Letter #53: Culture Shock 102--A dark fantasy of Fanon and middle age

Well, I decided arbitrarily that it is time for me to write home again. At first, I was going to scribble out a diatribe about the center where I serve (with negative 40% operating profit margin to no one’s surprise, chagrin or even titter) and how difficult complacency is to overcome even when the bus is blithely flying off the cliff. Soon enough, however, I realized that I was having an inward hissy-fit and who wants a testimonial of self-pity, right?

Right, especially after beginning to watch a flic sent to me by a most excellent friend here in the Peace Corps that seems to be a latter-day Hispanic version of the Wretched of the Earth. Unfortunately, the computer lacks volume and I the facility in Spanish to make out much the dialogue. The visuals are intensely revealing, nonetheless; guns need no subtitles.

Life is suffering. And to think I was talking about John Rawls’s theory of distributive justice just yesterday with our wonderful ‘Doctora’ at the Peace Corps. This film is sobering – “Sid and Nancy” type of sobering. You know the world is a tough place when ‘hacer sexo’ is the one of the very few moments of pleasure wrested from long days and weeks of misery of grinding poverty.

Survival of the fittest in this dark world means surviving in a gang where expansive tattoos are one of the few means of identity. There are many people I know with tasteful tattoos – ones I would like to have had, if I had had the guts. The tattoos in this film are not among those: they hide God’s handiwork behind a permanent persona of survival on the surface. Enough for now.

So after checking in with a few friends via e-mail and facebook, I set off for my first quest officially as a middle-aged adult. You see, I have endured my first “itis” since my tenth grade year and that was only tonsillitis. Nothing serious, to be sure, but it did require a little experience that led to my second culture shock here in Mexico.

To get this ‘itis’ thing down, I decided to set off from my apartment today to take a urine culture to the laboratory. I tucked it in a bag, figuring it was sealed. Why I did not wait to do the deed until I got to the center lies beyond the scope of this letter as well as my mind.

When the here-and-now seems to be spiraling down-and-out, along comes those instances of unexpected cheer when the trite migrates beyond the trifling into the true…My culture shock today was one of those. As I walked along about half way to the clinic, I got the culture shock.

The translucent culture jar was in fact not sealed: AWKWARD. 

So, I had to carry it in my hand. When I got to the clinic, I found that the dump was closed for the day. Well, you can imagine the reactions as headed back to the apartment, walking through the streets with a dripping urine culture in my hand, plain to the sight of others. Again, why I did not consign the contents, visibly yellow to innocent bystanders, down a street drain attests to my not thinking well on-the-fly. 

Discreet as I tried to be, there was no hiding the cargo. Oy vey. So the pleasantries of small-talk became highly charged verbal ions electrified by choice facial expressions.

• When people passed me by from behind, they invariably looked down at my hand and then at me, either smiling or expressing (understandably) annoyance. So, I would say the logical small-talk response, “Sí (subtitulo: “Hey, pal, watcha lookin’ at? I am the one who has to carry this thing!”).
• When someone looked at me like I had committed some crime against humanity or, at least, a sin against God, I would smile, shrug my shoulders and say, “Yo sé…” (sub-titulo, “I know, I know. But, judge that ye not be judged, IDD-EEE-UT…”)
• When some Mexican family was simply enjoying the rhythm of a sunny day and had the temerity to walk in a relaxed gait in front of me, I would say with an urgency similar to that of Grant taking Richmond, “Por favor, con permiso!” (sub-titulo, “Get the ‘F’ out of my way! Can’t you see I have a culture shock here in my hand?”).

Hopefully, by now, you have some sense of where I was coming from and so I will wait until Monday morning and do what I really should have done all along: drop a casual thirty pesos (two and half bucks, that is to say, can you see) on a taxi and go to the clinic at 7:30 a.m. By the way, that film is harsh, really harsh. More about that film, now.

Life in Hell is pretty easy to figure out, even if can one only manage an occasional ‘entonces’…But then comes that smoldering justice borne by the noble savage though, in this case, it manifests with a machete through the jugular of a man about to attempt his second rape in a week -- in front of the victim's family -- having murdered his first target: a fourteen year old girl who tried to resist.

With this first sexual assault occurring in a cemetery; it is Camus on steroids, this visual anguish. The flic is unsparing in its visuals. The fifteen year old boy tries to stand up for one fourteen year old; he does save another, as the thundering herd of migrants hurtles forth from Honduras through Mexico toward Tejas. These “illegals” desparately seek what we take for granted everyday.

That boy's love for the second girl -- chivalry in all the wrong places -- is finally consummated, not by the way that long word usually implies but in making sure she gets to Tejas. The price for that love? Giving up his smart-phone and then, moments later, his life so she may live after a quick trip across the Rio Grande on an inner-tube.

The vengeful gang members pursuing him through Mexico finally vindicate the tattooed leader that the nameless teen had killed so other innocents could live. To make a depressing film almost completely hopeless, the fifteen year old urchin-saint is first shot by his ten year old brother, admittedly after some hesitation.

