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saturday, march 26, 2005
The Tao of Process
"All the way to heaven is heaven." -- St. Teresa of
Avila
So without further ado ...
The core belief that social conservatives bring to cases like Terri Schiavo's
is that the value of each individual life is intrinsic. The value of a life doesn't depend upon what a person can physically
do, experience or achieve. The life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully
functioning adult.
First, I had rather he said a "PVS [persistent vegetative state] patient" because
the comatose can recover, and I understand that many comatose people really are aware of what's going on around them; they
just can't respond. In other words, they are sentient. I have an enormous respect for sentience.
Social conservatives go on to say that if we make distinctions about the
value of different lives, if we downgrade those who are physically alive but mentally incapacitated, if we say that some people
can be more easily moved toward death than others, then the strong will prey upon the helpless, and the dignity of all our
lives will be diminished.
Like I said, I have an enormous respect for
sentience. Terri Schiavo is not mentally "incapacitated"; she is no longer sentient. Way different. There are many people with diminished
mental capacity as a result of birth anomaly, disease, or accidents, yet they are sentient, and a compassionate society
gives these people every opportunity for the best life they can have.
Many conservatives, I've noticed, stubbornly refuse to see this
distinction, so strong is their desire to present slippery-slope arguments. But to me it's quite clear.
***
Also, there are many ways to look at "individual life." If you don't
mind indulging me for a moment, I'm going to present, very briefly, the Buddhist perspective. Please note I'm not trying to
convert anybody, and if this really doesn't interest you, feel free to skip down to the other set of asterisks below.
From a Buddhist perspective, an individual is to life what a wave is to ocean.
The individual is a phenomenon of life, as a wave is a phenomenon of ocean. Although the wave is a distinct phenomenon, at
no time is it separate from ocean. When it begins, nothing is gained; when it ends, nothing is lost. Thus, life itself, beingness
itself, neither begins nor ends. It just ceaselessly manifests in myriad forms. Because life is infinitely wonderful
and precious, all phenomena of life are wonderful and precious and worthy of respect.
The Buddha taught that an individual happens when five "aggregates" come together. These are the physical body, the senses, conception, volition, and consciousness. There are whole libraries
of sutras and commentaries on sutras explaining all this; it's very complex. For purposes of this discussion, however,
I will only point out that all of these aggregates, although they depend on physical form, are also all processes.
As the guy who wrote this page explains,
Matter is organized into a physical organism and animated by consciousness.
These two combine to form the body-mind substrate of the personality. The other three aggregates are forms of activity that
arises in the interactions between the body and mind.
So, in Buddhism, an individual is not a thing, or an object, but a process,
continually becoming, continually reaffirming itself, until the process has run its course. And since, from
this perspective, the process that was Terri Schiavo has ceased, there is no moral reason to prevent the physical
form from being reclaimed by the ocean of beingness. In fact, I suspect some sects of Buddhism would discourage keeping the
body animated when it is no longer sustaining the process of personhood.
***
The rest of this post gets easier, I promise. Brooks continues,
The core belief that social liberals bring to cases like Ms. Schiavo's is
that the quality of life is a fundamental human value. They don't emphasize the bright line between life and death; they describe
a continuum between a fully lived life and a life that, by the sort of incapacity Terri Schiavo has suffered, is mere existence.
On one end of that continuum are those fortunate enough to be able to live
fully - to decide and act, to experience the world and be free. On the other end are those who, tragically, can do none of
these things, and who are merely existing.
I hate it when someone who doesn't understand what I think tries to explain
what I think. I suppose I'm as much of a "social liberal" as anybody, but Brooks doesn't explain my POV at all. Although quality
of life is important, that doesn't mean I think the life of someone with diminished capacity or a poor quality of life has
less value. (And, anyway, it's all the same life.) My POV is that Terri Schiavo no longer exists. I suspect most
"social liberals," including non-Buddhist ones, see the situation this way.
Brooks continues,
Social liberals warn against vitalism, the elevation of physical existence
over other values.
I honestly don't know what he's talking about there.
They say it is up to each individual or family to draw their own line to define
when life passes to mere existence.
