Letter #52 to Friends and Familiares: the Number-1 Reason I am a Republican

There are those issues which arise during life that might better, or at least more conveniently, be avoided in public discourse. Every few generations, one such issue breaks into the public conscience relentlessly precisely because it is a matter of conscience. There is one issue that involves a moral absolute that lands me in the Red sea.

Before I upset the few people who might actually be reading this essay, permit me to return to the last discussion. While sounding lucid, that essay overlooked the key conflict that is not resolved easily. Often values drawn from implied absolutes can and do clash. They raise nasty social questions and conflicts on how to establish a hierarchy of, or (even more complicated) exceptions to, these absolutes.

The clashing values of what a human being is versus a right to property killed nearly a million of our countrymen a century and a half ago. The Civil War did not engulf our country for reasons of tariffs or economics. These regionalist policies created a tinder-box to which people like William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher and his sister as well as Henry David Thoreau and John Brown took a lit match.

The right-to-life versus the right of choice strikes me as another irresoluble dilemma. Simply put, I am pro-life. The basic arguments in favor of Roe versus Wade do not stand upon deeper scrutiny of the underlying premisses: the right to privacy and the notion of viability. One arguably no longer applies and the other is, well, an intellectual hoax to justify the taking of a life.

The right to privacy almost certainly existed implicitly (i.e., as an unspecified right to flow through to the States and the people); but Roe versus Wade made the right explicit. A friend of mine pointed out that the information age effectively negated that right of privacy some fifteen years ago. Americans have repudiated that right through continuing use of the social media, notwithstanding their porous privacy.

Viability was always an intellectual fiction. Truth is: a baby outside of a mother’s womb for up to nine months is no more viable left to its own devices than he or she would be inside his or her mother be he or she a zygote, embryo or foetus. The only two exceptions would be the result of rape or incest since the malevolent means nullified the higher end of parenthood. The Hyde amendment stands.

Now here is where my cowardice kicks in: there remains a gender divide on this issue. While many men are pro-choice, the passionate people on this side, at least in my experience, have been women. While arguably the women who are pro-life may be more passionately so than men who are pro-choice, the great majority of people arguing publicly for the absolutism of the pro-life position are often men.

Said bluntly by friends of mine (who are women): the zygote, embryo or foetus is a part of the woman’s body and could wreck her life if she were to surrender a deeply personal decision to others. This is where John C. Calhoun comes prancing back to life. While Vice President Calhoun articulated the right of concurrent majorities to defend slavery, it may apply well with unclear terms of a social contract.

While I continue to be pro-life, the only proper way to nullify Roe versus Wade as a national standard would be with a concurrent referendum in which 60% or more of the women participating consented to the change of the law. Other support measures to provide adequate care to the pregnant poor with the calculation that such overt support could obviate the need.

In the next essay, I will explain briefly the other issues that have landed me in the G.O.P. as well as pick out my preferred candidate. In sum, those issues will include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; gay marriage; detainees; leaking classified information; the rescue of the banking system; the class-war rhetoric; as well as, the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Letter #51: Aint no alien, nor Pygmalion...just a tag-along Republican

The difference between pretentious pedantry and brilliant political theory is about twenty points on an I.Q. test. To you, I leave the task of assigning me to one side of the intellectual divide; I fear I know already. Nevertheless, a sincere political philosophy really has to be founded on genuine ideas and assumptions about the nature of God (if any), man, society and government.

Many years ago, I read an arm-load of books in a now mercifully forgotten quest to devise the political theory by which I measure myself, my fellows and our society. The end product, I remember, had seven levels of aggregation. Then I read The Inferno and its seven levels of Hell. Well, my political theory went up in smoke. Better off forgotten…until now, that is.

The upper two levels are all I remember and I will have to make do with those. Basically, my thinking comes out of the classic social contract theory of John Locke – big surprise for a Yank (NOT) – as well as bits and pieces from the thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein (don’t ask), Baron Montesquieu, John C. Calhoun, John Stuart Mill, and Plato (don’t tell). The assumptions underlying my thinking are straight-forward.

