I Myself Dabbled in Pacifism

Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

At the first Democratic primary debate of the already interminable 2016 Presidential contest, it took a little over half an hour to call in the airstrikes. Ironically, much of the first half hour was spent arguing over who would most effectively curtail the ready availability of firearms on the domestic market. Gun control is a strange and contradictory position for mainstream American liberals. President Obama has observed that America, almost uniquely among developed nations, permits almost anyone to own not just a gun, but lots of guns. The result, he claims, is our national epidemic of gun violence, especially the escalating incidence of “mass casualty” events.

But the United States also uniquely has an archipelago of 700 military bases around the world and is waging hot wars in dozens of countries, from major ongoing deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan to air strikes in Syria to drone warfare in Africa. If the US is an unusually gun-loving culture, it is also an unusually militaristic one. Without drawing lazy lines of causation, there’s clearly more at work than just a legal right to possess firearms. What makes a society paranoid and trigger-happy? There must be a reason why a market exists for so many guns.

The candidates, with the possible exception of Jim Webb (whom my astonished boyfriend described as “the worst uncle at your family picnic”), didn’t pitch themselves as pro-war, of course. A mainstay of liberal politicians in America is stake out a position as a staunch opponent of all the bad wars (even those you accidentally voted for yourself) and an enthusiastic supporter of all the good ones. Obama himself campaigned and won his first term in part by casting himself as anti-war; he’d opposed the invasion of Iraq. He won a Nobel Prize for the accomplishment of not being George W. Bush, and then proved to be an even more enthusiastic supporter of drone warfare than his predecessor. He spent the next eight years expanding a secretive campaign of botched assassinations. There are, it turns out, no anti-war American presidents.

The closest thing to an anti-war candidate in the current race is not the supposedly radical leftist, Bernie Sanders, but rather his fellow New Englander, Lincoln Chaffee, a former “liberal Republican” whose chances of winning the nomination are only slightly better than mine. Sanders, meanwhile, positions himself as less committed to foreign military intervention than Clinton—hardly probative, since her principal claim to wisdom and perspicacity on military matters is that the guy who beat her to the 2008 nomination in large part on the issue of her Iraq War vote elevated her out of defeat and made her Secretary of State.

Sanders was a conscientious objector in Vietnam. He was emphatic. “I am not a pacifist, Anderson.” He opposed Vietnam specifically. It would be churlish to mock him for objecting most strongly to the one war in which he stood the greatest chance of fighting. Unlike the Rumsfelds, Cheneys, and Bushes of the world, he did register his open objection; he didn’t mouth support for bloody foreign adventure while trading on his daddy’s connections to keep his own delicate flesh planted firmly on American soil. In effect, Sanders argues that his support for war has been judicious: precisely the quality we’re supposed to want in a commander-in-chief. He opposed Iraq, and looking at Syria, he fears a “quagmire,” though he went out of his way to support air strikes and the nonsensical idea of a no-fly zone.

On the other hand, in making the case for his military bona fides, he proudly noted his support for certain campaigns:

Obviously, I voted, when President Clinton said, “let’s stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo,” I voted for that. I voted to make sure that Osama bin Laden was held accountable in Afghanistan.

Perhaps we learn better lessons from our bad wars than the “good” ones. It would be more accurate to say that Afghanistan was held accountable for Osama bin Laden, who was discovered and killed more than a dozen years after the Afghan War began, and notably in another country. America is now 14 years into that conflict; the country is riven and unstable; the Taliban, against whom our initial invasion was ostensibly fought, are retaking territory, and have even become America’s tentative allies in some circumstances against ISIS and other foreign militants. It’s a strange resume-builder for a man opposed to quagmires.

Kosovo is a stranger lesson still. There’s little doubt that the NATO air war hastened the end of the Kosovo War, but it did not “stop ethnic cleansing.” On the contrary, it had the opposite effect. Although there were atrocities prior to the bombing campaign, not to mention hundreds of thousands of “internally displaced peoples,” the systematic expulsion of the Albanian population only started after the bombing campaign began. Then, at the conclusion of open conflict, hundreds of thousands of these refugees returned, while almost all of Kosovo’s Serbs fled. As Adam Roberts, hardly a Chomskyite, wrote in an assessment published shortly after the conclusion of the war:

The fact that the campaign failed in the intended manner to avert a humanitarian disaster in the short term, even though it did eventually stop it, makes it a questionable model of humanitarian intervention. The uncomfortable paradox involved—that a military campaign against ethnic cleansing culminated in a settlement in which the majority of Serbs resident in Kosovo departed—must reinforce the sense that humanitarian operations cannot suddenly transform a political landscape full of moral complexity.