Well, no, we think that it's up to medical science
to determine when a life process has finished, or when the body is no longer sustaining the person we loved, or when the individual
is no longer sentient, however you want to perceive it.
The central weakness of the liberal case is that it is morally thin. Once
you say that it is up to individuals or families to draw their own lines separating life from existence, and reasonable people
will differ, then you are taking a fundamental issue out of the realm of morality and into the realm of relativism and mere
taste.
No, what we've saying is that, once the body is no longer sentient, it is
up to families to decide if they want to maintain the body, or let it go. And it should be up to the families, because they're
the ones who have to live with the consequences.
There is a story in today's Los Angeles Times about two mothers whose children were in a persistent vegetative state. One mother chose to bring her daughter home to care
for, and the other mother chose to let her son go. My position is that these mothers had to work out for themselves what they
could or could not live with; what they could or could not handle. Each mother did what she felt in her gut she should do,
and so IMO both decisions were the correct decisions.
If some "moralistic" do-gooder had forced the first mother to let her daughter
die, and the second mother to take her son home to care for him, those would have been the wrong decisions.
Families in these circumstances have to consider how they're going to
cope with the consequences of the decision. Some families may not have the emotional or physical resources to maintain the
loved one's body, and others might find some purpose or comfort in caring for the body. Some may perceive the person
is really gone, but those who do not may need more time to process what's happened to their loved one. So, the right
decision may not always be the same decision. There are a lot of variables to consider. That's why it's important
for families to make these decisions, not the government.
People like Brooks who whine about "relativism" want morality to be something
written in a rule book. I think that rule-book morality is what you fall back on when you don't understand morality.
You are saying, as liberals do say, that society should be neutral and allow
people to make their own choices. You are saying, as liberals do say, that we should be tolerant and nonjudgmental toward
people who make different choices.
Yep, as long as people don't break the law or
scare the horses.
What begins as an appealing notion - that life and death are joined
by a continuum - becomes vapid mush, because we are all invited to punt when it comes time to do the hard job of standing
up for common principles, arguing right and wrong, and judging those who make bad decisions.
This makes me nuts. It's the rule-book moralists like Brooks who
are not doing the hard work that compassion often demands. "Common principles" can cause suffering. There used to be
a "common principle" that slavery was moral, for example. True morality demands that we close the rule books and set aside
what we want, and instead look at the situation as-it-is and respond with selfless compassion.
If "principle" causes people to act in ways that are not honest
and compassionate, then principle can hang.
The down side of honesty and compassion is it takes hard inner work to
avoid the temptations of desire and ego. Nobody said morality was easy.
And what's this about "judging people who make bad decisions"? In how many
different ways did Jesus teach his followers not to do that? The poor man-who-maybe-was-God practically stood on his
head, waving a flag and whistling Dixie, to draw attention to the teaching do not judge one another. See Matthew
chapter 5, for example. But here's Brooks, thinking it's up to him to pass judgment on the rest of humanity.
If I ever meet Brooks, I will explain he is relieved of this duty.
There are laws, and courts, and courts must judge, but this isn't the work
of morality. It's the work of civilization; it's something we humans need so we can stand to live with each other. But civilization
doesn't depend on whether the family next door chooses to pull a feeding tube, or not.
You end up exactly where many liberals ended up this week, trying
to shift arguments away from morality and on to process.
I've written before from time to time that process deserves respect. I've
often noticed that conservatives these days seem to have no respect for process, only for the result. But the result is
the process. This is something you have to learn for yourself through experience; I don't think I can explain it. But whenever
you hear people say that the process doesn't matter, as long as we get to our result, expect the result to be bleeped
up. And truthfully, in the grand scheme of things, there are no results. Everything is always in flux. It's all process. If
you read the Buddhist section, you saw the argument that individual humans are processes.
And to me, morality is a process. It's a continual challenge of
understanding who you are, how you relate to the rest of creation, how your actions impact others, how your actions come
back and bite you, how to find the will to put aside what you want and instead do what is compassionate.
Though you may be following the Bill Bennet Golden Rule Book of Morality
to the letter, if you have no understanding of these things -- of process, of beingness, of action and reaction, of the
temptations of ego -- you will still screw up the morality thing.
