The "Third Culture Kid" and the Impotence of the "Incurious"

In a short thread discussing the intellectual shortcomings and failings of liberal professor, civil rights activist, and frequent Bill Maher panelist Cornell West, Andrew Sullivan posts an email from a reader who writes the most cogent description of President Obama that I've ever read. Money quote:

The liberal label doesn’t fit Obama either. As you have pointed out, like Reagan or Thatcher, at his heart he is a pragmatist. Like a true TCK, he doesn’t romanticize any one culture or ideology. He understands that there is good or bad in everything. Yet another reason why he can also be called the anti-Bush who along with Cheney is trapped in a juvenile Manichaeism.

Look closely at Sarah Palin and George W. Bush. They are not just anti-intellectual but they are deeply provincial people [who] made sure not to expose themselves to much outside of their comfort zone. Sarah bounced from college to college unable to really fit in anywhere but Wasilla. Not even the Governor’s mansion felt like home to her so she left that too. Bush grew up in the upper crust East Coast and found his identity as a simple, “aw’ shucks” Texan who just knows what to do in his gut. He can be detached from the real world when necessary. TCK’s have no choice. They must engage the world.

I strongly identify with this description: as a Jew, who grew up on the largely Italian/Irish Catholic Jersey Shore; who moved as a teenager to the transplanted Okie world of Long Beach, CA; who attended college at the gigantic UCLA (University of Caucasians Lost among Asians); who has lived a large part of my adult life among Latinos and other immigrant populations; and who has stood side by side with people from all walks of life and in all socio-economic strata, I have had to engage fully with all these different levels of society in order to survive. It was not a choice for me to retreat into that with which I could easily identify, mostly because I identified with so little. Those in America who have spent the bulk of their lives among people just like them would easily identify more with a George Bush than a Barack Obama. That is, of course, unless that "George Bush" type were so egregiously daft that he couldn't even attract the similarly intellectually Incurious.

One reason, perhaps, why John McCain didn't prevail against Obama was because he could not be a representative choice of the Incurious. He was a soldier, to be sure, but he was a silver-spoon fed soldier who'd had no amount of difficulty in the armed forces until he succeeded in getting himself shot down. He lived his life as a millionaire. He did not legislate unequivocally (in fact, I think the "maverick" label hurt him because the Incurious typically identify with those who fall into lock-step behind their rigid, theocracy-infused ideology). Even with the Queen of the Incurious as his running mate, he couldn't overcome those shortcomings because he'd alienated the intellectually curious in his party who could not grant power to the one who represented the antithesis of intellect itself.

Tales from the Dark Side

Andrew Sullivan has (so far) put up three posts today detailing new information regarding torture used at Gitmo that was profiled in an article for Harper's by Scott Horton. These occurrences are said to have happened in 2006 -- long after Bush and Cheney said that all "enhanced interrogation techniques" had stopped at the facility. But these allegations come in part from a former guard at Gitmo, a model Republican who voted for Reagan and re-enlisted, at age 37, in the National Guard. He won numerous awards for his service at Gitmo as well.

I am going to read the Horton article a little later and will possibly have more comment, but Andrew's views on this subject do mirror my own.

Alas, poor Petraeus, I knew him well...

I have to say that I love Dick Cavett and wish that I had been older during his heyday when he had his talk show. Such a brilliant humorist, and now a brilliant writer. On April 11 the NY Times published his piece entitled “Memo to Petraeus and Crocker: More Laughs, Please” where he skewered the Bush administration’s despicable prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by ridiculing the language used by Bush’s principal mouthpieces on the war, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. My favorite arrow from the piece were the last seven sentences:

…poor Crocker. His brows are knitted. And he has a perpetually alarmed expression, as if, perhaps, he feels something crawling up his leg.

Could it be he is being overtaken by the thought that an honorable career has been besmirched by his obediently doing the dirty work of the tinpot Genghis Khan of Crawford, Texas? The one whose foolish military misadventure seems to increasingly resemble that of Gen. George Armstrong Custer at Little Bighorn?

