Letter #98: Just what is human dignity anyways?

“To consent to any treatment which is calculated to defeat the end and purpose of [one’s] being is beyond his right; he cannot give up his soul to servitude, for it is not man's own rights which are here in question, but the rights of God, the most sacred and inviolable of rights.” 

- Leo XIII, 1891.

 “….I also addressed an appeal to…all the great world religions, inviting them to offer the unanimous witness of our common convictions regarding the dignity of man, created by God. In fact…the various religions, now and in the future, will have a preeminent role in preserving peace and in building a society worthy of man.” 

-  John Paul II, 1991.

 ‘In building a society worthy of man….’ What a remarkable – in a sense, revolutionary – phrase by a pontiff deemed very conservative. This phrase is not an outlier, either. In his encyclical “Centesimus Annus” of 1991, to celebrate the centennial of the issue of Leo XIII’s "Rerum Novarum", John Paul II took pains to explain why Communism had collapsed but also made himself quite clear that consumerism – gratification of the senses being confused with a sense of living fully – or exploitation hiding behind globalism were equally fruitless to an Earth literally gaunt in spirit while often flaunting the material. 

Then Cardinal Ratzinger (eventually, Benedict XVI), the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (erstwhile spearhead of the inquisition), oversaw the compilation of a new "Catechism of the Catholic Church", published six years after Pope John Paul’s commentary on Pope Leo’s classic encyclical:

“The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. ‘The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.’” That said, the Catholic Church has amends to make for its silence during the holocaust; its complicity in the scandals mentioned in the comment below; its unwillingness to ordain women; as well as, perhaps, other and more overtly political issues.

Yet, few institutions in modern life have steadfastly stood apart from popular trends and ideologies to stake out an unmistakable stand by unfurling the banner of human dignity; of reminding us that, after all, men and women were and still are created in the image of God. That is to say: while the Church is a human institution fraught with human faults and frailties that ought properly to be addressed with courage and transparency, it still has a lot to tell us – even when such truths are neither convenient nor fashionable.

Human Justice or Human Nature?  As a conservative, I respect the traditionalism of the last two Popes, though I welcome the popular touch brought by the current pontiff; the kulturkampf is getting tiresome.  While I salute the role of the Sacraments in the spiritual lives of over a billion Christians across the world (i.e., as a physical syntax of the metaphysical), for me, these acts are simply symbolic. Yet, Christianity – Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant – remains a vast store-house of wisdom about human nature that has been accumulated by some of the better minds in the West for two millennia.

This is a short essay because its question is not one for me to answer, but one for each of us consider in an era of fear, aggression and vitriol. Just what would a “society worthy of man” look like? Of course, I do not know. But what a refreshing idea! So few are the contemporary signals that man is worthy of anything, let alone deserving of a society, ordained in natural law and tempered by Providence. Only the Roman Church steadfastly envisions a world order founded on the freedom of each individual to grow in truth ‘from image to likeness’ toward the godly (or, for humanists, the ideal) as it exists in each. 

Such a vision is neither silly nor naïve; it requires a summoning up of the courage to defy the petty and to transcend the crowd, whatever that crowd is: sect, party, school, company, class. Just imagine the possibilities of a humanity grounded in the world, reaching for Paradise and growing beyond fear and degradation. My tentative conception of the just society, taken from an earlier letter, remains: “The just society is that which enables the greatest number of people to attain their properly ordained statures in the eyes of God….”

Of course, such a vision statement, is magnificently simple. As always, the devil lurks in the details; but ideas often get choked by the weeds. In my lifetime, there were men and women who stood up for the very best in us; who made resignation look cheap and ideology crass. Some are well known to all of us, of course, but so many more still exist today, living their lives, helping where they can and leading when they must. The piety of today may not wear the garb of, or voice, the holiness for all to perceive.

But it does exist in a thousand little and forgettable deeds that, in their totality, prove man's sentience as distinct from the 'consciousness' of the animal. For this theme of a society worthy of man, what I would propose, inasmuch as people have widely divergent views, is that this vision become a criterion for judgement of leaders while it remains an end of the larger society. What I would propose is that people view each policy, law or regulation and subject it to an acid-test: Does this idea take America closer to being a just society or does it not?

Letter to Friends & Familiares #97: better late than never

“My questions only serve as a goad to myself; I only want to be stimulated by the silence which rises up around me as the ultimate answer…”
--Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog”, 1936.

Being nearly or actually and even permanently expelled from a leading prep school and college as well as R.O.T.C. meant nothing. When my father stated that I would pay for any schooling after my scheduled graduation date, the jig was up; the jug was down; and, my career was on as a teetotaler of dubious deliberation. It was a bleak winter’s day and I felt that usual mix of equally bleak feelings when toxins are exiting the body.

It was dinner-time at the fraternity, where I was a social member only but, fortunately, in with a crowd of prepsters, druggies and others content to nurture a paradox of arm's-length intimacy: be close enough to pass the pipe but far enough away to remain inscrutable. Bottom line: these comrades-in-qualms remained willing to accept me as one among ‘uniquities’ after I had packed away a promiscuous persona with the Scotch I never got to sip.