And lo, Brooks provides an example:
If you surveyed the avalanche of TV and print commentary that descended upon
us this week, you found social conservatives would start the discussion with a moral argument about the sanctity of life,
and then social liberals would immediately start talking about jurisdictions, legalisms, politics and procedures. They were
more comfortable talking about at what level the decision should be taken than what the decision should be.
Then, if social conservatives tried to push their moral claims, you'd find
liberals accusing them of turning this country into a theocracy - which is an effort to cast all moral arguments beyond the
realm of polite conversation.
He's so eager to make his argument about principles he forgets to be honest.
Oopsie-doodle! This is the danger of denying the process of morality and relying on a static rule book instead. In order to
maintain the integrity of his principles, he has to be dishonest -- in his column and with himself -- about the views
of others.
Nobody says that people can't debate "moral arguments" in "polite conversation."
What we're saying is that this is a nation of law, not a nation ruled by a mob, or subject to some popular consensus
of what is or isn't "moral."
Many actions I consider immoral are not illegal, nor would I make them so.
True morality cannot exist where all behavior is coerced. And once in a while someone does something illegal that
is very moral. Rosa Parks comes to mind.
The point is that, as a nation of law, and not a theocracy, our laws must
have a practical and secular purpose, such as maintaining traffic flow, respecting property rights, upholding contracts,
and prohibiting murder -- not because murder is "immoral," but because civilization can't exist where people live in fear
of each other.
I suspect Brooks knows this; he just lacks the moral courage to admit it.
Once moral argument is abandoned, there are no ethical checks, no
universal standards, and everything is left to the convenience and sentiments of the individual survivors.
Since when were there "universal standards"? Ideas about what is and is not
moral shift throughout space and time. What's upsetting Brooks is that there are people in the world who do not share his
ideas of what is or isn't proper. And because he is a limited person, he must find some excuse to denigrate people
who see things differently. Hard, heartbreaking choices are dismissed by Brooks as mere "convenience"
and "sentiments."
This is, IMO, immoral.
Also: For another POV on why Brooks is being dishonest,
see Armando at Daily Kos. And I agree with Armando that Matt Yglesias's post on "absolutism," although interesting, doesn't break through to the fundamental dishonesty of Brooks's position. But
Matt is very young (compared to me, anyway) so I'm inclined to forgive him. See also Billmon on moral relativism and David Brooks.
|
Big As Life, and Twice as Natural
Last night I was flipping channels and caught a snip of Larry King interviewing
Pat Boone about Terri Schiavo.
 Oh, please, make it stop ...
The evil "MSM" is covering Terri Schiavo the same way they covered last year's "swift
boat" flap (and most anything else) -- by trotting out the usual clowns to present their uninformed "opinions."
Ne'er a fact in sight. The cable networks aren't presenting news, they're presenting a freak show. The Daily Show's
"Culture of Strife" segment pretty much says it all.
One exception seems to be Dan Abrams of MSNBC. I caught a bit of his
program a couple of days ago, and he was actually challenging a couple of Terri cultists to get their facts straight.
It was a rare and beautiful thing to see. Abrams deserves at least an honorable mention for trying to be honorable.
Hunter at Daily Kos has a must-read rant about cable news called "Blood Sport."
There is a difference between bad coverage and willfully irresponsible
coverage, and another line between willfully irresponsible coverage and dangerously irresponsible coverage.
In the last three days, those lines have been crossed. Repeatedly. And it has been absolutely, definitively intentional. ...
... Now, there are times when the news media is simply
sloppy; there are times when journalists simply get stories wrong, and there are times when, as in the trials
of Michael Jackson, Kobe, O.J., Martha Stewart, etc., the news channels are simply swept away by their natural tendency towards
low-cost voyeurism. But this isn't one of those times. This isn't petty irresponsibility or sloppiness, to be chalked
up to the dwindling resources of corporate newsrooms.
This is a decision on the part of producers to willfully bend the lines in
a manner that promotes sensationalism and potential violence, by intentionally tossing known-false information into
a wire-taut public conflict to enhance the "ratings value".
