Letter 102 to Friends and Familiares: more thoughts on Iraq

By necessity this letter will – ¡hallelujah! – be very brief.  Ahora, I am in the process of packing my carpet-bag – this time for Tijuana.  Nice climate, great economy, wonderful opportunity and friends in LOW places; life is good.  But certain articles and sound-blights about Iraq showing up in cyber-space have truly stuck in my craw.  So these ‘blurt-outs’ have their reasonings behind them – trust me (…suckahhhh).

 

First, I supported the invasion in Iraq and I was wrong.  At the time, I argued persuasively that Iraq was a just war for many reasons.  The justice of violence, however, lies in its consequences, making bloodshed rarely open to justice. The aftermath over eleven years has eroded the justification of the war, notwithstanding the true heroism of 75% of the field troops, 50% of the officers’ corps and 25% of the civilians who cared.  To be sure, President Bush deserves credit for realizing this fact of strife and undertaking an unpopular and counter-intuitive surge to preserve Iraq for the Iraqis.

 

Second, the current chaos in Iraq is of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s making by a tyranny grab after the U.S. departed and in the election of 2010.  The difference between a secular and religious tyranny is that the former has the dubious virtue of keeping most of its depredations in-house. 

 

Third, President Obama is pursuing the right course, here. If the U.S. (read: neo-conservatives looking for a vindication of a grossly failed policy they initiated) were to bail out P.M. al-Maliki now, President Obama would simply be kicking this crisis down the road for the next President. Such temporizing does not serve us well. Yes, I argue that President Obama‘s inaction in Syria and Ukraine are disappointing and I have bored people with my reasons why. Suffice it to say, that Iraq, Syria and Ukraine are fundamentally different.  Syria is a regional proxy war with a terrain that makes ‘muscular’ humanitarianism an option.  Ukraine involves external aggression by the Putinista. Iraq is a civil war; more of a crime wave.  The government has to set itself right for its own subjects to defend it.

Fourth, Iran’s help – and ours to Iran – is appropriate. This development may be the only welcome aspect of this sadness in my belovèd Iraq.  Fact is: the American  and Iranian peoples share more in common than with any other people in that region, save Israel and, perhaps, Turkey. The status Iran holds of the largest state-sponsor of terrorism resembles a glass half full of cherry juice. Some say this and some say that; too many drink the U.S. government’s kool-aid.  In the meantime: first things first – stop these blood-drunk  I.S.I.S. bastards from slaughtering innocents in Iraq.

Fourth, making Iran a straw bogeyman makes little sense to me.  Iran does sponsor Hizbolah, winning it the exulted status of being a terrorist state, conferred by Foggy Bottom. While my support for Israel remains strong, if not unconditional, Hizbolah can rightly be seen as a resistance force (whether I agree with it or like it is of no relevance) and vehicle of social services for a largely disenfranchised people stuck in refugee camps (http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2010/06/letter-9-to-friends-and-family.html). Outside of some border skirmishes (swift-boating the Brits in 2009; nobody killed), Iran has not started a major war.  Our proxy, Saddam Hussein, murdered many more people than Hizbolah ever has. It is time to readmit Iran to the community of nations and foster good relations. We all hate the humiliation of 1979; but Iran did not murder those fifty-two hostages. How long would they have lasted alive in Riyadh, Kandahar or Karachi? In fact the most stabilizing powers – with arguably two great civilizations – in the Middle East may well be Israel and Iran.  With a re-democratized Iraq, the “I”s would have it.

 

Fifth, the specter of a nuclear Iran is just that: illusory.  Yes, of course, Iran is striving to manufacture nuclear weapons. Why wouldn’t Iran do that?  Israel has them.  The U.S. has used them. But that is not the motivator, here. Look it: Iran is flanked by a country that killed half a million of her young people and two radical Sunni states spawning the virulent violence, primarily against shi´ites, we see today: Saudi Arabia with the wahabis and Pakistan with the pashtuns / taliban. The only thing worse than decadent infidels to these very few but very lethal extremists are ‘apostates’ (read: shi’ites). We have seen with horror the massacre of Iraqi soldiers who surrendered.  So you tell me: ¿Just who is the bigger worry for Iran?  A nuclear Israel and the United States or Saudi Arabia and a nuclear Pakistan?