Except that I had never sipped a thing in my life. Taking a left out of the boarding house, a two century old clapboard beauty owned and run by the kindly widow of the former Episcopal bishop, I walked a couple of blocks along White Street lined with similar structures fronted by the same wrought-iron fence with slight filigrees and shaded by occasional pines and naked elms. After a minute or so, I arrived on Main Street, taking a brief left.

In front of the grocery store that had closed an hour before, at 5 p.m. (on the nose, at the tail-end of an era of single-earner families), I inserted forty-five cents into the outside machine to get my daily quart of Coca Cola. Then I cut across the Main Street toward the small cemetery punctuated by the stately statue designating the eternal quarters of the earthly remains of General Stonewall Jackson, the untimely death of whom, by friendly fire, may have saved the Union some 117 years prior.

This daily sugar shock seemed necessary at the time for whatever reason. Ironically, drinking that Coke did not put on any weight to my thin and dissipated frame; in fact, it ruined my appetite for dinner and I was soon down to 147 pounds; to place this in perspective, most people consider me rather thin today, though I am now thirty-five pounds heavier. So I swilled my sugar-water and came upon a Grotty sporting a “Question Authority” button.

Now, I well knew, many people would find this anachronistic hippie and his button to be cool; especially at the frat house. Well, I was not fooled; no, not the least. Dismissively, I thought with some contempt, gained only since I had quit partying to flush out the system (rather knowing that I would never return), ‘Come on, Fred, surely you can do better than that! After all, you have had a decent education…I mean, whoa-man, that button is so utterly slackadelic…’

After that momentary yet dissembled contempt, I realized that, for the first time in so long, my disapproval had not led to some stupidly stuttering slur to prove me and my ‘integrity’. In fact, I hardly cared. Since I had given in and obeyed my father’s stern wish that I graduate on schedule, I found that I was rather happy in spite of 'distant' Phi Beta Kappa grades descending into a hole of mediocrity. At least, I was not so dependent upon the mainstream to wear a button that defied it. Fact is, anarchists need the law to flout more than cops or attorneys do to front it.

Truth is, cloudy day or no, I had enjoyed reading Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego that afternoon – still giving the heave-ho to assigned readings from my regular classes. The problem was that I had signed up for the easiest, least labor-intensive courses W.&L. had to offer; the lectures were as boring as the readings vacuous. But obedience remained a tricky concept to me. My college sweet-heart had already decided that my brooding 'thoughtfulness' and fermented hurt, no longer tranquilized, did not make for a pretty personality type for her better (let alone other) half. 

Nevertheless, when she died four months later, my world tipped off its axis. Though that love story was not meant to be written, at least in this ripped fabric of time-space, I was determined to obey that inner mandate not again to do those drunken things which had assured me the most transient of all rewards: popularity and attention. The price had been too high, particularly for others. Yet obedience still rankled me and for thirty-five years, I have been trying to figure it out. Vice, like virtue, had been its own reward; at least, I was still independent enough to walk alone in the Blue Ridges.

Some personalities seemed less geared toward submission than others. While I took pride in my often painful independence and rued other craven capitulations (again, dissembled), I was simply unable to obey anything or anybody, especially God Who, after all, had intervened just two months before to purge the demon-lover stalking me from meal to meal, day to day, girl to girl. Well, time heals wounds and even affords occasional insights.

Three decades spent in, and two careers distracted by, the contemplation of (i.e., brooding over) this idea of inner jihad toward submission to God’s Will – though, of course, I did not think of that inward and existential struggle in terms of the pillars of Islam – had gotten me nowhere…until this week. In all those previous years, I could only cast terms of obedience to God’s Will as submission to It; that is, of dissolving myself into that path of muted destiny, with the fake gin’s tear wending its way down Winston Smith’s cheek. 

A strict upbringing had removed the simple felicity of just going along. Through those wandering years of social cluelessness, emotional absence and incongruous illusions, I had failed to make the inference from Fred’s button seen so long ago: ‘Don’t wear a button; do it if you believe it will benefit others; otherwise, accept life on life’s terms, dig?’ It is embarrassing to admit that the obvious connection between mere acceptance and obedience, so obvious to others, was lost on me.

Letter 96: Is American Exceptionalism Dead? Part lV (mercifully, the last)

“….[President] Lincoln incarnated the essence of American democracy: the harmonious blending of the mystical and the pragmatic within the individual soul…The harmony of these seemingly opposed realities may now be identified as the fundamental meaning of what an American is – as a human ideal…the story of America can be deepened and renewed…."

--Jacob Needleman, (The American Soul; 2002)

"....the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.”  

--President Thomas Jefferson, 1789

PREVIOUS ESSAYS in this series on the ¿DEATH? of AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM:

• Symptoms
• Flaws
• Diagnosis 

George Harrison Disclaimer (see comment below). As I have pondered this notion of an American exceptionalism that might one time have existed but has become attenuated and needs to be right-focussed going-forward, I decided that I should re-read The American Soul by San Fran philosophy professor, Dr Jacob Needleman, because he had written that one of the unique aspects of the United States had been its founding based on an idea, not on a people.

