POTUS Under Pressure

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Wednesday’s news conference faced POTUS off with a very feisty press, whose members are apparently fatigued of the wide apprehension that he cradles the adoring media in the palm of his hand. All manner of aggressive tactics hitherto unknown – save a few tough questions overseas from foreign journalists – came into play: flagrant interruptions, tag-teamed questions, topical non sequitur, ad hominem inquiries about POTUS’s smoking habits, direct insinuations of subterfuge, even some outright griping. POTUS held his own, but snapped back when he needed to and laughed away awkwardness when it was expedient to do so. He displayed his world-class talent for maintaining an affable sort of cool, even as he managed the conversation carefully, setting limits, issuing subtle rewards and punishments as required. As POTUS ended the 55-minute news conference and made his way out of the briefing room, a journalist asked:

May I ask a question about Afghanistan? No questions about Iraq or Afghanistan, sir?

Although POTUS turned his back on this effort to extend the Q&A, any impression that he was ignoring the subject of our misguided wars is unfair. Blame for any topical omissions, I’m afraid, has to rest on the questioners not the questioned. The preferred issue was, of course, Iran, specifically, the violent suppression of political demonstrations (30 dead, 200 wounded) following what appears to be a stolen election and a patchy attempt to preserve the status quo. Surely, POTUS was prepared for a lot of nervous handwringing over the issue, with many Republican critics urging him to take a much harder line since the June 12 election.

I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran’s affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.

Long bored by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, John McCain and those of the imperialist mindset in both houses of Congress would love nothing more than to see the U.S. invade Iran or at least drop some bombs. Thankfully, however, POTUS has read his history books. Though he wasn’t even born, POTUS recalls that previous U.S. “activism” in Iran has turned out badly. In 1953, the CIA engineered the assassination of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, facilitated the overthrow of his democratically elected, moderate government, and arranged for the subsequent installation of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, who in turn presided over an authoritarian regime so repressive and draconian – locking up thousands of detractors, wreaking havoc on Iran’s civil society and educated middle class – that the 1979 theocratic revolution that unseated him and elevated his rival Ayatollah Khomenei became all but inevitable.

Ignoring this unpleasant history completely, reporters took shot after shot concerning POTUS’s supposed silence, timidity, and restraint regarding interference with the internal politics of sovereign Iran:

Jennifer Loven, Associated Press: Is there any redline that your administration won’t cross, where that offer [to engage in direct talks] will be shut off?

Nico Pitney, Huffington Post: Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad?

Major Garrett, FOX News: You said about Iran that you were appalled and outraged. What took you so long to say those words?

Chip Reid, CBS News: Were you influenced at all by John McCain and Lindsey Graham accusing you of being timid and weak?

POTUS, for his part, remained stalwart in his articulation of a few core themes, none of them sufficiently newsworthy to satisfy either the overcaffeinated media or the rabid warmongers in Congress. First and foremost, respecting the sovereignty of nations, a novel approach to foreign policy:

We have provided a path whereby Iran can reach out to the international community, engage, and become a part of international norms. It is up to them to make a decision as to whether they choose that path. . . . But just to reiterate, there is a path available to Iran in which their sovereignty is respected, their traditions, their culture, their faith is respected, but one in which they are part of a larger community that has responsibilities and operates according to norms and international rules that are universal.

The protests and demonstrations are an internal matter, not fomented by Western meddlers:

And the Iranian Government should understand that how they handle the dissent within their own country, generated indigenously, internally, from the Iranian people, will help shape the tone not only for Iran’s future but also its relationship to other countries. . . . And so, ultimately, the most important thing for the Iranian Government to consider is legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, not in the eyes of the United States. And that’s why I’ve been very clear: Ultimately, this is up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their Government.

POTUS exercised savvy caution, well aware that any overstepping in his rhetoric would be readily exploited by Ahmadinejad’s propaganda machine:

My role has been to say, the United States is not going to be a foil for the Iranian Government to try to blame what’s happening on the streets of Tehran on the CIA or on the White House, that this is an issue that is led by and given voice to the frustrations of the Iranian people. . . . This is not an issue about the United States; this is about an issue of the Iranian people.

The White House even went to the admirable effort of providing Farsi and Arabic transcripts of POTUS’s opening remarks on its website. The message was clear: we witness your suffering, we acknowledge your efforts, but this is not our business. Still, POTUS could not satisfy the media’s voracity for something new, something breaking, and journalists, impatient and under pressure, often dig for it when it’s just not there.

Jennifer Loven, Associated Press: So should there be consequences for what’s happened so far?

Major Garrett, FOX News: Are Iranian diplomats still welcome at the Embassy on Fourth of July, sir?

Chip Reid, CBS News: So there’s no news in your statement today?

Chuck Todd, NBC News: But shouldn’t the Iranian regime know that there are consequences?