Another paradox: a good war that Bernie Sanders supported ended in a scenario terribly similar to the bad war he opposed, the effective ethnic partition of a multi-ethnic state.

He now supports an air war in Syria. It suggests that, though he may differ in the particulars, in broad principle Sanders is a predictably mainstream Democrat with the mainstream’s fatal affection for air war as a neat and clean form of “humanitarian intervention.” What, precisely, the bombardment of Syria is meant to accomplish, tactically or strategically, and against whom, is not so much unanswered as unasked. The natural American reaction—to fill every void of good options with a bombing campaign—is more than bipartisan: it’s the fundamental default of American politics. Consider this: Bernie Sanders is more willing to distance himself from the civic religion of capitalism than he is from American intervention in foreign wars. Socialism, relentlessly demonized in US politics, isn’t a poison pill, but the notion that a military is only for self-defense is.

Rare Arms

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

Second Amendment jurisprudence is high on the list of the great national embarrassments foisted upon us by our embarrassing federal judiciary, who continually accept the ahistorical interpretations of people who actually claim that a Constitutional government enshrines the right to armed insurrection against itself. Not even the framers, who had actually and recently fought in a revolution, imagined it meant such a thing, but here we are. America’s quasi-religious fetish for its own Constitution is in any event a strange national obsession. The Constitution is a hash of archaic bylaws whose principal strength is that it’s so vague and badly worded that it can mean whatever we need it to mean at any given time. “A well regulated…”

Well, gun advocates have done nothing if not given us a pithy slogan expressing exactly how incoherent they are: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. This is like saying cars don’t drive on roads or hammers don’t pound in nails. That a tool requires an operator to do its work begs the question. Guns were made to kill things, people chiefly among them. They’re a very good tool for this purpose. It’s possible to nail wood together without a hammer, but much easier with one; it’s possible to commute 30 miles to work without an internal combustion vehicle, but not easy; it’s possible to kill a whole lot of people all at once without a gun, but crossbows and broadswords do lack individual efficiency. Guns are machines for killing, and they kill a lot of people.

Refocusing from the implement to the actor also lends itself to our current absurd scapegoating, in which “mental illness,” never specifically defined, becomes a legitimate target for legislative intervention; Congresscreatures publicly imagine they can legislate sanity, and yet they can’t conceive regulating the purchase and ownership of an industrial product. How a nation that requires a $25 co-pay for a blood pressure and reflex test that you have to wait five months to book intends to provide universal, ongoing, robust psychological care to its 300 million souls, many millions of whom don’t have sufficient insurance and are therefore on the hook for more like $150 if they ever want to visit a regular old doctor, is unclear. Meanwhile, much of the gun violence in the country—not the mass shootings of white people that make the news, but the daily killings of one here, two there in places like Chicago—isn’t a question of mental health, not as the gun debate defines it anyway.

But. There is a kind of moral credulousness on the part of the Nice Liberal critics of our national gun culture, and there’s something intolerably amoral about a politician like Barack Obama assuming a pose of high moral dudgeon to snipe at conservative gun rights advocates while he presides over, among other atrocities, the bombing of a neutral hospital—literally, a war crime. (And the bombing of the MSF hospital is just one war crime among many; we just happen to note it because its victims are Western, professional, media-savvy, and English-fluent.) This isn’t cheap whataboutism; if you ask how we can be such a violent society and exclude sixty years of uninterrupted global warfare from your analysis, then your crass factionalism is showing.

It’s true: blaming domestic gun deaths on America’s violent, aggressive imperialism is a little like blaming it on mental illness; it identifies an approximate rather than a proximate cause and spins its wheels wildly away from a practical mechanism for mitigating the problem here and now. I do, however, wish that those who advocate for stricter gun control in this country would evince a more convincing and universal pacifism, rather than crying out in passionate horror each time some nut shoots up an elementary school but merely regretting each time their president blows one up.

Shabbos Goy

Culture, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

“The court cannot condone the willful disobedience of its lawfully issued order,” Judge Bunning said. “If you give people the opportunity to choose which orders they follow, that’s what potentially causes problems.”