On to today. Well, I am busted.  In re-reading this 356-page book during the past week, I found that much of what I had devised as an American exceptionalism was detail-for-detail inspired by Dr Needleman.  No, I had not plagiarized. In truth, I had read The American Soul in 2004 before my first tour to Iraq and then forgotten almost all of the details in the ensuing chaotic decade. 

So, as I chewed the philosophical cud, my notion of American exceptionalism veered away from power. Nevertheless, my eventual thesis turned out to be quite close to, if not derivative from, Dr Needleman’s masterful prose.  The American Soul reflects the same soul-searching as that of yours truly. To say the least, if you want to understand American exceptionalism, read the book!

http://www.amazon.com/The-American-Soul-Rediscovering-Founders/dp/1585422266 

Sir Ned’s 'tweener' doctrine.  We have seen that American exceptionalism is not the age-old doctrine – forever seductive in its Kiplingesque rhetoric of the day – that ‘might makes right’. This notion sounds essentially Nietzchean in its philosophy, though it utterly lacks the back-breaking burden of personal responsibility that the mad genius himself had always understood his thinking to impose. 

(That Nietzsche's anti-Semitic sister and churlish brother-in-law as well as, later, the Nazis conveniently disregarded this second dimension of his philosophy of ethics is not his fault and serves as a tell-tale warning for our day.)

By extension, the idea here is that temporal supremacy in payloads and profits has derived from, or conferred upon Americans, an innate superiority. That is to assert: such supremacy is both source and reflection. What is clear, as this thinking goes, is that American military and monetary dominance is intrinsically co-relative with American exceptionalism.  Call it Manifest Destiny ending history.  

This argument has -- and is -- a tragic flaw.  Such thinking implies that we Americans – or at least those of us in the echelons of power – are the übermenchen of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, later fleshed out in Twilight of the Idols without the superior conscience rightfully to be expected of such 'natural' leaders as fully realized individuals. That means we define the new world order through our new world values that we also define. 

Of course, this “trans-valuation of values” is nothing more than a consequence of the rhetoric of self-will and self-idealization into Lord Acton’s observation that corrupted power corrupts absolutely. In the case of the United States, this contemporary trans-valuation of values -- under the power-based sense of exceptionalism -- leaves American leadership making up the rules as it goes along and deluding itself that such fluid doctrines are automatically justified by, and integral to, the American Century.

That intellectual legerdemain skates around the dark reality that expediency with power and adherence to natural law only work together in rare and momentary coincidence.  On the other hand, certain people afflicted with an equally delusional guilt for the many past wrongs, committed by our forebears (i.e., slavery, Japanese detention, genocide of Native Americans, etc.), believe that Americans can do no right out of a presumed malevolence genetically encoded or, almost as bad, out of a certain unrefined shortage of subtlety (i.e., savagery). 

Using the phrase quoted by Dr Needleman, I would say to these liberals, “You have no idea of what youhave here [in America]….”  So one side believes in a perversion of the golden rule into ‘he who has the gold makes the rules’, while the other view seems to apologize for America’s sins without progressing beyond its mea culpa for all of American history.  Both sides are off-the-mark in visibly divergent directions. 

Defining new values in a vacuum of ‘living and breathing democracy’ (as Baron Montesquieu wisely counselled in The Spirit of the Law), creates a tyranny of power. As Dr Needleman observes, if that be true, the Republic will go the way of Ozymandias. Meanwhile, wallowing in guilt at the expense of an optimism in the virtue of meaningful employment ignores President Jefferson's wise counsel expressed above.

The third President, the greatest of our philosopher-kings-as-executive-temps (the others being Presidents Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, F.D. Roosevelt, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Obama), believed that the world belonged in trust to the living.  By overlooking this Jeffersonian advice, the never-forgetters fear complacency so much that they often never get around to providing the much-needed impetus toward making amends for the past; that is, changing the behavior or thinking patterns that led to a finite number of ugly excesses in our common heritage.

Finally, American exceptionalism defined.  By adding back the overlooked and wise humility of Baron Montesquieu to the thinking of aggressive exceptionalists as well as by inserting Jefferson’s dictum into supplications to those worshipping the bitch-goddess of ungainly guilt, we come to a somewhat colorless notion of American exceptionalism that will, hopefully, remain adaptive and durable, long after the ‘American Century’ has ended.

That quiet exceptionalism is best rendered as a simple statement that casts down to us, as citizens, a formidable gauntlet of republican governance at each decision point during the daily life of the country: “We can do better.  God-willing, we shall do better…”  The ‘we’ picking up this gauntlet (i.e., taking up this challenge of organic improvement) is not a particular set of genes or religious beliefs intrinsic to a particular people but the constantly changing – if not always properly engaged – citizenry of our most mongrel and blessèd of nations.