I felt the same way last year about the swifties. Of course,
there's an unholy alliance between cable news and the VRWC anyway, but I also believe the cable news whores saw
the swiftie controversy as a ratings booster, and they exploited it. The cable newsies may be whores, but they're
not stupid, and deep down most of the cable news show hosts must have known the swifties were full of it. And I believe
that exploitation swayed a presidential election. We can rightfully gripe at Kerry for not responding sooner and more forcefully,
but if the news business weren't such a freak show, he wouldn't have had to.
As I keyboard, basic news coverage seems to be breaking down. By now you've probably heard about the Miami Herald's report that Governor
Bush sent state law enforcement agents to take custody of Terri Schiavo, but they were stopped by local police from doing
so. Here's the story as reported by Knight Ridder. Putting aside that this farce was almost certainly staged -- Jeb needs to appease the Fetus People, but he also needs the
Schiavo controversy to go away and never come back -- Dr. Atrios says there appears to be a blackout of the story on CNN. I don't see anything about it on the web sites of MSNBC, the New
York Times, or the Washington Post either, which makes me wonder if there's some question about the story's
veracity. Or, maybe (dare I hope?) they're ignoring it because they know it was staged.
Nah, that can't be it.
But yesterday, I remember clearly, there were stories about somebody trying to steal a gun to kill Michael Schiavo, and somebody else putting a bounty on Michael Schiavo, but today those stories have
nearly evaporated.
I'm starting to feel a tad nervous.
Billmon has a long rant up about blogging and life and the universe and everything, in which he says,
What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent
in the face of modern propaganda techniques – as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon,
the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities,
etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it
isn’t inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where
the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn’t very hard to make inconvenient facts
disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate – particularly
if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.
He's right, but if he's right, how can republican government survive?
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friday, march 25, 2005
Stop Them Before They Nominate Again
It seemed as if the campaign had never ended. There
was John Kerry standing on a chair in a blue neighborhood of Atlanta, in the Democrat-friendly tavern Manuel's, speaking to
100 folks, many of them wearing Kerry-Edwards T shirts. ...
"It's been a long time since the Democratic Party gave somebody a second
chance," says Grossman. "That's a big challenge to overcome." But it might not be the biggest. Kerry may find that there is
little he or any other contender can do to get his party's nomination if Hillary Clinton decides to run. The New York Senator
holds a commanding lead in every poll of Democratic voters, and some major party fund raisers are saying they expect her to
have a huge financial advantage over her opponents. "She'll crush them all," says a lobbyist who plans to raise funds for
2008 candidates.
Discouraging. But Joan Venocchi writes in today's Boston Globe that Hillary Clinton is "carving up" Kerry's "political base" by seeking support from Massachusetts
political activists and Democratic women, possibly to knock Kerry out of the running for the 2008 nomination..
As she slices up the traditional Democratic base, Clinton is also reaching
out to the middle, seeking common ground on contentious issues from war to abortion. It is an early, but impressive show of
political gamesmanship. And it is all happening while the rest of the Democratic pack of presidential possibilities train
their arrows mainly at President Bush and Republicans in Congress.
Clinton's reaching out to women in Kerry's home state for her 2006 Senate
race is smart politics for 2008. It points out how difficult it would be for both to run for president.
For liberal women, the lure of backing a female presidential candidate is
powerful, one that would be difficult for Kerry or any male Democrat to neutralize. Moreover, if Clinton does run for the
Democratic nomination, Kerry would also be fighting off another US senator from the Northeast.
Meanwhile, Delaware Senator Joseph Biden, who is also contemplating a presidential
run, is also taking shots at Kerry, most recently in a New Yorker article, where he used the ''w'' word -- ''weak'' -- in
connection with Kerry. Shoving Kerry out of the '08 contest makes it easier for Biden, who doesn't need another veteran male
senator in the race, especially one who begins with the national constituency Kerry built as the last Democratic presidential
nominee....
...Some conservative commentators are beginning to speculate that Clinton
will not seek reelection to the US Senate in 2006. The theory, advanced by John Podhoretz in the New York Post, suggests that
Clinton would not want to take votes in the Senate that could be used against her as a presidential candidate, which happened
to Kerry during his presidential quest.
