Letter 99: Max, would you believe....

Dear everyone,

Of course, there is nothing significant about my top twenty favorite songs over my life-time. We all have our own tastes and mine tend to feed off the preferences of those close to me in my life. For example, I thought the Dead Heads were cult-like and I said so, mainly out of my not being the center of attention among Dead Heads; yet the gal at the center of that teapot trifle did introduce me to my favorite all-time song.

Another example is the classic blues solo by Miles Davis, introduced to me by a far-more cultivated school-mate when I was in my forties. So there is little of intrinsic value here, with the exception of me seizing the opportunity to show off. But then my father’s sage words of years ago come homes to roost, “Neddy, never try to make an impression because you never know what impression you are making.”

People’s Exhibit-1 of pre-medicated ‘boge’, I offer the evidence that, until my Peace Corps tour, I thought mariachi music was the singing of some big-sky, big-eyed beauty from Italy.  So why, after debunking the content of ‘the f*ck-it list’, do I post these songs? Mainly so I can reach to one location for some of my favorite tunes; kind of like a mini iPod. What made this exercise interesting was the challenge of whittling the list down to just twenty names.

That need to weigh which songs go in and which stay out is admittedly petty. What I found to be interesting was how the criteria for inclusion evolved over the several hours during which I indulged this silliness. Truthfully, I have a new-found sympathy for school admissions committees. There are twenty favorites that I have today – more than twenty – that omit many more from the past which played significant parts when they were preferred.

Twenty songs is not many and so it almost needs to be a collection of ambassadors, representing the various types of music – from top-forty to jazz to classical and even to religious – to reflect the wide diversity of my taste. Underlying that diversity is the wide array of needs. Different musical modes meet different needs, profane and sacred, rooted in the past; spicing the present; and, heralding the future. 

Try this little exercise and you will find it to be interesting. Many questions will cross your mind, including the tension between what appeals to your personality and why versus what you want others to know of you. Since twenty tunes is necessarily the tip of the proverbial iceberg inside your head, what criteria do you apply in letting those select melodies through to the list? That list vaguely outlines of the wider body of music embodied in you.

Please let me know what your all-time faves are; I am still malleable after all these years. And so doth proceed my scruffy-pod.

20. Pennies from Heaven; Jimmy Beaumont & the Skyliners (dunno)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4-vaG-hWto

Just a great fifties tune, though this one (I think) originated in the forties; there are so many. Sometimes complacency with a rhythm is just what the shaman of jitterbug ordered. The Beach Boys took this happy-music into the 1960s.

19. You Are Here; John & Yoko

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BslpXO4oha4

Incredible love song in which absence can make the heart grow longer. For an angry guy, John Lennon really had depth that I see in few speed-ragers...How lucky those who get to be married; their union reconciles the godliness and needfulness of humanity.

18. Day by Day; Godspell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWQEUzOACm4

Cannot think a song that better evokes to simple joy of Xians with peace and humility. Privately, I have envied the evangelicals for their simplicity and enduring happiness. Fundamentalists are a different breed altogether, a type of virus everyone can live quite easily without.

17. Semper Fideles; United States Marines Corps (John Philip Sousa)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgABUZ4i9co

Puts one in that Kicking-A with the U.S.A. frame of mind, every time. While I sometimes cringe at what my country does, I do love America so. 

16. Guadalajara; ELVIS (¿quién sabe?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__xpWYelT64

The newest addition to the list, after going to Mexico; this version selected out of deference to Elvis Presley (and, indirectly, Buddy Holly, early American rock icons)

15. Anarchy in the U.K.; Sex Pistols

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbmWs6Jf5dc

Best teeth-grinding, flame-spitting rock and roll still out there; Neil Young’s “Hey-hey, My-my” is quite the companion piece…

14. Naima; John Coltrane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OuD9VqpgNc

A love song that captures the bittersweet utopia of the rapture; where one senses the infinite in a finite, frail being…Like many other white people, when I try to explain 'soul' verbally, the description is truly pathetic.  Nevertheless, a durable definition of soul whispers through it.