'God' is also malleable for the good to mean a deity; higher ideals and ethics they spawn (e.g., humanism); and / or, the undeniably great aspects of our common history. Together, we can emulate President Kennedy by being idealists without illusions. Thus can our exceptionalism be one of ‘taking exception’ to the conventional wisdom of the day.  This may entail standing up to aggression by pursuing potentially provocative, if not militarily kinetic, countermeasures.  It may manifest in opening immigration to people being consumed by genocide. 

In actuality, it may be any of a thousand different things clustered together by heeding a higher calling, and honestly so (i.e., under the scrutiny of daily dissent and moral debate). Man truly has part of the angel as well as the brute within him, as said another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal.  In this immediate time, come those words of President Kennedy yet again, “Never negotiate out of fear but never fear to negotiate.”

Letter #95: Is American Exceptionalism Dead? Part III

“Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.” – Blaise Pascal, Les Pensées (1669)

Letter #95 to Friends and Familiares #95: Is American Exceptionalism Dead? Part III: What American Exceptionalism is Not

The first two essays in this series have delved into the external symptoms and inward flaws that indicate the approaching end of America's exceptionalism, at least in terms of power. In my next essay, I commit to spell out what I believe American exceptionalism is supposed to be, if indeed it exists at all.  My thinking on this apparently arrogant subject has a lot more to do with principles than power. In that sense, those in our time who have espoused this concept have come from diverse backgrounds and include people as far apart as the Reverend Martin Luther King and President Gerald Ford.

To find the thread that binds together these men, and many women as well, I would like to start out by clarifying the popular notion behind the rhetorical device of this American exceptionalism. While this notion, and variants of it, has its adherents, my sense is that the leading idea of this exceptionalism is a misconception that America’s might makes right her actions or that American leadership is an exceptionally malignant force in the world because of this 'hyper-power' and has been for a while.

Neither imperialism nor its dialectic of “leading from behind” is a source of American exceptionalism.  Each represents a reaction to the rise of American commercial power and military capacity. While American imperialism began to appear from the early nineteenth century onward, it has only been the last fifty years during which the illusion of coercion has intoxicated too many leaders into an amoral realpolitik or, worse, into a tendency to project military force too quickly at the expense of the weak.

One view produces bloodless calculation, as seen in the stark indifference to the unceasing slaughterin Syria. The other view has produced the string of phony wars in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Kosovo, Serbia and Libya as well as pushed for invasions of bloody consequence in Viêt Nam and, perhaps, in Iraq. While coincident with the apotheosis of American commercial power, that economic leadership preceded this hubris of power by almost a century. Things started changing when the British, exhausted and insolvent after two world wars, handed their empire and policing role to their ‘American cousins’.

Unfortunately, the counterpoint to this inflation of power – the notion of leading from behind – is an over-reaction to this hubris and often degenerates  into an excuse for indifferent diffidence that compromises what American exceptionalism ought properly to be.  In a sense, this new paradigm of leading from behind parallels the British shift away from empire seventy years ago.  In the case of the United States and her accession to empire, the world saw two large empires squaring off for almost five decades in another world war of ideas. 

Both the United States and Soviet Union divvied up the policing powers according to immediate interests at play.  Imperialism and policing is not a sustainable foreign policy; war broke down (at least) direct British influence in the Second World War.  The Cold War was another world conflict that bankrupted the U.S.S.R. As the lone ‘hyper-power’ for the last quarter century, America’s policing role and aggressive pursuit of policy has basically made the U.S. insolvent with wartime debt levels in peacetime and a monetary policy that has the world sloshing through deep pools of inert currency. 

(Once that currency moves or others trade in their stored dollars for other newly recognized store-value currencies and / or selling off Treasury notes and bonds, inflation will spike and accelerate a long-deferred deflation of artificially high asset values generated by near-zero percent rates suppressing the discount rates applied to asset valuations. The American people are weary of war-making far from home with dubious assertions of national security where inconvenient challenges tend to be exaggerated into existential threats.)

Thus, this doctrine of leading from behind is the American version of handing off the hegemon function, with its attendant costs, to others.  In the case of Syria and Ukraine, the unhappy beneficiary of this bequeathing of power appears to be the European Union, particularly Germany.  The problem is that the Germany-led E.U. is as unprepared today to assume that mantle as were the United States when Great Britain made this shift in the 1940s. 

The unwillingness of the current Administration to initiate the process of a significant push-back in the face of evil or illegal aggression – that is, take the lead through a concerted first step so new partnering powers can feel empowered to stand with the democracies – has vitiated leading from behind to a public compromise of what our Republic stands for.   The United States is managing to alienate allies, to embolden terrorists and to encourage illegal expansionism.  

In short, the stars and stripes are coming to mean weapons or self-enriching development aid for many of the world’s poor while, at the same time, the disenfranchised of the earth see America backing away from confrontations with countries strong enough to impose significant casualties.  This behavior of a school-yard bully – by bombing defenseless countries while recoiling from more powerful adversaries – surely cannot be the stuff of American exceptionalism.

If it is, then those friends of mine who argue that American exceptionalism is a myth used to justify armed adventurism to safeguard short-term, primarily economic, interests are sadly correct in their heated assertions. Nevertheless, there has been an American exceptionalism forged in the past and applied judiciously across two centuries, until the 1960s, as the United States evolved from a struggling post-colonial state in 1784, an emerging economy in 1820 and a great power in 1860.  More about that soon.