But at the moment, Clinton is concentrating on the base that lifted Kerry
up, while letting others talk about the obstacles that blocked his path to the White House. Slice.
Makes me want to crawl into a corner and cry.
The Dems are not getting it. We don't want a candidate
who moves right to find "common ground" with the wingnuts. We don't want a candidate who has ever provided butt cover for Bush. We don't want a candidate who voted for that abomination of a bankruptcy bill (Biden).
Dems are preparing to package Hillary into their idea of a marketable
political product. Everything from her speeches to her hair style will be focused-grouped to death, and eventually she'll
be made over into whatever some Beltway "consultants" decide is what people want, and off she'll march to the 2008 nomination.
And then they'll wonder why sales are off.
I'm hoping the Blogosphere has a major impact on the 2006 mid-terms. Then the
Washington powers that be would be given notice that they have to haul their heads out of their butts and pay attention to
us.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Recommended: "All You Need to Know About the Schiavo Case" by Motherlode at No More Apples. "The Radical Right Tries Out Some New Fashions" at Steve Gilliard's News Blog.
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White Father Blows It Again
Native Americans across the country -- including tribal leaders, academics
and rank-and-file tribe members -- voiced anger and frustration Thursday that President Bush has responded to the second-deadliest
school shooting in U.S. history with silence.
Three days after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed nine members of his Red
Lake tribe before taking his own life, grief-stricken American Indians complained that the White House has offered little
in the way of sympathy for the tribe situated in the uppermost region of Minnesota.
"From all over the world we are getting letters
of condolence, the Red Cross has come, but the so-called Great White Father in Washington hasn't said or done a thing," said
Clyde Bellecourt, a Chippewa Indian who is the founder and national director of the American Indian Movement here. "When people's
children are murdered and others are in the hospital hanging on to life, he should be the first one to offer his condolences.
. . . If this was a white community, I don't think he'd have any problem doing that."
In fairness, I don't know that Bush would have been the first one to
offer condolences had the shooting been in a white community. Bush has a history of being oblivious to this part of his job.
As I wrote in December when Bush was criticized for his initial silence after the Tsunami disaster,
This, of course, is just part of a pattern. After September 11 The
Brat had to hide out on Air Force One for several hours before he could pull himself together (or sober up?) and act like
a president. More than a year ago he had to be coaxed into addressing the nation after a particularly bloody day in Iraq (not as bloody as
the days have been since, of course). And do you remember The Blackout of August 2003? I wrote at the time
It took him four hours to bring himself to speak to the nation after
the Blackout began, and then he could do so only on tape. (Drunk or stupid? We report -- you decide.) After this week's bombing
that killed at least 20 UN workers, Bush's keepers managed to get him off the golf course, into a suit and tie, and in front
of cameras a bit faster. The keepers are learning, it seems.
Of course, he would have been a lot quicker if he'd been able to wear a
quasi-military costume and prance around in front of a few thousand screaming groupies.
So if it's any consolation to Mr. Bellecourt, Bush doesn't give a shit about white people, either. That is, unless
they're donors or present an opportunity to pander to donors.
The reaction to Bush's silence was particularly
bitter given his high-profile, late-night intervention on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman caught
in a legal battle over whether her feeding tube should be reinserted.
"The fact that Bush preempted his vacation to say something about Ms.
Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling," said David Wilkins,
interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and a member of the North Carolina-based
Lumbee tribe. ...
Even more alarming than Bush's silence, he said,
is the president's proposal to cut $100 million from several Indian programs next year.
Bill Clinton addressed the nation within a few hours after Columbine. But the White House says Bush will say something
about Red Lake in tomorrow's radio address. I'm sure the speechwriters are hard at work right now, making sure the President's
words are sufficiently sincere.
Joan Smith writes in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
In Bush's America, where the political class has embarked on a mission to
resuscitate the brain-dead, no one seems to have either the will or the power to intervene in the everyday existence of young
people whose lives are going horribly awry. Whole sections of U.S. society grow up with guns and violent death, if not the
internecine rivalries of gang culture, making the right-to-life debate currently being conducted in Congress and the Florida
courts seem like a surreal joke.