When I was younger, I was more strident in my atheism. If I lacked the misogyny and gross prejudice—against Islam in particular—that qualify a person for the “New Atheist” label, then I nevertheless held to their practice of swashbuckling into almost any conversation, dull sword drawn, ready to declare that Holy Books hopelessly self-contradict; all those eternal truths are changeable and historically contingent; the notion of any kind of supreme and omnipotent being refutes itself under the simplest tests of logic; and oh, by the way, the Inquisition etc. were very, very bad. All of these arguments are simultaneously true and facile; faith exempts itself from these little eructations of materialism, which doesn’t make it correct but does make it in a sense immune to correctness as a category. In the last decade, my atheism has both deepened and softened. I suspect that had I encountered the right rabbi at the right time in my early twenties, when my passionate anti-religion burned hottest, then I might have been salvaged by grace. Now I tend to view religion, and at least some of the religious, with sympathy, which puts my soul beyond their reach, although it does sometimes force me to remind people that I know there are no gods and just appreciate the poetry.

This long caveat is to say that I have some sympathy for Kim Davis, though not because she’s in the right in her imagined protest. The idea that an agent of the government can nullify the law and obviate the constitutional rights of citizens due to her own private beliefs is manifestly silly. In the immortal formulation of your Catholic hero and mine, Antonin Scalia, you are entitled to your beliefs but not to your government job. Yes, even government employees, even elected officials, can engage in civil disobedience, but you don’t get to ride the First Amendment freely into your pension, especially not by violating its first clause in the delusional belief that in so doing you’re defending its second. As plenty of folks have pointed out, it was well within her small power to deputize some other row officer to sign off on these Satanic permits; that she refused to do so out of a let-us-say theologically suspect belief in the transitive property of the rendered-unto-Caesar suggests a desire to force the issue to a head. The Supreme Court is ironically responsible for this mess: its sloppy Hobby Lobby decision has convinced every minor divine in America that mere belief in whatever puts diplomatic plates on his prejudices.

But the Supreme Court is responsible, and it seems to me that any reasonably dull person, which is to say most Americans, who occasionally tunes into cable news, could easily draw this same conclusion: that “deeply held faith” abrogates temporal law. Egged on in this incorrect belief by unscrupulous legal counsel, you can just imagine how a person like Kim Davis could come to see herself as a hero and a martyr. Unlike her counsel, I don’t actually imagine that Davis holds any particular animus toward gays in particular, but rather has just a vague, foreboding sense of the inevitable decline of the familiar order of things. I grew up in a dying Appalachian coal town in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, and I knew plenty of women like Kim Davis. They went to the Church of Abundant Life and believed that Jews were going to hell, although one suggested to my mother that our family might be among the 144,000 to be bodily assumed into Heaven on the Rapture’s eve. They thought homosexuality was an abomination, but they were on perfectly good terms with the chubby homo who feathered and teased out their hair at Bangz. Democrats hadn’t done shit when the mines closed, so they drifted toward George Bush and learned to blame the unions and weren’t entirely wrong in either case. The Kim Davises of the world can’t do shit about the decline of Eastern Kentucky, but by God, this one of them can take a stand against things bein’ different. Correctness as a category does not apply.

Now, your regional sob story and hopelessly convoluted sexual ethics don’t entitle you to discriminate from your elected office, but I have the inescapable feeling that by holding her in contempt and tossing her in the clink, Judge Bunning did precisely the wrong thing. He was correct to observe that a pecuniary penalty would have had no impact; political allies of her lawyers would have made fines immaterial to her. And yes, courts do need a mechanism for enforcing compliance with their orders. But it strikes me that if Bunning could just wave his federal wand and allow others to issue the permits, then I see no reason why he couldn’t do the same without the cell. Despite her protestations to the contrary—that these certificates are somehow invalid without her signature—no one believes that the boys down at the Social Security Office are going to take her word over the order of a federal judge. I’ve seen some commentary on the convoluted authority to issue these permits in Kentucky, but state permitting statutes don’t trump the constitution, and their misapplication doesn’t invalidate gays’ right to marry.

If anything, to have simply swatted away her feckless protest and instructed someone else to marry the couples in question would have been a more fitting, biting, and deserved punishment. Let her whine impotently from behind the permits & licenses desk down at the county office while the janitor signs off under the authority of the US District Court. She will be neither hero nor martyr, and in a few months, she’ll wonder why she ever made such a fuss. Instead, I fear we’ve created another dumb saint in a country that seems to me to be drowning in dumb sanctimony. We must learn to love our enemies enough that the only punishment we desire in their defeat is their irrelevance. That would suffice.