Letters to friends and family #94: Ukraine, the butt of history

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it [...no matter how much they rant on mass or social media]."

-- George Santayana.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines [...and bloggers]."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

By now, in the unfolding developments in Ukraine, it is almost certain that President George W. Bush would have deployed 10,000 troops from Germany, with or without N.A.T.O., into the Crimea and the Eastern half of Ukraine to create an immediate trip-wire, pending replacement by U.N. troops. Since the military does planning scenarios out the kazoo, such a deployment could roll out post-haste.

The difference between Ukraine and the Russian land grab of Georgian territories in 2008 is that the borders in Georgia had been disputed for many years; not so in Ukraine. Second, Ukraine is a larger nation firmly embedded in Europe. Finally, U.S. forces were unavailable due to engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008. Nevertheless, President Bush cut in front of P.M. Putin in the V.I.P. seats at the China Olympics of 2008 and ripped an armpit so savagely into Putin that other leaders scooched away on the bleachers. Putin stopped the invasion immediately, though he had gained control of the two disputed territories.

This nation, Ukraine, clearly responded to Senator McCain's call in the streets of Kiev to stand firm for liberty. The people drove the wannabe dictator out. The courage of Senators McCain (R-AZ; raz the taz) and Murphy (D-CT) in December brings out in stark relief what increasingly looks like a nightmare of appeasement.  Don't believe me? (Wish I did not, either.):

First, inaction to the slaughter in Syria and watching on as radical elements hijack the opposition. U.S.-led reaction? Nothing. Could the U.S. do something?

http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2013/08/letter-83-thoughts-on-syria-case-for.html 

(from six months ago).

Second, emerging civil conflict brought on by a power grab at the expense of Iraq's fragile democracy by President al-Maliki in 2010 in Iraq. U.S. reaction? President George W. Bush started this war of choice; otherwise nothing. President Obama could have travelled to Iraq, as President Bush almost certainly would have, to demand the peaceful transition of government to the rightful winner of the election (Iyad Allawi) but did not. Result? Sunni jihadists coming in from Syria, where President Obama has already displayed a passivity perceived as an appeasement of terrorists free-lancing throughout the Arab Spring. The illegal President al-Maliki is now running for cover to Iran, at the expense of moderate shi'ites.

Third, the internal collapse of Venezuela. Admittedly, this crisis is not a result of a widespread perception of an impotent leadership in the U.S. The non-response thus far by Washington is neither constructive nor surprising. Decisive action to advocate the creation of an interim structure toward a national reconciliation could win a great amount of goodwill in Latin America for the United States right now. But we will see nothing as this President focusses on the longer-term implications of his legacy; sadly, President Obama has checked out.

The one instance of action, Libya, proved incredibly stupid. We bombed into régime-change and to death a dictator that had suspended W.M.D. and tried to establish links with the West. Preventing COL Khadafi's tanks from blowing Benghazi away was one thing. But hunting him down and killing him sent a clear signal to Presidents Assad and Kim Il-Jung and their brutal buds that there is no way out once the trouble starts; ergo, fight to the death. Why Libya? Because we were appeasing the residual colonialism of Italy. Thus, by killing Khadafi, we made sure that the option we are using in Syria, appeasement, is the exact wrong one. Please! Less people-pleasing and more principled people!

Letting the Russian forces capture significant parts of Ukraine -- a country with well-defined borders beyond dispute and clearly desirous of her sovereignty -- over excuses of protecting Russian nationals sounds quite similar to Nazi rationalizations for the Sudetenland and the eventual dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Lastly, let us remember the suffering historically endured by the Ukraine:

• the six million people starved to death by the brutal collectivized farming of the U.S.S.R. during the 1920s and early 1930s, a figure on the level of the Nazi partial genocide of the Jews; and,
• the four million (25% Jewish) more murdered by the Nazis for blood-sport.

These sobering numbers involved a population of 25-30 million at the time (i.e., 25-40% of the population during that era).  So, we have managed in recent weeks to embolden jihadists in Syria and the Russians in the Ukraine. No wonder Israel is skeptical of Iran's intentions. With the current leadership in Washington, Iran may well decide not to take the blandishments seriously.

So, to those who defend President Obama by vilifying President Bush: whom would you trust right now in confronting clear cut aggression in the Ukraine, ¿President Obama or President Bush? The hardest part in writing this essay is knowing that deploying troops to the Ukraine would not mean war; it would mean that Russia -- and other would-be aggressors enticed by Western dithering -- could not count on getting away with land-grabs. Though we are cautioned on the destructive power historical analogies through the misuse of the domino theory in Viêt Nam, at a great and terrible cost to 58,000 American families and millions in Viêt Nam, the lesson does fit in this particular context.