Quickly enough, however, fear and the mandate of early manhood kicks in and snuffs out that flicker of humanity in the ten year old brother. The little one has passed his initiation, now, and watches as his new extended family (all under twenty-five years old) arrive and light up on the body of his former sibling to make sure the message, whatever that message is, remains clear.

And there isn’t a damn thing one can do about it. It is only a movie, right? One of the things that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau could possibly have envisioned was the casual continuance of such nihilistic poverty amid so much plenty in our time.

 Indeed, that protracted poverty is the structural violence of our time. So, now it is my time to get up, dust myself off and don some decent clothes to attend a very worth-while fund-raiser so that I can feel somewhat worthy, too, with that culture shock in my refrigerator, safe for democracy.

Letter #52: the other price of admission

It becomes ironic in life when a son realizes that not only has he forgiven his father, he has morphed into him. In actuality, there really should be nothing unusual about this abrupt awakening to one’s past. After all, most people remain, throughout their lives, creatures of habit beholden to frames of reference. Well, that has certainly proved to be the truth with me.

In this last essay, sounding like my father forty years ago, I will try to touch on a few decisive issues that will make me say, like my father had about himself, “Why, I am so far out, I’m in.” The issue of pro-life versus pro-choice in the last discussion made untenable any allegiance to the Democratic Party. The good news is that, contrary to my fear, abortion simply has not become a popular form of birth control.

GAY MARRIAGE: civil unions yes; marriage, no. Full rights ought to be accorded to, and enforced on behalf of, partners who enter long-term committed peaceful relationships. Marriage is a sacrament and the base of the family unit. It is a tradition not to be trifled with unless the rights of partners in civil unions can not be protected. Then civil rights accorded in civil society trump religious tradition..

DEPT of DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION BILL: opposed. While we are cleaning house, let’s get rid of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. As is often the case, the muscle-bound over-reaction of the government has likely hurt the larger society more than did the original provocation. If there is evidence to document a probable cause of a clear and present danger, then get the warrant and arrest the citizen like everyone else.

The WAR on DRUGS: decriminalization yes; legalization no. Too many people are getting murdered in Mexico and too many black youths rot away in jails for petty crimes. Re-direct the war into one against addiction. That gets people out of jail who have no business being there and frees up a lot more resources to help the addicts who need it and to arrest the really bad people selling stuff to kids.

BRADLEY MANNING: innocent and good for Wiki-Leaks. Bradley Manning did what a responsible citizen should do in airing out information that wasn’t secret but damning. Wiki-Leaks took pains not to reveal truly sensitive information per Manning’s request. Vilifying Manning as some deranged homosexual probably is the best argument I could devise to support the implicit righteousness of his behavior.

The INVASION of IRAQ: supported. The problem with this war of aggression was not misinformation. It was, as I wrote at the time, the absence of a formal Congressional declaration to hold the government and the American people accountable. By 2003, any observer could see that the sanctions did not work and that a nation of oppressed people was going hungry. President Bush bravely ended that.

ISRAEL and PALESTINE: both have rights. Israel has a right to exist and the Palestineans have a right to return. What is taking place now is apartheid and it is brutalizing a once-liberal democracy. The U.S. has likely forfeited its opportunity to facilitate a one-state solution. It would be interesting to know how many Palestineans have been killed by the I.D.F. versus Israelis by terrorists. The math ain’t pretty.

IRANIAN NUCLEAR CAPABILITY: non-issue. Iran’s rising stature in the region is the issue. Southern Iraq may become a shadow satellite of Iran, a strategic set-back for the U.S. One of the hoped-for benefits of the “twinvasions” of countries flanking Iran was to topple that much harder society to defeat militarily. So we are now demonizing a gangster regime, possibly pushing it into gangster actions.

AFGHANISTAN: time to go home, now. The surge in Afghanistan actually assured an outcome the U.S. did not want, unlike the earlier surge (which I had also opposed) in Iraq. The difference? Afghanistan is not a nation but a no-man’s land contained by the frontiers of three erstwhile empires – the British, Persian and Russian. Call me a reincarnated Gladstone but our National Guard was designed to defend our people not an empire.

WALL STREET RESCUE: opposed. Instead of putting up all of this money to exempt plutocrats from facing up to the consequences of their actions, the Federal Reserve could have ring-fenced the Street and liquefied the overnight markets to keep regional and retail banks working. Main Street would not have gone broke bailing out Wall Street. The whole rationale reeks of paternalistic prattle.

OCCUPY WALL STREET: support. These people are exercising rights peaceably to assemble under the Constitution. Claims of criminal infiltration smack of excuse-making rhetoric. If there are criminal elements identified, produce the evidence, get a warrant and arrest the alleged criminals. Then let the law abiding 99% go back to demonstrating. We owe them thanks, not spanks.