Not an apt comparison, I admit.

Custer sent only 258 soldiers to their deaths.

"The tinpot Genghis Khan of Crawford, Texas" -- LOVE IT!

I would also add: at least Custer died with his men.

The piece generated hundreds of responses posted on the NY Times website. Most of them were supportive of Cavett, but not a few were highly critical of his treatment of Petraeus. One writer, who identified himself as "Tim," wrote: "It is easy for a civilian to sit safely at home and criticize a soldier, the life and death decisions do not weigh on you at night, nor are you entrusted by the people of your country to execute a mission, as ordered by your President. Instead of insulting a soldier who is serving honorably, I think it best to direct your insults at an inept Congress and our incompetent and despicable commander in chief."

I agree with Tim. Petraeus and anyone serving in the military are to be commended for their service, particularly at the folly of a commander-in-chief like President George W. (for "War-criminal") Bush. Having myself entertained soldiers at American military bases all over the world, from Iceland to Kuwait to Diego Garcia, I have witnessed first-hand their bravery, their selflessness, and their belief in the American ideal. All of them, even the ones I thought were assholes (mostly the officers), are patriots.

But if anyone thinks that Petraeus is not also a political cog in Bush's machine, he is deluding himself. Bush's presidency will go down in history as the most obstructionist, secretive, "Dick"tatorship the nation has ever seen. Petraeus would, at Bush's behest, do everything he could to keep all of Bush's balls in the air for as long as possible, including the wearing of every single medal he ever earned since he was in boot camp (called "Fruit Salad" by the irreverent) and using more syllables than needed to say what was plainly clear to anyone witnessing his congressional testimony. Further complicating matters is the fact that he likely bears in mind that he might have a political future of his own. Best not to upset the Republican apple cart if his goal is someday to lead that party to the White House.

Torture and War Crimes

Contributors to Andrew Sullivan's blog The Daily Dish have been debating the torture issue for a few days. One reader wrote in to differentiate the bombing of Dresden in WWII and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from torture and torture camps used by the U.S. as it prosecutes the "War on Terror." He saw the former as acts necessary to inflict the kinds of damage that would end the wars quickly and permanently deter future wars. They seem to have worked, don't you think?

However, torture is used to humiliate and dehumanize the enemy as much as it is to obtain information (dubious, that).

It's funny how the dehumanization works both ways, though. The reader related a time when he was sharing his feelings about the war in Afghanistan in his Quaker religious service. Money quote:

I called the men we were fighting "animals, who deserved to be treated like animals." This is the mentality that not only justifies torture but makes it appealing: to reduce your enemies to pathetic creatures; to at once demonstrate your superiority and to make someone--anyone will do--the vessel for your own pain and your own humiliation. It's a psychological form of warfare all the way down, and it dehumanizes all parties.

To me this is the essential ingredient needed to make torture OK. To view the enemy as human makes it impossible to torture them for whatever reason. Once it's become OK to call them "animals," "thugs," "savages," "Muslim scum" or "pieces of Iraqi shit," it becomes much easier to inflict the kinds of pain and suffering on them that one would reserve only for one's most gruesome yet exclusively interior fantasies. Like the guy who nearly ran me off the 110 freeway this morning. I wanted to string him up by his lead foot from an overpass, about 15 feet off the ground, while cars zoomed under him at 70 mph. Now, knowing that he's a human being who might have been in a big hurry for a very important reason -- plus the fact that I just couldn't catch the guy -- would obviate any attempt on my part to act on my scenario. But, with might, will, and a mind-set that reduces the enemy to sub-human status, anything is possible. It's what made slavery possible, what let the Holocaust happen, and what caused senior high-ranking officials in the Bush Administration -- including the president and vice president themselves -- to blame a few "low level renegades" in the military for being "bad apples" and committing atrocities at Abu Ghraib.