• There are such things as moral absolutes implied across time and societies.
• Nobody ever gets these absolutes absolutely correct. That fact of human life does not absolve us from turning our backs on them.
• The ends do not justify the means; rather, the means sully or ennoble the ends.
• The truth is crushing in its simplicity.
• The just society is that which enables the greatest number of people to attain their properly ordained statures in the eyes of God.
• Man and Woman were created in God’s image and, therefore, concepts like qualitative utility do apply.
• The upper two levels of my erstwhile privately held theory represent the social compact – as the culture, conventions and traditions of a society – and a formal social contract.

Many elements make up the social compact, which is rather vague by necessity as it expresses values more than rules. The social contract is more likely to be an explicit subset of these norms and traditions. Those cultural elements that become explicitly stated in a contract do so because they codify as ‘sacred’ absolute ideals inferred over time and practice. In the U.S. context, our founders wisely made the contract largely secular.

Since any human adherence these absolutes has uniformly proven to fall far short of those ideals, we call these incomplete manifestations 'values'. These values, to be included in a written social contract, have to be accepted by all the contracting parties. Of course, contract terms often change with the times. In the case of the U.S. Constitution, such change is never meant to be casually accepted.

In fact, many of the values are self-evident; so much so that defining them is difficult and largely rely on ostensive definitions. It is analogous to Justice Potter Stewart’s remark that he could not define 'pornography' was but he surely knew it when he saw it. Liberty versus license is difficult to distinguish precisely. Yet we can discern liberty both in its presence and its absence.

To me, at least, the Declaration of Independence is the defining document of our social compact. But many others from diverse disciplines contribute to the social compacts antecedent, the social covenant which defines values and other elements of contemporary life into a living and widely followed culture. Examples might include the painting ‘American Gothic’ by Grant Wood, the poem ‘Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost or the music of Stephen Collins Foster.

Secularly sacred values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (assumed to contain the right to property), are manifest in that Declaration. That is not all. Other tenets, later included in the Constitution explicitly as the social contract, include a primacy of civilian power and a right to revolution to end oppression or corruption (usually found fornicating in the same bed of iniquity).

Beyond the necessity of surmounting high hurdles to change the social contract through amendments, the Constitution clearly allows for the existence of implied rights, not enumerated in the Constitution and subsequently articulated or inferred by the States and the people. The rub is how does one know what these rights are and whether they were known by, knowable to, the average citizen as not to be surrendered to the government through the Constitution?

The key point here, as a conservative, is that the contracting parties under the Constitution are the governed who surrender some portion of their rights (for example, the freedom to act without restraint; that is, with absolute license) to safeguard the value of liberty. This trade-off, taken seriously, is what is meant by people living and breathing the democratic spirit.

Without that fundamental engagement by the citizen, usually reinforced by the social compact as coloured by the social covenant, the contract basically becomes unenforceable and implodes. Without the guidance of the social contract, ‘show-me’ definitions become blurry as individuals once again redefine their singular governance. Gradually, more likely rapidly, the culture becomes indefinite and the compact itself collapses under the weight of popular interpretations spiralling into space in every which way.

One of two states is likely to ensue: mob rule or anarchy, almost inexorably to be followed by tyranny. Now there have been many, like Jean Jacques Rousseau, who believe that mob rule would be okay because, left to his natural (i.e., pre-social) state, man is basically decent. Others, for much the same reason, believe that anarchy would be an improvement. Karl Marx thought so.

In my heart, I would prefer to believe in Marx and Rousseau. Nonetheless, I live in the world and not in my heart. The heart may have its reasons that reason does not know. Yet, when I read the Black Book on Communism in 1998, I realized what happened in places where a sublime ideal of a future without laws ended up permitting mass murder of millions now. Of course, that future never quite showed up.

Blaise Pascal, conservative thinker from several centuries ago and misquoted in the previous paragraph, had a better idea of man than Marx or his progeny of Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot et al.: Man is neither angel nor brute. The terrible irony remains that as he acts the one, he becomes the other. Again, please excuse this far too long of a letter. Next note will be a dance in my Kulturkampf zone.