The most ironic aspect of all this is that President Bush would deploy those temporary peace-keepers, with or without N.A.T.O. Once the integrity of Ukrainian sovereignty were clarified, then he could pursue a peace-offensive with Russia by saying, "Hey, President Putin, Ukraine wants to join the European community. That is great. But why don't you think about joining the European community as well? We in the United States would welcome Russia back to Europe since she was the only great power that sided with our struggle to banish slavery one hundred fifty years ago and she proved herself a steadfast ally in defeating fascism and genocide seventy years ago. We have done some great things together. Come, let us do some more."

Letter to Friends & Family #93: Is American Exceptionalism Dead; part-2

Notes from the underbelly: “Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew.”

--Colum McCann; Let the Great World Spin; page-131 (2009).

In the autumn of 1976, after a challenging four years of high school (that has rewarded me many times over), my dad and I packed up the car and headed down to Lexington, Virginia.  In picking my college, I had focussed on my sense of honor and gentlemanliness.  Washington and Lee was considered, at least north of the Mason-Dixon Line, to be the southern gentlemen’s school.  Finally, I had found my element.

Well, not really.  Aside from the fact that I was too self-involved to be a gentleman and still way too lax for honor, I had a steep learning curve – this one of character – ahead of me.  W.&.L. did restore my sense of honor, though my near-expulsion finally bred it into me as could nothing else. My peers seated on the Honor Council treated me with mercy rather than justice in allowing me to finish.

As if inward challenges were not enough, I had to navigate my way through my own hypocrisy and that of others.  The code of the southern gentleman is awfully high, far beyond the sense of honor of the average person (e.g., me). That is, since these southern boys often could not match that standard, they chose to flout it, often nastily.

Like me, many of those classmates learned the value of their values by flouting those standards of courtesy and conduct granted them at the outset.  Yet, those few southerners – and some yankees, too – who met this impossibly high standard in college were the best peer group I have ever known anywhere.  Like Vice President Calhoun’s march of progress, these gentlemen – more like the ‘natural aristoi’ of Jefferson – marched the rest of us along by their example.

The reason for this diversion is to discuss the darker side of the challenge to American exceptionalism discussed in these essays.  The previous essay looked at the symptoms – the historical indicators – of the end of the American Century.  This essay briefly touches on some inward symptoms of the cancer inside the American being.  Mine is an idiosyncratic view drawn from my particular experience and evident bias. Obviously, it is open to the three-Rs: rebuttal, resistance and rejection.

Like those few gentleman I came across in college or prep-school – literally, five or less – I remember well those public servants over the past decade who have met President Kennedy’s challenge for public service.  They are among the best men and women I know; they are all too few, like any natural élite.  To those in the military or molded by military service, I salute them. Those in the diplomatic corps do great things, superb things for our country.

While there are more such people than when I was young – because many grew into their personal honor over time and through challenges imposed by dilemmas – they are still in the minority. Of the lower ranking officers in the field and the non-coms, I have little to say.  Unless a soldier does something really dishonest or malevolent – and some certainly do – I presume him to be honorable because I have seen their humanity first-hand. 

As I stated to a U.N. official in Iraq years ago, who stated that he could not join a foot patrol because he was a ‘humanitarian official', “You know what? Ninety-eight percent of the humanitarians in this country wear that that uniform…” while pointing to a nearby lieutenant. Theirs was, and is, a telling example of American exceptionalism, not because they had the guns but because they had the caharacter.

Indeed, 98% of the humanitarians I came across wore the uniform of the U.S. Army, the Bundeswehr or the British and Australian Armies. The response of that ‘humanitarian’ official? In a sotto voce, he stated rather guiltily in French something to the effect, 'Je suis désolé mais je dois garder les apparences, bien qu'elles ne soient pas la réalité.'  At least, he was honest in saying he had appearances to keep.

Many civilian officials as well as overstayed and overstuffed staff officers, however, arrogated themselves to some exulted level that furthered their careers. Ambition blights the character of the mediocre, leading to abuses along the chain of command, civilian and military.  With each of my four tours, the overall quality of personnel seemed to decline.  Of course, there were enough exceptions to this mediocrity to make the work wothwhile. We soon networked together to keep our spirits high enough to finish the tour intact, if not unscathed. 

The examples are many, too many for the scope of this brief essay. The following sample of the things I saw were neither unique to my experience nor were exceptions to the norm:

1. blatant theft of intellectual property and plagiarism by U.S. foreign service officers ranging from copying verbatim the content of web-sites and the translation of the intelligence of an allied non-English speaking Army to pass along as one’s own intelligence work;
2. little to no monitoring and evaluation by over-worked officers in the Embassy, leading to routine falsification of reports in addition to fraud, waste and abuse;
3. foreign service officers dispatching translators or other subordinates to follow and monitor the activities of rivals to undermine them;
4. military officials routinely classifying information by no means confidential but embarrassing by casually conflating careers with the larger national security (that such classification is truly intended to protect);
5. civilian ‘experts’ billing the U.S. government for twelve-to-sixteen hours per day for twelve-to-sixteen hours per week of actual work, on a good week;
6. subject matter experts – so deemed – who defied sensible guidelines and specific instructions of the sovereign governments to experiment with techniques untested and often beyond their fields of knowledge; as well as,
7. Defense Department civilian and military planners charting out the course of Iraq without ever speaking with host-country nationals seriously and hardly ever leaving the base…ever.

