You People Are Really Nuts

Arthur Schopenhauer – “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

 

Samuel Goldwyn: “You’ve got to take the bitter with the sour.”

 

And this, from a waitress named Anita Esterday on the press corps’ fascination over whether Hillary Clinton left her a tip during a campaign stop –

 

You people are really nuts. There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now – there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.

 

You don’t know the story there?  Lucky you – but it’s at the link if you think you need to know.  It ranks right up there with the Barack Obama flag pin scandal (full CNN coverage here, Associated Press story and eighteen opinion pieces listed here) – showing that sometimes the proper perspective is hard to come by.  Oh, Obama does not wear a lapel flag pin.  CNN and AP and the others reporting on this might argue they do have the proper perspective – this is what people think is important and they make their money providing what people think is important, so by an odd sort of logic, such things are important.  The people have spoken, or have been duped and sedated – take you choice.

 

It’s all a matter of what we all agree is important, even if we cannot agree.  Long ago, in the age where agreement mattered a bit more, Edmund Burke, considered the father of political conservatism put it nicely –

 

Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy… When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

 

Ah, where are we now but dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable?  There’s too much news, too many facts, no one knows who to believe – or believes no one but those who make them angry or tell them who to really fear, as thinking about things independently is impractical, what with one had to do to just get along these days.  And we relish disagreement – we’re convinced our unwavering partisanship is a virtue.  Heck, there’s even a brand new book on that (short version – it’s not doing us much good).

 

Andrew Sullivan, the conservative who dug up the Burke quote, has this to say –

 

In this election, among the central questions, it seems to me, should be: who will restore the rule of law in America? Who will restore constitutional balance? Who will restore habeas corpus? Who will end torture? And who is the wisest in tackling the extremely difficult task of isolating moderate Muslims from Jihadist terrorists across the globe, using measured force to defeat terrorism where necessary, but winning arguments where essential? Who will best secure our departure from Iraq? And who can actually unite decent, patriotic Americans around these goals again?

 

What about who leaves a decent tip, or who doesn’t wear a lapel pin?

 

Maybe we can agree on big issues – like waterboarding.  No reputable or knowledgeable source says it isn’t torture, and there is no question that it is illegal.  Think about it.  Why else would John Yoo, directed by Cheney’s chief-of-staff David Addington, write those should-have-been-secret special opinions that argue the president is bound by no laws and no treaties in this “war on terror” we’ve got going?  These guys really need some cover.  Hey – it really is torture and it really is illegal.  And by the way, it also seems to be the reason we went to war four years ago –

 

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, was waterboarded, he revealed valuable details about the operations of al Qaida, the Bush administration says. But CIA agents say Mohammed also “confessed” that al Qaida was plotting to kill former presidents Clinton and Carter and Pope John Paul II, making them realize that he was inventing sensational information to satisfy his interrogators. Another al Qaida operative who was waterboarded, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi, blurted out details about the connection between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein, saying that Iraq had trained terrorists in the use of chemical and biological weapons. But al-Libbi later recanted, and the CIA concluded that he “had no knowledge of such training or weapons, and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.”

 

Yep, there are new memos, stuff that flew back and forth years ago.  The CIA interrogators rather quickly did figure out that they were getting “sensational information” when they employed the newly allowed techniques – it was so sensational it was apparent that it was useless.  Man, it doesn’t seem fair that when you put someone through unimaginable and extended pain they say anything at all to stop the pain, that they make up stuff.  They were supposed to tell the truth, weren’t they?  The red flag – this was questionable raving – went up the chain.  But what Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi said – after he was buried in a small box for seventeen hours then beaten – was what Colin Powell presented to the UN, proof of that connection between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein.  He said we had an inside source that admitted all – and he was obviously referring to al-Libbi.  Oops.

 

Our case for war was based on evidence obtained from people who we made sure would say what we wanted to hear.  Perhaps you could argue that it is their fault – they didn’t have the decency and honor to scream out the truth to stop the pain, but took cowardly shortcuts and screamed their best guess at what they thought we wanted to hear.  Damn them.  But then, we did not accept the truth, we would not, as it didn’t seem right – so they hardly had a choice.  It’s a puzzle.

 

Like Sullivan, you can get on your high horse – “We traded our soul for bad intelligence. The perpetrators need to be brought to justice.”  But that’s the way it was – the president in particular believed all this stuff was true, and Cheney and the rest hoped it was, and even if it wasn’t, it should have been.  Even if it wasn’t true, it was useful.  Kill Clinton and Carter and Pope John Paul II?  That’s good – it covers all bases.