Consequences? What exactly do these heavy-breathing scribes have in mind? What indeed do McCain and Graham expect in practical terms? Did George H.W. Bush bluster about consequences for the far more horrific repression exhibited in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre (at least 200 dead, thousands wounded)? Did the Soviet Union threaten consequences for the U.S. National Guard’s firing on unarmed students at Kent State University in 1970 (4 dead, 9 wounded)? Although sober observers around the world discern the wisdom in POTUS’s approach toward Iran, his delicate word choices are apparently making the reactionary set very anxious. Let’s recall that the Mighty McCain had attacked POTUS on the campaign trail for advocating “restraint from both sides” in the August conflagration that broke out between Georgia and Russia. In the mythology of American exceptionalism, only the Other Side must show restraint.

The second hot topic was health care reform and POTUS’s insistence that new legislation include some sort of “public option” that would extend and improve health care coverage for those 50 million Americans currently uninsured or underinsured. Though poll data consistently show that the overwhelming majority of Americans support expanded government-subsidized health care, some are nervous that private insurers would be priced out of the market:

David Jackson, USA Today. Won’t that drive private insurers out of business?

The President. Well, why would it drive private insurers out of business? If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care, if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the Government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.

ABC’s Jake Tapper later characterized POTUS’s appeal to logic as “Spock-like” but pressed him to assert whether or not provision for the “public option” was “nonnegotiable,” again groping for conflict. After a joke about the “Spock reference [being] a crack on my ears,” POTUS didn’t give up on logic, however, which in any case, he has in his favor in this debate.

I think that there is a legitimate concern if the public plan was simply eating off the taxpayer trough that it would be hard for private insurers to compete. If, on the other hand, the public plan is structured in such a way where they’ve got to collect premiums and they’ve got to provide good services, then if what the insurance companies are saying is true, that they’re doing their best to serve their customers, that they’re in the business of keeping people well and giving them security when they get sick, they should be able to compete.

Certainly, we can take POTUS’s word about “healthy debates” to heart here. Is health care a right (and therefore, the government’s responsibility to protect) or merely a privilege (and therefore, a private concern)? What’s interesting to me is that education, a public service difficult to separate theoretically from health care in my mind, does not appear to raise the same controversy. In fact, the inverse situation obtains. Private schools (in existence since colonial days) and now charter schools are said to put salutary market pressure on public schools to perform better and compete for students. The school voucher system, lauded by free-market devotees on both sides of the political spectrum, in fact, is very similar to POTUS’s proposed health care exchange. This analogy argues that context and legacy matter more than pragmatism and common sense in dividing our loyalties. A largely private health care system threatened by public competition meets a largely public education system threatened by private competition. Even Spock would see the profound irony of our insistence on framing these positions as adversarial.

I take those advocates of the free market to heart when they say that the free market is innovative and is going to compete on service and is going to compete on their ability to deliver good care to families. And if that’s the case, then this just becomes one more option. If it’s not the case, then I think that that’s something that the American people should know.

On the flip side, it might be worth having another healthy debate about why health care organizations (insurers, providers, billing agencies, etc.) should be run as for-profit enterprises in the first place. Pursuing the above analogy, most private schools and universities are still operating on non-profit guidelines even within a capitalistic superstructure. They compete for customers, sources of funding, and prestige, but they don’t turn a profit in the way other businesses do. That is to say, the so-called free market is not necessarily predicated on financial gain alone. The principle of competitive self-interest readily applies to other forms of “currency”: customer satisfaction, industry reputation, community relations, mission fulfillment, etc. But we’ll leave POTUS to address that question on another day. For the moment, he’s got his hands full battling the 24-hour news cycle, which has no time for antiquarian relics such as logic.

“The Future of an Illusion” by Sigmund Freud

by Joshua H. Liberatore

I’m not sure what moved me recently to pick up my copy of Sigmund Freud’s classic critique of religious belief, The Future of an Illusion (1927), which has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. Perhaps the impulse grew out of my observation of (and growing distaste toward) the breezy manner in which religion is often dismissed by fashionable liberals and otherwise smart men like Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens but also many among my educated, well-meaning peers. I’d read and profited from the successor companion volume, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), in which Freud explains how the destructive instinct in mankind is firmly rooted in both his culture and his psychological makeup. The order of these two books might well have been reversed, I now realize, since Freud was clearly interested in exploring how men can (and must) control and suppress the will to destroy that grows out of intensified individualism (our native egocentrism) in order to preserve civilization, which many do through mythmaking and religious doctrine. Civilization (Freud’s untranslatable Kultur), in turn, paradoxically propagates and encourages this destructive principle, for men tend to demonize and lash out at the forces that keep them from realizing a full expression of their egos, sometimes unconsciously, often in full awareness of their dangerous folly. So perhaps the order of Freud’s essays makes sense after all, since Freud’s overarching narrative suggests a dynamic feedback loop connecting the desire to destroy with the necessity to civilize. So, religious belief, even though childish and predicated on fear according to Freud, is nevertheless useful as a functional way to keep the house in order.

    Consummate scientist that he was, Freud can’t help himself from positing a possible civilization in which scientific principles and reason prevail over the “magical thinking” (Bill Maher’s characterization) that has made religion such an indispensable component to the successful “maintenance” of societies thus far. Is that the epoch in which we live in 2009, more than 80 years after Freud hoped for its emergence? Not at all, say our liberal critics, who attach themselves to the idea that religion, contrary to Freud’s contention, breeds all sorts of destructive and violent (indeed repressive) behaviors, motivating men to commit great evil in the name of their gods. Thus, they say, religion itself has become an impediment to the flourishing of enlightened civilization. Though I’m not a very religious person myself, I often find myself defending religion in conversations of this drift if only because I think religion gets singled out so narrowly and so blithely, whereas I see it as just one item from a vast menu of organizing forces that may lead to good or ill, depending on the user and the context.