13. Leningrad; Dallas Symphony Orchestra (Symphony #7 of Dmitri Shostakovich)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCUdGyUrr0

This long symphony sings of resilience, not with words but brassy grit. Comrade Shostakovich apparently composed this work in the basement of the Leningrad Conservatory of Music during the Nazi bombardment of 'Petrograd' in which the living indeed envied the dead; when a communist city came to resemble the island of the gods darkly imagined by Stephen Vincent Benét just a few years before.

12. I’d have You Anytime; George Harrison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPrHaB8KCIk

Always feel like I am floating in the clouds with this song; great match with “Good Night” by the Beatles from the 'White Album' and also something of the beneficent twin of "I Am the Walrus". Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl" also fits this music of thoughtful passion.

11. Grazin’ in the Grass; Friends of Distinction (Hugh Masekela)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c81ANIBbYSc

As the 1960s flic says, “What’s so Bad about Feeling Good?”; this is the tip of the iceberg (sic) of really hot dance songs like “Louie, Louie” or “Aint No Woman Like the One I got”; the original by Hugh Masekela pulls at the heart during ‘Bobby’.

10. Abraham, Martin and John; Dion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5hFMy4pTrs

First ‘45’ I ever bought in early 1969; still makes me choke up at the losses of the 1960s. While Watergate certainly helped make much of the 1970s bleak, those years in many ways were the fall-out of possibilities denied ten years earlier (including the murders of Malcolm X, et al.).

9. Clair de Lune; Claude Debussy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvFH_6DNRCY

Piano études, composed and played rightly, can stir the soul at the darkest hour. Clair de Lune helped me wend my way through some unavoidable challenges. Each has his or her own way through to the other side, much the same but reverential to life itself.

8. Let it Rain; Eric Clapton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNSYnBFLAcM

Still gets my heart beating hard all these years later; Clapton had soul.  So many other songs by Eric Clapton -- even 'Cocaine' -- draw from something very deep within; something predisposed toward tragedy yet undefiled by adversity.

7. Opus #1; Tommy Dorsey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N2aEmcEbyg

To me, this song expresses the quiet grandeur of Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby -- the typical Yank who does not know a whole lot but knows how to be decent; who may not get around as much as he knows his away around.

6. Kashmir; Led Zeppelin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQH3LtNePgI 

Led Zep had the guitars of their era, often tapping the mysticism of the ages.  Bands like Led Zeppelin, the Police and the Beatles (all British) made the counter-culture more than just a rebellion against empty consumerism, not the good fortune of comfort.

5. American Patrol; Glenn Miller

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niYPjvd7y-Y

Love to dance to this song, too; makes patriotism fun instead of ponderous. Ironically, the lindy-hop tends to make me more jingoistic than the kulturkampf of my fellow conservatives trying to 'save' America.  Other Miller greats -- "ln the Mood" or "Perfidia", for example -- cut the rug. 

4. So What; Miles Davis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEC8nqT6Rrk

The King of Cool brings the senses to us; better synesthesia than Baudelaire…like looking inward while lunging on a patio chair on a spring Saturday afternoon, after running a few miles; gratitude in the everyday takes some introspection.

3. Sophisticated Lady; Billie Holiday (Duke Ellington)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r4jLwjj_Ik

Okay, I have always had a crush on Billie Holiday; plan to raise some Hell with her in Heaven. Of the five or ten truly beautiful women I have met over the years, almost every one has some trace of the melancholy inherent in the incomplete. 

2. Begin the Beguine; Artie Shaw (Cole Porter)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCXVxE_YeP4

Brings a tear to my eye every time; more for mourning what’s lost that cannot be understood but only felt. The tightness of the snapping rhythm is somehow stoic and has been somehow lost. 

1.Eyes of the World; the DEAD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCy9k_RWlvA

American mysticism; Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter understood the infinity within by which even recent memories are wind-swept into the inscrutable solitude of a horizon just a few paces behind; sort-of like rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and rendering to God what is godly.

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.