I don't think this is an accident. Politicians enjoy occupying the high moral
ground and it is easier to emote about the pain of Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, than to address the disfiguring
inequalities of the richest nation on Earth -- especially when you are personally implicated, as the current president is,
in making those inequalities worse.
But we knew that.
Also note: Wampum is accepting donations on behalf of the Red Lake Memorial Fund.
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thursday, march 24, 2005
Why We Love Death
Peggy Noonan has a truly bizarre column in today's Wall Street Journal. Well, yeah, I know this is Noonan, but this is Out There even for Noonan. She's
decided that those of us who are not willing to sacrifice federalism so that Terri Schiavo can continue to vegetate
indefinitely must love death.
Rather than explain to Peggy why we lefties are so all-fired determine to see Terri
Schiavo die, I'm just going to nudge her over to this Townhall Column by Neal Boortz. Writing from a Christian perspective, he responds to a question from Rush L., "Why do [you liberals] want Terri Schiavo
to die?" I'll let you read his answer for yourself.
My answer is, I don't want her to die. I just recognize that it's probably
her time.
There's a Zen story (Zennies have the best stories) about a monk who developed
tuberculosis. So, as was the practice of the time, he was relieved of work duties and sent to live in a small house by himself
outside the main monastery building. Every day the old teacher would come by to bring food, offer instruction, and see how
the sick monk was doing.
The monk had a lot of worries, like who's going to keep the brass polished, and who's
going to remember to feed the cat? And the teacher would always smile and say, not a problem. Don't worry about a thing. Somebody
will take care of it.
Finally the monk asked, What if I die? And the teacher smiled and said,
not a problem. If you find you need to die, just go ahead and die. Don't worry about a thing. We'll be sure
you get a nice funeral.
Zen teachers tend to be big-picture guys. Anyway, I understand the monk got well
after that.
Western culture and religion tend to have an antagonistic view of death (Oh death,
where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?). But the old teacher said, maybe dying is what your body needs
to do. That's going to be true of all of us, sooner or later. It's painful to lose people we love, but not everything
that's painful is evil, or wrong.
Right now it's pretty clear the Bushes (Prez and Guv) and Congresses (fed and FL),
and all the courts, are closing their doors to the Schindlers. The GOP has been bitten hard by this little gambit, and they
must realize there's no advantage to them if the tube is reinserted. They'd just have to go through the same farce again
sometime in the future.
But did anyone notice how the Prez skipped out and let the Guv take the heat? And
has the Prez made any statements about the Red Lake, Minnesota, tragedy? I hadn't heard.
And does anyone else think the Guv has his fingers crossed that Ms. Schiavo
doesn't die on Good Friday? If she does, the Fetus People will go ballistic. I can already see the faded T-shirts showing
a crucified Terri Schiavo being welcomed into heaven by Buddy Jesus.
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Holy Bleep
This reminds me of a course I took in college (awhile back; we held classes in caves;
I think the dean was a brontosaurus) called "Life and Teachings of Jesus." The teacher taught about Jesus, etc., the same
way a history professor would teach about any other historical personage. The course material was based on historical scholarship,
not theology, and the teacher steadfastly refused to inject his own religious beliefs into the course. I honestly
don't know if he was a believer or not.
We had one guy in the course who perpetually interrupted because the professor
wasn't teaching the class that Jesus was God. The professor wasn't teaching the class Jesus wasn't God, mind
you, and Jesus was treated very respectfully, just not worshipfully. The professor (who was a very good lecturer)
kept trying to appease the heckler and get him to calm down so he could go on with the lecture. But the heckler was eating
a lot of class time.
Then, one day, after a couple of weeks of this, the class turned on the
heckler. I don't remember exactly how it started, but we rose up as one and told him to shut the bleep up, because
we hadn't paid fees to listen to him.
As I remember, the heckler stormed out and dropped the class. A shame, because if
he'd shut up and listened he might have learned something about Jesus.
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Things Fall Apart
Very basically, there are two kinds of conservatives on today's American
Right: social conservatives and political conservatives. And although they have been fellow travelers and Bush supporters
for some time, they really are two very different groups with very different philosophies.