    Now, I can arm myself with Freud’s own insights, though he nowise concealed his skepticism of religion as the chief purveyor of lies and fantasies, circumscribed by infantile wish-fulfillment and longing for the father. Lies and fantasies, nevertheless, have been quite effective in historical terms, argues Freud, in so far as they function in their high purpose of restraining our base natures. He only wishes their eventual replacement with what he calls “the primacy of the intelligence over the life of the instincts.” I venture to add, however, that science cannot boast a better – or at least a pure – record in any case, despite Freud’s ardent projections, which turn out to be naive from the relatively placid vista of the late 1920s. Europe to date had only flirted with self-annihilation just the once, with the help of industrial-grade weapons and scientific planning quite inferior to what the next generation would witness beginning in 1938 (Freud died in 1939). Rationalist liberals often point to the persistence of jihad and abortion-clinic arsonists in our modern world as proof that religion begets hatred and violence. Religious traditionalists meanwhile offer nuclear weapons and industrial pollution as equally destructive and barbaric on the global scale. Neither camp, it seems, has read Freud carefully.

    Civilization, I contend, is not vulnerable to an epic clash between religion and science. Both exist at once, in one cultural space (yes, even in the “Muslim world”!), as competing loyalties, by no means mutually exclusive. Moreover, both religion and science exist alongside and in grand mixture with all the other organizing structures Freud would recognize as buffers to self-destruction, all of them irrational loyalties, de facto “faiths” of a sort: political ideologies, patriotism and ethnic identity, cults of personality and hero worship, institutions of marriage and family, even technology itself. Ours is a world in which Sunday mass is no more destructive or benign than Facebook or “The Bachelorette,” no more repressive or productive than income tax or the all-volunteer army, no worse or better than Brita filters or Viagra. Religion is simply another instrument with which we tamp down our all-consuming egos. But make no mistake: I’m not advocating any kind of easy relativism here. The contextual equality of these competing, organizing forces does not relieve us of the burden of making choices and value judgments, nor does it remove the necessity of constructing meaning out those choices. Our postmodern birthright is such that we choose our discipline as freely as we choose our poison. Our ignorance is often that we posit poison and discipline as opposites, adversaries, when in fact they are two sides of a coin.

“Absurdistan” by Gary Shteyngart

by Joshua H. Liberatore

In Gary Shteyngart’s brilliant novel Absurdistan, the narrator and protagonist Misha Vainberg is struggling – in vain, it seems, for most of the novel – to free himself from the “sins of the father.” His father, a post-Soviet Russian businessman whose corrupt profit schemes and murderous ruthlessness have come to haunt Misha, whose sole goal is to get back to New York to live with his Puerto Rican soulmate. Instead, he is stuck in his patriarchal homeland, held hostage by Immigration Services officers keeping tabs on his father’s criminal activities. Later, one of his father’s colleagues jokes that Misha’s father killed an Oklahoman (ruining Misha’s dreams for a renewed American visa) just to keep his son close, but Misha does not see it as a joke.

    The dizzying fates of chaos and circumstance, which eventually leave him stranded in Absurdistan, a Caspian Sea republic, seem to conspire, in his father’s honor, to keep Misha living within the Russian midst. Misha’s dream to live a simple life with his uneducated girlfriend Rouenna is in direct rebellion to his father’s wishes that he marry a Jewish girl and succeed him as oligarch in the “family business,” but throughout the novel, Misha seems to be running from both his heritage and his family expectations to carve his own path, however absurd that path may appear on the surface.

    In the first part of the novel, Misha finds himself living the life his father wants for him. He lives like an aristocrat in a huge St. Petersburg apartment, resting on the luxury of servants and extravagant comforts, while the surrounding city crumbles in poverty and despair. With no job or ambition to speak of, Misha thinks of founding a philanthropic mission to “save the children,” but this stratagem merely constitutes another (albeit more humanitarian) excess in his otherwise “superfluous man” existence, a prototype familiar to anyone versed in Russian literature and culture. In short, though highly intelligent and possessed of an American liberal arts education from Occidental College, Misha has learned only to throw his money around and live high on the hog, quite literally as a cultured pig.

    Although he appears genuinely to care for the humanitarian cause he hopes to serve (motivated in part by his pity for Rouenna’s native urban poverty), besides hiring a fleet of social workers and contracting a web designer, Misha does not show an active drive to build and run the service himself. When his father is suddenly killed (in revenge for his own assassinations, no doubt) and Misha is left all alone and stuck in a city he loathes, Misha slips into a serious depression, which culminates in the egregious decision to sleep with his recently widowed stepmother (a young “peasant” girl from the provinces who also evokes his pity). This extreme blunder marks the nadir of Misha’s desperation but also the beginning of his new awareness that he must leave Russia – and his father’s post-mortem grip on his future – at any cost.