Ronald Raven Signs a Piece of Legislation

Media, Poetry, Religion, Things that Actually Happen, War and Politics

Never more than a few wing’s beats
away; the poor pigeons warble that
they’ve lost the parking lot where they grew fat
to the loud and faster Corvidae who bleat
an almost-human language; the raven defeats
the mere flocked and fearful flights of cat-
harassed and bread-fed winged rats
of the city by being them but more: he eats
what they eat; lives where they live; but he
collects in his nests a bright collection, this
strange habit of display, half warning
and half fetish. De-natured doves, we,
really, are the pigeons; how we miss
the lost evening cliffs. But the raven is morning.

Her Rude Conquerer

Art, Culture, Economy, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and Politics

Contra Horace, captive Greece was captive.
The empire smashed you good and made you slaves.
Instructing some patrician’s louche, attractive
son in meter while he misbehaves
and mocks your accent; father drinks and raves
that lazy immigrants won’t take an active
hand in their own assimilation, saves
for his servants a grudging, wholly retroactive
permission to be as you were made to be:
this is the rude conqueror’s capture:
only to be burdened by your surrender, ever
to pretend to regret that you’re no longer free,
amputation cast as hairline fracture,
always and inescapable as never.

Though I Am Native Here

Culture, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

The patriarchy’s not how many drunk
and virgin girl’s fratbro Don Juan has “kissed.”
An –ism’s not the plural of an –ist.
Of all our costly fallacies, we’ve sunk
the most bad debt into this junk,
a penny-stock conclusion. What we’ve missed?
Five fingers unconfigured aren’t a fist.
A white boy? Surely troubled. Black? A punk,
a hood-rat twisted by his absent dad
and too-loud mom. But no bad man decided
these pathologies, which render each
black victim criminal, white killer mad—
a thing repeated is a thing believed
even by disbelievers, in the observance, and the breach.

For Users Identified in the Chat Below

Justice, Media, Poetry, War and Politics

“Why is the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet?”

–Ken White

First we’ll mulch the judges; then we’ll bake
the ground-up prosecutors into pies;
we’ll pluck-out every congresscreature’s eyes;
for every cop, a guillotine and stake.
We mean it, pigs. Make no fucking mistake:
if not tomorrow or next week—surprise!—
some day we’ll figure how to anonymize
and route actual murder so as to make
hyperbolic rhetoric into
a magic incantation, thus commission
via mere intention, criminal
and violent retribution of the sort we spew
quite fecklessly, an Internet tradition:
untruth made true, if quite subliminal.

The Tool of Athens

Culture, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

“Nothing matters if we aren’t safe.”

-Marco Rubio

Nothing matters if we aren’t safe; our lives
are emptied by the scent of risk; our passions,
proximate to chance, all strictly rationed;
it cannot be enough merely to thrive,
to love our families, like our work, survive;
it’s insufficient that our God has fashioned
us to perish. Ours will be the Athens
of the modern world, a reborn state derived
from the demos, although I find democracies,
even within strict limits are a bit
too chancy. Nothing ventured? Nothing lost.
Elect me! I will be your Pericles,
though rarely modest and without the wit,
without the chance of gain, but without cost.

Middlebrow March

Culture, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

Fairly regularly, the online commentariat will erupt with frustration at the truism that you can’t get fired from the Op-Ed page for being wrong. If anything, a record of incompetence burnishes a career. Someone takes to Twitter and thunders that Newspaper Columnist is the only profession with real lifetime tenure. Well, that and Justice of the Supreme Court, another venerated institution that proves the truer truism: people rise to the level of their incompetence. There is, of course, an odd, often unvoiced conviction underlying these complaints: that in the Wild-Western private sector, people get bunged out for being incompetent all the time. This is part of a broad myth about corporate efficacy that anyone who’s ever actually met the C-suite occupants and corporate board placeholders of many a major corporation—or, frankly, just worked in any office anywhere—knows to be completely untrue. The smartest people in business do frequently get fired, yes, but it’s when the latest round of right-sizing cans the smart toilers on the lower end of the pay scale. The cream rises, yes. What that really means is that fat floats. David Brooks doesn’t get an endowed chair at Sulzberger University in spite of his mediocrity. All of the institutional incentives are designed to reward it. It is the curricula of his vita.