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.

Letter #48: The Peace Corps and Hymn #243

¿Is the Peace Corps a partisan political endeavor – a sacred cow of discredited liberalism?

¡You bet your sweet bipartisan sweet bippee it isn’t!

Since the Cold War, U.S. diplomacy has been evolving away from a largely bi-partisan consensus of preparing for a dreaded global confrontation with another superpower. Now we confront less dreadful, if daily, adversaries across the world attacking not only the United States but democracy itself.

‘Eyeball to eyeball’ great power rivalries are giving way to a nuanced, if partisan, diplomacy that ties together high-level government-to-government interactions, for example, in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad with grass-roots counter-insurgency and economic development efforts just a few miles away.

In that context, I have favoured, and argued passionately within the U.S. government for the consolidation of development agencies, the foreign out-reach efforts of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Treasury as well as the Peace Corps into the Department of State. Such an integration unites often diverging non-military activities and presents a unified civilian chain-of-command with enhanced bargaining power against the Department of Defense. Now, however, I have come to believe that the Peace Corps should remain independent.

¿Why?

When the Peace Corps started out in the heady “can-do” America at the peak of her economic dominance two generations ago, the policy premise was hardly new. President Franklin Roosevelt had anticipated this vision of the Peace Corps in the bi-partisan appeal – no, a call to transcend politics in favor of defending democratic principles worth fighting for – of his ‘Four Freedoms’ Speech of seventy years ago.

That speech boldly argued to a troubled land, still neutral in the face of the bloodshed wrought by “gangster régimes”, that a post-colonial world could only hope to foster democracy through a continuing and universal presence of the freedoms of speech as well as those from fear, religious persecution and poverty. The United States has little left of the fresh-faced, deeply moral innocence of the ‘greatest’ generation. Perhaps, with American power so vast and international, such a decadence of values was inevitable in a Cold War fraught with moral ambiguity.

With the new diplomacy of our day, however, institutions are aligning for a whole-of-government approach that will inevitably make diplomacy more partisan as these executive branch institutions function at the pleasure of the President. Whoever that President is, he has to answer to many partisan interests coalesced to place him in the White House. That is the democracy of competing factions foreseen by President Madison, though the version we see today is admittedly ugly.

One institution needs to remain apart and above the trench warfare and trench-mouth of the contemporary debate of U.S. foreign policy: the Peace Corps.

Today, more than in most other periods, America needs to remember why she exists, not for what interest or for whom in particular. There are people who still shudder at the thought of a world without an America in it, notwithstanding many of the vitriolic, if defensible, self-recriminations poisoning public disquisition these days.

Obviously, I am one of these exceptionalists. I still believe that people the world over would suffer even more today without America. Yes, we can do better. But, first things first: we must justify that exceptionalism. That means that each American is a statesman now and should strive to be, well, exceptional. 

One thing that lingered within me from my work in Afghanistan and Iraq was how often I was the only version of the Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation or Universal Declaration of Human Rights that these people had ever seen. That thought changed my attitude, not radically, but enough for me to smile through most hard days or stare down a majority of fear-based bureaucrats.

To do so, I had to lay aside self-centered anxieties to show host-country counterparts, whatever their stations in life, that they still mattered. It could be something as simple as taking ice cream out to unwashed, invariably skinny, Iraqi children sadly forced into selling porno-DVDs in the U.S. Embassy parking lot. These incremental, fulfilling efforts are the daily fare of most Peace Corps volunteers, albeit in less tragic places, or at least they can be.

Our industries and industriousness make the United States a powerful nation. Only the American grace from within – that attitude of “¡heck yeah: these guys deserve a chance!” – creates that off-beat patriotism of giving back and humbly serving others that makes America great. The accumulation of thousands of little acts of charity – based not on ideology but on ideas people really have died and still die for – can hope to guide our Republic through the difficult days that lie ahead.

These ideas are simple – inalienable rights endowed by our Creator of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness – and yet their transmission requires sincerity, fortitude and character. What still gives me heart is to hear or read about what many of my fellow, particularly younger, members are doing with the goodwill and the optimism they bring, in spite of many frustrations, to Mexicans in the laboratory or campo alike.

These younger ‘exceptional’ Americans implicitly understand that the United States, and democracy itself, can only hope to continue through the attraction of what we stand for and not through promotion of self-interest, no matter how enlightened. Otherwise, we suffer the heretofore inexorable fate of Shelley’s Ozymandias.

These youthful compatriots give some in a rising generation of Mexicans the courage and the compassion to take up the mantle of leadership for their society’s future. These very ordinary Americans enable me to recall, with sentimental pride, a childhood Episcopal hymn I sang, usually in a broken voice, at my grade-school’s weekly chapel services 40+ years ago:

“I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true,

Who toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew.

And one was a doctor and one was a queen

and one was a shepherdess on the green:

They were all of them saints of God—

And, God helping, I mean to be one too.”