    The second stage of the novel lands him in conflict-ridden Absurdistan, where Misha’s wealth and his dead father’s connections promise to secure him Belgian citizenship and a ticket out of the old Iron Curtain. His machinations, though hopeful at first, are soon thwarted by the collapse of Absurdistan’s government in a trumped-up coup attempt (later revealed to be staged) and a violent civil war between Sevo and Svani factions of the country’s Christian population for control of its natural resources (later revealed to be all but depleted). Here Misha finds two things that put him on the path to productivity and redemption: love and courage. Despite his wealth and connections, Misha’s gambit to survive his stay (now indefinite) in Svani City requires daring, cunning, and a newfound appreciation for life’s simple pleasures. The borders have shut down, violence rages in the streets, and refugees (including Misha) crowd into prostitute hovels at the Intourist Hotel, which doubles as a bomb shelter (the Hyatt has long been plundered).

    Meanwhile, Misha falls in love with a young tour guide, Nana Bragabagovana, who shows him the city’s modest charms and introduces him to delectable fresh sturgeon and ripe red tomatoes that capture his senses almost as aggressively as her beauty does his lust. As his relationship with her deepens and he becomes embroiled in the local politics (Nana’s father, a local kingpin, recruits him to serve as Minister of Multicultural Affairs in the post-coup government), he exercises his generosity and compassion, and for the first time, not by spending money. His inquiries and adventures reveal a civil conflict that is more than absurd – there is nothing real to fight over – it is fictitious. In these simultaneously bewildering and formative circumstances, he begins to plan his escape to the West with Nana, an objective that the reader somehow understands will never be consummated.

    On September 10, 2001, just as Misha hopes to cross the border toward his freedom, his attention turns back to his deep love for Rouenna and he decides to leave Nana behind (her father, Misha discovers, has plans to ambush their train and “kidnap” her back). And although readers can’t be sure Misha will fulfill this dream, his final email to Rouenna (as he composes it mentally) reveals how much his adventures have liberated him from his father’s loving but domineering hold on him, and from his own paralyzing superfluity. Emerging from his trials more self-assured and focused, Misha is ready to do right by Rouenna and come after her, to live with her, look after her education, and help her raise her child. The descent into absurdity and his short, but transformative tenure in Absurdistan have awakened in Misha a fresh purpose to living, not born of family guilt and spoiled entitlement, but sincere affection and a thirst for a new kind of freedom. Despite these promising tropes, however, Shteyngart is thoroughly rooted in the Russian tradition, and the fateful paring of Misha’s date and region of departure suggest that he will not be leaving Absurdistan any time soon.

The Vague Disappointment of Good Citizenship

by Joshua H. Liberatore

When you think about it, there’s so little that’s asked of us as citizens on a day-to-day basis. Sure, we vote enthusiastically every four years (and a few of us more often than that), we pay our taxes (hoping for sizable refunds), we try to obey most traffic laws (within reason). Since we rely on an all-volunteer army these days, we don’t even live with the once ominous responsibility to carry spears for our nation, as even our parents’ generation did. By any standard, whether historical or in comparison with many other places, the demands of being an American today are very modest indeed. Under such circumstances, it’s understandable perhaps if we occasionally look for and seize opportunities to participate, in ever so small ways, in acts of what we might call, sarcastically, as you’ll see, “heightened” citizenship. But quite often the results disappoint, leading us back into routine complacence, at least until the next invitation arises.

    I offer two recent anecdotes as examples. A few weeks I ago, I discovered a dropped wallet when I was riding my bike through the neighborhood. It was loaded with cash and various forms of picture identification, multiple credit and debit cards, even a Social Security card. An unscrupulous man might have taken out a mortgage in this poor guy’s name, as a friend of mine joked. To summarize the four-day saga, despite all the personal information it contained, I couldn’t find an active phone number for the owner, a Frenchman by the name of Arnaud Dupoizat who seemed to be an employee of the World Bank of all places, so I called his credit card company. A supervisor instructed me to bring the wallet to the nearest police station, but I insisted that Dupoizat be called and informed, because I knew that once I delivered it into the hands of DC’s finest, the wallet would be sucked into a bureaucratic vortex of misplaced paperwork and gross inefficiency.

    And I was right, sort of. I took it in to my neighborhood police station, and luckily, the officer on duty was nice and left me her badge number and the report reference number so that I could keep tabs on the case. Meanwhile, I continued to try to track down Dupoizat on my own, with no luck. The available addresses of record led me to two condo buildings, one impenetrable with no security desk and no phone directory, the other presided over by a half-witted security guard who claimed he had no way to determine who lived in the building. I left my name and number anyway, with a brief note for Monsieur Dupoizat. During these investigations, I was also making twice-daily calls to the police department but never seemed to catch old Officer Long, whose 12am to 6am shift did not jive well with my middle-aged bedtimes. Finally, one evening I reached another rather honest officer who admitted that I would have been better off delivering the wallet myself and that “returned property” usually sits for years until picked up. Years. I told him that I had tried to reach Dupoizat but to no avail, and perhaps he was suggesting that I would have been better off pocketing the $135 and destroying the rest of the contents? I suspect I eventually bothered the original Officer Long’s colleagues enough that they gave her the message. She left a voicemail later that night to the effect that Arnaud had picked up the wallet about five minutes after I had dropped it off that fateful Saturday night! Thank you, private sector.