Letter #50: why I am no whiz kid but a conservative; part uno

Dear everyone,

Throughout my life some of the people I have admired have been liberals like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Senator Bobby Kennedy, Ambassador R. Sargent Shriver, Representative Morris Udall, President Carter and even President Johnson. Conservatives have also stood the test of time, particularly Senator Barry Goldwater, President Ford (though more moderate), Senator Robert Dole, Senator Charles Grassley and, more recently, President George W. Bush.

Before I explain the foundation of my Republicanism, there are a few admissions I should make in the interest of intellectual integrity.

1. For eighty percent of my waking life, I have been a Democrat. Perhaps conservatives like me are those who considered themselves liberal at one time but have shifted over a generation.
2. Only with great sadness did I let go of the Great Society of President Johnson. Yes, I grew to detest the national pain imposed by the foolish and immoral war in Viêt Nam and believed it de-railed the Great Society, in my mind a noble attempt by a world leader to re-assess its aims and try to attain a truly just society. Its failure remains heavy but fail the Great Society did, and badly.
3. I much prefer the company of liberals. True liberals, not preening progressives out for a P.R. snow-job to prop up a flagging self-absorption, see the possibility of things and often do ask why things are not better, though they should be.
4. Nevertheless, I admire true conservatives for their labouring under an intellectual burden of proof when that should lie with the liberals or other advocates for change. As a cousin-by-marriage aptly pointed out, “preening anythings” are thorough-going thorns in the flesh.
5. There are many Republicans whose company I really do not relish. These tasteless traditionalists, often newly privileged thanks to a society that used to be more open and mobile, exude the attitude of “I have mine and forget you” (with another ‘F’ word in place of ‘forget’). These people are not conservatives, simply craven in their self-centered avarice.
6. For my dark side, I am often a coward and almost always a hypocrite, at least to some degree. Sincerity is a hard-won virtue for those with an open mind, self-doubt and more than a half-century on the planet…and who lack the independent means to ignore that complicated necessity of a public persona.
7. For me, at least, I would rather be a hypocrite with principles often sullied than an amiable conniver without a conscience.
8. My politics has remained rather stable over the years but a few litmus-test social issues, combined with a view that I have a duty to join one of the two parties, places me as an odd-ball in G.O.P. Ironically, the feeling is roughly the same as being an odd-ball on the Democratic side.
9. Boiling down the reams of blistering rhetoric and bilious bloviation, the one ‘sort-of’ archetypal difference between liberals and conservatives is that Democrats most often think with their hearts while Republicans feel with their heads.
10. For me, I follow Dr King’s timeless dream and ever-timely counsel that people are best judged by the content of their characters, not the colors of their skin, the levels of their educations, the relative magnetism of their personalities.
11. While I often criticize the United States of America, I dearly love her, with all that I have in my hamstrung heart, middling mind, sullied soul, quavering character and limited years left in life. Obviously, I am far below the giants of our common past but that fact does not exempt me from caring for my country as they did.
12. Lastly, in any society, ‘Great’ or otherwise, based on mutual respect, the rule of law and natural rights endowed by “Our Creator” – in short, one that strives toward being a just society – the highest form of tolerance has to be mercy in which the greatest justice lies in forgiveness and democratic spirits persevere through compassion.

My next letter will describe briefly the theoretical construct of my personal politics and why it lies with the Republican Party along with a brief summary of the most basic litmus-test preferences I hold and why. Lastly will follow with a note on the one candidate I believe can credibly challenge President Obama, the latter being a better man than most with a high character and unquestioned integrity.

Above all, liberal or conservative, I would ask you to take a moment to step back and wonder where the world would be today had there been no America (warts and all) in it. And, please try to imagine an America without a Franklin, Washington, Irving, Lincoln, Dewey, Roosevelt, King, Ford or many others throughout her enviable history.