Bravo, Thomas Frank

Fantastic piece in today's Wall Street Journal Online by Thomas Frank (no, not the ballplayer recently cut from the Toronto Blue Jays because he was old and tired out). Thomas Frank is the author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and other books. In that book, Frank points out how the Republican Party went from being the party of aristocrats who were in the minority, to being the most dominant political party of the modern era by transforming themselves into the party of the people, the buddy of the working man. George W. Bush was the candidate you most wanted to drink a beer with. Huh? Ivy-League educated W? Sober George?

But think about how this was done. The rise of angry white men in the media: Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage, Drudge, Dobbs. None of these guys would be sitting down in a local bar yucking it up with the hard-hats of the world. No, they prefer sipping scotch and smoking cigars in the tony clubs of the Beltway and Manhattan, rubbing elbows with industrialists, lobbyists, hedge fund managers, and the other rich folks with whom they now identify themselves.

And, Frank writes, look where it's gotten those beer drinkers and hard hats: massive government deregulation, attempts to privatize Social Security, the Clear Channel and News Corp monopolies of mass media, Welfare Reform, "free trade" that sent their jobs to Asia and Mexico, the Wal-Martization of middle America whereby being represented by a labor union meant that you were un-American. As most intelligent pundits said after the 2004 election -- the GOP got the middle class to vote en masse against their own self-interest and security. They created a bogey-man in the Muslim, scaring them into giving up their civil liberties as being a patriotic act when it was in fact just the opposite. Created the fallacy that "either you're with us or you're with the terrorists."

And now this machine, this fantastically organized machine, has gotten a Democrat to try to eat one of its own! Barack Obama's comments that have led to "Bittergate" were certainly clumsy, embarrassing, simplistic, and overly generalized, but what they were not was elitist. As if Obama, rather than the Crown Royal-drinking, squirrel hunting, $100 million-earning townie named Hillary Clinton, were now the aristocrat.

Beautiful quote from the Frank op-ed:

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

But has Frank shown us his idealistic knickers? Is this country really that "land of relative equality?" Maybe when I was a kid and hadn't experienced the world and all it has to offer. But now I tend to be a little cynical about this myself. Perhaps the Republicans managed to reveal what this country truly is: a boiling cauldron of provincial, culturally ignorant, violent, hateful swine. We are people who couldn't care less about America's standing in the world. Who would just as soon shoot a Muslim as engage him in meaningful dialogue. Who lack the patience to understand anything beyond the headlines that pass through our vacuous heads every 22 minutes. Bill Maher makes jokes about how stupid Americans really are, but we all know that in every joke is a kernel of truth, the size of which varies on how biting the joke is. To have ceded responsibility for our national intelligence to a bunch of superstitious Christianists who believe the universe is only 20,000 years old, we have to be pretty fucking stupid.

I've worked for nearly seven years at the same company, and I have met and talked with hundreds of its employees in that time. I can literally count on one hand how many of them have actually read the Constitution and can tell me what the Fifth Amendment says. That doesn't necessarily mean that they other several thousand I haven't met are troglodytes, but for the most part, it painfully obvious what most people are interested in. They are most interested in what they're going to do the next weekend, or what's on their DVRs (a-ha, but read my iPod post below, I'm such a hypocrite!), or how their local sports teams are doing in the standings. Their deepest contact with world affairs occurs weekly at the gas station, as they drive up and see how many more cents per gallon they'll pay for gas, and they weigh the option of downgrading to a lower octane even though they know their mileage deteriorates. It then ends once they re-start their cars after filling up, and their endless musical soundtrack blares once again from their car speakers.

Biden holds forth on McCain, the election, and National Security

A Biden adviser released an excerpt from a speech he's giving today at Georgetown University. He says, "When people say, 'This is the most important election in my lifetime,' they're right."