Brooks has lately invented himself as a kind of genteel moralist, and you can imagine him cast by George Eliot as a gently satiric country priest whose bit of Greek impresses the parish but makes him an object of fun at the manor. To be fair, few of us are really willing to pursue our moral sentiments to their most rigorous ends, and the elision of coherence and consistency in our criticisms of other people’s politics and philosophies is its own kind of error. Nevertheless, there is something not just comical, but slightly sinister, in a man who corrals his timid approval of “cop cams” with a dozen caveats about the value, and virtue, of privacy. Eleven months ago, he made “vast data sweeps” a pillar of privacy! Now he’s worried that some patrolman’s Go-Pro video of a domestic will wind up on YouTube.

“Cop-cams strike a blow for truth, but they strike a blow against relationships.” I won’t be the first to observe that Brooks’s turn to moralism coincided with a divorce. Maybe it’s unkind to psychoanalyze, but, after all, the man is very publicly lying on the couch several times a week. I think you find, in Brooks’s soft authoritarianism, his Matryoshka society of nested obligations, one overriding conviction, which is that too much truth kills a relationship, and wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we all just drank our cocktails at five and pretended nothing was wrong? His “zone [of] half-formed thoughts and delicate emotions can grow and evolve” sounds an awful lot like the moment the brain requires to tell the wife that yes, of course she looks lovely in that dress or, oh, dear, I’m going to be working late tonight, so don’t wait up. And in fact, I agree with him in broad principle; we are all due some space to be furtive little shits, only not when that secrecy possesses, and uses, a gun.

Religious Me-dom

Culture, Economy, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

“Religious freedom” laws are, broadly speaking, efforts to circumvent the broad drift of a society toward varieties of sexual and reproductive autonomy and freedom that social conservatives dislike. Recognizing that they are increasingly in a moral minority, they seek to provide an opt-out mechanism through which they can decline to participate in whatever unspeakably licentious —generally speaking, same-sex attractions of all types—activity they perceive in the culture writ large. Leaving aside, if we must, the pejorative penumbra of the word “discrimination”, discrimination is precisely what these laws are designed to permit. As something of a cultural relativist, I’m not entirely unsympathetic with these desires, even if I find them personally reprehensible, immoral, and based on religious hocus-pocus whose historicity and divinity I find questionable at best. The truth is that I am not sure how a society as large as ours can be properly morally regulated; perhaps it can’t. Even as a gay man who has very greatly benefited from a great flowering of (God, how I hate this word) tolerance, I am not convinced of the Progressive case, which is really a mirror of the most conservative cultural argument, which presumes a singular and universal morality at the Kingdom end of a teleology of human, well, progress. At the possible expense of my own self-benefit, I have my doubts about a moral monoculture.

I mention this, because you now have hugely influential corporate governors like Apple’s Tim Cook taking to the pages of major newspapers to denounce Indiana’s rather stupid new religious freedom law on the rather tendentious ground that “Men and women have fought and died fighting to protect our country’s founding principles of freedom and equality,” which is a fairly silly reading of our invasion of the Phillipines or the theft of California or the war in Vietnam, but I suppose we did help the Ruskies lick Hitler, and that’s a pretty decent trump card. The idea that the martial history of America is testimony for the value of inclusivity is patently bogus, but cheers to Cook for saying forthrightly that “Regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana or Arkansas, we will never tolerate discrimination.”

But isn’t this sort of interstate, interest-specific legal arbitrage precisely the sort of thing that, expanded to the international forum, has permitted companies like Apple to become almost immeasurably profitable and valuable and men like Tim Cook to become ungodly rich? Isn’t it precisely the differing legal standards of the largely Asian nations where Apple manufactures most of its gadgets that permits it to violate, directly or through its contractors, all sorts of standards of labor decency and occupational safety—practices that we would consider not only illegal if they were to be deployed here in the US, but deeply immoral and unjust? Isn’t this effectively a vast, global, legal opt-out. And what if we expand our inquiry to include the people who labor even farther downstream extracting the raw materials necessary for the production of products like Apple’s, who work in even sorrier conditions hardly a step removed, if removed at all, from slavery?

So you see, people like Tim Cook are selective in their moral universalism; morality, it turns out, is universal only insofar as extends to the particular desires of a Western bourgeoisie; deny a gay couple a wedding bouquet that they could get at the florist down the street anyway, and that is a cause for outrage and concern; extract minerals using indentured Congolese servants, well, look, we’ve got marginal cost to consider! The moral argument, it turns out, curdles when exposed to the profit motive, and the universality of justice actually does end at certain borders, one way or another.