Social conservatives want to use government to enforce their vision of morality
and "normalcy." They want government to ban gay marriage, abortions, most divorce, and the teaching of evolution. They want
government to indoctrinate conservative Christianity through prayers in public school classrooms and various "faith-based"
programs.
But political conservatives lean toward libertarianism and don't like Big
Gubmint, period. They've been Bush supporters because they like his tax cut plans -- they tend to be "starve the beast" proponents
-- and they support the war in Iraq. They are mixed on whether they approve of gay marriage -- some do, possibly most do not.
But they do not like people messing with the Constitution and are opposed to a gay marriage amendment. And they don't want
America turned into a theocracy.
You may have noticed that whenever two Democrats, or two liberals,
disagree with each other in public, rightie bloggers cheerfully announce that the Democratic Party is imploding, and that the
Left is coming apart at the seams. By contrast, the American Right has been absolutely brilliant in maintaining uniformity
of message. On any given day you can count on prominent Republicans and conservative activists to mouth the same scripted
talking points verbatim. Democrats don't stay on message, mostly because they have too many diverse opinions
about what the message ought to be.
But the fact is that the American Left isn't about to come apart;
it came apart thirty years ago. As this Wikipedia article explains, what had been a "liberal consensus" eroded in the 1970s. The progressive/New Deal/pro-civil rights consensus
was replaced by "identity politics," and the American Left broke up into a lot of issue advocacy groups competing with each
other for attention and funds. Even the single-issue movements have lost cohesion. For example, there hasn't been a
unified feminist movement since the Equal Right Amendment was defeated, some twenty-five years ago.
Further, since the ascension of Ronald Reagan, the Right has come to dominate
national dialogue in mass media, and this in turn has kept the Left splintered. Mass media only allows for a one-way dialogue
-- from the powerful to the masses -- and increasingly, lefties haven't been allowed to use mass media without having to shout
over the righties. Gotta be fair and balanced, you know.
And in all these years, no leadership emerged to give the American Left a
unified vision and direction. Those who might have (Mario Cuomo and Paul Wellstone come to mind) couldn't break
through the mass media noise to communicate with us. Even Bill Clinton, for all his success and charm, did
not pull us together. A great many liberals never felt he was one of us, anyway. He was just the best we could find
under the circumstances.
The Right, on the other hand, had Reagan, and then they had mass media mega-stars
like Rush and O'Reilly, and they had the many Clinton scandals, and now they have George W. Bush and the War on Terra. So,
in spite of obvious ideological fissures, they've put on a cohesive front and marched in lock step lo these past several years.
As I said, they're brilliant about it.
So today many Republican leaders must be stunned that much of the political
Right isn't marching with the cultural/religious Right on the Terri Schiavo issue.
I've believed for a long time that the Republicans couldn't get away with
the cohesion act forever. Eventually, the gap between small-government libertarian conservatism and authoritarian
"values" conservatism would be wide enough that only the seriously deranged could be loyal to both sides. I didn't imagine the
split would happen with what is, in the grand scheme of things, a minor issue. And maybe it really hasn't happened
yet. But I think from here on out the GOP is going to step more carefully.
On reflection, it may be that a split was inevitable now that we're
past the election and George W. Bush is a lame duck. Many on the Right had put their individual issues aside for the sake
of getting a second term for Bush. Now, they want payback. But it's going to be darn near impossible for the Bushies to appease
the cultural/religious Right and remain true to the libertarian ideals of the political Right.
About the only way the Right might be able to hold it together is if they
can focus on a common enemy, like liberals or terrorists. Another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would probably do the trick
for them. (Note: Stay out of tall buildings.) But the Dems seem to have adopted a rope-a-dope strategy, which is
smart. And I don't think there's enough of Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky to go around.
On the other hand, we on the Left no longer have to wait for mass media to
give us a few crumbs of uninterrupted time, because now we have the Blogosphere. And in between sniffing out and informing
each of the the latest Bushie outrage, we've been engaging (finally) in real dialogue about what liberalism and progressivism
are, and what it is we really stand for.