Letter 49: proof that January 1st is just another day

Well, here comes 2012. This is the day we reflect about the year past and think through the year ahead of us. Or this is a day devoted to recuperating from the ‘Absolut proof’ that 2011 ended with a ‘grito’ and not a whimper, with 2012 starting with a colossal bang, bang, bang and ice packs, etc. For me, I have a hangover of sorts from eating too much chocolate again and wondering if ever I will make a smooth transition in anything.

The big events for me today are to start preparing my return to Mexico and to see how the Steelers will fare in the ‘seeding’ of the play-offs. This is not a hard chore because the two or three nemeses of the Steelers – the Baltimore Ravens, the Green Bay Packers and the San Francisco 49ers – are all teams I have liked for many years and so, while bittersweet, I will likely find some happiness in a month during the Super Bore. My money is on the obvious: Green Bay.

Why? Two reasons, really. First, the team is amazing and, perhaps, one of the best squads of all-time. Vince Lombardi would be proud. Secondly, because the team lost its bid for a perfect season to Kansas City. That is disappointing for Packer fans, to be sure, but should lock Green Bay into yet another Super Bowl ring for two sub-reasons. First, the pressure is off for the perfect season and that pressure was likely to have been high enough to have become a distraction.

Now reality of that stress and the dream that fed it are both long gone to the Packers’ benefit. Second, and the flip-side of the first, is that the players are mad they lost the perfect season and they will take that out on any team less than fortunate to be in their path. The Pack has been back and this time they are taking no flak.

Of course, I am rooting for the Steelers and really love the team. A bit too old now and with less talent than many other teams, the Steelers are like that quietly popular girl in high school who wins unacknowledged respect for doing the most with what she has. These meandering thoughts indicate to me – and now to you – that I am as clueless as ever as to what is God’s plan or mission for me, if indeed I merit such attention.

When it is impossible for me to think my way out of, around or through such questions, it is always helpful to me to focus on those things for which I am grateful in life. First, my singular resolution for 2012: finding an apartment. This is one resolution I am likely to keep – precedent-setting -- for I have a week or two to do it.

1. This tour in the Peace Corps is proving to be the time of my life. My work is fulfilling and seeing the evident quality of many of the younger volunteers brings me the warmth, assurance and happiness that America still has what it takes to be America.
2. The holiday here has been restful and loving; boy that makes a difference. To top it off, I beat my niece in ‘Wii’ football…yeah! She was half-asleep; a cheap victory but it is mine…
3. My colleagues at the science center where I work in Queretaro really like me and have been supportive. Nice to be a part of something and not feel guilty for working hard, for a change.
4. Finally, I have run twice in the last week and have found a new determination to take my body back from sloth. But, I must remember, Newark was not rebuilt in a day.
5. Slowly, my old contacts are growing less cold and it is a pleasure to have stimulating company, which I hope will enable me to pursue my dream career: a development trouble-shooter in conflict zones.
6. My Spanish has progressed steadily, if not at lightning speed. That gratitude really owes itself to Sra. Lourdes Rodriguez of the Peace Corps and her colleagues who “learned” me Spanish so very well. While I am nowhere near fluent, I am able to manage quite smartly. Gratitude also extends to those five or six colleagues at the science center who speak English as well as I speak Spanish but steadfastly refused to let me see that for a whole year.
7. One of the sublime pleasures of life – and a sure-fire way to endure crud-work – is a continuous desire to learn. My parents gave me an important value in life, one that helped place my ethical and moral compass firmly of the inside of me: the thought popularized by President Lincoln that one can learn something from anyone else no matter the station-in-life of the latter.
8. Dunkin’ Donuts turbos, on demand the whole time, is pure and motorizing luxury.
9. Reading the challenging text of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been gratifying, not only in absorbing the world-view of a polymath but also because it shows that I can still read pretty hard-core epistemology – not an easy task at any age.
10. Our troops are out of Iraq. To those worried about Iran’s apparent hegemony, please keep in mind how much the Persians will have on their hands when they start telling Arabs what to do. President Obama is at the helm in a dark time for the country.