    The instance reminded me of two previous occasions when I had returned lost property, once a driver’s license to Puerto Rican man in Chicago, whom a friend and I tracked down on foot and with whom we tried our best to communicate. We were rewarded with a few mumbles and a stony, straight face. Then there was the time in Madison, WI, when my brother found a very large certified check (in excess of $3,000), and unable to locate the owner, returned it to the issuing bank across town, again to bland acknowledgment. After my encounter with the Dupoizat wallet, I was left with that same familiar feeling of practical satisfaction but vague moral discontent that I now associate with good citizenship. Why is that? Do I object to anonymous acts of good will? Do I require gratitude, compensation, even formal recognition of my attempts at basic altruism? In the absence of such markers of closure, will I be less motivated in the future to do right by my fellow man?

    Another neighborhood incident, this one just yesterday, provides a different perspective, I think, on the sort of mild disappointment I am trying to describe, and because it does not involve property or money, I submit that it gets closer to the core of the experience in question. Walking from the metro yesterday evening, as I neared my apartment building, I witnessed an altercation in the brewing stages. Apparently, a cyclist had nearly hit a pedestrian carrying some dry-cleaning, and they were exchanging hot words on the subject, still from the distance provided by a dense column of parked cars. The cyclist, tall and wiry, dismounted his bike with marked hostility, flipped down his kick stand with a vigor that amused me (kick stands amuse me), and brandished his heavy U-lock in support of the mumbled insults that were issuing from both men. I slowly crossed the street, walked toward the men, and saw two waiters from the adjacent restaurant do the same. By the time we reached the men, they were scuffling on the sidewalk in close embrace. I had seen the cyclist raise the U-lock in a sort of fake-out threat but the pedestrian, short and stocky but clearly stronger, had restrained his arm, tumbling to the pavement in the process, now both of them in a twisted mass of absurd flesh, while happy hour enthusiasts sipped pinot grigio perhaps eight feet away and looked on in frozen horror.

    As the two waiters caught up with the contorted shapes and reached over the short fence to try to separate them, I busied myself with relieving the cyclist of his improvised weapon, a very blunt instrument capable of much harm. In tacit concert that combined applied force and mollifying talk, the three of us gradually detached both the men and the weapon. As they dusted themselves off and seemed to cool down, I asked, instinctively, “Are you all right?” as I handed the U-lock back to the sweating cyclist, whose mouth dripped a bestial sort of slobber, fruits of his great passion. The aggrieved pedestrian shot me a look: “Why are you asking him if he’s all right? This guy almost ran me over, then came after me with a bike lock.” Was I playing the principal, passing judgment, siding with the weak kid? Was I arbitrating? “Actually, I was talking to both of you. You both need to calm down.” Apparently, the interruption in fighting only allowed them to continue trading epithets, those from the cyclist becoming sharply racial (oddly, he seemed confident that the pedestrian was Italian – were we in Brooklyn, circa 1956?). Even as the cyclist returned to his parked bike in the street (regrettably, that kick stand hadn’t held), the rhetoric continued from both sides, us referees shifting in our expressions from worry to disgust, as a wave of collective embarrassment washed over the happy hour crowd and other passers-by.

    The shouting continued. Our interference did not. We walked away, they to their duties in the restaurant, I slowly to my doorstep, but not without glancing back, still curious, to the tenuous aftermath that could easily convert into fresh combat, silly as it was to begin with. The incident had upset me, but not for the obvious reasons of having witnessed an otherwise civilized corner of a cosmopolitan city transmogrify, however briefly, into a scene of unquestionable barbarity, and certainly not due to once again receiving neither thanks nor scant mention for a show of something more than indifference to a private mishap becoming public plight in broad day. Had justice been delivered? Had a modicum of peace and safety been restored? Even though I did not witness and could not reconstruct the source of the offense, I feel pretty sure the cyclist was far out of line, perhaps even deranged, if not actually on drugs. But meting out demerits was never my concern, nor did the trivialities of assigning blame trouble the waiters, whose main objective was to clear the scene on behalf of their customers. Rather, I think that what bothered me was the childish way in which the pedestrian rebuked me with his arrogant assumption that I was interested in anything more sophisticated that preventing bloodshed. I was not, after all, arbitrating. Just as returning a lost wallet or a dropped cashier’s check was no exercise in restorative justice, merely a pragmatic gesture, no more heroic than refilling the toilet paper or replenishing the paper tray in the office printer, becoming in the end an errand no more gratifying than these daily overtures in basic housekeeping and orderliness.

    Obviously, I have no wish to intellectualize these two fairly mundane experiences in blasé 21st century American citizenship. And I am sure that I will engage in many more such acts of general maintenance before my time is up, or at least before I become a grumpy old man content to let the world go to hell before his eyes on the strength of the memory that it wasn’t always that way and indeed need not be if people would just do their part. I hope I do anyway. I don’t mean to suggest that I wasted my time in either case. I believe that in most cases, we act only because we must, not because we expect either reward or recognition. Most of our motivation has to come from within, since otherwise, we’d stand around waiting for our good works to be properly noticed, eventually giving up. Something else must compel us. If not, what can citizenship or any other kind of outward-looking service be expected to signify, in this benighted age or any other.