First, I've come to believe (and I hope to write more at length on this in
the future) that the bedrock foundation of liberalism is democratic self-government. Liberals believe that people
are smart enough and decent enough to govern themselves, and don't need an aristocracy or oligarchy or plutocracy to boss
us around. Conservatives may make speeches in that direction, but American conservative policies seem inevitably to end up
serving a plutocracy over the people.
Second, I think the single most important message we need to promote is that
the powers of government legitimately can be put to work to improve quality of life. Put another way (via Digby) we must put the lie to right-wing dogma that government can't be trusted to do any positive social good.
What was Reagan really saying when he said, "Government is not the
solution to our problem; government is the problem"? In effect, wasn't he saying that democratic government doesn't
really work? That government of the people, by the people, and for the people is a fantasy?
The Right for years has been telling people they can't expect government
to do anything for them, and anyone who thinks otherwise should learn some self-reliance. That might have made some
sense in the context of reducing social welfare expenditures in order to reduce the deficit. But now we've got a federal government
that believes government cannot be used to help people in general, but somehow there is always plenty of money
to throw at special interests and business cronies.
In other words, Washington is just one big patronage scam. As Bob Dylan said,
you got to serve somebody.
Real democracy isn't about keeping political parties on-message. Real democracy
is messy and chaotic and involves lots of arguing and contradiction and negotiation. But there's nothing wrong with
that. When many people come to a table there will be that many different points of view, and rarely does any one point
of view take in the whole picture. Generally when people come to a consensus, they find a middle way, not an extreme way,
to work through a problem. But when ideologues take over and insist it's my way or the highway, representative
government cannot function.
Democracy isn't about ideological purity. Democracy isn't about teaching
party members to march in step and spew out talking points like parrots.
This is the time for liberals to rally around the ideal of progressive self-government.
If the Right is about to break apart, this is the time to pull ourselves together and charge into the breach.
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wednesday, march 23, 2005
Resentment
(CBS/AP) Congressional leaders have insisted their only motivation in getting involved in the Terri Schiavo case was
saving a life. But Americans aren’t buying that argument, a CBS News poll finds.
An overwhelming 82 percent of the public believes the Congress
and President should stay out of the matter.
Just 13 percent of those polled think Congress intervened in the case out of concern for Schiavo, while 74 percent
think it was all about politics. Of those polled, 66 percent said the tube should not be inserted compared to 27 percent who
want it restored. The issue has generated strong feelings, with 78 percent of those polled -- wheter for either side of the
issue -- saying they have strong feelings.
Public approval of Congress has suffered as a result; at 34 percent, it
is the lowest it has been since 1997, dropping from 41 percent last month. Now at 43 percent, President Bush’s approval rating
is also lower than it was a month ago.
This is going to sound
very cold, I realize, but it's the honest truth: I was reading the umpteenth news story quoting poor Mrs. Schindler pleading
for somebody to step in and "save" her daughter, and a wave of pure, unadulterated annoyance swept over me.
I suspect I am not alone.
The Schindlers have had the Florida
governor and legislature at their disposal for the past several years, and now the United States Congress and the President
have taken unprecedented steps to intervene in their little family drama. Today the Schindlers are shopping federal courts
to find one that will give them what they want. I don't watch much television news, but I bet the Schindlers are on somewhere
on cable nearly 24/7.
I don't know what percentage of Americans have watched a hospitalized love
one die, or what percentage have dealt with heartbreaking questions about DNR orders, life support, organ transplants,
etc. I suspect that a whopping majority of people over the age of 40 have been there and done that. And, nearly always,
these decisions are made quietly and privately. It doesn't occur to most people to make a federal case out of their grief.
How many of these Americans are
looking at the Schindlers and thinking, who the hell do you think you are? How many are thinking, I
loved my baby, my child, my wife, my father just as much, but I could let them go without setting the whole country in an
uproar.
Right now I think some people in the
GOP must realize they've made a miscalculation and are secretly hoping Terri Schiavo hurries up and passes on. I
think the longer this drama drags on, the bigger the backlash is going to be.
Update: Still
feel sympathy for the Schindlers? Read this.
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