Addendum to Letter-100: police reform plan drafted in 2005

Detailed TIME-Line for Police Identification Cards & Salary Reform

Salary Reform will challenge the Ministry of Interior’s (Ministry’s) resourcefulness by requiring the use of the following assets:

• 100 employees deployed temporarily to combine information from a paper data base compiled by the Qualifying Committee’s (QC’s) data-collectors, a computer file of employee information and finger prints and, possibly, governorate-level employee rosters available to the Ministry in Baghdad;
•  several hundred security personnel for at least the first two pay-days under the reform; and,
• 25-50 personal computers to consolidate information.

Should the Ministry find itself in a position to implement pay-parity with the military in conjunction with payroll reform, the Ministry could apply a unified salary plan to assign a certain level of pay with each rank.  Each pay-level would then correspond to a military pay-scale on a basis of 100% equality between the Defence and Interior Ministries.

In the various time-lines presented below, one of two distribution channels will be used for payment of salaries:  the current system of station commanders distributing payments or designated branches of the state-owned banks, Al-Rafidain and Al-Rashid.  If the Ministry is forced to continue with the traditional distribution system that has promoted corruption, it could alleviate potential payroll abuse by station commanders with the installation of telephone hot-lines.  Please recall that, under this reform, the Ministry of Finance will release only the amount of money properly payable to those employees registered with the QC.

The telephone hot-line option will entail the establishment of controls to protect tough-minded station-chiefs from false accusations by angry employees.  This control over the hot-lines is just one example of the many details the Deputy Ministers will decide during the salary reform.  Please note that this time-line is not comprehensive; details have been omitted while the QC will still have to submit a report outlining the criteria for retention or letting go of employees.  The benefits of accelerated salary reform will be:

1. human resource and payroll records centralized at the Ministry in Baghdad;
2. centralized accountability for station commanders through the hot-lines or removal of control over funds from them;
3. convincing evidence for the Ministry of Finance of the Ministry’s rigor and professionalism to argue for pay-parity; and,
4. consolidation of internal controls away from the governorates and the Minister in favor of the Deputy Ministers.

In sum, this initiative will aid you in exerting centralized control and accountability while permitting local police forces to use their discretion in reacting to crimes and other local matters.  The time-lines will abide by the following ‘key’; or, color-coding: 



Letter to Friends and Familiares #100: Arabian Agony

Iraq, stated concisely, may be in her death-throes. The Sunni-based Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (I.S.I.S., anything but a fertile goddess misplaced in the fertile crescent) is sweeping across the Sunni-dominated north and west of Iraq.  The U.S. experiment, initiated by President Bush, appears to be failing.  The politicoes are lobbing blame every which way.  Iraq continues to collapse.

The enormity of the challenge facing the U.S. et al. makes focussing on something or anything not only preferable but, in the eyes of a discredited President, politically imperative. Ten years ago, when I first worked in Baghdad, a wealthy Iraqi construction magnate, a Sunni, warned me of the infiltration into the Ministry of Interior by Shi’ite death squads.

Though AMB Bremer’s reign had only recently ended, his tenure was already proving to be a ‘DefCon-1’ disaster with the wrong analogy (i.e., post-war Germany) applied to the wrong culture (one with little tradition of western-style democracy) at the wrong time (after a devastating three decades). At that point, this friend told me only one insurgent leader was worth a damn: Muqtada al-Sadr.

Al-Sadr? The crazy cleric that many of the ‘cool set’ had long deemed as slightly retarded? The bad-boy of U.S. reconstruction efforts? What my colleague told me was that, as stupid and stubborn as Muqtada al-Sadr was, he was a “crazy kid nationalist”. Religious, yes; a anti-Sunni Shi´ite sectarian, not really.  Obviously, I rejected this insight out of hand. And so did the most Americans, to our subsequent peril.

Ten years later, I have argued until my face is blue against a number of dimensions of delusional thinking overtaking much of American policy. President Bush, at least and at last in 2007, broke the denial and surged troop strength to try to stem the slide toward total civil war. With General David Petraeus in field-command and partnering with Ambassador Ryan Crocker, one of the finest diplomats since General George Marshall, that gutsy surge carried the day.