In essence, ‘we’ (i.e., those of us serving in these war zones, mostly for the money) had disappointed our presidents and those compatriots paying our salaries through their taxes.  If the nation can not manage to summon up enough intellectually honest and financially prudent civilians and staff officers to support those younger brothers and sisters in uniform, one must wonder if ‘whole-of-government’ interventionism is an option for American exceptionalism or an excuse for a procurement boom.

Serving my country – and some of the things I did do, both small and notable – has had a supreme, if too long deferred, value in my life.  Despite my personal struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, I really believe my country sincerely sought to do the ‘next right thing’ for those beleaguered peoples; President Bush will always be a personal hero to me.  This world is better for America being in it; America is likely better for President Bush having led it; and, America may be ever so slightly better for me being here.

Nevertheless, if the country regards its youngest warriors as the Sunday morning clean-up crews minding the detritus left behind by policy failures and poor decisions of civilian or staff military leadership; if most of the civilians who serve in these war-time capacities are mediocre or worse; if adventurism is pursued for the bottom-line of defense contractors and USAID implementing partners, the mission is already lost and it is time to re-group and re-think and not groupthink. 

Letter-92 to friends and family: Is American Exceptionalism Dead?

UPDATE: APRIL 2nd, 2017: Honor Restored
Three cheers for General Keith Alexander. While I remain sympathetic to Mr Snowden, I have been living with a cognitive dissonance for several years. General Alexander, then head of the N.S.A., apparently overstated or outright misrepresented the eventually elucidated facts about the Prism and other programs on which Mr Snowden rightfully blew the whistle.

Additionally, Glenn Greenwald documented assertions that General Alexander was a 'cowboy' who wanted to scoop up everybody's data everyday. While Mr Greenwald's arguments were persuasive, the persona and personal demeanor of General Alexander did not square with the all the nasty things being written about him.

In this testimony, General Alexander clears away that cognitive dissonance. He is an honorable man who probably over-reached in his effort to prevent terror attacks and who definitely fudged the truth at times in an effort to protect the program and his subordinates. Yet, he was humble enough to transcend his institutional hard-wiring to team-up with the head of the A.C.L.U., Geoffrey Stone, so they together could optimize liberty and security (i.e., the meta-data - akin to water meter readings - and the privacy).

The capacity to change and to stretch one's worldview at an advanced age and in a position of power is rare indeed. The good General always reminded me of my uncle and one of the relatives mightily influential for me, Thomas P. Gordon, and now I know why. Uncle Tucker and this General are each gentlemen blessed with the intelligence of a Renaissance Man; the honor of the natural aristocrat of President Jefferson; and, the affable humility of a President Ford. These things integrate into the very best of what this country can produce.

Truthfully, in retrospect, I over-reacted toward General Alexander. I still credit Edward Snowden for being a contemporary hero. After seeing the cruel and unusual punishment toward Bradley / Chelsea Manning (i.e., months in solitary confinement with the intent of the problem 'going' away), Mr Snowden did what he had to do to blow the whistle. On the other hand, General Alexander had a fearsome responsibility of heading mass murder off at the pass. Did he over-reach? Yes, he did. Would I have in his position? Yes, I likely would have. In the end, however, decency prevailed.
ORIGINAL LETTER
As I have served the country overseas for much of the past decade, far from heroically, I have had the unanticipated privilege of hearing views about the U.S., her policy and her power from those on the outside, looking in.  Over time, I have come to acquire a more remote perspective, not only of U.S. policies and actions, but also of the right-sized place of America in the world. 
Current policies look different from out-there than they do from in-here.  The ‘American exceptionalism’, though fiercely debated at home, does not seem so evident in México – even less so in Arabia or Afghanistan. Recent developments have shaken my complaisant faith in the basic decency of America; a decency of purpose never inherent to, but persistently chosen by, us.

As long as the end of history appeared to be assured with overwhelming military power and commercial might, expressed primarily in finance, such exceptionalism seemed evident.  Polite might made right.  History has this irksome habit of not ending; of passing by the powers of the day.  Inside me, as an outsider now moderately alienated from that complaisance, uneasiness not only grows but feels painfully appropriate.

That is to say: the American Century -- a period of American disruption and exceptionalism in the affairs of the world -- appears to be coming to an end after about one hundred twenty-five years.  That ending, if true, has a large impact on the idea of American exceptionalism; if we can’t bend others to our will, how then are we exceptional? 
In my ruminating over these thoughts, my sense of this exceptionalism, in its pristine state, is one not projected by commercial interests nor protected by power.  Were both the case, one could argue that such exceptionalism was just another ‘new and improved’ version the brutal ethics of might makes right.