 

Could we agree that we seem to be practicing torture and it’s not only illegal, and should be, but a crappy idea too?  No?  Yeah, anyone can see that general agreement would cause trouble – a matter of legal liabilities.

 

And anyway, one of Sullivan’s readers suggests there is no place to begin, no common ground for agreement, as he describes his mother and people like her –

 

They have no clue about the things that so rile you and me, and when these matters are brought to their attention they find it easier to believe that the person who’s bringing them up is crazy than that there might actually be a problem. Moreover, the issues that do get her attention are of the Obama’s flag lapel pin type.

 

Now let’s put ourselves in the Democrats’ shoes. How do you deal with a nation of voters like my mom, a nation of people who don’t know what the Military Commissions Act is, who are inclined to think you’re a little touched if you go on and on about it, but who are easily upset by news that a candidate doesn’t wear a flag lapel pin? How do you do it?

 

Yes, the Democrats need to grow balls. But the fault also lies with the media and, though it pains me to say it, with the moms – or the ones like mine, anyway.

 

Well, there are a lot of such moms, and Sullivan says someone who should wake them up isn’t doing their job –

 

If leading Democrats actually spoke up against torture without Clintonian defensiveness, many moms like my reader’s might actually take notice. But the Democrats are in a vicious cycle: too scared to raise the real issues, those issues get obscured so that when they are subsequently raised, it appears as if only the fringe cares about them. And so the actual scandal of Abu Ghraib – that it was a result of official policies set loose, that the images represent in many cases the interrogation techniques approved by Bush and Cheney, that it resulted in one actual murder-by-torture – might actually be transmitted.

 

Murder-by-torture?  It happened, in case you forgot.  Sullivan is right – we could use an opposition party.  We could use a lot of things.  We do need to get things in perspective.

 

And as for the thought that sometimes the proper perspective is hard to come by, perhaps the definition what is proper can vary –

 

US President George W. Bush had a shoot-out with the “bad guys” in Iraq on Thursday, playing a computer game with war veterans that simulates a firefight in Baghdad, the White House said.

 

Bush tried his hand at the game with two soldiers during a visit to a rehabilitation center in Texas that treats veterans wounded in Iraq.

 

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush helped “shoot the bad guys” in a Baghdad neighborhood, albeit virtually.

 

Digby –

 

It’s a good thing they mark the “bad guys” in those games because if Junior had to tell the difference between civilian, insurgent, terrorist, Sunni, Shia or anything else, he would have gotten all frustrated and smashed that stupid old game all over the floor.

 

Well, aligning people’s perspectives might be a little harder than anyone could imagine.

 

Could we at least agree that we work out a way we can find something America can offer the world that might make us a bit more appealing?  That might help. Fred Kaplan write about that in Jazz, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Diplomacy, suggesting the third may be a lost cause.

 

Kaplan recently wrote about by Karen Hughes’ recent departure as the State Department’s “public diplomat,” making the argument that she simply realized the job is impossible.  In fact, Hughes and both women who preceded her in the job concluded that there are no answers, nothing we can show anyone about ourselves that works –

 

The roar of Abu Ghraib, water-boarding, and military occupation – or even the quieter but still teeth-gnashing encounters with rude officials at U.S. embassies and airports – drowns out, or infects, our most engaging art forms and most strenuous attempts at public diplomacy. Even in its heyday, the U.S. Information Agency could do little to counter the clear “message” transmitted by the war in Vietnam. In that sense, policies do trump culture.

 

But then there is Tom Stoppard’s new play Rock ‘n’ Roll, and that inspires him –

 

The play, which I saw the other night, is a brisk, moving, sometimes-enthralling piece of theater about a lot of things – romance, revolution, power, protest, ideology, the clash of individuals and systems (in short, the usual heady Stoppard brew) – but it’s mainly about what the title suggests: rock ‘n’ roll.

 

That’s the answer, rock ‘n’ roll?

 

Maybe it is, as the play is about a “rock-loving, record-collecting Czech intellectual in the years between 1968 and 1990″ – as you recall 1968 was the year of the Prague Spring and the Soviet crackdown that followed, and 1990 was the first full year of the Velvet Revolution.  That year Vaclav Havel became the president, Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew the Soviet troops, and the Rolling Stones played Prague.  This means something?

 

Yes, it does.  It was the real revolution -

 

Havel – celebrated playwright and essayist, leader of the Czech dissident movement in the ’70s, one of the authors of the Charter 77 petition, jailed for many years as a result – was deeply affected by rock ‘n’ roll. (One of his first acts as president was to appoint Frank Zappa as an adviser on trade and tourism.)

