces of magic are waiting for you. No yard is complete without a waving American flag carved in granite and the Anheuser-Busch eagle. I suspect it's actually meant to represent one of the armed forces, but frankly, this looks like a Bud Light kind of house, you know?
You pass those tiny pieces of stony delight on your way to house number two, which is not quite as hideous as house number one, but does have the distinct advantage of having a granite Mickey and Minnie Mouse in the front yard. Those are the things on the right...to the left is what I have to assume is a plastic object made to LOOK like stone, because it's a water wheel that turns. Luckily, they had the foresight to install an additional hitching post for when the first house's inhabitants visit.

I was not able to get a picture of the larger-than-life-size mannequin of abject horror that stands guard on the porch of house number one...it's a woman in a black gown, and I have no idea what the hell it's about.

I must learn to operate the zoom on my phone.