“Lives Per Gallon” by Terry Tamminen

by Joshua H. Liberatore

California EPA Secretary Terry Tamminen delivers in Lives Per Gallon a compelling if not altogether shocking diagnosis of our present energy ills. Its subtitle “The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction” may first suggest another liberal tract full of liberal self-loathing and guilty hand-wringing about American dependence on cars and the fossil fuels that run them. But Lives Per Gallon presents a much broader, wide-ranging discussion of the problem whose catchphrases are all to easy to utter in public without a firm grasp of either the full extent of the consequences or the ready solutions that have been systematically ignored for decades. It’s as if policymakers and politicians have convinced themselves that using a loaded clinical word like “addiction” means they have recognized and accepted viable treatments, in many cases, available at the rehab clinic around the corner. But Tamminen, as Governor Schwarzenegger’s special assistant on environmental policy, is neither so blithe nor so naive as national politicians have proven to be. In an era when we increasingly must look to states, municipalities, and even private companies and organizations, rather than the Federal government, to lead on forging solutions to our most pressing environmental and energy problems, Tamminen’s candid voice and direct experience in California’s largely successful energy policy portfolio are welcome refreshment.

    One of the most striking aspects of Tamminen’s analysis that may motivate those otherwise indifferent to the ecological costs of our dependency on hydrocarbons is his extensive look at their lesser-known health effects. From a variety of perspectives, Tamminen evaluates the hidden costs of petroleum consumption: on oil workers, on the lungs of commuters and urbanites, on populations exposed to oil spills, on plant and animal life adjacent to oil activity. Besides visible exhaust from cars and factories, petroleum products produce a miasma of pernicious elements (benzene, dangerous particulate matter, volatile byproducts, etc.) in our atmosphere that linger, penetrate our food chain for good, enter our bodies, and taint our water resources. Tamminen stipulates that an industry-wide class action lawsuit could brought against oil and auto manufacturing companies on a scale that would put the famous tobacco settlement to shame. Furthermore, true pricing of gasoline and petroleum products that accounts for all the hidden costs would offer a shock to our economy and pocket books that we would not easily dismiss.

    Anyone who has seen eye-opening documentaries like The End of Suburbia or Who Killed the Electric Car? will recognize some of the same damning themes in Tamminen’s assessment as well. In particular, as we continue to approach “peak oil” – the point at which no new reserves of oil are harvested and available world supply thereafter drops precipitously – the immense costs of our car-dependent lifestyles, which have never been truly borne by consumers, unless you count tax dollars spent on overseas wars, exorbitant corporate subsidies, generous aid to oil states, just to name a few, will shortly become ominously apparent and are certain to yield social and infrastructural consequences that boggle the mind. And the relevant industries know it, which is why oil companies and conventional utilities have emerged as huge investors in and developers of renewable energy sources and technologies. The only question is when will governments and consumers catch up? Those among us who offer tired rhetoric about some undiscovered technology or scientific advancement that will save us from our errant ways ignore the fact that viable, affordable technologies already exist that would begin to repair the damage. The short-lived electric vehicle (EV) movement that California’s landmark 1990 zero-emission regulations sparked remains an unflattering example of superior technology and sound science being squashed by industry intransigence, political cowardice, and consumer impatience. Perhaps a major energy cataclysm – not merely the $4.50/gallon fill-ups of spring 2008 or the ongoing painful misadventure in Iraq, but something that really hurts average Americans – will be required before a wide swath of people, not just those bleeding-heart Californians, muster the political will and consumer forbearance to break the addiction for good.

POTUS Among the Pharaohs

by Joshua H. Liberatore

As we prepared for POTUS’s reception in the Middle East this week, I for one found it salutary to take a good square look at where we’ve come from. When our former POTUS spoke about language training initiatives in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu at the State Department in 2006, he relied on his own rich linguistic heritage to drive home his message:

You see, freedom is the ideology that wins. We got to have confidence in that as we go out. But you can’t win in the long run for democracy unless you’ve got the capacity to help spread democracy. You see, we got to convince people of the benefits of a free society. I believe everybody desires to be free. . . . And you can’t convince people unless you can talk to them. And I’m not talking to them right now directly; I’m talking through an interpreter on some of these Arabic TV stations. . . . And the best way to do that is to have those of us who understand freedom be able to communicate in the language of the people we’re trying to help.