 

A turning point in the dissidents’ movement, and in Havel’s own thinking, was the arrest in 1976 of a grungy Czech rock band called the Plastic People of the Universe (named after a Zappa song). Havel embraced the Plastics as spiritual brethren and denounced their arrest as “an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom and integrity.” Many of Havel’s colleagues were initially puzzled; the Plastics weren’t dissidents or even political – they were unruly, long-haired, and not very talented rockers.

 

But that was the whole point, as a character in the Stoppard play explains –

 

The policeman isn’t frightened by dissidents. Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic. … It means they’re playing on the same board. So [Gustav] Husak [the Communist Czech president] can relax; he’s made the rules, it’s his game. The population plays the other way, by agreeing to be bribed by places at university or an easy ride at work. They care enough to keep their thoughts to themselves; their haircuts give nothing away. But the Plastics don’t care at all. They’re unbribable. They’re coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics. They’re pagans.

 

Ah that mysterious “from somewhere else,” impervious to the power structure.  Kaplan says that’s the key –

 

In the West, the point might seem obvious, even clichéd. But in the totalitarian societies behind the Iron Curtain, such notions – and the music they reflected – were truly radical. There was no individual space. The clearest proof of this was the arrest of the Plastic People of the Universe, who posed no explicit threat to the regime other than choosing to ignore it. And the most thrilling thing about the collapse of the regime wasn’t the exchange of one political system for another; it was the exuberance – the release from politics – that was allowed as a result of that change; it was, for example, the Rolling Stones playing a raucous concert on the Communists’ former parade ground in Prague.

 

What inspired many of the Eastern bloc dissidents during the Cold War – what they found so alluring about the West – was not so much our market capitalism or parliamentary democracy; still less was it our government’s policies. It was the insouciant freedom of our culture. It was our rock ‘n’ roll.

 

In the Soviet Union, the West’s appeal came more in the form of jazz, promoted by the our government in Willis Conover’s jazz broadcasts on Voice of America and in the officially sponsored tours of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, not just in Russia but also in the Middle East, of all places.  Kaplan says that, and a few movies, worked just fine –

 

When I was a Moscow correspondent in the early-to-mid-’90s, many Russians told me that their first endearing – and enduring – impressions of America came from Conover’s jazz programs. The music’s appeal lay in its boisterousness, its improvised virtuosity, which stood in such contrast to the party’s stale culture.

 

And let’s not forget the countries of Western Europe, whose postwar youth were attracted to America not just by the Marshall Plan but also by the liberating energy of our movies, especially the films noirs and gangster melodramas that our own critics at the time found so vulgar.

 

So the question arises – “What does America have going for it now? What could we send out to the world that might have the same impact on, say, Arabs and Muslims today that rock, jazz, and B-movies had on Russians and Europeans during the Cold War?”  A little rock?  A few odd speakers?

 

We should try, even if times have changed –

 

Many people under Communist rule hated their governments. Since the world was divided into two blocs (the American-led West and the Soviet-led East), those who hated the East were predisposed to like the West. But today, in a world of dispersed power, people have many models from which to choose; Saudis or Egyptians who despise their autocratic regimes are more likely to find solace in Islamic fundamentalism than in any Western beacon.

 

During the Cold War, information was also divided in two: the Communist organs on the one hand, the BBC World Service and Voice of America on the other. The choice was stark and clear. One appeal of jazz and rock, especially in times of intense crackdown, was their forbidden status. Now, with satellite dishes and the Internet, everything is accessible. The challenge of sending out a message isn’t that the foes are jamming the signal; it’s that the channels are cluttered with so many other messages.

 

We can do some quick fixes – train immigration and customs officials to lighten up, send speakers on foreign tours, even if they’re critical of our policies, translate more classic American books and documents, and make them available at foreign libraries (being done now), and we could revive the US Information Agency, the old independent bureau, separate from the State Department, that promoted American values and culture and had nothing to do with policies.

 

But then what?  Kaplan offers a challenge –

 

If you were president, or chairman of this revived USIA, how would you promote our values and culture? Quite apart from changing foreign and military policy … how would you make America more appealing or at least less hated?

 

Hey, if the media is not all nuts about trivia, and there’s something we actually could agree on, here’s a place to start.  Sometimes the proper perspective is hard to come by. 

You could start with this baby step.

 

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Footnote on the very British playwright -

 

Stoppard was born on July 3, 1937 in Zlin, Czechoslovakia and moved to Singapore with other Jews on March 15, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded.  But in 1941 the family had to be evacuated to India, escaping the Japanese invasion of Singapore.  His father, Eugene Straussler, remained behind as British army volunteer and died in a Japanese prison camp after capture.  His mother remarried, a British office in India named Stoppard, and the new family moved back to the UK.  All that can give you a wide perspective.