The symptoms or precursors of the end of the American Century abound and yet no one resists the behavioral fall-out of policy; few people seem willing to push back on morally questionable policies aside from Manning, Assange and Snowden, perhaps because the courage of those three is politically and publicly pilloried away as the deviance of faggots, rapists and traitors. 
Before issuing into these precursors, let us remember that the American Century, as we see it overtly manifesting today, started around 1950, halfway into the global preeminence of American power and prosperity. These precursors include, as examples of a wider set:

1. fiscal bankruptcy evidenced by military spending out of proportion to the base of wealth to support it and national debt levels that will dry up the capital markets eventually;
2. fiscal decline with the quantitative easing program drowning both the monetary system and the capital markets, creating asset bubbles and wrecking savings, at least in the short-term;
3. unsustainable policies with, for example, universal health care laws exerting high expenses and higher uncertainty;
4. gradual displacement over time of the dollar by the renminbi and the euro, which will divert these excess dollars created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve into a backwash-turned-tsunami onto the U.S. economy to provoke high, perhaps runaway, inflation rates in the longer-term;
5. the ‘F*ck the E.U.’ comment on the Ukraine by a senior-ranking U.S. diplomat, pointing toward an unsurprising U.S. uneasiness with the emergence of the European Union, perhaps the greatest guarantor of peace in our time, as an emerging rival to U.S. geopolitical influence;
6. arbitrary use of technology in service of expanding domestic police, commercial and domestic surveillance powers (e.g., incidental law enforcement information gathered by drones presaged by George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451) to infringe upon the private dignity people’s inner lives;
7. arbitrary use of weaponized drones by civilians beyond any accountability (most notably, the Uniform Code of Military Justice) away from the battle field to assassinate enemies, even U.S. citizens (albeit not pleasant ones), secretively and outside of the rule of law;
8. an apparent tendency of thought-leaders hiding behind ideologies and simplistic world-views (e.g., creationism) that fly in the face of scientific evidence or time-tested practices or civil axioms;
9. a general coarsening of the culture where there is more publicity for Kim Kardassian’s weight problem than the Ukraine or even the Olympics (not bread and circuses but all butt, no Caucasus); as well as,
10. a sense of popular exhaustion now with apprehension of what may come.

While I am a Republican, this essay is meant to look at the current snap-shot of my country from an outside, albeit conservative and admittedly cantankerous, perspective.  Consequently, as an aside, I have taken off the table those hot-button topics more likely to de-rail intellectual debate than create the climate for it. 
There are brave Democrats (Senators Udall and Wyden) and Republicans (Senator Paul and Representative Sensenbrenner) pushing back on the erosion of our cherished republican principles in the face of over-classification, excess coercion and over-incarceration.  All of these distressing trends are enabled by a climate of fear and greed preying on that fear.

The American pie is no longer big enough or expanding quickly enough, if at all. No longer can the economic engine permit a growing middle class, indulge costly industrial age military structures and subsidize a predilection toward imperialism, if not overt colonialism.  The evidence for this unwelcome change is persuasive, at least to me.  Many of my countrymen now see America's best days as behind her; I disagree. 
In actuality, ruminating over a return to some contrived 'golden age' is corrosive to the national spirit for three reasons.

• It implies permanent decline, which will be a self-fulfilling prophecy if we refuse to adapt to the realities of things beyond our control that defy the linear beauty of engineering; an inhospitable age as fluid with opportunity as fraught with peril.
• The things we cherish but often take for granted – liberty, freedom of thought as well the desire to improve our lives and those of our loved ones – seem less and less attainable; thus people struggle to keep what they have at the expense of welcoming the future and helping others along.
• If some golden era has indeed passed, and America finds herself truly trapped in irrevocable decline, people are going to want to know why it has passed and who is responsible for that loss; concomitant with the blame-game, will be the continued politicization of everything, ranging from what we believe to how we should act on, and manifest, those beliefs.

While I am my characteristic snaggle-puss self, the next letter (perhaps few) will lay out an alternate way of looking at our situation to prescribe, in foreign policy, what Dr Lincoln Bloomfield forty years ago fittingly called the humane use of power.

In Mexico, I re-read Dr Bloomfield’s book, In Search of American Foreign Policy: the Humane Use of Power, one of the two poli-sci books that captured my interest in college.  (The other treasured tome was Free Government in the Making: Readings in American Political Thought by Alpheus T. Mason; published fifty years ago).

Dr Bloomfield wrote in a simpler time politically and, perhaps, geopolitically, during the fall of Viêt Nam and the Watergate crisis. Nevertheless, those days had their perils and anxieties, too, as many of us can recall.  Heroically, as an ‘establishment thinker’, the hawkish M.I.T. Cold War policy wonk pushed himself – and his readers – to think hard about America’s place in a changing world.

Dr Bloomfield laid out his thoughts on renovating mainstream thinking to keep the American exceptionalism going forward, by preserving the best of the evolving political theory documented by Dr Mason. America could make this change, Dr Bloomfield seemed to argue, not through the excess use of power but through the judicious application of those republican ideals that had made the United States exceptional in the first place. 
But where to start?  For me, it would be in the area of foreign and military policies since so much of national thinking and resources are bound up in these arenas of thought; since people want these resources directed to domestic growth; and, well, since I find that topic to be more interesting.