Regrettably, learning Arabic or Farsi wasn’t enough to ensure the success of those 20 military linguists who were discharged between 1998 and 2004 for violating the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in force for gay soldiers, apparently not among those “who understand freedom.” But the former POTUS continued:

In order to convince people we care about them, we’ve got to understand their culture and show them we care about their culture. When somebody comes to me and speaks Texan, I know they appreciate the Texas culture. (Laughter.) I mean, somebody takes time to figure out how to speak Arabic, it means they’re interested in somebody else’s culture. . . . It’s a gesture of interest. It really is a fundamental way to reach out to somebody and say, “I care about you. I want you to know that I’m interested in not only how you talk but how you live.” (January 5, 2006)

Two and a half years later, we still don’t have an Arabic-speaking President, or even a properly multilingual one. Although some speculated that POTUS might have picked up some Bahasa Indonesia when he lived overseas as a young boy, he admitted from the campaign trail that he doesn’t speak another language, and that he’s embarrassed about it. (And his feeble, if well-intentioned, attempts during his first trip to Europe in April provided ample proof of this confession. At least he speaks English passably well.) So, as POTUS toured the Arab world this week, making key stops in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, both putative U.S. allies, he relied on gestures other than language as he renewed his offer to extend an “open hand” to the Muslim community. And even without Arabic, he found a way, it seems, to speak as directly as he could, as candidly any American president could be expected to. In his Monday morning NPR interview, POTUS offered some frank hints at the themes of his upcoming speech:

Now, in every country I deal with, whether it’s China, Russia, ultimately Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, allies as well as non-allies, there are going to be some differences. And what I want to do is just maintain consistency in affirming what those values that I believe in are, understanding that we’re not going to get countries to embrace various of our values simply by lecturing or through military means. We can’t force these approaches. What we can do is stand up for human rights. We can stand up for democracy. But I think it’s a mistake for us to somehow suggest that we’re not going to deal with countries around the world in the absence of their meeting all our criteria for democracy. (June 1, 2009)

On what criteria will said Muslim community be grading POTUS? As a recent Brookings Institution poll revealed, next to Iraq, the primary issue of concern in the Middle East is nothing new: the plight of the Palestinians. Many Muslims look to POTUS to set a new course in solving a conflict that all too commonly is shelved by American presidents or put off until late second-term (both Clinton and Bush the Younger are guilty of the latter). POTUS claims to understand that both sides need to make concessions, but after his meeting last week with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas he reminded us of the inherent complexities of the process and also issued a subtle signal toward a meaningful reversal of the prevailing Bush doctrine:

We are a stalwart ally of Israel, and it is in our interests to assure that Israel is safe and secure. It is our belief that the best way to achieve that is to create the conditions on the ground and set the stage for a Palestinian state as well. And so what I told Prime Minister Netanyahu was, is that each party has obligations under the roadmap. On the Israeli side, those obligations include stopping settlements; they include making sure that there is a viable potential Palestinian state. On the Palestinian side, it’s going to be important and necessary to continue to take the security steps on the West Bank that President Abbas has already begun to take, working with General Dayton. We’ve seen great progress in terms of security in the West Bank. Those security steps need to continue because Israel has to have some confidence that security in the West Bank is in place in order for us to advance this process. (May 28, 2009)

The Second Coming of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has caused many to fear not just a perpetuation of the status quo of the past 16 years (since the Oslo talks broke down) but indeed a dramatic roll-back of the modest gains made under his right-wing predecessors Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, namely, concerning the graduated withdrawal of Jewish settlements in land recognized by the international community and multiple U.N. documents as Palestinian, settlements that continue to be subsidized, protected, and in some cases, armed by the Israeli government, settlements that all but negate the physical plausibility of the so-called “two-state solution.” Will POTUS be able to persuade the warlike Bibi to rein in these defeatist policies?

Well, I think it’s important not to assume the worst, but to assume the best. And in my conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu, I was very clear about the need to stop settlements; to make sure that we are stopping the building of outposts; to work with the Palestinian Authority in order to alleviate some of the pressures that the Palestinian people are under in terms of travel and commerce, so that we can initiate some of the economic development plans that Prime Minister Netanyahu himself has said are so important on the ground. (May 28, 2009)

POTUS told NPR that being a “stalwart” friend to Israel means being more honest with it about what’s good and bad for its long-term viability. Israel, as a self-proclaimed Jewish state, faces a huge demographic dilemma in the shape of its 20 percent-and-growing Arab-Muslim and Arab-Christian population. Thus, for a two-state solution – easy to say, difficult to do – to materialize, what we’d be looking at is a Jewish state with a sizable Palestinian minority and a Palestinian state with a smaller, but not insignificant, Jewish minority of 280,000 settlers, many of them from the United States and the former Soviet Union. The first is not only plausible; it’s simply the existential reality of modern Israel. The second requires Jewish settlers on land conquered in the 1967 war to recognize themselves as Palestinian Jews, a duality that Israeli Arabs have had to accommodate since 1948 even though it means a sort of second-class citizenship. As for the settlements beyond Israel’s official borders, POTUS has had to choose his words carefully, using variously, “freeze, including natural growth,” “stop settlements”, “progress on settlements” – while the Palestinians and the rest of the world tend to favor the verb “withdraw.” In his meeting with Netanyahu, POTUS was markedly gentler but did not eschew the topic entirely:

Now, Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps as well. And I shared with the Prime Minister the fact that under the roadmap and under Annapolis that there’s a clear understanding that we have to make progress on settlements, that settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward. That’s a difficult issue. I recognize that, but it’s an important one, and it has to be addressed. I think the humanitarian situation in Gaza has to be addressed. Now, I was along the border in Sderot and saw the evidence of weapons that had been raining down on the heads of innocents in those Israeli cities, and that’s unacceptable. And so we’ve got to work with the Egyptians to deal with the smuggling of weapons, and it has to be meaningful, because no prime minister of any country is going to tolerate missiles raining down on their citizens’ heads. (May 18, 2009)

What does all this have to do with Egypt? Besides being the most populous Arab country, Egypt also has the longest-standing peace agreement with its neighbor Israel. As such, POTUS used his Cairo speech to renew his commitment to the region and attempted a most difficult balancing act in the country where he and his country are probably least popular according to Brookings (in media-maligned Iran, by the way, both POTUS and the U.S. are viewed rather favorably on the street). By virtue of its location, Egypt is also a key partner in resolving the perennial flare-ups of violence in Gaza that have left its poor residents living half-starved in a veritable cage. In short, POTUS needed to hit a home run in Cairo. Given the heavy attention his speech has received elsewhere, I’ll restrain myself from extended analysis and simply end with this key passage:

I know there’s been a lot of publicity about this speech, but no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust, nor can I answer in the time that I have this afternoon all the complex questions that brought us to this point. But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.” (Applause.) That is what I will try to do today: to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart. (June 4, 2009)

POTUS went on to quote other salient passages from the Koran, the Gospels, and the Talmud that demonstrated his well-founded belief in common ground: the shared desired for peace, prosperity, and fellowship. Small gestures such as tagging his mention of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, with the Muslim phrase “peace be upon them” received enthusiastic applause. His bold use of the P-word, Palestine, though it may not strike American ears as semantically different from “Palestinian state,” resounded in Arab audiences, and the entire umma Muslima, as an unprecedented illustration of support. POTUS also reminded us that while Europeans were busy bashing one other about with maces and halberds in the middle ages, Muslim scholars in Baghdad and Damascus were preserving the literary and philosophical traditions of ancient Greece, making substantial advances in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, and in general, presiding over a bright courtly civilization even as the lights were out for centuries in the West.

Now, surely many of the Rudy Giuliani school of nuanced rhetoric will vilify these overtures as pandering, but POTUS seemed sincere, galvanizing sharp and welcome deviations from eight years of Bushwhacking in the wilderness and labeling it freedom. If these promising words are matched with concrete actions, we might well find ourselves four years from now in a better position relative to the 1.5 billion people around the world who identify themselves as Muslims, a full 20 percent of humanity. Not a waste of time or effort, by any standard.

The Federalist Project 3

“The Madisonian Moment” and The Federalist 11 – 14

Rakove’s presentation of James Madison, “The Madisonian Moment,” challenges a superficial misconception of the Convention’s scribe as a sort of dry academic, an essential notetaker and punctilious proceduralist, but not the imposing intellectual presence of a Hamilton, Jefferson, or Franklin. On the contrary, he emerges from Rakove’s descriptions as an infinitely more colorful and restless figure, possessed of a vigorous, almost aggressive intellect that sparked forceful debate and demanded the highest standards of public service from his peers. Madison was no doubt a consummate advocate for establishing a strong central authority, as necessary “to compel” delinquent states “to fulfill their federal engagements.” His strong stance was in many ways born of his personal frustration and disappointment in the quality of his experience as an assembly delegate in Virginia. One critical contribution was his robust argument that property in the putative union of states was to be seen “as an interest deserving protection against the envious and unjust designs of the less fortunate” (41). On this note, Madison strikes the modern reader as a rabid conservative, but at the time, the view was decidedly progressive, Rakove notes, in meaningful contradistinction to legal conventions then prevailing on the Continent, which were rooted in an aristocratic tradition. Further to that notion was his unwavering (Rakove calls it “unmoderated”) view that the new confederation would need to provide for a central, secured national currency, anything less than which would be not only “unjust” but even “unconstitutional” – a bold statement indeed since there wasn’t yet a Constitution. Here again we observe a thematic link with contemporary fiscal conservatism.

    In Federalist 11–14, Hamilton continues his multipronged argument for the advisability of a stronger central authority to achieve efficiencies and security of scale. In particular, Federalist 11 raises the issue of a national navy, the commercial importance of which was an indisputable fact in the 18th century. Hamilton introduces here a new tonal element, an almost chauvinistic one, in which his desire to prove wrong British and other European skeptics who doubted the success of the new American state. He says: “Men admired as profound philosophers have in direct terms attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America – that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the European. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother moderation” (91). In short, he views America’s pressing need to develop a navy commensurate with her potential as a way to stand up to the old world and put the lie to its condescension.

    Hamilton continues this thread in Federalist 14 on a slight variation. Here his aim is to confront the traditional notion in political science that suggests democratic government is suited best to small, homogeneous communities, not expansive, diversely populated nation-states. He summarily dismisses these criticisms as the “confounding of a republic with a democracy” and goes on to redefine the two for the dimwitted. Hamilton all but dares Europe to underestimate the power of American unity, noting that: “the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their Union and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies” (104). Hamilton shows himself a true believer in the centrality of American identity and its promise to forge a prosperous and secure future for all those blessed to share in it.