"When it comes to Iraq, there is no daylight between John McCain and George W. Bush. They are joined at the hip. When it comes to Iraq, there will be no change with a McCain administration… and so there is a real and profound choice for Americans in November.
"Fifteen months into the surge that President Bush ordered and Senator McCain embraced, we’ve gone from drowning to treading water. We are no closer to the President’s stated goal of an Iraq that can defend itself, govern itself and sustain itself in peace. And we’re still spending $3 billion every week and losing 30 to 40 American lives every month.
"We can’t keep treading water without exhausting ourselves. That’s what both the President and Senator McCain are asking us to do. They can’t tell us when, or even if, Iraqis will come together politically, which was the purpose of the surge in the first place. They can’t tell us when, or
even if, we will draw down below pre-surge levels. They can’t tell us when, or even if, Iraq will be able to stand on its own two feet. They can’t tell us when, or even if, this war will end.
"Most Americans want this war to end. They want us to come together around a plan to leave Iraq without leaving chaos behind.
"They’re not defeatists. They’re patriots who understand the national interest – and the great things Americans can achieve if we responsibly end a war that we should not have started.
"I believe it is fully within our power to do that. Then, with our credibility restored, our alliances repaired and our freedom to act renewed, we will once again lead the world. We will once
again address the hopes, not play to the fears, of our fellow Americans. That is my hope for next November."

Much as I like Joe Biden as a venerated elder in the Senate, I just can't get 100% behind what is excerpted here. Neither Obama nor Clinton would get us completely out of Iraq, and McCain will actually make things worse. We need to face the reality that our presence in Iraq is now required to prevent further damage to the region. I think the war is wrong, our reasons for starting it were wrong, and Bush needs to be prosecuted for his failure to defend our Constitution (from himself!).

However, if we leave before the Iraqis can defend themselves without our support, we will create a power vacuum. Maliki is worthless and Sadr too powerful. Also the Shiite majority are too allied with Iran. Iran wants to go nuclear and dominate the region, and getting deep into Iraq will give them way too much real estate. In fact, last week it announced an expansion of its uranium enrichment program, prompting concerns in both Israel and Saudi Arabia. We need to face the reality that Bush's mistake, endorsed by Congress, is now America's mistake. We all need to see it through and leave the region better off for our having been there in the first place. I certainly don't like it, and I don't think anyone does. But I also don't like the idea of just cutting it off and pulling out immediately, because I think that things will get worse over there if we do. I don't think that the enemy will follow us home, but I do think that it will plunge the world economy into chaos over the supply of oil. Much as I hate to admit it, we will still need the black stuff to fuel our engines for years to come.


Ugh... excuse me while I go throw up now.

BHO and HRC Court Christians; McCain has no time

Obama and Clinton will be on hand Sunday night at a nationally-televised forum taking place at Messiah University near Harrisburg, PA. The forum's goal is to bring to light how their faith informs their views on global warming, poverty, AIDS, and abortion. McCain, however, claims he has too much on his plate and cannot attend: "I could show you a stack of requests to go to different forums around the country and I just simply can't meet all of those."

Nowhere but in America does religion play such a large role in electing the leader of a democratic country. Romney had to go on TV and explain his Mormon faith, and it likely caused his downfall to some degree. If it weren't for the fact that McCain has courted the extreme right-wing religious wing of the party (I like to borrow Andrew Sullivan's term Christianists), I'd say he was the only candidate who hasn't fallen into the faith trap. His depth of faith is murky and never seems to be something he talks about. Instead , it seems that he worships at the altar of anger and verbal abuse, as this Raw Story report attests.

As the Bush administration inexorably winds its way down to January 19, 2009 ("The End of an Error" best bumper sticker ever), I hope the current hysteria about faith as an essential part of political legitimacy winds down with him. I would like to see a candidate stand up and say, "Those who know me well know I am a man of faith, and that faith informs my personal decisions. However, I reserve that faith for my private life. How I govern as your president will above all else be informed by our Constitution, the laws that guide our country and all of its citizens and inhabitants."