Unfortunately, American victory in the field has proven not to be permanent. A very senior diplomat and Middle East trouble shooter, who had dealt with Prime Minister al-Maliki quite a bit, warned me in 2008, during his participation in the negotiation of the agreement between the Bush Administration and the duly elected Iraqi government of al-Maliki, that the then relatively new and always scruffy leader was looking to be a dictator.

To my eternal regret, I did not believe him; he was right. Trying to blame someone singularly is not a productive exercise. As far as President Obama’s strategy is concerned, it is time to end the riveting but irrelevant debate with its successive waves of recriminations and alibis. The President has confused detachment with appeasement; his policy has manifestly failed. 

Okay. 

As I have ranted many times, the President failed to act in 2010, when Prime Minister al-Maliki showed his true dictatorial ‘alpha-male fido’ by not handing the reins of government over to the duly elected Ayad Allawi, a secular Shi´ite and former Saddam official who had fallen out of favor with that tyrant for political and not sectarian reasons.

Democrats and liberal apologists need to accept this fact of President Obama’s strategy to date lest the current problems be neither addressed nor solved over time. As a quick aside: the U.S. invasion will eventually succeed in implanting a democratic governance – albeit quite different from the type we are used to – over the next ten to twenty years; think Viêt Nam in the late 1990s. The root causes of the startling advances, in recent days, of this newest crop of blood-drunk radicals in I.S.I.S. calls for nothing other than decisive moves including, but not limited to, the following:

• no aid or action until P.M. al-Maliki resigns while new elections and a new constitutional convention are scheduled;
• integration of the largest tribes into that new convention, the subsequent constitution and the eventual government;
• immediate integration into the security forces of the former Sons of Iraq (the Sunnis disaffected with Al Qaeda in 2007 who sided with the Americans to win the war);
• limited dispatch of Special Forces to usher in U.N. peace-keepers, preferably from non Arab Muslim countries like Indonesia, Senegal and Malaysia;
• limited airstrikes, only if necessary, to slow the I.S.I.S. advance while the honest members of the security forces – guessing roughly a 25-35% core – institute crime-watches and other neighbourhood policing tactics;
• provision of safe-havens for Muqtada al-Sadr and Ayatollah Sistani to avoid a deepening dependence upon Iran as well as high profile sectarian murders; as well as,
• an international police-training effort to clean the Shi´ite death squads out of the security forces.

These suggestions can be implemented rapidly to stanch the bleeding and permit the great majority of moderate Kurds, Sunnis and Shi´ites to take their country back from the current crime wave. I.S.I.S. may have high-sounding rhetoric – and may even believe its own P.R. copy – but it remains, first and foremost, a criminal gang. This insurgency is simply another crime-wave traipsing around in the garb of a galloping caliphate.  The trouble-makers on both sides are sectarian; their even-tempered and far more numerous compatriots may be religious but they are tolerant. All are Arabs or Kurds or both in the end.

President Bush won the war in 2007 by not abandoning the Iraqis to a fate almost as grim as the one implied by this currently dire situation.  President Obama did not fail us by not negotiating a Status of Forces Agreement in 2011. The Iraqis wanted us out. Where President Obama failed us was by not threatening to pull the 50-75,000 American troops still in-country when al-Maliki subverted an American-modeled electoral process based upon a flawed constitution with its civil war time-bomb of ceding vast swathes of territory from Arabs to Kurds. 

That threat of immediate redeployment in 2010 would have pressured Prime Minister al-Maliki  at least to come to the table and, perhaps, to acquiesce in the democratic transfer of power. There are many moving parts in this labyrinth of the two rivers; Ariadne's thread may well have been snipped by now.  There are too many issues for me to be able to perceive and capture as well as far too many to describe here.  The priority now is not to panic and bail out al-Maliki. Instead, cooler minds, Muslim minds, must empower moderate and religiously tolerant Iraqis to squeeze this vanguard of the caliphate out of everyone’s misery. 

What we can not accept right now is the same old reasoning of President Obama that, since Americans are rightly fed-up with war, his administration need not do anything and wait for the problem simply to drift away.  That hasn’t worked in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. The largely muted responses in these three cases have added up to a tendency toward appeasement, exciting bullies – Putinistas or blood-drunkards – to seize what they can, when they can, until 2017 (i.e., three years).

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.”